Local Color – New Orleans Eats

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.

Like many cities, New Orleans has its own way of speaking. Several ways, in fact. To the experienced listener, distinct differences in speech patterns and accents can be heard between individuals who grew up as little as a few miles from each other.

Generally speaking, New Orleans accents don't mirror the rural drawl heard in most other Southern states or even the rest of Louisiana. We do say "y'all" when we mean "you" (plural), and it's even often heard misapplied as a possessive pronoun, "y'all's", as in, "I'll stop by y'all's house later."

As a visitor to New Orleans, you may hear one of the more distinctive local dialects and find it charming. You may even make the mistake of thinking most people here speak that way. Worse, you may want to try to emulate it. Don't.

The first mistake a tourist can make when visiting New Orleans is to try to "blend" by speaking in the way they assume locals speak, usually by calling the city "N'Awlins". Outside of a few colorful characters in the local media and a random sample of inebriated individuals on Bourbon Street, no one here regularly pronounces it that way. The most common pronunciation is simply a casual "New OR-luhns".

Where things get confusing is when and where the word "Orleans" is pronounced differently.

The city of New Orleans is located in Orleans Parish (Louisiana doesn't have counties). In this context, it is pronounced "Or-LEENS Parish". The city is only pronounced "New Or-LEENS" when you need it to rhyme, like in a song, e.g. "Do you know what it MEANS to miss New ORLEANS?"

A third pronunciation, which adds an extra syllable, "New Or-Lee-Uns" is reserved for only two occasions. One is by local news broadcasters attempting an air of formality. The second is in radio jingles, where for some reason it just seems to fit better.

Some visitors think certain local accents sound like they could be from the Northeast, particularly Boston. An example of this is what is locally called the "yat" accent. Like Bostonians, the yat accent also often drops the trailing letter "r" from syllables, e.g. "Ovah the bridge, across the rivah."

The term "Yat" derives from the common phrase, "Where y'at?" a local greeting whose equivalent elsewhere would be, "How are you?", "What's up?" or, "How've you been?" None expect a serious answer, but are merely polite formalities. The same is true of, "Where y'at?" A serious follow-up question, however, would be, "How's ya mama 'n' 'em?" Translated, "How is your mother and the rest of your family?" Authentic delivery would be slurred together, sounding like a single word, "Howsyamamanem?" Primary speakers of the accent, normally working-class individuals, can also be called Yats.

Other terms commonly heard in Yat-speak are words like "berl", "erl", "rench", "swimp", "zink" and "terlet". Using all in a single sentence, one might say, "I renched some swimps in da zink, then berled 'em in erl that I poured down the terlet." Translation: "I rinsed some shrimp in the sink, then boiled them in oil that I poured down the toilet."

Find it all quaint and amusing if you will, but please just leave it to the locals.

Category: Local Color

New Orleans-isms

How To Talk Like A Local! (But Please Don’t.)