Some Cleveland-Area Words and Pronunciations

 Cleveland Words

• Canadian soldier. A kind of mayfly, born on Lake Erie, living about a day. They sometimes cover screens, sidewalks, and buildings within a mile of the lake in late June.

• Babushka. From the Russian word for grandmother. A cloth head covering worn by all Catholic women in Euclid in the 1950s and '60s.

• Potica. (pronounced po-TEE-tsuh). A dessert nut or poppy-seed roll.

• Pierogi. Pasta stuffed with meat, potatoes, or fruit. Often fried with onions.

• Treelawn. The strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street.

• Luckystone. Small, polished stones composed of milky quartz, found mostly in eastern Cuyahoga, Lake, and Ashtabula Counties on the Lakeshore. See the photo below.

• Parish. Cleveland Catholics lived in parishes, not named neighborhoods. "I live in OLA." (Our Lady of Angels). This is almost surely fading out.

• Davenport. A long stuffed chair that could seat 3-4 people. Similar to a couch or sofa.

• Lake Effect. Huge snowfalls generated by Lake Erie falling often on higher elevations on Cleveland's East Side.

• Youse. Plural of "you," common among Euclid Slovenians.

• Pail (chosen over bucket)

• You can call a rivulet a Brook or Creek. Many local waterways are called brooks, as in "Doan Brook."

Some word pronunciations:

Sorry. SORE-ee (not sah-ree).

Tomorrow. Tuh-MORE-oh.

Cuyahoga. Cuy-uh-HOG-uh. Keep the HOG in CuyaHOGa.

Coupon. KOO-pahn. Not KYOO-pahn.

Many of these words and pronunciations were common on the East Side of Cleveland in the 1950s and '60s.

The round white stones at the foot of St. Francis are Lake Erie luckystones.#

Comments from Kathleen P.:

I love this list. Some of the words I never heard of, but Babushka brought back memories.  That was the hat of choice for most schoolgirls I knew.  The wool ones with flower patterns were the best for Cleveland winters.  We tied them under our chins, as opposed to our bandannas tied behind our neck that I used from late '60s through the '90s.

We also wore Chapel veils and Mantillas to church. (As well as kleenex, instead of tissues, bobbi-pinned to our heads in a pinch)

Sadly I don't remember the Cleveland stones.  I've always been a "special rock" collector.  When I was a kid, my brother would go "Down in the Valley" looking for fossils.  Cincinnati soil is all fossils!  My friend, Margaret, used to live on Blue Rock Road, and that led to years of collecting blue-grey rocks for her garden.  In Oregon we look for sea glass and stones shaped like hearts.  We also have agates which can look almost like quartz that you can see the light come through.  Our State rock is called the Thunder Rock - round ugly looking rocks that crack open to reveal crystals. (Same as a Geode, maybe).

Lake Effect, Parish, and Tree Lawn are three that are unique to Cleveland/NE Ohio I think.  Also we had lightening bugs instead of fireflies.  We had "money catchers", which could be anything from those large Mayflies to bits of pollen falling through the air. Cleveland area also has Buzzards, instead of Vultures, and Locusts instead of Cicadas.

Our family had Pully-bones instead of Wishbones.  I think that was from my mother's Southern culture.

A bit of an aside: My daughter recently asked me what I meant by Soda Jerk.

Babushkas, Davenports, Ice Boxes, and Tree Lawns

Growing up in Euclid, Ohio, we spoke an exotic dialect of English--though we didn't know it. My dialect (which was a mixture of family "idiolect" and our socio-regional dialect) might be described as an inland Northern variety of American English, flavored by our lower middle class socio-econmic status and our Irish-Catholic religion--with a dash of family peculiarities! Now that is a mouthful, I know.

There was a Euclid twist on our language because outside of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Euclid probably had the largest concentration of Slovenians in the world. We had Slovenians, Polish, Irish, Germans, Italians, English, and other ethnic groups in our town. We had many Jews and a Jewish temple, Ner Tamid, at E. 250th and Lakeshore Boulevard. As far as I knew, we had no Blacks in Euclid of the 1950's and 1960's. I've since heard that there were a few African American families around Babbitt Road and the railroad tracks (Nickel Plate and New York Central). This might seem astonishing in the year 2011 because Euclid is now around 40% African American (the Euclid public schools are much higher than that).

One possible linguistic contribution of the Slovenians and Polish Euclidians might be the word "babushka." I know the word in Russian means "grandmother," but to us it meant a scarf head covering that women wore. It probably was the most common head covering in St. William's when I was growing up (at the time women were required to wear head coverings in Catholic churches). My very Irish mother always wore a babushka in church. The word was as ordinary and common to us as the word "hat." When my wife moved to Euclid in 1982, she encountered this word for the first time--and I discovered it was not a commonly known word outside of Euclid and Cleveland.

Another common word in Euclid was "tree lawn." A tree lawn is the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street. I found out as a graduate student at Ohio State (1979-1982) that this was also not a universally understood word. In fact, there are interesting regional variations of this. Some people have no word at all for "tree lawn"; in Barberton, Ohio they call a "tree lawn" a "devil's strip." In fact, if you ever hear that term, you can bet the ranch the speaker is from Barberton.

In our family, the long overstuffed chair in the living room was called a "davenport." Now I get a blank look or a giggle when I use the term. I have a feeling we davenport-speakers are losing ground! This is probably also true for the Canadian chesterfield-sitters.

Another term used in our family was "ice box." That's where we kept the milk, the beer, and the Cheez Whiz.

I feel like a dinosaur these days, mowing my tree lawn, wearing a babushka (well, not really), sitting on my davenport, and grabbing a Great Lakes "Edmund Fitzgerald Porter" out of the ice box. Some days I like to eat my pirogi and potica as I drink my beer.