Going to the shore on the east coast, and the beach on the west coast


I've never lived east of the Mississippi River, but I known a lot of people who have lived east of there, and quite a few people still do. And something that I've always found fascinating is that people who go to the Atlantic Ocean call it "going to the shore" while people who go to the Pacific Ocean call it "going to the beach". I find it fascinating, the way that my east coast friends say "dungarees" while I've only heard "blue jeans" from Minneapolis to Los Angeles.

I stumbled across this billboard, which was on the way to Asbury Park, New Jersey in 1939, today at the Duke University website ROAD (Resource of Outdoor Advertising Descriptions) and it reminded me about people who said that they were going to the shore. I have a good friend who grew up on the east coast, and even though he's spent his entire adult life on the west coast, he still says, "Yo, Brad, let's go to the shore! Wait for me because I want to change my dungarees". 

Now calm down there if you feel strongly about whether it's right or wrong, I have no interest in hearing the world's most boring argument. To me, this kind of stuff just makes life richer and more interesting, and is a reminder of just how incredibly big the United States is. Sometimes I think that it's a miracle that we can communicate at all - I've met people from the southern United States and even when I listen carefully I rarely understand everything they say. I listen to the music!

I've lived in the midwest (where I grew up) and the west (the west coast in my twenties, and Arizona since then) and the only thing that I recall that confused people was my tendency to call soda "pop". I settled on soda pop. Otherwise, people really don't have any difficulty understanding me from the Pacific to the Mississippi River, and vice-versa.

And to be fair to my east coast friends, the edge of any body of water is the shore. I mean, there's the shoreline, or driftwood can wash up on the shore, from the Pacific Ocean to Lake Minnetonka to the Atlantic Ocean. In my mind, the word "beach" just seems more cheerful, making me think of sand and palm trees, instead of a rocky coast. Of course, there are wonderful sandy beaches along the Atlantic, calm down there, I saw you there in the back row starting to stand up to yell at me!

My best guess about all of this is that we use the words that are most familiar to us, and if you grew up near Asbury Park, New Jersey, you went to the shore. I grew up in Minneapolis, and rode my bike around the lakes, stopping to look at the girls on the beach, and I used to go to the beach in Santa Barbara to eat my lunch when I lived there (and look at the girls, of course!). So hopefully my friends would cut me some slack if I asked if we could go to the beach!

See you on the boardwalk by the shore!

Update: See comment below from the Good Captain, who describes it more correctly as "down the shore"!

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Comments

  1. Cpt. CrankyAugust 13, 2021 at 8:30 PM

    Being a New Jersey resident (outside Philadelphia) for almost 60 years, nobody I knew said they we're going "to the shore", it was always "down the shore".

    ReplyDelete
  2. Brad HallAugust 14, 2021 at 5:54 AM

    Thanks, Captain! I've added an update to the post. Let's go down the shore!

    ReplyDelete

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