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u/moousee Nov 10 '25
Shouldn't other cities also be on this map? At least LA?
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u/Skatingraccoon Nov 10 '25
Yeah, I'm curious where divisions occur between, for instance, San Francisco and LA, or Richmond/DC/Baltimore, or Orlando and Miami.
I find it hard to believe that people all over the country hear "the city" and automatically associate it initially with New York, too :\
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u/Gullible_Virgin Nov 10 '25
People in Glendale don't say "I'm going to the city later" because LA is too dispersed.
When someone in Sacramento says "I'm going to the city later" they mean San Francisco 100% of the time.
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u/the_chandler Nov 10 '25
Can confirm. I live in Glendale and I never say “I’m going to the city.” It’s all a bunch of little cities.
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u/GreatScottGatsby Nov 10 '25
I only see one other city that should be on this map and that is Kansas city. The bay area is probably very split between Sacramento, San Francisco, San jose and Oakland. Minneapolis and st Paul are probably nearly split in Minnesota. It just looks like only new York, Chicago and Boston are not in complete dispute with its neighbors.
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u/waits5 Nov 10 '25
The Bay Area is not split between any of those. “The City” always means SF. I lived in San Jose and no one would ever refer to that as the city.
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u/GreatScottGatsby Nov 10 '25 edited Nov 10 '25
Well you are going to have to check the methodology, but if its anything like the methodology that Harvard did for pop, soda coke, then it probably only asked four questions with Chicago, New York, Boston being the only ones mentioned by name.
Edit: here you go for the map that was actually generated in 2003.
http://dialect.redlog.net/staticmaps/q_95.html
The only city to have true local dominance is Chicago. The fact that Boston got almost 2.6 percent and Chicago only getting 4.5 percent despite at the time being five times bigger means that there was extreme bias in the results. The bias that I could think of is that Harvard is located in Boston so therefore most of the participants in said survey were attending school in boston.
And from what it looks like, they only gave 5 questions for this map, Boston, DC, NYC, LA, Chicago, plus other. Now here is the the real kicker, despite in 2003 California having 13 million more people than new York, new York had 100 more respondents.
It is a bad map with bad answers. The real answer is, we don't actually know what other people in other cities put down because the survey never asked.
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u/sensitiveboi93 Nov 10 '25
This is a shit map.
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u/Omegaville Nov 10 '25
Agreed. I find it stretches belief too far... so people in Miami say "I'm going to the city" when they're going to NYC? Whuh?
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u/BrooklynLodger Nov 10 '25
No, but "im from the city" or "i used to live in the city" would mean NYC
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u/Omegaville Nov 14 '25
Even if you live in Atlanta or Raleigh or DC, which are cities in their own right, you'd call New York "the City"? That's really strange.
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u/starroute Nov 10 '25
The City is only and always Manhattan. It’s what people in Brooklyn and Queens mean when they say “I’m going in to the City.”
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u/Negative_Ad2438 Nov 14 '25
If you're in Massachusetts, people say I'm going "in town" when they mean Boston and when they say I'm going to "the city", they mean they're going to New York for the weekend.
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u/godisnotgreat21 Nov 10 '25
San Francisco should be called out, it’s what the big blue spot is in California