Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

(More net connection trouble. Details later in rant mode. Wrote this yesterday before the connection failed. Now even farther behind on prepping to leave for Pennsic.)

Finally giving in to this meme after I saw zoethe's take on it, but was motivated to follow her lead and comment on each item. One problem with doing a "you know you're from Maryland when" list is that Maryland is, for purposes of geography, dialect, accent, and culture, really at least four distinct entities.

You Know You're From Maryland When...

• You know more than 10 people who own boats and they all park them at the same marina in Annapolis I don't think I currently know ten boat-owners, but I certainly did in high school. Since I went to school in Annapolis, it's no surprise that many of them were docked there. But there are plenty parked in Baltimore as well. Of course, folks from Frederick probably have a different reaction to this.
• You can pronounce and spell "Pocomoke," "Mattaponi," "Accokeek," and "Havre de Grace" But ... but ... but none of those are the least bit tricky except the pronounciation of "Havre de Grace" (which you have to remember not to pronounce as French as it looks)! Doesn't everyone hear the double-'c' in "Accokeek"?
• You prononce "Bowie" BOO-ie not BOW-ie or BAUW-ie Believe it or not, I've had arguments about this with people in other states who refuse to believe someone who grew up in Bowie when told that it is not pronounced the same as the names of the rock star and the guy the knife is named after. Other words in English can share spelling and differ in pronounciation, but not the name of my hometown and a rock star?
• 1 hour is an easy commute to work Not especially easy, merely typical. (Anything from half an hour to two hours is ordinary. Twenty minutes is an "easy commute".)
• You have more than three recipies for crabcakes Okay, it's not the fault of the meme-writer that I'm a vegetarian. But I do have a crab story to attach to a different item.
• French fries just don't taste right without Old Bay Eh. They taste right enough without Old Bay; they just taste better with it. Related phenomenon: friends from New England ask you to bring some Old Bay with you when you go to visit them.
• There are more than two crab places in your town *snort* There are more than two crab paces within a couple of blocks of my house!
• Even your high school cafeteria made good crabcakes Tiny high school; no cafeteria. But I bet they would have. (Not that I would have eaten them, because even before I went veg I didn't eat crabs, but I would've heard about how good they were, if we'd had a cafeteria.)
• You got your first lacrosse stick before you were six years old Nope, not until high school. And I never actually played (but I did learn how to throw, catch, and cradle ... there's something soothing about those motions with a lacrosse stick).
• You call all turtles "terrapins" Hmm. Nope. I was taught early on (correctly or otherwise) that terrapins are "turtles that are good to eat" and the rest are "just turtles". But the association between turtles and the University of Maryland Terrapins is pretty strong for me. (My father worked there, so he took us to a lot of basketball and football games.)
• You refer to your state as "Merlind" That's an accent that applies to some parts of the state and not others. I grew up saying, "MAAR-i-land", but now live in a "M'R-lind" or "MUR-l'n" region.
• Your mother shops at Hecht's I have shopped at Hecht's. Even had a store credit card a long time ago.
• You still call Six Flags America "Adventure World", or even "Wild World" I haven't been to an amusement park in a long time. Wild World changed it's name? When did that happen? I'd heard radio ads for Six Flags but didn't realize that was the location they were talking about.
• You still remember the Wild World commercial (Wild World's the cure for the summertime blues!) Uh, I think so... Kind of foggy on that.
• You can tell the difference between the smells of septic and marsh. Yeah, but not as reliably as when I spent more time in and around marshes. Note that only part of the state has marshes. Another part of the state is mountains. And there's a chunk that's farmland not near a marsh (as well as another chunk that's farmland near marshes.) I grew up in a suburb that was none-of-the-above.
• You not only know how to eat hard crabs but you also know how to catch them, cook them and tell the males from the females. Yup, oddly enough, since I've never eaten them. (Got a small taste of crabmeat as a kid, decided I didn't particularly care for it (and besides, they were kind of creepy to look at intact and think of as food -- I sympathised with Amy when I read zoethe's recent entry.)) But I've been around people who do eat crabs all my life. When we caught a small crab on a school camping trip for 12th grade Estuarine Biology class, and realized that our exchange student from the Canary Islands had, in an entire school year, not tasted this so-very-Maryland food, we decided we had to cook it for him. As the only other person present who did not eat crabs, I was quite surprised to discover I was the only one who knew how to cook it. I improvised a tiny crab steamer out of pieces from two mess kits and our teacher's coffeepot (percolator) and cooked it over a Coleman stove. (As for catching 'em: I've never caught blue crabs, but I've heard a lot about how it's done. Plenty of my high school friends had done it.)
• You don't think that Assawoman Bay is a strange name for a body of water. *shrug* I guess not, at least not compared to other place-names.
• You know perfectly well why Rehoboth is called "Little San Francisco" *nod*
• M R Ducks makes perfect sense. I remember that it made sense to me at one time, but I can't remember why.
• So does C M Wangs. Huh, what?
• You think Salisbury is a big city. I think Salisbury is a city, which clearly marks me as not being from anywhere near NYC, Chicago, Atlanta, etc. The way I see it, Maryland doesn't have any big cities, and I don't miss them. If I do feel a need for that experience, NYC is a day trip and Boston is a solo-drive weekend visit. (Actually I guess Philadelphia counts, and it's only about an hour and a half from here.) Technically Bowie is one of the largest cities in Maryland and it doesn't feel "city" (legally it's a city; phenomenologically it's a suburb). Other cities that count in Maryland are Frederick and Baltimore, and we may as well include DC even though it's not part of Maryland. And none of those are "big city". Annapolis, the capital, is a very nice city, but it's as much a "really big town" as it is a city, in terms of the experience of being there. Note that this is not the result of growing up and travelling. I grew up with the idea that we had "cities" but no "big city" nearby, but that "the big city" in New York was a reasonable driving distance away to go visit relatives.
• You think of dumplings as wet slippery squares of boiled dough. [confused look] [reaches for dictionary to find out what else they coud be]
• You and your boss take off of work when the fish are running or the ducks are flying in.. Nope, different parts of the state.
• You've eaten muskrat at a church dinner but think it's better the way you fix it. #blink# Uh, no, not even when I ate meat. probably different part of the state.
• You think of "Dairy Queen" as a pageant title and not a place to get an ice cream. DQ is not completely alien to me, though I have no idea how far away the nearest one is. Which meaning would pop into my head first would depend on context.
• "Formal wear" is a ball cap, a flannel shirt and Timberlands. Different part of the state, but I know what they're talking about.
• You still root for the Orioles even when they suck Only abstractly, since I've never followed baseball. But I root for the Redskins even when they suck, and consider one of the benefits of living in Baltimore to be the fact that I now have two NFL teams to root for, which increases my chances of getting to root for a team that's not having a sucky year.
• You'll never understand why tourists come to DC. I eventually figured it out. Took me a while.
• When in Florida, you can only laugh when you see signs saying "Real Maryland Blue Crab Cakes!" Or getting close to Kentucky and seeing signs for "Maryland Fried Chicken".
• You color with "Crowns", take a "Share" with "Wooter" and think the president lives in "Warshenton." That's the accent where I live now, but not where I grew up. Note that "come to DC" in a previous question refers to a different area than this question does. (Only half an hour apart by car, but still a different area.)
• You know the difference between Glen Burnie ghetto and Catonsville ghetto. I think so but I'm not really sure. (And I live close to both of those places.)
• Your whole family lives within a 200 mile radius of your town. Well ok, not counting my mother's relatives that live in NY, England, Cyprus, ... ("Whole family" is ambiguous -- do I count aunts and cousins, or just siblings?) I can see the point of this one for much of the state, but folks who live near military bases or the Naval Acadamy or DC are likely to have relatives farther away.
• Dale Earnhardt's accident was a close personal loss to your father Sorry, nowhere near being a universal defining characteristic of Marylanders. I'm more into motorsports than my father was, and I'm not a really seriouf fan (though I still want to watch a race with someone who can explain all the subtle nuances to me, 'cause I figure I'll enjoy it a lot more that way).
• At least one man in your family is a waterman Nope, and again, only applies to a couple of regions. Big regions, but not the whole state.
• You plan for "The Festival" a year in advance. Uh, I'm not sure which festival. I can think of a couple of possible candidates, but even if they mean MDRF, I don't plan a whole year ahead. Not sure whether this one's wrong or I'm just out of step.
• During the summer, you spend more time in Ocean City than at home. Hee! I wish. Okay, likely not literally true for a very high percentage, but folks in at least three parts of the state will identify with the sentiment.
• Margret Heater, Hedspace, Jepetto, Outside Joke and Mary Prankster are people you think are "Famous" Well, some of those anyhow.
• Your radio dial is stuck on 99.1 Bleah. Once upon a time, yeah, but then it went downhill and started sounding just like 97.9 and 101.1, so now I listen to 103.1 and 89.7. But even understanding this question pins down my location within the state. Maryland is not so small that one FM radio station can cover it. What were they thinking with this one? Knowing you can get the weather (and a traffic report that may or may not apply to you) "every ten minutes on the eights" on WTOP (two AM frequencies and one FM, plus webcast) would be a better thing to put here.
• You actually get these jokes and pass them on to other friends from Maryland. Hmm. Nah, neither quite funny enough nor "hit the nail on the head" enough to cut it. Apparently they got some of the other states much better. But this was a lot like trying to cram four different states into one list.