New Orleans has its own way of speaking and some colloquial terms that non-locals may find mystifying. These are some of the classics.
Banquette: Sidewalk.
Bell Pepper: A green pepper.
Brake Tag: Sticker placed on automobile windshield signifying annual state vehicle inspection.
Camelback: A style of shotgun house with a single story front and a two-story rear section.
Cold Drink: Any carbonated soft drink. We don't say "pop" or "soda".
Double shotgun: A duplex in the shotgun house style, with separate residences on the left and right.
Dressed: The addition of lettuce and tomato to a sandwich; can also include dill pickle slices and mayo. "I'll have a ham and swiss po-boy, dressed."
Flying Horses: A carousel. There's a nice one at Audubon Zoo, but it features exotic animals instead of horses.
Go Cup: A disposable cup to take leftover beverage (usually alcoholic) from a restaurant or bar. Yes, walking around in public with an open alcoholic drink is legal here, as long as it's not in a glass container.
Hickey: A raised bump on the head. (Elsewhere, a bruise on the neck.)
Lagniappe: "Lan-yap". Something extra given for free. A bonus.
Making Groceries: Grocery shopping. Alternately, "going to make groceries". New Orleans supermarket chain icon Schwegmann Bros. even tapped the phrase for its slogan, "Makin' groceries, Schwegmann style!"
Neutral Ground: A median between a divided parkway. Derived from the expanse between the sides of Canal Street at a time long ago when one side was under Spanish control, the other French.
Shoot-the-chute: A playground slide.
Shotgun house: A single-story house with a narrow front face and which extends back deeply from the street. Allegedly popular because property taxes were based on front footage, but this is actually a myth. Shotgun houses, due to their narrowness, usually don't have hallways, but rather simply doorways leading from one room to the next. Such houses usually don't have built-in closets, either, also mis-attributed to tax law, but actually because armoires were popular and symbolic of prosperity.
Sidehall: A sidehall shotgun house has a gallery hallway extending down one side, sort of like a train car passageway, and doors from it lead to each room.
Silver dime: The normal ten cent coin.
Snowball: An ice and sweet flavored syrup confection, like a snow cone but with the ice finely-shaved, more like actual snow. Normally served in a styrofoam or waxed paper cup rather than a paper cone.
Solid quarter: The normal twenty-five cent coin, as opposed to 25 cents made up of pennies, nickels and dimes.
Throw: Any trinket tossed from a Mardi Gras parade float, including strings of plastic beads, metal doubloons, plastic cups, toys or other novelties. Some krewes have highly-coveted signature throws, like the Zulu coconuts. Throws over the years have evolved from mainly just beads and doubloons to all manner of oddities, some in better taste than others.
Yat: A person from a particular part of town, usually attributed to the Ninth Ward. Derived from the greeting used by those individuals, "Where y'at?", similar in meaning to, "What's up?" or, "What's going on?"
Who Dat?: A phrase popularized during the run-up to the New Orleans Saints football team winning the Super Bowl. Derived from the chant "Who dat sayin' they gonna beat them Saints?" Subsequently seen over-used in local commerce, e.g. Who Dat Plumbing & Heating, etc. Sports fans in another market claim it was copied from a similar "Who dey?" chant used by their team's backers.