Coast vs. Seaboard

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ellen. I’m in Greenbelt, Maryland.

Hello, Ellen. Welcome.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I used to live in California, and in California it’s called the West Coast.

And then about 10 years I moved to the East Coast near Washington, D.C.

But when I listen to the weather here, they call it the Eastern Seaboard.

And I wanted to know why is that and why isn’t it called the Western Seaboard?

Whoa, great question.

That’s very good.

It’s very good.

So when people talk about the California coast, the Pacific coast of this continent, North America,

They don’t usually call it the Western Seaboard, do they?

I’ve never heard it called that.

You can look and find people doing it, but it’s so incredibly rare.

And then the East, they don’t call it necessarily just the East Coast.

It’s the Eastern Seaboard, and they mean all up and down all of the land that borders the Atlantic Ocean, right?

Right.

You know what the answer is? It’s pretty simple.

We are creatures of habit.

We just develop these habits of saying things a particular way, and we just keep doing it.

We adopt phrases and sentences, and we move our tongues in ways that are familiar to us,

And we tend to repeat ourselves and repeat what we hear.

So we get these habits, and Western Seaboard is a perfectly fine phrase.

We could easily use it. We just don’t.

Well, I’m thinking that probably the Eastern Seaboard was established so much earlier than the West.

People got used to talking about it.

That’s what I wondered about.

Let me ask you a question.

If I’m in New York City, as I lived there for quite a while, and I say I’m going to the coast,

Why does everyone understand that I mean California?

Right.

I mean, it’s kind of the opposite side of the coin.

We develop these habits of referring to places different ways.

And even though maybe the opposite isn’t used or parallelism doesn’t exist, we still persist.

I can just see seaboard being a word that was sort of the border between us and the Atlantic and us and England.

That’s exactly what I thought.

Really? That people used that?

That’s what I was trying to guess.

Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. That makes sense to me because that word’s been around for a long, long time.

Seaboard. And so you would be talking about that, but it took us a long time to get to the West Coast maybe by the time we did.

But why wouldn’t you call it the Pacific Seaboard then, or the Western Seaboard?

And why wouldn’t you?

Because it’s perfectly accurate to say that.

And in fact, you’ll find Western Seaboard used in more academic texts,

Not just for the Western Seaboard of North America,

But for the Western Seaboard of other continents and other countries.

Right, right.

I think it goes back to what you said about habits of thought.

Yeah, it’s habits of thought.

There’s a lot more persistence for Eastern Seaboard.

It became a fixed thing, right?

And it is interesting that it’s a retronym in that it’s seaboard plus Eastern.

One of the most interesting things when it comes to thinking about the way we position ourselves in our language

Is if you talk to people in a wide variety of cities across the United States about what they mean by downtown and uptown.

Oh, yeah.

And it’s directly related to this.

We develop these habits where sometimes downtown is a direction and sometimes it’s a fixed place.

And occasionally those two uses collide and you get a lot of confusion.

And I think maybe this is, you know, Eastern Seaboard is just fixed.

There’s no confusion there.

We know what we mean.

Well, you’re always very educational, and I appreciate the new little bit of knowledge.

Oh, well, we’re glad to impart them, and thank you for sharing yours.

Thanks so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye from the West Coast.

Take care.

See you later.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s interesting.

The coast.

The coast.

Yeah, you would say that, right?

Yeah.

And in New York City proper, you often talk about going to the shore.

And you don’t mean any shore. You mean the Jersey Shore.

And I think in the Pacific Northwest, don’t you talk more about going to the coast than

Going to the beach?

I don’t know about the Pacific Northwest.

I think so.

Interesting.

Well, we have our habits and we have our ways.

What are your language habits and your language ways?

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