In or out

Jerry Seinfeld

Interested as I am in words and wordplay, one of my favorite comedy bits in Jerry Seinfeld's Is This Anything? has to do with peculiar idioms that seem to make sense until you stop to think about them.

He recalls that as a boy he lived in Brooklyn, but later his family lived on Long Island. Sometimes they went out to Jersey or down to the beach. Then he observes that we get on a train but in a cab. All this is much funnier when he says it, of course.

Seinfeld could have expanded on this. Why do we say "out west," but "back east?" This probably has to do with the fact that the East Coast was settled first, and pioneers literally went out west. Some of them returned back east. These usages have remained with us through the decades.

The phrases "up north" and "down south" probably have more to do with maps, where north is up and south is down.

Growing up in rural Ohio, when I heard someone say they were going "to Toledo" it suggested to me somewhere on the outskirts, such as the Westgate Shopping Center where my family often shopped. When I heard "into Toledo" it suggested the downtown area.

I have never understood the difference between uptown and downtown. Billy Joel had fun with this in his song Uptown Girl. Here the difference seems to be social status, upper class versus lower class. But when I was young, I referred to the center of the city when I used the phrase "downtown Toledo." The word uptown meant nothing to me at that time, and it doesn't mean much to me now.