Hi Mudcatters,

I'm looking for regional expressions from around the US and other countries. Can you help?

For instance:    If you travel from Gloucester Mass to Maine, you are headed "down Maine".

If you are a tough kid in the Bronx, you are a "shtarker" and a sissy is a "pisher".

If you are from Boston, things can be "wicked good".

In the Bronx, there are the "coops" (not co-ops)

Los Angeles, "Orale Esse, as they say in LA have a nice day"
(Answer: "okie dokie artichokie"

Most everybody knows Yiddishisms (which I love). If you have "shpilkus" and you are of Italian descent, it's "agida".

A good day in New England is "right luscious" unless it gets "a mite lowery".

In New York and LA, mexicano and PR for talking bullshit is "menudo" (a tripe-soup)

In the forties in LA, "pachucos" (tough Chicanos) wore "huaraches" (sandals) and
dressed in "zoot suits with a reet pleat" and carried a blade.

Cowboy stuff is great like in the Gail Gardner (Prescott Ariz) song Tying A Knot in the Devil's Tail, Rusty Jiggs and Sandy Bob "hit 'em up a lope", "build a hole in their old seago" "Ile up their dry insides" and catch the "dallies" of the Devil.

Nowadays it's "whassup" but earlier it was "what's the haps?"

In the Forties everything was "copacetic".

Where I grew up in Santa Barbara, the Chicano kids would exclaim "Uta!" or "Uta-eh?"

"Chill, go with the flow"...now common usage.

It's interesting to figure out how these expressions came to be such as "gimme a break".

"Hold your horses" in the South is now "Back up the truck".

Among jazz musicians it used to be "hip" to say if you wanted something, you "had eyes" for it (coming from the standard jazz song "I Only Have Eyes For You"). In the thirties, the "cats" would say (if they wanted some pot) "Lay a tray on me, gate". "Gate" from "swinging". Clothes were "threads" and a car was a "short".

Anyway, there are thousands of these and it would be useful to hear from folks "Across the Pond".

A "pita" is inflight hostess talk for "a pain in the ass".

Hope this gets the ball rolling. "Hey", it's folklore or as they used to say in the thirties,
"Say", it's folklore.

So from Jersey, "you got it sussed".

Does anyone have a copy of Dictionary of American Regional English"

Frank Hamilton