From VOICES: Upstate by Varick A. Chittenden

Volume 31
Spring-Summer
2005

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As a native and a lifer, I know that the climate, the sparse population, and the remoteness—as well as the resourcefulness and intimacy of life that those “negatives” require of residents—are taken for granted here. In fact, they often invoke a sense of pride that newcomers find hard to grasp.

Photo: Martha Cooper

Varick A. Chittenden is professor emeritus of English, SUNY Canton College of Technology, and executive director of Traditional Arts in Upstate New York (TAUNY). Photo: Martha Cooper

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You Know You Are From Upstate New York if... by Varick A. Chittenden

We all know them—the jokes and anecdotes and sayings that get passed around the office, printed out on a copier for anyone to see. They may come as a poem, a cartoon, a spoof memo, a doctored photograph, or a list. Often they contain ethnic or racial stereotypes, political satire, or blatant sexuality. They can be downright raunchy.

Called “xeroxlore” in the 1970s by the prominent folklore scholar Alan Dundes, such materials have forced us to rethink the old definitions of folklore: those expressions that are traditional in form and content, have often been passed down for generations, are shared within a community, and are circulated orally in face-to-face encounters. Instead, the photocopies we find in our office mailboxes or posted by the water cooler are new forms of jokes that are printed and widely circulated to a “community” that defies geography and time. In fact, with the arrival of the fax machine and e-mail, chat rooms and blogs, such communications can now travel around the world in an instant, to people who understand exactly what they are about although they may have no idea who sent them.

While I have seen quite a number of these office jokes in the last few years, my greatest source was an English department secretary, who collected a drawerful and posted those she dared to on the department bulletin board. Once Gloria knew I was interested, she would frequently drop a copy of her latest “good one” on my desk without comment. I almost always knew who had put it there.

Among my favorite examples from Gloria’s collection was a list of in-jokes titled “You know you’re from upstate New York if …” and made up of about twenty phrases. I still remember a few: “you measure distance in hours,” “you know several people who have hit deer more than once,” “you drive at 65 mph through thirteen feet of snow during a raging blizzard without flinching,” “it takes you three hours to go to the store for one item, even when you’re in a rush, because you have to stop and talk to everyone in town,” “you know there is nothing international about Watertown International Airport,” and “you carry jumper cables in your car year-round, and your wife knows how to use them.”

I liked that. It’s fun when you can laugh at yourself, and every one of the items on the list resonated with me. As a native and a lifer, I know that the climate, the sparse population, and the remoteness—as well as the resourcefulness and intimacy of life that those “negatives” require of residents—are taken for granted here. In fact, they often invoke a sense of pride that newcomers find hard to grasp.

A few years ago, as I was working on a series of live, call-in shows about North Country identity for our public radio station, I received several more of the upstate lists, this time by e-mail. They were hilarious. Some of the phrases were familiar to me and others were new: “You know you’re from upstate New York if …” “you’ve been trick-or-treating in a blizzard,” “you refer to downtown Syracuse as ‘the City,’” “your career ambition is to work as a CO [corrections officer] for New York State,” “you call it soda! And people who call it pop make you want to slap them,” “you’re proud that your region makes the national news ninety-six nights each year because Saranac Lake is the coldest spot in the nation,” and “you have more money in your snowmobile than in your car.”

From these sources I began to surmise a sense of place that is recognized by the people who have known it best. Out of curiosity, I did an online search and found, to my surprise, a web site that led me to similar lists for all fifty states, and several for cities and regions within them. By entering “you know you’re from” into the search engine Google, I found over 800 entries! While these lists are widely disseminated, they often include highly localized variations. Dundes has observed, “You would think these things would be the same everywhere. But they are changed to fit a particular [situation].” In most of the lists I’ve seen, some items could only be familiar to people who know the places well. For instance:

You know you’re from Buffalo if “you save the Genny Cream Ale for special occasions,” “you know how to pronounce Scajaquada, Cheektowaga, and Depew,” or “you think Jimmy Griffin is a ‘real’ politician.”
You know you’re from Long Island if “you never, ever want to change at Jamaica,” “no word ends in ‘er,’ just an ‘ah’,” or “when you’re away from Long Island you love it, and when you’re there you don’t.”
You know you’re from Rochester if “you ask lifetime residents where the George Eastman House is, but they don’t know either,” “Wegman’s is somewhere to go on Friday night for entertainment,” or “the worst four-letter word you could say is ‘Fuji’.”
You know you’re from Westchester if “below 1400 is a so-so SAT score,” “your sixteenth birthday present is a Jeep or your Mom’s old BMW,” or “you consider anything north of White Plains ‘upstate’.”

Now, for me, I know I’m from “true upstate”—the North Country—when half the change in my pocket is Canadian, when I’ve used my summer porch as a refrigerator in January, when I’ve ordered a “michigan” and gotten a decorated hot dog, and when I travel downstate (for four hours!) to Albany.

Varick Chittenden’s Upstate column was published in Voices Vol. 31, Spring-Summer 2005. Voices is the membership magazine of the New York Folklore Society. To become a subscriber, join the New York Folklore Society now.