You say green pepper, I say mango

You know what each of these is called, right?

Growing up, many members of my family in Pennsylvania referred to green peppers as mangoes. Although I found it to be somewhat odd, I never really thought about it too much. But when I mentioned this to my wife a while ago, she basically said that a mango is a mango, and a green pepper is a green pepper. And she is right, but I got to thinking about how interesting these regional colloquialisms are.

So I did a little research. According to the Food Reference Web site, "the usage of 'mango' for green peppers seems to have originated with coal miners in eastern Pennsylvania (1870s +) - and spread with the mining industries, and then with the miners families as they migrated to new areas and found new jobs.....

"...but why the word 'mango' for green peppers? Many of these coal miners were of Eastern European origin, and it has been suggested that the word may have a Slovak origin. The English 'dialect' of the Appalachian region with its unique pronunciation, grammar, and word usage is due in large part to the immigration of miners, engineers and others from so many countries coming together in one area and being relatively isolated in the small mining towns.”

So, there actually was a reason for that use of the word mango in my house. Oh, and by the way, to my knowledge we never had any "real" mangoes in my family. So we avoided that confusion of perhaps calling real mangoes something unique like say....okra.

And I also started to think about more of these colloquialisms from my youth. Here are a few:

· You had to "red up" the house before company came over.
· Rubber bands were always called “gumbands.”
· The capital is “”Warshington, D.C.” not Washington. Likewise, go “warsh your face.”
· Yes, we really did say, "I’m going down to the 'crick.'”
· The Tigers play in “Dee-troit.”
· Anyone from Italy is an "eye-talian.”
· We never went there, but if we did, we would have gone to the “shore,” not the beach.
· A great snack was “jellybread.”
· Sloppy Joes were always called “hamburg barbecue.”
· Cinnamon rolls were “sticky buns.”

I still use some of these -- although now I am “worldly” enough to know the difference between a green pepper and a mango.
As future generations also become more worldly (and homogenized), will we lose these and other verbal identifiers of our homes and places of birth?
And, if we do, is that a good or bad thing?