Posted on 04/26/2016 3:28:53 PM PDT by NYer
Lol, Chicago is halfway between the north and south, we say “crawfish”, maybe cuz of all the southern immigrants long ago?
We call the blues ones “mayflies”, because if you go out to any creek in May, there will be a horde of them breeding like crazy.
My dad always says “woish” for wash and “woiter” for water... but it’s not a Chicago thing, he is the only one I ever heard say that. Some of his family was from Michigan, I think that is where he picked it up.
I grew up in CA, and I can’t say I ever noticed any geographical preference for the name of those tiny fresh water lobsters. Crawfish, crayfish, crawdads, it’s all the same to me.
Southern USA: "Crawdad"
Interesting. I grew up in Northern Virginia & mid-Atlantic areas. We said "Crawfish"
>>I grew up in CA, and I can’t say I ever noticed any geographical preference for the name of those tiny fresh water lobsters. Crawfish, crayfish, crawdads, it’s all the same to me.
Same here. I grew up in Sacramento and Santa Rosa. We interchanged a lot of words for many things.
Santa Rosa? We lived there for a while, and Sebastopol for many years before that. I also graduated from UC Davis, so I know the Sacramento area, as well. What a happy place CA was when I was a child!
Despite the fact that growing up there left me unable to discuss fresh water lobsters with any consistency of terminology...
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I grew up in southern Illinois and I recall hearing snake doctor. I haven’t heard that one in so long that I had forgotten about it.
My Brother-in-Law is from rural Illinois near Mattoon.
He has some peculiar local inflections. For instance he pronounces Fish as Feesh and Creek as Crick.
Much of the early American settlement in that part of the state was from the southeast, so that linguistic influence is still evident. I knew a lot of more recent transplants from Tennessee, Arkansas, and southern Missouri. One of my favorite terms from down there, and I didn’t hear it much down there either, is “ foot feet.” No one outside of the area has ever had any idea what that means. — except for a coworker in Chicago. And it turned out she was raised around Mattoon. Foot feet are the clutch, gas, and brake pedals.
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