For all those California people what’s this ‘we’ to whenst you refer when identifying freeways with a prefacing ‘The’. That is SO SoCal.
Up North, right at about the Santa Barbara line it’s just ‘we’re taking 101, or we’re going to shoot down 5’.
“Grew up in a small town in Illinois. Never heard the term “pop”. I and everyone else there called it soda.”
If not in northern Illinois that’s not surprising. http://popvssoda.com
I am from the south so I grew up with a lot of “different” sayings, terms, etc. My dh is from MA. I could barely communicate with his family when we first met. LOL. Good times.
LOVE this thread.
“Dugway”. And that’s VERY regional. As in just a couple counties in SW WI.
LOL
Minnesotan here raised by Norwegians. I hear (and say) it plenty in southern MN.
@cshell2, what’s a “dugway”?
So Uffda is a Norwegian version of Oy Vay?
I don’t think I saw it discussed here but can any Philly natives weigh in on jawn. I’ve read at least three long articles on this word and still don’t understand when it’s used.
Jawn is kind of a catchall word for pretty much anything. It basically means thingie. Like this good article states, it is all purpose. It’s a pretty unique, linguistically speaking.
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/the-enduring-mystery-of-jawn-philadelphias-allpurpose-noun
Oooh. “Thingie”. That’s the best description I’ve seen. I read the AtlasObscura article before but still didn’t really understand the usage. Do you personally use it @doschicos ?
@maya54 I don’t. I’m not a Philly native so it would feel contrived but I’m a big fan of the city and some Philly born and bred friends do use it and explained it to me.
I think it is cool when different cities/regions have their own vocab and ways of saying things. The world is becoming too homogeneous and a lot of the unique regionality is getting lost, an unfortunate thing in my opinion. Even in my area in Northern New England, some of the old phrases and words aren’t used as much as they used to be.
Used extensively here in some areas of Seattle. 
We even have Uff Da businesses (Uff Da Logistics, Uff Da Shoppe, etc.). Our iconic Archie sells Uff Da socks.
This New York Times quiz will map you to a specific location based on your answers to its questions about which words you use:
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2014/upshot/dialect-quiz-map.html
When I went with hubby who was then my boyfriend to his home in WV it was a real wake up call. I went to a store looking for something and the woman kept saying it was in the DEE-splay. She had to repeat herself several times and I kept saying it in my head over and over. She had to walk me over to it when the lightbulb went off - display!
That same visit his feisty mamaw - ie grandma told me I spoke way too fast she couldn’t understand me. I told her they all spoke so slowly I was ready to fall off the couch waiting for them to finish their sentences. We fell instantly in love with each other.
Michigan Left.
Draw the curtains (will that be in charcoal?)
A ladder (run) in my stocking (stairway to heaven)
Trousers for Pants
Bum Bag (fanny pack is very rude!)
Wardrobe (makes it very difficult to ‘come out of the closet’, lol)
Aubergine (eggplant)
Courgette (zucchini)
Public School (private school)
H says ‘shut the lights’ I think he means ‘turn-off the lights’!
@dietz199 - we Southern Californians say “the” before our freeway numbers because our freeways used to have names. My Dad (native Southern Californian) will still say The San Diego freeway, The San Bernardino freeway, The Ventura freeway, The Harbor Freeway, etc. Now that the freeways all have numbers we have just kept “the.”
I just thought of another one…Gibbons! My dad loved a few gibbons, lightly salted, with a piece of cheese. Have fun guessing!
When I lived in Pasadena in the 1980s those freeways had numbers I think, but we still called them by their names not their numbers.
Many freeways and other major roads in other parts of California have names. For example:
CA-1: Pacific Coast Highway
US-50: Capital City Freeway, El Dorado Freeway
US-101 in northern California: Redwood Highway, Bayshore Freeway
I-280: Junipero Serra Freeway
CA-480: Embarcadero Freeway (now demolished)
I-880: Nimitz Freeway
But using “the” in front of the freeway or highway name did not transfer to using “the” in front of the number in other parts of California.