Bags or Sacks



"Do you like cafeterias?" I asked.

"Don't know," he answered, "I've never played them."

"What religion do you follow?" another man asked me.

In a mining camp they told me to take such and such a "trail."

The point is, that we did not talk that way where I came from. Of
course, I hasten to say, we doubtless talked some other way just as
peculiar. And if I could detect our colloquialisms I would write a lot
about them but alas I can't. I was in the West two years before I
noticed that a "trolley" is a "street car."

A woman in a mining camp said to the stage driver, "I want out at the
bank because I don't want to pack this sack of silver." In the first
place we wouldn't have had a sack of silver and if we had, it would have
been in a "bag" not a "sack," and we never "pack" things and we never
"want out."

In the East we never refer to our locality as "this country," as in the
West and South. We do not take the name of our state either as
"Californian" or "Kentuckian." One never hears of a "Connecticutian" or