Why do southern Californians refer to interstate thoroughfares with the definite article, as in the 405 or the 8? This usage is a result of the history of freeways in Southern California, and is heard in a few other places, including Phoenix, Arizona, and Buffalo, New York, as well as parts of Canada. NBC’s Saturday Night Live has had a lot of fun satirizing this Californian locution. This is part of a complete episode.
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
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