Hot tamales have never crossed the plains East. And baked beans have
never come West - not real ones. The difference between the Eastern
baked bean and the Western is all the difference between a tin can and a
religious rite and it is the same with succotash. A cruller is only a
fried doughnut when it gets out West. Tea is more subtle in the East,
but out here the waitress will ask "Black or green" in a black or white
tone and stands over you until you decide. Maybe you don't want black
tea, maybe you don't want green, but just "tea," but there she stands in
her unequivocation - "Black or green?"

Silver money has never traveled East. A man told me recently that he
didn't like silver money when he first came out here and that it was
always wearing his pockets out but since he'd gotten into Western ways
it never wore a hole in his pockets any more. In the East a change purse
is scorned by anything masculine, but here all the men carry one, I
don't know why not in the East, nor why in the West. Blessed old
"two-bits" and a "dollar six-bits" are the only woolly things left over
from the old wild West.

What else - oh, I could keep on for pages. "Stay with it" is Western and
has lots more feeling I think than "stick to it." A Westerner when his
wife and babies were going back East to visit her relatives, telegraphed
to her brother - "Elizabeth and outfit arrive Tuesday." And until she
arrived the brother spent his time in conjecturing as to just what an
"outfit" would mean. Rhubarb plant is "rhubarb" in the East and also
"pie plant," and one day I was in a fruit store and when the man - he
was a Greek - yelled "Wha else?" I could only think of "pie plant" and
so I didn't get any.

It's all the way you are "brought up," Eastern, and all the way you are