My Dad was a frontiersman, in the last frontier- Alaska. A Sled Dog Driver (incidentally, in his area, “Mush” was what you fed your sled dogs, when it was time to go, you simply said “let’s go boys”.)
He used Nope, Yep, & Howdy.
Thus, I will often do so also.
I totally confused a little girl walking with her Dad on the trail, when I greeted them with a Howdy, she had to ask Dad what it meant!
A parka is a parki, another Dadism.
Living all my life in CA, I dont have that many regionalism. I can say “The 101” or leave off the “the” depending on audience and context. (altho that is not longer such a firm dividing line as Norcalers would have you believe).
I’ve never heard this before. Where is “The Range?”
And I was reading along thinking “Oh, yeah, from Missouri!” until I hit the second paragraph. I’ve only known two families from Missouri, but they both used that phrase in just that way, and neither was ethnically Indian.
Nope, “Trash truck” is perfectly cromulent thing to say here in Northern Virginia. “Garbage truck” has a slightly more cultured, or maybe grown-up ring to it, but trash truck isn’t odd at all.
I’m confused. To me a “soda” is sparkling water with flavored syrup in it (your “pop”). An “ice cream float” adds iced cream and maybe whipped cream/cherry on top (Your “float”). What else could you possibly add to this to make it qualify as your “soda?”
Here’s one for all of you with German idioms, have you ever heard “Lick your hand backwards”? This is a decades-old family mystery, resulting from a telephone argument between my German Stepmother and her ex-husband. The overall argument was him not paying enough toward their daughter’s wedding, and she said “Well, you should lick your hand backwards!!”
We were all afraid to bring it up as she was spittin’ mad. And now they’re divorced so I never see her. Anybody know what on Earth was meant by that?
c*romulent
Though ‘cromulent’ originated as a joke on The Simpsons, it’s a perfectly cromulent candidate for future entry in the dictionary.
The word cromulent ended up in the script courtesy of a showrunner’s challenge to the writers. According to the DVD commentary for The Simpsons, the showrunners asked the writers to come up with two nonce words that sounded like words that could be in actual use. Writer David X. Cohen came up with cromulent as one of those words. It means “acceptable” or “fine.”*
*cromulent
adjective
Appearing legitimate but actually being spurious*
These disagree on what the word means, which is either ironic or suitable…
A soda adds some kind of syrup. Not like what you’d mix with carbonated water to make pop, but a heavy syrup like you’d pour over ice cream - chocolate is commonly used. The liquid in a soda doesn’t even necessarily have to be pop. It could be plain seltzer. Traditionally it would be chocolate syrup on the bottom, followed by 2-3 scoops of ice cream then unflavored carbonated water poured over it to make it foam, and topped with whipped cream and a cherry.
With a float the pop goes in first and the ice cream is added which floats in the pop (hence the name) then optionally whipped cream and cherry.
We say trash truck in Georgia, too. That’s just normal. Trash truck, trash can, or outside trash, which is your big container that goes to the curb on, guess what, trash day.
I know this has been said multiple dozens of times before by lots of other people, but “soda” is a Northern thing. In the South, soda and pop might as well be foreign words. Everything is either a “Coke” or we just call it by the name. “I want a Nehi, RC, Cheerwine or Mountain Dew”.
In my hometown (NY State), the IBM plant was “the IBM” and it wouldn’t be weird to say “He works up to the IBM”. We weren’t natives, so “He works at IBM” worked for us.
I’ve only encountered the negative for a positive construction up here, like
“I took a day off yesterday.”
“So didn’t I.”
“I was pissed off in the meeting and so wasn’t Joe.”
That one is pretty wild. Note, though, that the “positive” statements actually have negative connotations. I’m sure they don’t do it for truly positive statements.
Basically, they’re kind of doing what a lot of languages do in their standard forms: have different words for “yes, I agree with the positive thing you said” vs. “yes, I agree with the negative thing you said” vs. “no, I don’t agree with what you said.” In French, this is “oui,” “si,”
and “non.”
In the South, when your Mama calls you in for lunch and you step up onto the porch in your muddy work boots, she’ll tell you to “Take them right on off.”
UGH! This is such a pet peeve of mine! Many of the people I hear who say “I could care less” in situations where they mean to indicate they don’t give a damn, don’t realize they are saying it wrong. I can’t even give them credit for saying the opposite of what they mean and being aware of that as in these other examples.
There are times I just have to be a bitch and correct them. “Oh, you mean you COULDN’T care less?”
It’s just that wordiness that you find in Southern speech. People will often throw in extra words, as in “Turn that all the way off”, “Pull it all out from under the bed” or “Bring it right on up here”.
Oh, man, I want to make that rolling “hurry up” motion with my hand just so my mom’ll get to the end of her sentence before dinnertime. And she’s as Yankee as you can get. I can’t imagine if she were born *dahn sahth *…
Latin Americans laugh at Spaniards because Spanish has verbs that mean come-up, or come-down, or go-there… and those of us from the Old World will add redundant complements. They say sube (go up), we say sube allá arriba (go up up there); they say ven (come), we say ven aquí (come right here). We put on the straightest face we have and claim it’s for emphasis.
Ending a proposal or question with pues (then) is very typical of Pamplona. It can get chained after o qué (or what). ¿Nos vamos o qué, pues? Are we leaving or what, then?
My sister in law is Aragonese. It took my brother several years to get her to stop calling him maño, “no honey, you are the one who’s maña, I’m not :D”. Maño (or maña) is both a nickname for people from Aragon and what they call everybody.
Way back when my hometown started getting exchange high school students from the US we had to learn to explain that yes, it’s normal for a waiter or retail worker to call you “love”, “pretty one”, “sweetheart” - nowadays I would explain it as being “like Southerners calling everybody ‘honey’, but in Spanish.” It’s just a substitution filler for a place where your name would go if the speaker happened to know it.
