What's the night before Halloween called? If you said anything other than "Pumpkin night" I'm afraid you are incorrect.
this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2025
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I mean, that's better than my "All Hollows Eve Eve", by far.
"October 30th" around here. Theres nothing special about that day.
What happens on "pumpkin night"?
Traditionally, its for the older kids who have aged out of halloween. Its unofficial and many places just dont tolerate it anymore but the older kids would go around smashing pumpkins and causing mayhem, maybe teepee a tree.
We didnt participate but would bring in our pumpkins that night.
Everywhere else it's either called Mischief night or... nothing. But in some small parts of Western Massachusetts it's called Pumpkin Night because... reasons!
Its called devils night where I was born.
Michigander?
We had an issue in my college town in the Midwest. Someone almost got expelled because he called out loudly a ground squirrel, which in his local town they called... Squinnies.
This was in college, which hosts many Asian students and he did it in front of them. I believe his phrasing was pointing in a general area and yelling something like "look at all the squinnies".
Now, to many it could definitely be misheard as "squinties" a derogatory term. He got into a lot of hot water and if I remember correctly, a professor who studied local dialects actually knew the term and was able to save him.
a professor who studied local dialects actually knew the term and was able to save him
Lingua to the rescue!
I've always preferred the Cunning type over the Super type.
So we said both where I grew up
The town I grew up in has a longish name, most people in the area shorten it to just the first syllable with a y at the end, similar to how Philadelphia gets shortened to Philly
But there's a slight difference between how the people who are from town pronounce it and how everyone else does and you can pretty reliably pick out the townies based on that.
we didn't call them anything because they don't live here.
That's true almost everywhere these days. Climate change and pesticides did a number on them.
I used to see hundreds floating around at night. Now I'm lucky to spot one a year.
Also, lovebugs. There were so many everywhere it was difficult to drive sometimes. I haven't noticed any in years.
And sometimes there's a comparison to 50 years ago and there were 3 dozen different rare to semi-common linguistic variations for it back then. But somehow only this one small one didn't get assimilated into the two prevailing ones. Makes you wonder what kind of secrets that town is up to.
I grew up in the center of Mississippi. I always called it “the devil is beating his wife”. Idk why it was ever called that because there was no story; it’s just how it is.
We had "the devil is beating his wife behind the kitchen door with a frying pan" and sometimes really old people would finish it with "on Sunday"
I seriously have no idea where the fuck this comes from, and it's so weird and I love it
"Foxes getting married"
this feels like two students were having an argument and the one who said "everyone says the devil is beating his wife" lost by a lot
My mom, who grew up as the seventh generation of her family in Maryland, said "the devil is beating his wife."
That's an incredibly difficult map to decipher
It makes more sense when you have the background that most people don't have a term for that.
Because of course that's what you're looking for at first. But yeah, I get that the "no term" data is actual positive data that they surveyed, and they want to make that distinct from "no survey data" but...
True
Spawning my own enclave of 'glitter bat' users.
What up my glitter bat?
i was so confused when i visited a friend in kentucky and they were talking about the lightning bugs and how pretty they are.
they were dumbfounded when i had never heard of them; they talked for the rest of the day about how much awe i would be in once i saw them.
...... they were fireflies. i had to pretend like it was the most amazing thing i had ever seen because i told them i hadnt even heard of them before.
Where I'm from we call them Butt Lights
Then there's Belgium and The Netherlands, where the same words have straight up different meanings.
you'll run into that in latin america sometimes too, where some places a word is a delicious dish, and another the same word refers to testicles
"they're the same picture"
how to pronounce "Appalachia" is a contentious subject. Harpers Ferry and south we say "App-uh-latch-(ee)-uh" (the ee is in parentheses because it's such a small sound most wouldn't hear it). north of harpers ferry they say "app-uh-lay-tcha". then there's one small town of mostly people descended from eastern Europeans who say it "app-uh-lack-(ee)-uh". fun fact, tekking on YouTube, the manga reviewer, is one of those weirdos who are somehow both simultaneously the most wrong and less wrong than most northern Appalachians.
i mean come on, the name comes from the appalachee tribe, and the "lach" there is pronounced mere like "latch" than "laych." at least with "lack" i can reason through that my Ukrainian friend can absolutely not say her "ch"s the way western Europeans do so if you have an insular community of people that pronunciation will stick.
Chocolatine or pain au chocolat?
Then we have this little region who calls them croissant au chocolat...
At least pain/croissant au chocolat gives you an idea of what it is. Chocolatine? Sure, I'd assume that chocolate was involved, but I wouldn't even be 100% on that.
I live in the country of the chocolatine so stop blaspheming immediately!!
/j
There's a few "petit pain au chocolat" which is the best kind of technically correct. And right next to it the absolute most wrong: "petit pain".
I thought a glitter bat was a goth wearing colorful accessories.
Feathers = Bird Leafs
Be cool if someone made a global map thing of this