i remember being on a school choir trip to Canada and reading the signs in the hotel. You know how normally hotels have signs pointing you to the ice machine and soda vending machines? This hotel had signs pointing you to "Ice and Pop".

The Californians on the trip (me included!) all took pictures of ourselves in front of the sign.

Gary - we do have a downtown much like that...you're probably thinking of the Varsity theater (it used to be a stage theater, now it runs independent films). The BR employees are used to crowds now - they have dollar scoop nights on Tuesdays and the lines are always out the door. At least you made a bunch of Catholic school kids VERY happy to have an easy way to guilt the nuns into ice cream.

A few people I know still talk about needing to Hoover the carpets . . . no matter what brand of vacuum they are actually using.

In Canada, "soda" generally refers to either 'baking soda', 'washing soda', or 'soda water' (as close as we come to using it to describe a 'soft drink' -- which is, more or less, interchangeable with 'POP')

Living in Maryland all my life, I've had to put up with the following Baltimorese!

Lingo from the land of pleasant living

Bawlmer, Merlin = Baltimore, Maryland
Downey Ocean = Down to the ocean
Fard = Between your eyes and hairline
Renkatroll = An emotional issue in city housing
Figger = You figger it out!
Yoose all = Several of yoose
Moran = As in "Lemon moran pie"
Far Excape = Crawl out the winder to the far excape
Semlem = Djever wonder why there's a 7-11 on every block?
Dizzy Whirl = The land of Mickey Mouse
Ersters = Delicacy of the Chesapeake Bay
Hunnert = 97, 98, 99, Hunnert!
Draff = Animal with long neck
Tuhmar = Day after today
Jeet = "Did you eat?" "No, joo?"
Dubya = 23rd letter of the alphabet
Warshnin = D.C.
Iggle = National symbol of the United States of Mairka
Arn = What you do when it's not "wash & wear"
Bummer Stigger = People put them on their cars
Yerp = Europe
Noose = What you read about in the Noose Paper
Calf Lick = Protestant, Jewish, and . . .
Plight = Well mannered
Croddy = How you break bricks with your bare hand
Ollin = Piece of land surrounded by wooder
Wooder = The stuff that comes out of a spickit
Zinc = The thing with a spickit that wooder runs into
Spickit = Where wooder comes out of
Dennis = The doctor who fixes your teeth
Praps = Maybe
Oryuls = The baseball team from Bawlmer
Quar = The group of singers in church
Ford = The opposite of backward
Beero = As in "the Federal Beero of Investigation"
Zatit? Yep, slong!

TAMMY ~

How about this one (I didn't notice it in any posts) WORD I have been getting this from my son (25) nephew (16) a bunch!

For all needing to be up on the latest word in slang:

http://www.urbandictionary.com/

Awesome site. For all your translation or hipster needs.

(Warning: some words may be less than pure.)

"Word." I have friends who say that. I also have lots of friends who end conversations with "peace" which I don't mind at all, but find rather amusing.

I'm from Alberta, Canada, and people mostly say "pop", but no one would look at you strange if you said "soda".

I laughed so hard at that. I talk to people from Merlin all day and all yoose all are hard to understand!

I swear I can understand any foreign accent that I come across at the call center, but I have a **** of a time understanding anyone with a deep southern accent. Once as a supervisor I got this transfer call because the poor customer service guy couldn't understand a word the customer was saying... and when I got him I had no freaking clue.. I just agreed with him and eventually he went away. *LOL*

My stepmom doesn't like to bother with using the shift key, so she types everything in all capital letters. I sometimes get very lengthy emails from her that are in all capitals. They are very painful to read. I'd much rather she just use lowercase and not bother with caps at all if it's so hard to hit the shift key. OK, I'm getting a little catty (and she really is a nice person and has been a great stepmom, so God is going to strike me dead) but, really, how hard is it to hit the shift key every few words? Talk about avoiding exercise!

sz2atheart - ROFL! Hilarious. My Dad is from West Virginia and I know I've heard some of that from him but even my mom from NW PA said some of those things.

I dated a Scotsman once. He could understand me perfectly but there was sometimes a long pause while I figured out what he said. But even though I sometimes had trouble figuring out what he said, the accent was way attractive!

Ok, well I think I'm going to go have a diet pop now, which I will maysure very carefully. Afterwards I'll be sure to warsh the cup!

That's so funny!

sz2atheart, I've been living in Baltimore for almost two years now. There's one more to add to the list. A while back, my friend was telling me that he was going to the show. I asked what show he was going to see. He just gave me a bemused look and said, the eastern show. Silence...then it clicked; OHHH, you're going to the SHORE!

I was also puzzled to hear people talk about the Merlin game. Considering that I don't follow sports at all, I thought, maybe he means Marlins, that's a team Mascot, right? I didn't realize the guy was really saying Maryland until the next day.

It does seem to get worse when you get farther east (closer to the show).

Speaking of accents...

My marine biology teacher in high school was from Tennessee. He used to talk about "Owwa" all the time. I swear it was 2 months or more before I figured he meant Iowa.

my biggest ord pet peeve is ANYWAYS!! it is anyway no S!!!!!

i thought of another one quote unquote... for instance, "my friends say i have quote unquote mental issues" I find it annoying.

Also annoying in written form is when people don't close their parenthesis. Close them or just use a comma or the dreaded period once in a while.

At the beginning of one term in University, we got a new Statistics professer who was from an eastern country. We were all going insane trying to understand him. It took about five lectures before we figured out that what sounded like 'persoonsage' was actually 'percentage'. After that light went on, it all started to fall into place.