I used to sit on a chesterfield but now I sit on a couch with my feet on a footstool. Sometimes I sit on the couch after dinner, but we still say supper sometimes, too. I wear gumboots, although we also call them rubbers or rubber boots. Galoshes are overshoes, and we only had one kind, the kind with buckles you wear over your street shoes. Some were for high-heeled shoes.
What you call braces the other guy might call suspenders and what he calls suspenders another guy might call galluses. Farmers wear overalls and the kind with sleeves are called coveralls. The red thing they might wear around their neck is a bandana, but once it was a neckerchief.
My dad used to wear “bone dries”, which were waterproof work gear, sort of like oilskins, but not. They wear oilskins in NFLD.
A toque is headgear and a toboggan is a long wooden/metal sled. We drink pop, and whisky means Rye Whisky. If you want Scotch, say so. A “case” of beer in BC is a dozen, but in Ontario a case of beer is a 2 - 4. We stand in line and “regular” coffee is black without sugar. A doubledouble can be got at Tim’s, Timmy’s or Tim Ho’s, but since I drink black unsweetened coffee I’m not really sure what a doubledouble is. When Tim Ho’s has their “rrrrrrrrrroll up the rrrrrrrrrim to win” contests you can actually buy a little gizmo to make rolling up the rim easier.
A well built sturdy device or man is “skookum”. I know what a steam donkey is, also a high rigger, a choker, and a grease monkey. There used to be a skid road in the back of my dad’s place, from the olden days and one of our neighbours used to be the grease monkey who greased the skids with axle grease and oxen pulled the logs over.
The first and last piece of bread: the bunny end. I think that was a family expression though.
A carbonated non-alcoholic beverage: pop or soft drink.
Toboggan - a flat wooden vehicle with a curved-up front. The entire bottom of the vehicle slides across the snow. It’s definitely not a sled; a sled has runners that slide across the snow and support a separate body raised above.
Throw a pass downfield: no frickin’ idea. I know little of football of any sort.
The long chair in the living room with cushions: couch, if three or more sitting places. With two sitting places, it’s a ‘loveseat’. I grew up calling this a ‘chesterfield’, though. ‘Couch’ has supplanted ‘chesterfield’, perhaps due to the insidious linguistic influence of the expression ‘couch potato’.
The cushiony thing you put your feet on: footrest.
Most common greeting in a bar: “Hey, how’s it goin’?”
The fixture that shoots water in an arc: water fountain.
Addressing a group of people informally: you guys.
Meals: lunch and supper or dinner. For me, supper and dinner are synonyms, with dinner being more common.
At restaurants, we wait in line for food that’s either “for here or to go”.
A few Montana-isms, some inherited from my father and some picked up when I lived there:[ul]
[li]“Ditch” is the same as the Texan’s “branch water,” as in “I’ll have a bourbon ditch.”[/li][li]A “borrow pit” is the depression alongside the road from which dirt was taken to build the roadbed. I never got a definitive answer as to whether the term was a corruption* of “barrow” or whether it referred to “borrowing” the dirt.[/li][li]Chewing tobacco is “snoose.”[/li][li]Something overly expensive is “spendy.”[/li][/ul]And last (but most certainly not least),[ul]Soy sauce is “bug juice.”[/ul]*And Montanans cede very little to anyone when it comes to corrupting the language. What they did to my French-Canadian grandmother’s family name would be a capital offense in most civilized countries.
I was “raised” mostly in Texas. People who grew up elsewhere were probably “reared”.
Our noonday meal was usually lunch, but on occasion could be dinner (Sundays, mostly). The evening meal was generally supper, but dinner was used interchangeably.
The long cushioned piece of furniture in the living room was a sofa or couch, but you’d hear divan, davenport or chesterfield once in a while.
The thing you rested your feet on was a footstool or an ottoman.
When thirsty, you drank soda, soda pop, or coke, which was any flavor of carbonated soft drink, often with redskin peanuts in it.
You stored your folded clothes in a dresser or chest of drawers or sometimes a chiffarobe (sp?).
A short distance away would be “down the road a piece”, while an indeterminate length of time was “for a spell”.
When milk accidentally went bad, it was “curdled” or soured. If you let it go bad on purpose to drink it, it was “clabbered”.
After a hard day’s work, you would be “tuckered out”, but if you were especially tired, you were “plumb tuckered out”.
Snoose is actually snus, a Swedish word for a type of chaw that was flavored with salt.
I learned “bug juice” in Michigan, where it meant any kind of non-alcoholic fruit punch.
Are drinking establishments commonly called “taverns” anywhere but Wisconsin? I don’t mean on signs, but in everyday speech - instead of “bars,” which is Upper Midwest shorthand for any kind of dessert squares. (They might be peanut butter, lemon, Rice Krispie, chocolate chip cookie, but you’d just say “we’re having bars for dessert.”)
I am a senior Southerner. We drank co-colas and either co-dranks or col-dranks. The default co-cola was Coke. Pepsi and RC Cola were the other two. If you had a Moon Pie, you were supposed to eat it with an RC Cola just out of tradition. Col-dranks were things like Orange Crush and Nehi Grape or Root Beer. Dr. Pepper was borderline between a Co-cola and a col-drank.
Sometimes we put salted peanuts in our bottled drinks. They were good too! Co-colas came in a kind of small bottle that costs 5 cents.
A davenport is a small desk – usually with drawers on the side. In West Tennessee we sat on a couch. In Middle Tennessee we sit on a sofa.
When I was little we went to the movie The-ATER on Saturday nights.
Sometimes we would wait on people to finish eating or finish getting dressed before we would go. There was a saying, “If you’re waiting on me, you’re losing time.”
My sister’s name is Mary. My mother calls her “May-ree.” I call her “Merry.” And she calls herself “Marry.” She had a boyfriend that called her “Murry.”
I wish Maine would lend us “wicked good.” That is the best expression!
When I moved away from Northern NY, it took several years to erase “wicked good/cool” from my vocabulary. It sometimes comes out after I’ve gone back home for a visit, where I still hear it.
My brother has lived in Cleveland for a couple of years now and he told me that you guys drop your Ls, as in “It’s code outside” instead of “It’s cold outside”. But, I don’t know what a tree lawn is.
I say that too and it’s not gender-specific. I get so tired of women joking “but what about me?” when I say it. Is that as common outside of NY?
Jeans/Dungarees - I remember someone laughing at me in college for calling them jeans, but she was the only person that I’ve ever heard refer to them as dungarees. I’m not sure where she picked that up.
I had a friend (Chicago area) who used that expression when we were kids. My husband’s Mexican co-worker took it a step further. Rather than saying he had to take a shit, he’d say he had to MAKE a shit. I always wondered if there were tool belts and measuring implements involved with that.
