I was one year behind that in that I was in 7th grade when the change occurred so that the year ahead of my was the first year to be 9th grade in high school.
Ours was called “intermediate school” instead of “middle school” although that may have changed in the centuries since I was there.
In Utah, scones are what other places call fry bread: bread dough that is stretched and then deep fried like a doughnut.
I was having lunch with an out-of-towner in Atlanta and I mentioned I was going to “North Georgia” for the weekend. She said “aren’t we already in North Georgia?” And at that moment I realized that we refer to North Georgia, South Georgia, and West Georgia as distinct places. North Georgia is the mountains for weekend-getaways, West Georgia is close to Alabama, South Georgia is the hot desolate lands south of the airport. (There is no East Georgia, it’s just Athens).
This is the first time I have heard of gitch. There was a school mate who was called Gotch, but I thought that it was his given name until I was in grade 11.
When looking up the terms just now I came across a CBC sketch. https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/2646237192
When I first visited my brother at his new home in Michigan, he proudly showed off his Canadian toilets (five of them in his home).
His wife has a thing about toilets. Moving into a new home, she wants brand-new toilets installed. Not just seats, the entire unit. My bro spent one weekend replacing all five toilets. Step one was borrowing a truck and driving across into Canada for hi-flow toilets, as low-flow was all that was available (by law) in Michigan.
Great story!
Qadgop: Where’s the nearest TYME machine?
Stranger: (backing away slowly) uhhhh, sorry Marty McFly, no idea…
Oddly, my friend in Merrill uses bubbler. She and all her family are from the Merrill area.
I’ve found I’ve confused non-Americans by calling sneakers tennies (short for tennis shoe).
Another Canadianism: a “mickey” for a pint of booze. I grew up in Ontario, moved to Virginia 34 years ago. Last year I was at the ABC store (another one–the Virginia version of “liquor store”, though a number of states call them that) and said I was looking for a mickey of bourbon for a recipe, got a blank look. Funny that it took me over three decades to trip across that one, but I’ve asked friends and colleagues here since, and nobody knows it.
For me, being a frequent visitor to Hawaii before my sister-in-law moved to Virginia, it was confusing when she would talk about the ABC store. In Hawaii, ABC stores are a chain of convenience / cheap souvenir stores, but also sells booze. It took me too long to realize the Virginia ones were not the same chain.
I thought a “mickey” was a poisoned alcoholic drink.
Most people don’t know that you drink water from a bubbler.
Really.
Grew up in Milwaukee County in the 70s and all we knew was “bubbler”. Water fountain wasn’t even an accepted alternative. “Water fountain? You mean like the big thing in the park with statues?”
Didn’t take long to find usage of the term didn’t extend much outside our immediate area.
In Minnesota one of the regional terms people use is “duck,duck,gray duck” for the children’s game more commonly known as “duck,duck,goose”
When I first came to the New York City area, I kept wincing internally and wanting to correct my friends when they’d say “Well, being that today is Sunday there’s no mail delivery” or whatever, when of course the correct expression is “Seeing that”.
Eventually I caught on to the fact that everybody up here says “being that” instead of “seeing that”. Or occasionally even “being as how” instead of “seeing as how…”
I had heard other variations, including “Insofar as…”, but this “being” thing was utterly foreign to my ears.
When we moved from Texas to Ohio about 55 years ago I recall my mom getting strange looks from people when she stated that she thought the milk was blinky. Which means turned bad. Is that terminology still used in the south?
I have heard from transplants to the area that other parts of the country do not have “sunbreaks” much less make them a prominent part of the weather forecast.
What is a sunbreak? Brief patch of clouds, or the other way around?
It seems discourse doesn’t like the word “sunbreak.”
And, in what part of the country is the term used?
Edit: googling suggests that it’s a term from the Pacific Northwest, and means a short period of sunshine in an otherwise cloudy day.
Nope, we say “doing donuts” or “doing shitties” and I grew up in the shadow of General Mills. The neighbor across the street from me worked in the Betty Crocker kitchens.
Here in the Twin Cities “up north” generally means lake and vacation areas in the central and northern parts of Minnesota, but not in a working sense. When I was sent to these towns to train workers on our new software, we referred to the actual cities. “Up north” is reserved in conversation for hunting, fishing, hiking, and the like. It took me a good long while to understand that “hot dish” for us was casserole to everyone else.
Steamed hams for hamburgers? It’s an Albany thing.
When I was a teenager in Hawaii I used, “pau” meaning “finished” in front of a mainlander, and it blew my mind that it wasn’t universal. My mother made an effort to teach me American standard English without an accent, and somehow pau had slipped in.