-tucky (2023)

> I told some friends about it, and they said, yes, and we have "Pennsyltucky" too. But when I looked that up, it wasn't nearly so demeaning as "Counciltucky". It basically just means Pennsylvania minus the Pittsburgh and Philadelphia metropolitan areas

The size of the area has nothing to do with how demeaning the term is. The term is centered on calling the region, to oversimplify, an underdeveloped poor rural backwater.

Just because Pennsylvania has a larger chunk of land that some would describe that way than Council Bluffs does doesn't inherently change that both terms are demeaning.

I haven't been to Council Bluffs, but I have spent time in parts of Pennsylvania outside the Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and State College metros, and while I'm not going to proclaim wisdom without having lived there I certainly saw where the term and stereotype came from.

I live in Lincoln, so about 50 miles south of Omaha. I think a crucial point left out by the author here may be the massive (at least perceived) demographic disparities between Omaha and Council Bluffs.

Council Bluffs is a vastly less financially successful city than Omaha with far more visible opioid problems.

That is to say, as a local, I don’t know if I would associate the term as much with demeaning “hillbillies or hicks” but more for the socioeconomic and drug disparities between the two cities.

I don’t know if the drug disparity is so large between them, but it certainly feels more visible in Council Bluffs. Maybe why we don’t see the -tucky suffix used as much with other twin cities is that St Paul and Fort Worth are still quite successful metropolitan areas in their own right.

It's crazy how the etymology of "Kentucky" cannot be traced with certainty. Goes to show how much of the native American culture and language is now untraceable and how fragile our record-keeping is, even in "modern times".

> Dallas-Fort Worth

But Dallas, as people in my circles talk about Dallas is everything from Denton / Lewisville maybe even Little Elm / Prosper / Celina to Waxahachie. Dallas Fort Worth is not a twin city at all in my opinion.

I would love to hear your opinion.

The author (Victor Mair) of the piece makes two errors:

(1) Omaha and Council Bluffs are not twin cities. The former doesn't think about the latter, and the latter sees the former as workplace, shopping mall and zoo.

(2) The residents of Omaha didn't coin the term 'Counciltucky.' That privilege belongs to the residents of Council Bluffs themselves.

Reference: a former resident of Council Bluffs who is a current resident of Omaha.

Try the Quad (or Quint) Cities if you want a dynamic with more than two cities. Three on the Illinois side, one (or two) on the Iowa side.

(It started as a “tri cities” so the bump to five isn’t the first it’s seen)

Bonus points: an OK native pizza style if you like tavern-ish pizza varieties.

Related to TFA, a “judgmental map” of Omaha and Council Bluffs:

https://i.pinimg.com/736x/0a/db/ea/0adbea3bcdffbcb4ccfe6ec10...

Warning that these are usually offensive, or at least have the potential to offend (but often super helpful when visiting a new city…)

Council Bluffs just gets a blanket “meth and casinos” label.

"Pennsyltucky" doesn't necessarily mean "the rural parts of PA." It can mean "the swath of country roughly from Pennsylvania to Kentucky" or "places like that" or it can be even broader than that. Or it can simply mean "Pennsylvania." It's really not so easy to pigeonhole this stuff. Not accurately anyway.

It's helpful to write these things down. What's not helpful is using them as if they were precise and definitive.

EDIT: If you've badgered me in an attempt to get a different answer, try Google or Wikipedia.

It’s not easy to express negative things. No matter how many neutral terms we invent, they become pejorative in the end and we have to invent new ones by switching the words around.

I remember "-tucky" being used in my part of Southeastern Michigan, in the early 1980s. It may have been related to the historical migration of people from Appalachia to the Detroit area during the heyday of the car industry.

I grew up in a twin city and it's OK. It isn't an insult, St Paul and Minneapolis are close. There's no "-tucky" understanding though. They are different cities and that's fine...

Portland OR has "Vantucky" (Vancouver WA)

Another -ucky is Ventucky, CA which is a local name for Ventura as mixture of Kentucky and beach town.

Cf. Spokompton (Spokane, WA + Compton).

I have heard that the name of Kentucky derives from a "cane-tuck"—a copse of river cane, a kind of bamboo native to North America.

(My only source for this was someone who had learned of the existence of river cane in their Kentucky backyard, and was doing an enthusiastic deep research dive into it. It may or may not be true, but it's at least an interesting possibility!)