by Kevin Burton
One fine morning in a restaurant we don’t often go to, in a small town where you better not speed or they’ll fine you for sure (Derby, Kansas), a waitress referred to my wife and I as “yins.”
That is a contraction of “you ones” and it’s a regionalism from greater Pittsburgh. I recognized it immediately, as I spent some very pleasant time in a small town on the Ohio River, about an hour west of Pittsburgh.
“Y’all is the much better-known southern version, a contraction of “you all.”
“Yins” is on the Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s list below of phrases particular to a region of the USA. You’ll see a second term from Western Pennsylvania that I was not familiar with:
Jimmies New England : tiny rod-shaped bits of usually chocolate-flavored candy often sprinkled on ice cream or pastries (such as doughnuts)
You may know these sundae (or frappe, or creemee) toppings as sprinkles, an intuitive nom-de-add-on if there ever was one. Jimmies is, shall we say, less intuitive, even if it’s on the tongue (literally and figuratively) of every kid and kid-at-heart at ice cream joints from P-town to Presque Isle.
Ask for jimmies on your cone anywhere else, however, and you are bound to get some strange looks.
Toboggan South/Midland : a long knitted cone-shaped cap with a tassel or pom-pom worn especially for winter sports or play
You’re probably familiar with the word toboggan as it refers to a long, flat-bottomed light sled made usually of thin boards curved up at one end, but some folks in the Southern and Midland United States also use it for a stocking cap.
The word comes to English from the Canadian French tobogan, itself from a word of Algonquian origin that shares an earlier ancestor with the Micmac word tobâgun, meaning “drag made of skin.”
Yinz Pittsburgh and environs : you guys, you all, y’all
Y’all know about yinz? If you enjoy reserving street parking spaces with chairs, eating sandwiches with French fries on them, and the colors black and yellow, the answer is maybe (who doesn’t love these things?).
But Pittsburghers, or “Yinzers,” certainly do—they use yinz in addressing two or more persons or sometimes one person as representing also another or others.
Pink stuff Midwest/Great Plains : a side dish consisting of gelatin, whipped cream, fruit, mini marshmallows, and sometimes nuts.
This remarkable foodstuff goes by many names (and variable colors and ingredients) depending on where you live in the United States. As one of our editors, a native Midwesterner, reports: “I do believe the rest of the country calls it ambrosia salad. It is pink. Jello and whipped cream (usually) for the base, plus canned fruit cocktail, mini marshmallows, sometimes nuts. all mixed together. I have seen it with a graham cracker crust but we never made it that way. It is served as a side dish along with your meal, on your plate. Not as dessert. But Midwesterners literally call it ‘the pink stuff.’”
Doorwall Michigan : a sliding glass door
One might imagine that a compound word such as doorwall, comprised as it is of two extremely common elements, would be in widespread use from sea to shining sea. One would be wrong.
Evidence of doorwall being used for sliding glass doors comes almost exclusively from Michigan, aka The Mitten State, The Wolverine State, Water-Winter Wonderland.
Spendy Pacific Northwest : expensive
While spendy is gaining (cough) currency as a word to describe someone who tends or is inclined to spend, we currently define a single sense, used chiefly in the Northwestern United States, synonymous with expensive.
Sport pepper Chicagoland : a small, mild, yellow-green pepper that is pickled and used principally as a topping on a hot dog
Far be it from us to tell you how to festoon your frankfurter, but if you’re fixing to eat a wiener in Woodlawn or a sausage in Sauganash, locals may insist you include sport peppers amongst the fixings (and skip the ketchup).
Redd: Western Pennsylvania : to set in order (usually used with up or out) or to make things tidy (usually used with up)
We initially aimed for all of the words in this article to represent a different part of the country, but yinz will forgive us for including a second western Pennsylvania term. The verb redd, used chiefly in the dialect in and around Pittsburgh, comes from Scots (specifically that used in the Northern Ireland province of Ulster) and is thought to be perhaps an alteration of ridden. Redd can take an object, usually with up or out (as in “redd out the drawers”) or not:
Croker sack South : a sack of coarse material (such as burlap)
Okay, so maybe burlap sacks aren’t the most glamorous material objects in the world. But what if we called them croker sacks?
Still no? Okay, we tried, but croker sack is an interesting and fairly unsung Southern regionalism. The word is an alteration of crocus sack or crocus bag, and first appeared in print in the late 1800s, with crocus referring not to the familiar spring-blooming flower, but to burlap, being the Jamaican word for that material.
Gumbo Montana : a heavy sticky mud
The word gumbo is of Bantu origins, related to the Umbundu word ochinggômbo, meaning “okra.” In addition to sometimes being used synonymously with okra, gumbo most often refers to a soup thickened with okra pods or filé (the powdered young leaves of sassafras).
The viscosity of gumbo has led the word gumbo to also take on the meaning in parts of the interior U.S., including Montana, of “a fine-grained silty soil that when wet becomes impervious and soapy or waxy and very sticky” and more broadly “a heavy sticky mud.”
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