Sweetest Day, Suspenders, and Why We Say Pop: The Unofficial Ohio Word Book, Volume One

Back in January, we put up a form on the site with one question: what's a word you've said your whole life, then discovered nobody outside Ohio understands?

We figured we'd get maybe thirty responses. We got 214. Some were typed. Some were handwritten and photographed. One arrived on the back of a church bulletin from Middletown. All of it went into a shoebox (metaphorically — it was actually a spreadsheet) and became this: the first Unofficial Ohio Word Book.

The Rules (Such As They Are)

A word qualifies if it meets two out of three criteria: you grew up saying it, a friend from out of state has looked at you funny because of it, and no dictionary has fully claimed it yet. Our members did the voting. Arguments were had. The debate over what counts as "pop" versus "soda" got heated enough that we had to close the thread for a weekend.

The Words That Made the Cut

A few highlights from the winning entries:

"Please" — as in "please?" meaning "excuse me, say that again?" Forty-some members swear this is purely Cincinnati, inherited from German settlers. The rest of the state is baffled. Both sides are certain they're right.

"The ends" — rural shorthand for the far corners of a county. As in, "she lives out in the ends." Nobody from Columbus has ever used this correctly on the first try.

"Frog hair" — as in "not a hair of difference," usually describing two gas stations selling the same fuel at the same price. Submitted by a member from Circleville with photographic evidence.

"Sweeper" — not a vacuum, the vacuum. Non-negotiable.

"Jeet?" — the compressed form of "did you eat?" which, once pointed out, you will hear everywhere for the rest of your life. You're welcome.

And yes, "bussy" made the list — the old farm term for a fussy, overworked animal (or, affectionately, a person), which we've been assured predates anything else you might be thinking of. Please stop emailing us about this one.

We Called a Professor, She Did Not Hang Up

To make sense of the pile, we rang Dr. Ellen Vasquez, a sociolinguist who studies Midwest dialects. She told us Ohio is what she called a "convergence zone" — a state settled in overlapping waves from New England, Pennsylvania, Appalachia, and the German-speaking world, all within a couple of generations.

"Ohio never developed one dominant accent the way New York or Boston did," she explained. "You can drive ninety minutes and cross a dialect boundary. That's vanishingly rare. It makes Ohio a living archive of older American English — words that died elsewhere are still being used here, casually, by people who don't realize they're holding onto history."

So when your grandmother says "please?" at the dinner table, she's not being polite. She's speaking German. Sort of.

Get Your Word in Volume Two

This is an evergreen project. The submission form is open year-round, and next winter we'll publish Volume Two with new entries, updated votes, and — if the comments are anything to go by — a formal arbitration process for the pop/soda question. Include the county you heard it in. Context matters. So does a good story.

Ohio talks funny. Let's write it all down before somebody smooths it out.