Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

I'm just old enough to remember watching Armstrong stepping onto the Moon on television, and I grew up in Bowie, Maryland (a "bedroom community" suburb halfway between Annapolis and Washington D.C.)

What do you call...

1. A body of water, smaller than a river, contained within relatively narrow banks?
   
   "stream", "brook", or "creek", occasionally pronounced "crick" depending on where in the state I'm standing at the time and whom I'm talking to. I grew up thinking of a creek as something especially small because there was one not too far from my house that was jumpable in some places and fordable in others; but several years of driving over bridges crossing bodies of water large enough for a sailboat, named "____ Creek", eventually sank into my brain. Now I think of "crick" as being the especially tiny special-case of "creek". For some reason, if there are steep banks and lots of uncultivated, ungroomed brush, it doesn't register as a "brook" to me, but has to be "stream" or "creek".


2. The thing you push around the grocery store?
   
   "Grocery cart". Or if we're actually in the grocery store at the time, simply "cart".


3. A metal container to carry a meal in?
   
   Like in elementary school? "Lunch box".


4. The thing that you cook bacon and eggs in?
   
   "Skillet", though I grew up just calling it a "frying pan".


5. The piece of furniture that seats three people?
   
   We used "sofa", "couch", and "settee" interchangeably.


6. The device on the outside of the house that carries rain off the roof?
   
   "Gutter".


7. The covered area outside a house where people sit in the evening?
   
   "Porch" usually, though a concrete or flagstone one at the rear of the house might be called a "patio", especially if the roof were clearly a later addition. Without the roof, it's clearly a "patio" unless it's a raised wooden structure, which would make it a "deck". Screening the sides makes what had been a patio or a deck more likely to be called a porch. (Also, "porch" usually implied, though not too strongly, "front porch"; we usually specified "back porch" when we meant the one in back. I don't remember talking much about wraparound porches, which we seldom saw.) By the way, I have a friend whose parents owned a German sports car, which they decided to replace. But they bought the new one before they'd sold the old one, so for a little while they parked one in front of the house and one behind the house, because, as his father explained, they'd always wanted to have both a front Porsche and a back Porsche.


8. Carbonated, sweetened, non-alcoholic beverages?
   
   When I was very young, "soft drinks"; later, usually "soda". Though we understood when visitors from strange lands said "pop". (Actually, we quite often referred to the specific drinks or drink types instead of the general class: Coke, Pepsi, Fanta, RC, Dr. Pepper, root beer, orange soda, cola. I think the use of "soda" as a generic term came from our familiarity with "orange soda" and "grape soda". The idea of calling colas other than Coca-Cola "coke" was a little strange and annoying to me when I first encountered it, and when I later ran into the practice of calling even non-colas "coke", I found that downright bizarre.


9. A flat, round breakfast food served with syrup?
   
   "Pancakes". Though we understood "griddle cakes" and "flapjacks" from reading stories. I think I first encountered "flapjacks" in a story about Paul Bunyan, and had to ask my father what it meant.


10. A long sandwich designed to be a whole meal in itself?
    
    At first, "submarine sandwich"; later simply "sub". But you only had to drive about fifteen minutes to get into "hero" territory, so we had to recognize that. And school cafeterias called them "hoagies", which was confusing because I never heard anyone else use that term for a long time. I don't recall hearing "grinder" until I was in high school, and only in the context of "some places, people call it...".


11. The piece of clothing worn by men at the beach?
    
    Usually "swimming trunks" or "swim trunks", back when that was the predominant style. I think we called the Speedo-style "briefs".


12. Shoes worn for sports?
    
    Growing up, "sneakers" or "tennis shoes". I think "tennis shoes" more often when I was really small, with "sneakers" very gradually overtaking it. Occasionally "Keds", as long as the shoes in question were in fact that brand. Special case for ones that covered the ankle, which I called "basketball shoes" until I heard others refer to them as "high-tops", but they were still considered a subclass of "sneaker". When they started marketing shoes specialized as "running shoes", "jogging shoes", and so on, it took me a while to get used to calling all of those anything other than "sneakers", but nowadays I'm likely to refer to most athletic shoes as "running shoes" unless I can identify a clear specialization at a glance.


13. Putting a room in order?
    
    "Tidying" the room.


14. A flying insect that glows in the dark?
    
    "Firefly" or "lightning bug", interchangeably. I don't recall either being said more often than the other.


15. The little insect that curls up into a ball?
    
    "Roly-Poly", until I encountered the term "pill bug" in novels.


16. The children's playground equipment where one kid sits on one side and goes up while the other sits on the other side and goes down?
    
    "See-saw", though I often heard it called "teeter-totter" as well.


17. How do you eat your pizza?
    
    Depends on the pizza and the setting. Often with a knife and fork, sometimes picking it up and eating it point-first, occasionally folding it in half. How thick is the crust? How crisp? Are the toppings trying to squish away? Are we in a pizza parlour, or sitting on cardboard boxes on moving day? Is it "real" pizza, frozen, or something from a vending machine?


18. What's it called when private citizens put up signs and sell their used stuff?
    
    I grew up calling it a "garage sale", but now call it a "yard sale". I heard "rummage sale" as a child but never got in the habit of saying that. I don't recall hearing "tag sale" until much later.


19. What's the evening meal?
    
    "Dinner". But we had neighbours who said "supper". When I say "supper", it's usually an intentional dialect-shift, an allusion to a literary work, or a reference to a common phrase that just seems to work better with "supper" instead of "dinner".


20. The thing under a house where the furnace and perhaps a rec room are?
    
    Usually "basement", though "cellar" comes out just as easily -- I think it often depends on other language cues I get from whomever I'm speaking to at the time, but in the absence of such cues, if it's finished and furnished, it's much more likely to be "basement", and if it's unfinished, low-ceilinged, and mostly just storage, it's somewhat more likely to be "cellar". Special cases for "salt cellar", "wine cellar", and "root cellar", which never have "basement" equivalents. Note that I grew up in a development that was all concrete-slab construction, so nobody around me had a basement. (Relatives we visited did, so my speech might reflect Northern Virginia usage as much as Central Maryland.) I'm not certain, but ISTR that there's a legal difference between "cellar" and "basement" when used in formally describing property for a real-estate transaction.

And one I wanted to add because it came up in the comments to someone else's journal entry: For sliding down a snowy hill, what counts as a "sled"? I grew up thinking of "sleds" as wooden platforms with metal runners and a steering bar which worked by flexing the fronts of the runners. Anything without runners wasn't a "sled". Toboggans, saucers, anything without runners was in a separate category. But I got corrected by someone who said that they were all sleds, and the kind I was referring to was a "runner sled". So the question is whether this is another regionalism, or whether my neighbourhood was just unusually picky about what we were willing to call a "sled".