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People in Philadelphia also call sidewalks pavement. If a kid is playing in the street and a car is coming, a mom will scream, "Get on the pavement." Sidewalk is also used.
People in Philly (and parts of New England, I believe) call sprinkles for ice cream "jimmies."
And of course, Italian ice is "water ice" which is a funny phrase if you think about it. But I'm from Philly so it sounds natural to me.
I always called a purse a pocketbook, too. My parents are born and bred New Yorkers, though, so sometimes I'm not sure if I get certain terms from NYC or from Philly. That's what my mom called it, too.
My Italian neighbors in Philly called tomato sauce "gravy" too.
I say pocketbook. I also use purse, but that's not my original word.
Funny. It seems like she would have know better and gave her daughter a name that did not end with a, to avoid making her own daughter sound like one of Santa's reindeer.
She was nineteen years old and had lived her life to that point on a farm in Maine where everyone spoke the same way she did. I don't know why you imagine she would have "know" better or that other people in other places pronounced things differently.
She was nineteen years old and had lived her life to that point on a farm in Maine where everyone spoke the same way she did. I don't know why you imagine she would have "know" better or that other people in other places pronounced things differently.
I guess that came off a little harsher than I meant it, sorry, didn't know her whole life story. Just found it funny that when people have that accent, typically know they have that accent, you would imagine they would avoid naming their own children with names that end in a (not the most attractive pronunciation for a name), but every-bodies case is different.
I guess that came off a little harsher than I meant it, sorry, didn't know her whole life story. Just found it funny that when people have that accent, typically know they have that accent, you would imagine they would avoid naming their own children with names that end in a (not the most attractive pronunciation for a name), but every-bodies case is different.
She left Maine at 20, went to her husband's hometown of Jersey city, then suburban NJ, and then ended up in Florida, but my SIL was still always Donner.
Bulkie and cupboard, yeah. But I never heard gravy used to denote tomato sauce, and I never heard skeevy or agita, period.
Skeevy and agita are Italian slang terms, so if you did not have a large Italian population in your community you would have likely not heard either of these words. Skeevy evolved from the Italian term che schifo with translates to disgusting, and agita evolved from acido which means heartburn.
R.I. still has a fairly large Italian population, and as a 2nd generation native Italian Rhode Islander the use of the word gravy for red sauce is highly debated here. In the East Bay area of the state where I live sauce is red and is put on pasta, and gravy is brown and put on roast beef, turkey, etc. The communities closest to Providence you will hear red gravy or brown gravy but rarely sauce, and the rest of the state it's a toss up.
Now onto pasta. Although we do use the term pasta here, you would more than likely hear the word macaroni used instead especially in communities that have a large Italian population. And in those you will also more than likely hear the type of macaroni used in a dish someone cooked or had at a restaurant such as ziti and meat balls, penne with vodka sauce, rigatoni with sausage, etc. because certain pastas go better in certain dishes. Same goes for pastina which is the small pasta used in soups. Ditalini is most often the pasta of choice used when making pasta fazoole/fagoli, and acini di pepe is always the pasta used in Italian Wedding soup. If I were making Italian Wedding soup and only had on hand orzo or tubetini pastina hubby would be making a trip to the market which is a common term we use here for grocery store to get me a box of acini di pepe.
In addition to taking our pasta pretty seriously we also take our pizza seriously and invented what is known by most Rhode Islanders as party pizza. Party pizza most often is made at bakeries which is served at room temperature and is cut in strip with only red sauce with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. You may also see a white version with no sauce, a little olive oil is used instead of red sauce and topped with peppers and cheese. A party is not a party in R.I. without party pizza!!!
What most know as Coney dogs, we too have these everywhere here which you will either hear them called hot wieners or by the slang word "gaggers". The traditional toppings are a chili type with no bean mixture along with mustard, white onions, and they are not a gagger without a sprinkle of celery salt. And if you are a true blue Rhode Islander you will wash your gaggers down with a large coffee milk followed by several TUMS and a rinse of Listerine.
^That was interesting! My niece lived in Providence for a while, then moved to New Bedford, MA. I have to ask her if she encountered those terms.
Re pasta--that was not a commonly-used word anywhere in the US that I know of until the early 80s, when it suddenly became a trendy food. People started buying pasta-making machines and trying different shapes and sauces from all parts of Italy. Big 80s thing. That's when the word "pasta" became part of the general American lexicon.
Before that, outside of Italian families, few people ate much pasta except for spaghetti and meatballs, which was something your mother made to stretch the money near the end of a pay period.
If you jumped in a time machine and went back to the 70s and told most people you were going to a restaurant for something called pasta, they'd say, "WHAT?" If you started saying things like Fettucine Alfredo or talked about the great angel hair you'd had last night, they'd probably start to back away.
Skeevy and agita are Italian slang terms, so if you did not have a large Italian population in your community you would have likely not heard either of these words. Skeevy evolved from the Italian term che schifo with translates to disgusting, and agita evolved from acido which means heartburn.
Oddly enough, I grew up in a town that seemed to be about half Irish and half Italian. But now that I think about it, my close friends were neither of those.
R.I. still has a fairly large Italian population, and as a 2nd generation native Italian Rhode Islander the use of the word gravy for red sauce is highly debated here. In the East Bay area of the state where I live sauce is red and is put on pasta, and gravy is brown and put on roast beef, turkey, etc. The communities closest to Providence you will hear red gravy or brown gravy but rarely sauce, and the rest of the state it's a toss up.
Now onto pasta. Although we do use the term pasta here, you would more than likely hear the word macaroni used instead especially in communities that have a large Italian population. And in those you will also more than likely hear the type of macaroni used in a dish someone cooked or had at a restaurant such as ziti and meat balls, penne with vodka sauce, rigatoni with sausage, etc. because certain pastas go better in certain dishes. Same goes for pastina which is the small pasta used in soups. Ditalini is most often the pasta of choice used when making pasta fazoole/fagoli, and acini di pepe is always the pasta used in Italian Wedding soup. If I were making Italian Wedding soup and only had on hand orzo or tubetini pastina hubby would be making a trip to the market which is a common term we use here for grocery store to get me a box of acini di pepe.
In the 60s and 70s in eastern MA, we said "spaghetti" or "macaroni", because those were the prevalent pastas. Nobody actually used the word pasta then. We also said "noodles" to refer to everything else.
In addition to taking our pasta pretty seriously we also take our pizza seriously and invented what is known by most Rhode Islanders as party pizza. Party pizza most often is made at bakeries which is served at room temperature and is cut in strip with only red sauce with a sprinkling of Parmesan cheese. You may also see a white version with no sauce, a little olive oil is used instead of red sauce and topped with peppers and cheese. A party is not a party in R.I. without party pizza!!!
What most know as Coney dogs, we too have these everywhere here which you will either hear them called hot wieners or by the slang word "gaggers". The traditional toppings are a chili type with no bean mixture along with mustard, white onions, and they are not a gagger without a sprinkle of celery salt. And if you are a true blue Rhode Islander you will wash your gaggers down with a large coffee milk followed by several TUMS and a rinse of Listerine.
^That was interesting! My niece lived in Providence for a while, then moved to New Bedford, MA. I have to ask her if she encountered those terms.
Re pasta--that was not a commonly-used word anywhere in the US that I know of until the early 80s, when it suddenly became a trendy food. People started buying pasta-making machines and trying different shapes and sauces from all parts of Italy. Big 80s thing. That's when the word "pasta" became part of the general American lexicon.
Before that, outside of Italian families, few people ate much pasta except for spaghetti and meatballs, which was something your mother made to stretch the money near the end of a pay period.
If you jumped in a time machine and went back to the 70s and told most people you were going to a restaurant for something called pasta, they'd say, "WHAT?" If you started saying things like Fettucine Alfredo or talked about the great angel hair you'd had last night, they'd probably start to back away.
Yeah, but in 1979 that changed after Breaking Away was released. "All those ini foods: Zucchini, linguini, fettucini!"
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