The quiz missed me by half a continent as well. I did strive to give the answers I would have given in my formative years.
The strip between the sidewalk and street were a thing we called “half of the front yard.” Our sidewalks were about 15 feet from the road, which seems a lot safer.
Not sure how widespread it is but my mom referred to empty soda bottles as “dead soldiers.”
The quiz correctly picked Michigan for me, though based on someone else’s response, that might have just been due to knowing the term “Devil’s Night”. I wasn’t aware it was something local until fairly late in my life (though not just now).
I’ve heard “dead soldiers”, but only in reference to beer bottles.
Finest compliment you can bestow.
Mountain lion may be more of a California name. Here in the Northwest, they’re cougars. Except in Pullman, where they’re just Cougs.
I’ve heard the term used for empty wine or liquor bottles, too. Not for soda bottles.
I’m not sure how much this is still the case, but hazelnuts used to be called filberts here in Oregon.
In Utah it’s called a park strip, and my family called it the parking. Since I haven’t lived there for more than 30 years, I’m not sure how universal my family’s experience was.
Also in Utah, we had our own pronunciation of things. The first syllable of Weber is pronounced like “we.”
This is also the only name I learned for it while growing up in southern California. I’ve adopted the term “devil’s strip” because I find it to be poetic and ominous, but since that particular kind of urban fixture is almost nonexistent here in the PNW, I rarely have an occasion to use it.
I’m in the East, and I hear “mountain lion” more often than “panther.” Though I hear enough variation that I tend to call them “the cat of many names.”
I don’t remember ever calling the strip between the sidewalk and the street anything in particular. But then, most places I’ve lived, sidewalks were something that existed if you went into town.
It it possible the language has changed now that cougars/mountain lions/panthers are pretty much extinct in the eastern US, and people are starting to pick up the western terminology. But my understanding is that at least historically they were known as panthers when they were still common in the east, although I’d have to find a cite. Although I would say names like the Florida panther and place names like Panthertown Valley, SC, would be evidence of them once being called panthers in the east.
Since my previous post I saw an article in a semi-local paper that, while it used several names in the article, used “panther” in the headline.
I think local use is currently pretty mixed.
Huh. That spectacularly failed for me. It got me as Nevada. I’m Chicago. I’ve taken much shorter quizzes that have pegged me as from Chicago or close enough (perhaps another Great Lakes city.) I’ve never had one so far off. (And if you met me, you’d probably identify me pretty easily as from Chicago if you know your accents.)
ETA: Oh, and I have no idea what a “water bug” is, but that wasn’t an option. Didn’t recognize either bug, nor the term.
Gave me New Jersey- which isn’t that far off since I’ve lived in NYC my whole life. But the New York Times quiz narrows it down to New York City, Yonkers and Newark/Patterson.
I just came across a second reference to raw red bell pepper as parika. What’s interesting is that [the] first time I heard this reference was from a Korean speaker and this time it was from a Japanese speaker. Is this widespread and common [in Korean and Japanese] and in other Asian languages?
I assume you’re talking about something like this
Does the sidewalk really run through the middle of the front yard or does the city/town village own everything from the sidewalk to the street?
PS to anyone - How do you get links to show a preview?
Put them on their own line; not on the same line with other text.
Some of them won’t show it anyway; it depends on the site.
Yes, it looked like that but the houses often sat higher and the yard sloped down to the road more. I’m not sure what the legalities were there. We mowed all of it and our trash was picked up at the curb. We had a dead tree between sidewalk and curb, and I think cutting it down was ours to deal with. We also planted a couple other trees between sidewalk and curb, and I don’t think we needed permission or anything. We tore out a cement walkway from sidewalk to curb and didn’t replace it…the grass just filled it in. I don’t remember any utilities coming in from the curb—we had alleys—but the sewer line probably exited in that direction.
I have always used the two words interchangeably.
There’ve been arguments about what to call them:
A number of years ago, the Oregon Filbert Commission changed its name to Oregon Hazelnut Commission, which is why I’m not sure about what we call them now. BTW the reason we have a commission is that 99% of all domestic filberts/hazelnuts are grown in Oregon.
The NYT test put me in Boston/Worchester, MA, Providence, RI. Evidently calling the place where streets meet in a circle as it should be called, a rotary, is the defining trait. I grew up on the South Shore of MA and in Maine, with family from NJ, so pretty accurate.
