Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Popular misnomers

The crazies in the northwest.

Lots of stuff seems to have 2 or 3 names around these parts.

Tissue, Kleenex
Truck, pickup, rig
Soda, pop, cola
Semi, tractor trailer, big rig, 18 wheeler
Coho, silver
Chinook, king, blackmouth
Keta, dog salmon, chum
Pink, humpy
4 wheeler, quad, atv
Trackhoe, hoe, shovel, excavator
Bobcat, skid steer
Knuckle boom, grapple loader, log loader
Truck Cap, canopy
Reprod, second growth, dog hair

The annoyance is when folks know exactly what’s being discussed yet still point out the word use.
Like with clip and magazine. If you know what the guys taking about when he says he has a 30 round clip. Then it’s fine.

BJ when it's obviously a SJ.

I have pondered on this myself.

Scared the shït out of me? More like it scared it back into me, with the pucker factor.

I was perplexed by the term hummer for years, then late one night.....

I have always thought fountains were "burblers" for many reasons.

Not to hijack the thread or anything but I wish "...a coke was a cola, and a joint was a bad place to be..."

Tin foil

Unthaw

I'd say yes and no.

Somebody mentioned the French. The French have a governmental agency that attempts to enforce rules. They especially want to keep foreign words out of the popular jargon when they conflict with existing French terminology.

We don't have any particular governmental agency, but we do have some private entities that try to enforce standard usage. As an example, when I got into journalism, everyone was expected to use the Associated Press style book as a reference. It had grammar rules, but it also had some actual words. When I got to college, everyone had to get a copy of Turabian's Manual of Style which followed what was called "The Chicago Method." It was more about grammar, but it did have some rules about how to pronounce things. When I got into Broadcasting, I had to submit to an evaluation of my speech, and I was given a list of deficiencies that I had to clean up. I remember the one that really rang the bell: "Dubya instead of Double-You." I was told I'd never get a job in radio if I could not pronounce the call sign properly. It was funny, because I'd grown up next door to Powell Crosley's brother, Louis. They'd started WLW radio as a way to sell their radios, and then went on to own the Cincinnati Reds. Lou said "Dubya-El-Dubya." and "Sin-sin-Na-ta." They also funded the Crosley School Of Broadcasting that I was attending at the Univ. of Cincinnati. He and his brother, Powell had grown up on a farm on the north side of Cincinnati, and were just good old farm boys. There was a mini-dialect of Anglo-Protestant farmers that was spoken on the fringes of Cincinnati that is now totally gone. It differed considerably from the Dutch-Protestant truck farmers and was different still from the Germans. When a guy opened his mouth back in the day, you could tell where he was from and what church he attended.

Bottom line: Americans don't have any carved-in-stone rules, but there are influences that force us to a standard speech.

I really interesting case is KYHillChick. She has two modes. The one is a very effete-sounding Midwest accent. That's her day-to-day speech. The other turns on when she gets below Richmond, Kentucky, or when she gets a long distance call from her family down at the KY-TN border. Pronunciation, grammar, her whole affect changes. It has to do with fact she went through accent-reduction training at Berea college during her degree program and then 30 years as a secretary up north here in Cincinnati. As soon as she gets close to home, it's like she's kicking off her shoes.

Me? As I said, I entered college with a quite a few quirks. My father was 2nd Gen German-American-- spoke German until he entered Kindergarten. I've got a lot of leftovers from that in my own speech. The other is being in what's called "Mid-Ohio." I was several years out of college, and well beyond my last air shift in radio before I realized that I'd started to lose my native mode of speaking, and I made a point of reintroducing it back into my everyday speech.

Stuff that's still in my vocabulary:

1) Everything is jake if it's okay, copacetic, or all right. If you are worried about whether your buddy is mad at you, you say, "Are we jake?"

2) If I've had business dealing with a man, I've had truck with him.

3) When it's time to go, I how up. That one perplexed me all my life. I even asked my dad. He'd forgotten. I finally realized Dad was in the pack artillery in WWII. They shot 75mm howitzers, carried on mules. To "how up" is the same as "pack-up" in the infantry. Duh.

4) When I can't hear what someone is saying, I say "Please?" It's from the German , "Bitte?" I picked that up in 1st grade. My teacher was a German Catholic. They all had that idiom. When I moved into a predominantly Catholic neighborhood as a kid, it stuck.

5) I make the mistake frequently of saying "What can I do to you?" It's a German-related quirk that I picked up from my father. You're supposed to say "What can I do for you?" It's gotten me into trouble a couple of times.

The amusing irony is that some of the examples given in this thread are actually non sequiturs, which means the examples themselves are misnomers.

Hot water heater????

The world continues to go round-n-round, but....

Channel locks for slip joint pliers
Crescent wrench for adjustable wrench
Alemite for zerk fitting

Once a spike-always a spike

Scrub buck

Meat hunter

Red herrings

‘Nother” as in, “that’s whole ‘nother’ ballgame”.

Don’t know if it’s incorrect or not but it bugs me when the local weather guesser says, “blah, blah, blah, to your north” vs “to the north”. I didn’t think one could possess a direction.

How about "mango" for a green pepper? I started running into that about 30 years ago.

Oriented vs Orientated

Hot tub vs hot tube

My all time favorite is the term "slingshot" being used for another type of stone launcher.

😉

One I have never understood is calling the cupboard at camp a "press".

Fine hair splitting: If you're a local weatherperson, it helps to say "our north." The point is to include yourself in the audience. If you're a national weather nitwit, you should say "your north." Sometimes on a national or regional scale one guy's north is another guy's south. Yeah, I know, confusing. However, think of how a low-pressure center moves east. Chicago may get it as preciptation from one direction. Lousiville might get from another.