3 lexical californification

Oh nooo. I was reading Gothamist just now and I took a double take on the passage:

The Daily News reports on the Black Friday sales ("New Yorkers go bananas for bargains") included an account of a stampede at Toys R' Us. Jen reports: "by the way, my brother's girlfriend went to a Best Buy in Queens at 3AM yesterday and people were getting STABBED on line!"
(src)

Specifically, I had to read over "on line" and realize that it didn't mean that someone had gotten stabbed on the internet (whatever that would mean, though with technology today it seems entirely possible); it meant that a person was stabbed by another person in the same queue to get into Best Buy.

I didn't realize this until I'd read a blog entry by Rain a while ago but apparently New Yorkers (or maybe it was East Coasters) are the only ones who use the terms "on line" and "in line" interchangeably. I was an "on line" person and I even remember using it consciously after moving to California, but eventually I stopped using it because I feared people would get confused. And now I've assimilated the Non-New-Yorker term into my vernacular. I'm slowly turning into a Californian. Scariest realization... ever.

I can still take comfort in the fact that I can tell the difference between "cot" and "caught." Yeah I'm a hater.

No, I'm just jealous that all of my friends were able to go home for Thanksgiving while I'm stuck in sunny warm Southern California, in a T-shirt and flip-flops. Sometimes I just forget it's November over here.