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  #41  
Old Posted Mar 16, 2014, 11:57 PM
Shawn Shawn is offline
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Originally Posted by fflint View Post
Oh please! The same doctor who delivered my Mom and her four siblings also delivered me and my sister--same doctor, same hospital--and yet my own blood relatives contest I'm a Boston "native" because my family moved me out at age 6 and I didn't move back until age 18!
Heh, I am just bustin balls. When people from Cambridge and Somerville can never say they are from Boston, you know we are probably the most parochial place in the country.
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  #42  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 1:08 AM
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San Diego has so many transplants (myself included) that I don't think anyone really cares where you're from. I felt like a local here when I stopped saying the word 'hella'.
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  #43  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 1:38 AM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Lipani View Post
San Diego has so many transplants (myself included) that I don't think anyone really cares where you're from. I felt like a local here when I stopped saying the word 'hella'.
You ever started saying hella?

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  #44  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 2:48 AM
Buckeye Native 001 Buckeye Native 001 is offline
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Originally Posted by Lipani View Post
San Diego has so many transplants (myself included) that I don't think anyone really cares where you're from. I felt like a local here when I stopped saying the word 'hella'.
Likewise in Arizona. I think when people stop bitching about the weather in the city from which they moved and start bitching about the heat is when they're considered native enough.
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  #45  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 3:11 AM
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SpawnOfVulcan SpawnOfVulcan is offline
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I think there are a few things that influence your being considered a local.

1) How open you are to conforming to local norms

2) The pace at which the city is growing

3) How long you've been there

4) The size of the city

5) Your age

I think my #1 is the biggest thing. When I was in New York last year, as I walked down any street all I could think was "damn, just f***ing walk!"
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  #46  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 4:15 AM
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In San Diego you are a local when you drive around in your Lexus or BMW with a Vape Pen puffing on hash oil on your way to Whole Foods to pick up a cold pressed vegetable juice.
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  #47  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 4:47 AM
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Other boxes that must be checked to receive your Boston local card:

- Are you still wearing shorts outside in January or February? If not, you have some additional climate acclimation and fashion-sense loss to work on.

- Do you wear white after Labor Day and before Memorial Day? If so, GTFU. Counter-intuitive to the point above, I know.

- Are you walking at least twice as fast as the clearly out-of-town college kids / tourists / New Yorkers seeing their college kids? If not, you need to get up to speed. We don't do slow-walking in Boston, and we don't take kindly to slowpokes clogging up the works.

- Are "bzah", "pissah", "shuah", and "retahded" all intrinsic parts of your vocabulary? If not, consider yourself lucky and don't bother trying to integrate any further; you're already ahead of the rest of us in terms of not sounding like a mental midget, no reason to go down that path now! Note: "wicked" is New England-wide and not Boston-specific. You will certainly earn some points for dropping "wicked" in place of something asinine like "hella" (groan), but you're not definitively identifying yourself as a Bostonian with "wicked."
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  #48  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 5:40 AM
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I honestly think that being a local isn't dependent upon a period of time or anything tangible. It is determined by how a city has affected your personality. After you have been influenced by that cities culture to a certain degree is when you are a local.
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  #49  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 7:00 AM
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I think the question is, a local of which part of the city?

Everyone in Kensington and Chelsea (and other parts of west London) is from somewhere else, whether that's elsewhere in the UK or another country. As a result, I'd say you're a local once you're settled, you know your way around and you're on a first name basis with the bartenders at your local.

To be a local in other parts of London (particularly those that are less desirable and therefore dominated by people whose families have been there for generations or poorer immigrants), you've not only got to be born there but I expect that in some cases your father and grandfather must have been too. But then you're a Cockney.

Last edited by 10023; Mar 17, 2014 at 7:13 AM.
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  #50  
Old Posted Mar 17, 2014, 5:41 PM
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I've lived in L.A. for twenty years come August. I feel like a "native" now.
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  #51  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 1:35 PM
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Perhaps I am biased as a 4th generation Tulsan whose grandparents told stories of coming to Tulsa in a covered wagon, who has streets in nearby towns named after past relatives, who was told stories of "over there was the first this and that" "we used to do this and that and Tulsa used to be…" .

To be a "local" here I would say you should be at least be a second or third generation Tulsan. Part of that is history, or having lived through some of the things, and been handed down some stories, that has made the city what it is today. Your not a Tulsan unless you have felt the glory of an oil boom and the sting of a bust for instance. Though thats not something that will likely ever happen again, those repeated boom and bust cycles around oil deeply shaped our cities built character and the psyche of many who live here. You have to know something of what was "there before" what is there now, and "how things used to be". There are so many new people here who seem to know nothing about Tulsa and what Tulsa is. I often run into people who live mostly out in the suburban/mall type areas and think that is Tulsa, and have little knowledge about the core or even some of the Treasures of historic Tulsa. Ran into someone who had lived here most of their lives the other day who didn't even know what Villa Philbrook was or where it was or it's history and the history of it's part of town. I was shocked, part of me still thinks they were actually pulling my leg a bit. Definitely not a local.
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  #52  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 1:50 PM
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Quote:
Originally Posted by WilliamTheArtist View Post
Perhaps I am biased as a 4th generation Tulsan whose grandparents told stories of coming to Tulsa in a covered wagon, who has streets in nearby towns named after past relatives, who was told stories of "over there was the first this and that" "we used to do this and that and Tulsa used to be…" .

To be a "local" here I would say you should be at least be a second or third generation Tulsan. Part of that is history, or having lived through some of the things, and been handed down some stories, that has made the city what it is today. Your not a Tulsan unless you have felt the glory of an oil boom and the sting of a bust for instance. Though thats not something that will likely ever happen again, those repeated boom and bust cycles around oil deeply shaped our cities built character and the psyche of many who live here. You have to know something of what was "there before" what is there now, and "how things used to be". There are so many new people here who seem to know nothing about Tulsa and what Tulsa is. I often run into people who live mostly out in the suburban/mall type areas and think that is Tulsa, and have little knowledge about the core or even some of the Treasures of historic Tulsa. Ran into someone who had lived here most of their lives the other day who didn't even know what Villa Philbrook was or where it was or it's history and the history of it's part of town. I was shocked, part of me still thinks they were actually pulling my leg a bit. Definitely not a local.
yeah sounds a little like metro st louis. theres areas where being a transplant is much easier and you dont have to worry about fitting in with the "locals." I was born in St Louis County (and my family has been in the region since the 1850s at least) and have been (jokingly) considered an outsider in the City (although the City is much more accomodating to regional transplants). There are generations of suburbanites raised 40 miles west of the city that don't know the urban core and come in like tourists on the weekend. unlike some of the city-born guys, haha, i have sympathy for them and will make them pro-tip lists on bar napkins, etc.
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  #53  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 2:03 PM
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I live in a relatively small city of 275,000 but we are right across from Canada's capital city of Ottawa. Which makes for a very transient population.

If you move here from Montreal or Quebec City or anywhere else in French-speaking Canada and speak French with the requisite accent, you become a local almost instantaneously.

If you don't fit that description above you have to obtain a pretty good grasp of French (and ideally use unique expressions specific to this part of the world) in order to be considered a local. Though not the accent - which very few adults are ever able to fully take on.
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  #54  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 5:24 PM
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IMO to be a "native" of somewhere you have to be a product of the community, most commonly by education. To be a local you need to live there long enough to know what's what and then choose to stay after you've gotten to know the community you're in. If you move somewhere and figure out that you hate it but can't leave for x reasons, it doesn't really matter how long you live there imo... You never truly become a local because you don't accept the local norms.
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  #55  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 5:38 PM
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i became a montrealer after i had lived there for longer than any other place, had studied and worked at its main (anglo) institutions, and knew the history and layout of the place better than that of any other city in the world.

took maybe 12 years.
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  #56  
Old Posted Mar 26, 2014, 6:01 PM
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Half the people in our city are from Pittsburgh or Buffalo. A local is anybody who knows what the locals know - if you know about the events, the bars and restaurants that are popular, how to get around the city, then you're pretty much a local.

With so many new people arriving for the colleges (UNC, Duke, and NC State, etc.) or to work in one of the big tech firms, the entry level for being "local" is very low. People are actually shocked when my wife tells them she was born here. "Wow, I've never met someone who was born here" is the usual response.
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  #57  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2014, 2:32 AM
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You defend it lol
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  #58  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2014, 2:34 AM
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You defend it lol
look at you babe.
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  #59  
Old Posted Mar 27, 2014, 1:39 PM
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I've been in Miami now for 16 years and have already been here longer than a good percentage of it's inhabitants. So I feel like a Greater Miami local. But the whole beach thing I won't crack. There's people there that haven't left the island in decades. I can't compete with that.

I think being a local is being able to share in nostalgia for a place. In Miami that nostalgia can be 5 years ago. In a slower growth place, that can be 20, 30 years or maybe generations.
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