“Flip-Flops”: The Lost Language of Place
We’re going to the municipal swimming pool in Rosendale, NY. I put on my swimsuit and slip into my thongs. No, not that kind of thong—the skimpy, sexy strip of material designed, barely, to cover what needs to be covered.
No, I’m talking about the rubbery, pliable cheap sandals for our feet that we always, while growing up in New York, called thongs, for whatever reason. And that now, permanently ensconced outside New York, we generally call flip-flops.
The thought occurred to query our friend Alice: “What do you call these,” I asked as I showed her my footwear, “thongs or flip-flops?”
“Those are Zorries,” said Alice, who has spent time in the South Pacific. “That’s what everyone calls them out there.”
I had never heard of Zorries and had no idea of the name’s existence, but was very glad to learn it, to hear that there were still regionalisms around, localized terms for common items, in our increasingly homogenized country.
Where there had once been “hero,” hoagie,” “grinder” and “po-boy,” there’s now, usually, just the irritatingly bland “sub.”
Where there had once been “pop” and generic “coke” for a carbonated beverage, they have been increasingly replaced by the even more generic “soda.”
Where some of us used to wear sneakers and others us wore tennis shoes and a few of us wore gym shoes, we now all wear standardized Nike’s or New Balance to drive around what had been, depending on where you lived, a traffic circle or a rotary but which we now all generally know as a roundabout.
The distinctive language of regionalism has been dying for some time. With the advent of the internet, the loss of local media, the omnipresence of social media and all of us watching “Emily in Paris” on the same streaming services, localized language has gotten diluted. Even the interstate highway system and its attendant increased mobility, with more Americans moving across state lines more frequently, has helped to erode regional differences.
Kids in Maine and kids in Arizona now watch the same content and adopt the same slang as YouTube promotes more uniform speech patterns and vocabulary. National chains like Target and McDonald’s and all the others use the same language everywhere—menus, signs, labels—so there goes “pop” in favor of “soda.” Cross-country distances have been reduced to FaceTime and Zoom split seconds.
What had been a culturally balkanized country when we were growing up has become something more monolithic.
And that’s a loss. I remember a time, not that long ago, when you’d drive through a different part of the country, turn on the car’s AM radio, and hear a local DJ or news announcer with a southern drawl or a clipped Midwestern accent talking about “po-boys” and “bee-bee-cue” and you knew you weren’t in Kansas anymore.
If you are driving somewhere today and actually turn on the radio instead of listening to an insular podcast or enveloping audiobook, the voices—trained at the same schools, reciting from the same corporate scripts—not surprisingly sound the same. Nothing regional about them.
All politics is local, the former House Speaker, Tip O’Neill, famously said. But now, of course, all politics is national and although we have red states and blue states politically, culturally we are losing our distinctiveness. And that’s a shame.
On the way home from Alice’s place in upstate New York, we stopped for dinner at a diner in southern Pennsylvania. My wife, Carol, ordered turkey. It came, of course, with mashed potatoes and gravy, but also with filling. Not stuffing, as we used to call it in New York. Not dressing, as we now call it in the south. Filling.
It didn’t taste any better, but it was nice to know.