What do you guys go when you want to go to the beach? Just the beach, or maybe the shore? Or even 'the ocean'?
In Maryland it seems to be 'ocean' ("I'm going to the ocean this weekend"), or 'beach' works. 'Shore', I believe, is a New Jersey thing.
That, in fact, is a midatlantic oddity.
The Shore = southern New Jersey
The Beach = Delaware
The Ocean = Maryland
The Philly/Jerseyism is "going down the Shore" to mean traveling
to the oceanside, not
along it as is implied. It bugs me to absolutely no end, as does the "Do you want to go with?" question. That is a Midwesternism that seems to start in western Pennsylvania and extend all the way out to the Big Sky states.
Philadelphians generally broaden and nasalize their vowels, and they drop some interior consonants. "Milk" is pronounced "melk", "water" is "wooder" or "wuder", and "strength" comes out "strenth". "Fire" is "farr" and "oil" is "oal" or "ohl"
"Sub" is of course short for "submarine" sandwich, but around here you better not order it using the long name. "Hoagie" and "sub" are interchangeable here, but "hero" is a New York thing, not Philly. A "grinder" is not a thing of its own, but is a hoagie that is made and then baked in the pizza oven for a few minutes. In the Midwest, "sub" seems common, but they looked at me like I had two heads when I ordered a "grinder" - even after I expalined exactly what I wanted them to do with the sandwich. I've also heard the term "zep" for a hoagie out there. This is not to be confused with a "po' boy", which is typically a large sandwich made on a shorter, rounder roll.
The stuff you make hamburgers out of is "ground beef" in the Philly area, but it's "chopped meat" if you're from New York. My wife used to call it that and it's funny because I found myself being totally unappetized by the term "chopped meat" instead of "ground beef".
In the South, a small, rustic vacation home is referred to as a "camp", even if it is an actual, permanently-constructed house. People from the North think that's stupid, because such a thing is clearly a "cabin". It would only be a "camp" if it was a group of tents.
I've never heard people anywhere except Southern California do that "the (route #)" thing. And speaking of which - you bastards should have kept the whole newspeak compressed-word thing to yourselves. "SoCal" was bad enough but could be written off as a trendy Californiaism, but now there's "SoBe" and "SoFla" and myriad others. It drives me nuts. It's like speaking in txtmsg - your precious minutes are just not so critical that you can't take the time to actually say the words. I heard two college girls talking about getting a "FroYo" the other day and I wanted to throttle them.
On the subject of spelling differences between American and British English, that was a concious effort on the part of American linguists in the early 19th century. They made a large push toward Americanizing the Colonial language after we were no longer colonies.
I wanted to avoid that word though, because I’m also including grammatical or structural differences.
