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Tell me all about it, dear...
terri t - 2011-06-02 19:03:45
It is funny how the locale can make the choice of descriptive words sounds strange. We use basement around here, diet pop, "ant" for our female relative not "Aont". Glad your day went well....
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deb - 2011-06-02 19:15:26
Hmmm where I come from if it has stairs down from inside the house it's a basement, if the steps go to an outdoor entrance it's a cellar ... says the girl who grew up in a house built on a slab.
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michele - 2011-06-02 19:17:14
My family is from western pa, and northwestern nj, ain't no city folk here nowhere, and we've always called it a basement. Unless you are referring to a storm cellar. My washer is in the basement, and you hide from tornadoes in the storm cellar ;)
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Jim - 2011-06-02 21:00:11
Basement vs. cellar... Hmmmm. I say "basement" but your entry got me to remembering childhood in a very Italian neighborhood in Kingston where most of my friends said "cellar" -- but many of the parents (and especially the grandparents) made it a one syllable word, dropping the "ar" and leaving just a ghost of a breath stretching the el sound. Anyway, from a technical point of view, a cellar is an underground room used for storage (especially of produce, etc.) and might not even be beneath a house, it could be next to the house. A basement is a room or rooms beneath a house that have cement or brick walls and floors (and may even be finished to form another living level. Basements are reached from an interior stairway but may also have an exterior walk-up exit (perhaps with a bulkhead door) or even a walk-out exit (in the case of a house built on a hill where one (or more) exterior walls of the basement are at ground level). Basements may be called cellars in rural areas where this usage has come down from the days of root cellars for storing food for winter. I would guess that is why the term was used in your area (and in mine because of immigrants from rural areas of Italy).
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Amy - 2011-06-02 23:13:24
I'm glad that you're having a well-deserved wave of good luck, but now you have me confused. My boyfriend grew up partly in New York and partly in Bergen County and he calls it a basement. I'll have to ask him about that.
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Stephanie - 2011-06-03 09:30:48
I use both basement and cellar, and purse and pocketbook. What drives me apeshit is the way Daniel says Nazi (gnatsee) and pasta (past [as in tense]a)! That's good news about summer school. The TA summer school position was just posted, so I can finally breathe a sigh of relief, myself.
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Poundheadhere - 2011-06-04 01:30:40
I grew up in Podunk USA myself, in northeastern Iowa. It's basement, purse, and dinner's what you eat late - lunch is, well, lunch!
But I married a man from the Netherlands, so if those things bugged me we'd be in trouble, lol.
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