I grew up in the rural west, and like most regions of the country I grew up with words specific to the area that might sound strange to people from other places. Jockey box comes to mind. Currently, a jockey box is a cooler used to cool tap beverages in temporary locations. Those of us from north Idaho, though, know that a jockey box is a glove compartment found in vehicles. The term comes from stage coaches. The driver sat on a bench which held a storage compartment beneath it and was thus called a jockey box. I’ve trained myself to say glove compartment, but I know in my heart that its a jockey box.
I do recall one of my college boyfriends from New York making fun of the word “rig” being used for any vehicle. I grew up getting into the rig. He grew up getting into a car.
Here are a few other words specific to the areas that I sometimes have to explain to my editors:
Leppie–an orphan animal, usually a calf. It’s from the Spanish word lepe meaning a stunted calf.
Buckaroo–this is a serious term denoting cowboys and cowgirls from the Great Basin area. It’s from the Spanish word vaquero. I could say a lot about buckaroos, because they have an amazing culture. Buckaroo is both a noun and a verb. “He’s off buckarooing for the Anderson outfit.”
Outfit–a ranch operation.
Gut line–a braided rawhide rope. These take a long time to make and are highly valued.
Line out–to explain to someone their duties of the day. The boss will line out his employees.
Cayuse–a horse
Those are just a few words from my area. Give me a word or phrase that is unique to your area for a chance to win a $10 Amazon gift card!
Jeannie Watt raises cattle in Montana and loves all things western. When she's not writing, Jeannie enjoys sewing, making mosaic mirrors, riding her horses and buying hay. Lots and lots of hay.
We played at the crick (creek) and lived in White Clay Hunert (Hundred).
Hundred is a unique term going back to the Colonial days when tracts of land were divided into hundreds. Delaware is one state that used it, but I’m not sure it’s still used colloquially nowadays.
Wuder comes out of a spicket (spigot).
As for me, I pronounce Hundred correctly and I quit using crick because of an English teacher. I try to say water.
Where I live in Maryland has a strong concentration of Balmerese. Baltimore-speak. Day is not long enough to touch that.
I played in a crick, too! That’s interesting about the hunert. I’ve never heard of that.
it’s a Philly thing, and Northern Delaware is a Philly suburb.
as for hundred, I found this online: A HUNDRED was an early designation for an adminstrative land division during British colonial settlement. A Hundred would be created when a 100 people had settled in a given area. A Hundred was established with a constable and was followed by a court system.
I should have called it White Clay Creek Hundred, mispronounced at hunert.
I grew up in the Appalachian Mountain region. A bee gum is a beehive, and to bless out means to scold.
I’ve learned something today, Janice. 🙂
I say creek, my husband says crick. I grew up calling a couch a sofa. In Mexico, we called a pacifier a chupon (I think it may be a brand name). My grandma said she would Hoover the rug, but the rest of us vacuumed it. Here in Wyoming, when we are asked to “man up”, we say “cowboy up”.
I love cowboy up! We called our couch a daveno. I have no idea where that came from. Chupon is interesting.
I’m pretty sure daveno comes from davenport, which is what we called a couch.
Here’s one from my neck of woods, Finland, North Karelia: Muantie on kiärällä jiällä.
Muantie: road
on: is
kiärällä, kiärä: very slippery (ice), that doesn’t have any snow on top of it (but there might be some water)
jiällä, jiä: ice
Fascinating! My grandmother was born in Finland. My mother wasn’t taught the language and regrets it. I do, too.
Well, may the force be with you if you ever decide to learn Finnish! The grammer is very different from English.
My paternal grandmother was from Norway so anything with A -W sound was alway vy, vere,vhen. Couldn’t pronounce the W or Wh.
And doesn’t it sound cool when the words are spoken that way. My Swedish grandmother took out the thrash (trash).
We called soda “pop”. I still do.
I still say cricket not creek.
I’m sure there’s many things I just can’t think.
My husband says soda. Pop is a foreign concept to him, lol. I still call it pop, too.
That is interesting on the jockey box. I can’t remember ever hearing it called that. I’ve tried to think of a few words. Pig trail road. Meaning not a well traveled road. Supper instead of dinner. Over younder (over there)or a far piece (a hundred miles or more). My favorite is Suwannee. We grew up near the Suwannee River. And my parents built a house on the Suwannee. But, we would say,”I Suwannee,(declare or swear)”. I would think this is only said around here. I’ve never heard it said anywhere else unless you were from here or picked it up. Suwannee is Native American name. Meaning Echo or Deep water.
Well, I stand corrected. This article says “Suwannee” has nothing to do with the river. Interesting! Wrote in 2017.
https://www.mysanantonio.com/opinion/commentary/article/Swannee-he-s-fixin-to-give-a-11943263.php
Jeffrey, it mentions some of the lingo you posted too! LOL
That’s so interesting, Tracy. Until I was in my teens I thought the river was called the Swanee. I was shocked when I saw it spelled out. My maiden name is Swanson and there were a lot of Swanees in the area, so I guess I just assumed… 🙂 I think I might start saying “I Suwannee..” Love it.
Here in middle Georgia there are more local colloquialisms than would fit on many pages. We don’t drive someone; we “carry” them. Beer is not just beer: It’s “cold beer.” We are not planning to do something; We’re ” fixin” to do something. Speaking of someone else’s faults, They’re not just wrong, “they ain’t right.” The veiled insult to someone else’s shortcomings is “bless their heart.” And on and on…
I’ve never heard of carrying someone. Totally new to me. I love “they ain’t right”. I’m going to work that into my vocabulary.
Milk was typically called “sweet milk”, as in contrast to buttermilk. Also, it is a pickup, not a truck. Interesting posting!
Sweet milk–interesting.
Such a fun blog post!
My is “Ope” like Oops.
If you bump in to someone “Ope, Sorry”
I didn’t realize I say it until someone called it out as a Midwest thing.
When I read “ope” I thought this has to be in a Scandinavian area of the country. I can imagine my relatives saying that.
Yes, Northern Midwest.
The Iceboxes states;)
very interesting. I grew up in upstate New York. We called rigs the tractor trailers.
Yes. That’s probably where it came from. I can see why my boyfriend thought it was a silly name for a Ford Pinto.
We speak a lot of the south here. Like bless your heart and fixin to do something or ain’t that something. Also it is a creek here to. I also use the phrase get er done a whole lot and yes soda is still pop to me.
Yay for pop and get er done! When I hear “fixin to do” I always think of Jed Clampett, one of my favorite TV characters.
Oh what fun to read these! My grandma called a couch a “davenport” and for fun I’ve kept calling it that. Here in Michigan we say things differently. Most of our city names are said as one word – Grand Rapids is said as “Granrapids” and Traverse City is “Travercity”. We say pop, call most certain roads highways, we add “s” to the end of most stores (Meijer is always Meijers), its a crick – not a creek, spicket (not spigot). There are actually a couple social media accounts that are about Michiganders and our weird ways of talking! Its fun to watch the videos and realize we DO say things not right.
I add s to the store names, too, because my parents did that. When I went to college I had to train myself to say Safeway and not Safeways. Now that I think about it, spickets were common where I was, too.
Jockey box is a term I had to learn the meaning of when I moved to Eastern Washington. In upstate NY it was a glove compartment. A pickup is a pickup. Truck is used for the bigger trucks such as the wheat truck or the cattle truck. Rig could be any of them including the car. What we called a tractor trailer in the East is a semi here. A term that used to be used more frequently here is barrow ditch. It refers to a deep ditch near a road. I am glad we still have some regional differences. It makes life more interesting.
I so agree, Alice. I’ve loved reading all of these replies. I have never heard of a barrow ditch. Must add that to my repertoire, since we have those.
In Eastern NY State there are a number of streams/rivers that are called “kill” as in Normans Kill, Snook Kill, Batten Kill. There are even some towns with that name. It is from the old Dutch settlements.
Hoosier for those born in Indiana, crick, catty-corner, etc
I have lived all my life in little rural towns and a word that is unique to my area is Yynz.
Crystal, you must come back and tell me what that means. 🙂
I use the word kitty-corner. We do not say gasoline, but gas. I remember my grandmother saying shirtwaist. She taught me the area in my mouth was goom, not gums and the flower peony was piney. We say pop instead of soda and add an s to the end of store names. I also call a small stream a crick which was what my grandmother called it. I’m sure there are many more that I can’t recall.
Those are all wonderful regionalisms. Goom is interesting. I’ve never heard that before.
We call grocery carts, but in the south they are called “buggies” . I never heard of “jockey box”, but then I’m from Indiana.. and I’m a Hoosier which perportedly comes from riverboats calling out to those on land “Who’s there” that’s one theory. Do you call it “pop” or “soda” or “coke”?
Back in the 60’s, my sister had a language/speech college prof who could tell what part of the country you came from by listening to your speech. If you’re old enough, you can remember when TV commentators/network people did have regional accents. I worked as a receptionist and could tell when people would call from places like Minnesota, Maine, Boston etc. and if you watch things like HGTV or DIY where you have regular people talking and not someone who has been schooled on talking in front of a tv camera or radio mike., you can hear regional speech.
I’m a pop gal. My husband from the east drinks soda. He also otters things from Amazon. I love hearing different dialects. One side of my family is from the south, the other from Scandinavian countries, so I have a strange dialect that I’ve learned to overcome. Even in the area where I grew up, I pronounced things differently.
Valise. I grew up with this term and used it all my life.
That is a cool term, Anne. Love it!
Where I grew up any kind of a soft drink is a “Coke” and we warsh our clothes in the zink.
I don’t have a zink, but I grew up next to Warshington State and warshed my clothes. 🙂
Strange how people in Washington add the r even my kids. It’s okay for an Idahoan to add it too.
Soft Drink, biscuits, jerseys, and running shoes. These words were all I knew when I was young.
Soft drink is very formal sounding. I love it!
my mom was a stickler about words being correct. but she had trouble saying spaghetti, it always came out psspaghetti. so I grew up saying it this way. and she had trouble saying tomatoe. she would say tomato (long O)
Yes–I’m in the long O tomato club myself. So cute about the psspaghetti!
Supper is the evening meal and dinner is lunch, soda pop is just pop and tennis shoes are sneakers.
Dinner is lunch–that’s interesting. I like the word sneakers.
I grew up in Iowa where potatoes were “spuds”, and 18 wheelers were either that or a “semi”. the word wash for Hands or clothes was pronounced “worsh”. In North Carolina I heard slangs such as “boot” which is the trunk of a car, “step up” was to get into a car, “step down” was to get out of a car, “Glove box” was the glove compartment and many more which do not come to me at present. In Iowa I had an Uncle who would often say, “Do ‘yuze’ want a cup of coffee?” He grew up in Iowa so I do not know where he got that from. He is the only one around us who said it. When listening to others in a different area of the U.S. it always challenges me to try to determine where they might be from. I did this quite a lot when we managed hotels.
It was quite a challenge.
How fun to guess regions. You have a lot of phrases here that I’ve never heard. Step up and step down are new to me. Very cool.
True New Jerseyans say “down the shore” which means “going to the shore”. I’ve lived in New Jersey most of my life but I was born elsewhere which might be why I say “going to the shore”. Thanks for the chance to win a prize.
You’re welcome, Vickie. I like “down shore”. Short and to the point.
Wow! All those comments were very interesting. We say CAR and others say, CAAR….
Enjoyed your blog & all your books.
Isn’t it fun to hear people say caaar? I say froooog, and I don’t know why, but I can relate.
When I was growing up a plain pizza was called a cheese pie…. when I let it slip now where I live, they look at me like I have two heads. We enjoyed hard rolls with butter or a burger…
Cheese pie makes total sense to me. 🙂
I can’t believe how many of your readers say crick for creek. I grew up in southeast Colorado and we used to go fishing down at the crick. My grandma had lots of old sayings and one I remember was when you hoped for something to happen. She said….God willing and the crick don’t rise.
In SWMO, we have cicadas that sing in the trees of an evening during the summer. All my life, our church has had a national campmeeting the third week in July in a tiny little town close by called Monark Springs. So we’ve always just called the meeting “Monark.” It’s an open-air tabernacle, so at night, the cicadas sing in the trees all around & it is a part of the “feel” of Monark. So every summer, around the end of June/first of July, when the cicadas start their evening songs, we say, “I hear the Monark bugs!!” It always gives a little thrill of anticipation to hear the Monark bugs begin to sing! 🙂
For me, it’s pop; meals are breakfast, lunch, & supper… dinner is only the meal you have on Sunday afternoon; something crooked is catty-wampus or angled in the corner is catty-cornered; you all is y’all; if you’re watching for something, you “keep your eyes peeled” for it; when you’re anticipating showing something to someone, you tell them to “hide & watch” instead of “wait & see”… just a few that comes to my mind. 🙂
I love the Monark bugs!
I call soda ,pop and potatoes, is taters here at my house and yes wash is wrash here too lol Have a wonderful Day
Thank you, Sarah. I warsh spuds, but taters are also a thing–meat and taters.
I say Pee Kahn, alot of people say Pee Can. Something I have heard is Across the Pasture, where here in west Texas to me it would be across the desert. This is so very interesting. I enjoyed your post. Have a great day and a great rest of the week.
Thank you Alicia. My husband and I say pecan differently, so I always hesitate before I say it, trying to remember which one I use, lol. Across the desert has meaning to me. 🙂
Grandma used to say Cat got your britches, meaning hold your horses, knock on wood good luck and soda instead of pop
Cat bot your britches might be my favorite new saying! Thank you, Deborah!
Skeeter-mosquito and Snowbird – Someone from a place with an actual “winter” who travels to Florida to escape it. Those are two I could think of for here in Florida.
Skeeter is great, Cherie. You probably have lots with all the water there. 🙂
In Ohio, we called them ditches, my friend in Montana calls them coulees and here in Florida they are called swales.
“They feed in the coulee and they water in the draw…” Lyrics to a Woody Guthrie song about pushing calves through Montana. I never thought about the usage before. Interesting.
I sometimes get carried away, so I apologize in advance for this lengthy response:
OMGoodness, my husband was from MA where Soda = Tonic and Jeans = Dungarees and a Milk Shake = Frappe. Additionally, in his family Potatoes = Buh-tatoes and they ate Cannibal sandwiches which is essentially steak tartar on bread with condiments. And, they thought I was dim if I didn’t know what they were talking about.
I grew up calling a couch, a sofa, and gas was fuel. In SoCal, back in the ‘50s when I was a kid, flip-flops were called Go-Aheads… And my mom could whip one of hers off to swat a behind fast-like-lightening. Here in AZ, I’ve heard the work “chancla” (pro: Shan-kla). The city of Prescott, AZ is pronounced “PRESS-kit”.
Growing up a Semi was an 18-wheeler, and they would always honk when my brother would pump his arm at them. For Route we said Rowt not Root.
Some other family words my daughter “invented” and we just kept using them, because she would put her tiny fists on her hips and correct us, were Bus-skettie, Lallow (for yellow), Mazagine.
My Hebrew teacher in college insisted Youse was the plural of you.
Dana, this was a fascinating post! I have learned so much! Thank you for sharing!
This is for eastern N.C. “carry” How about carry me down the road to the store. They use the word in place of take.
That’s really interesting, Connie.
The only one that I can think of would be saying pop not soda. Thank you for sharing. God bless you.
Thank you, Debra!
Fantom- a feeling or dread. Usually phrased, That gives me The Fantods. Used in thr South and Kansas.
Dang autocorrect: F A N T O D
I’ve never heard of that. I really like it!
“Madder Than a Wet Hen”
Good one! 🙂
Depending where we have lived, carbonated sweet beverages were called soda, pop, coke, moxie, cola no matter what the brand and often no matter what the flavor.
As for regional where I grew up, we had michigan hot dogs.
A michigan hot dog, michigan red hot,[1] or simply “michigan”, is a steamed all-beef hot dog on a steamed bun topped with a meaty sauce, generally referred to as “michigan sauce”, and is a specialty in and around Plattsburgh, New York. For more info – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michigan_hot_dog
These aren’t the same as chili dogs, but similar.
Patricia, being from two counties south of your home I was totally surprised to see a “chili dog” was a hot dog with regular chili on it and not a Michigan Hot type chili dog, the chili as in what would now probably be called salsa.
I have never heard of this! My education continues. Thank you for sharing, Patricia!
So fun, Jeannie! I grew up saying rig, jockey box, pop, and outfit too! My oldest brother was a buckaroo down on the Nevada/Oregon border on a ranch in the middle of nowhere and it was fun to listen to him and his friends speak their lingo when they’d come home for a weekend of Mom’s homecooked meals.
I think we share a similar background, Shanna. 🙂 The last school I taught had the Nevada-Oregon border going through the football field.
I’ve lived in western MD all my life. I remember when my sister-in-law’s family moved from Ohio to their current home in WV, I found it so weird that they called shopping carts “buggies.” To me, buggies are the vehicles pulled by horses, not something in the grocery store! 😀 Also, I have PA friends who call Whoopie Pies “gobs”.
“Well, let me let you go…”
That magical phrase that politely ends any phone call.
That’s a great phrase, Abby!