Bridge tunnel

are you kidding? why would anyone compare themselves to those Chelsea-fouling drunkards who flood Manhattan every weekend from that landmass to our east that God created as just a easy way to speed to Philadelphia????

I was born and raised in Brooklyn. Usually it's Manhattanites that use that term. Those that use the term "bridge and tunnel" to describe me are people I wouldn't want to associate with anyway.

kosherdave wrote: I think of B&T as people from outside NYC, ie NJ. But maybe people in Manhattan have a different view.

Technically, anyone who crosses water to get to "the city" is B&T. But the stereotypical B&Ter definitely has a Jersey bent.

EDIT: "the city"=Manhattan

Flexichick wrote: I always thought of LI as included what people call B&T crowds

Yes. Anywhere with cugines.

Yeah, we're not really B&T, however as others have said I'd rather just avoid the kind of morons who actually have conversations about B&T to feel better about their 'station' in life, I lived in the city for 6 years and if there is anything worth bragging about, it's living in the slope.

Livetotravel wrote: make that landmass to our west

LOL. Ah, the mark of a true New Yorker--not knowing what the hell direction any other state is in.

As my husband said recently, "Kentucky is next to Missouri? I thought it was way closer to us."

I guess I think of B&T as referring to people from NJ and Staten Island and, well, some parts of Brooklyn, but only in the context of going to Manhattan to go out to clubs and be noisy and obnoxious and urinate on the sidewalk. I've never heard anyone say, "There are so many bridge-and-tunnel people in my office," for example.

caaahyoko wrote: [quote=Livetotravel]make that landmass to our west

LOL. Ah, the mark of a true New Yorker--not knowing what the hell direction any other state is in.

As my husband said recently, "Kentucky is next to Missouri? I thought it was way closer to us."

Technically, your husband has basis for a debate, as there are parts of Kentucky that are closer to us than they are to most of Missouri.

meanderthal wrote: [quote=caaahyoko][quote=Livetotravel]make that landmass to our west

LOL. Ah, the mark of a true New Yorker--not knowing what the hell direction any other state is in.

As my husband said recently, "Kentucky is next to Missouri? I thought it was way closer to us."

Technically, your husband has basis for a debate, as there are parts of Kentucky that are closer to us than they are to most of Missouri.

Eh, a very tenuous debate. Kentucky borders Mizzou, and every point in Kentucky is at least 100 miles closer to at least one point in Mizzou than it is NYC.

Isn't "Bridge-and-Tunnel" really just a dialect-driven compound modifier you spit at someone who doesn't belong whereever it is you are? It's more of an elitist notion than a description of how a person gets around. I imagine that even the grungy Manhattanites at a place like, oh, I don't know, Milano's on Houston have thought something like this about people like, oh, I don't know, the O.P. ...It seems that, in linguistic terms, B&T is a handy, flexible term of derision that is probably best applied to anyone who is usually not waking up in the city on Saturday mornings but that, perhaps, can be applied even to people from Sunset Park whenever they come all the way up to the Slope for a beer.

meanderthal wrote: My point is that you can be from Kentucky and be closer to NYC than you are to most of Missouri.

I wanted to weigh in on this strangely fascinating geographical discussion: What would your basic spaghetti-in-a-cup guy in Paducah have to say about this? Isn't it somehow closer to the point that Kentuckians, in their minds, see themselves as a million miles from New York City? Judging by the number of porches with couches on them alone, Kentucky may as well be Missouri.

There are, though, quite a few Kentuckians who are closer to New York City than Missouri. The easternmost municipality in Kentucky is about 200 driving miles closer to New York City than it is to the northwesternmost one in Missouri. Anything west of Lexington, out in coal country, and you're closer to your fellow hayseeds in Missouri.

Err, uhm, the Kentucky-Missouri border also is notable because it is home to the only true exclave in the United States. Kentucky Bend, a little boob of geography supposedly created by the famous New Madrid earthquake, is part of Kentucky but completely surrounded by Missouri and Tennessee.

meanderthal wrote: ...That one's always interested me too. And since I'm OT already, why the heck is the northern border of Delaware a circular arc?

Uhm, err... The boundary between Pennsylvania and Delaware, the only arc demarking a boundary in the United States (if you ignore boundaries that follow lines of latitude or, I guess, longitude), was specified by the original land grant given to William Penn, which called for the boundary to be set by a circle with a 12-mile radius centered on New Castle, Del. Why the king does this, though, is unknown to me. ...If you look closely at the map, you can see that on the western edge, along the more-famous Mason-Dixon Line, this arc has been roughed off, as if a carpenter trimmed it up to fit, so that a small wedge outside the arc is inside Delaware and another half-circle within the arc has been given to Maryland.

Interestingly, ...uh, well, sort of interestingly, the boundary between Delaware and New Jersey, within this 12-mile circle, is actually the low-tide mark on the east bank of the Delaware River, not the middle of the river. Almost all other boundaries, in the U.S. and elsewhere, that follow a course of a river divide the river in two between the bordering, uh, whatever-they-ares. :roll:

Subject: This Is Wa-a-a-y Off-Thread

Uhm, err. Shit. ...At the risk of sounding like I sleep with maps or history books (or worse), the boundaries of West Virginia represent the 39 counties of Virginia which voted to secede (from Virginia, to join the Union) after the beginning of what other Virginians might have called the "Late Unpleasantness" (i.e. the Civil War). ...But the seeds of this divide go back to colonial times when the dominance in state affairs of large-scale, landowning eastern Virginians ruffled the rural feathers of the small-time, often itinerant, western Virginians.