terms used in Indiana

I grew up at the same time period way off in New England and my answers would be the same as Chris P.

Are you looking for regional expressions? Colloquialisms? Try looking up how they'd refer to a carbonated beverage. (Plenty of variation in that one and it's changed over time.) Or how they'd refer to a large sandwich with lots of 'stuff' on it.

If you want to identify an area with specifics, go for food. Every region has their own peculiarities and preferences. The locals will often wonder why the people down the road or across the state line says things 'differently.'

I don't know about the 1970's, but I have lived in Indiana my entire life. In my area of the state (northwest Indiana and later Indianapolis), dinner means lunch and supper is the last meal of the day.

It's breakfast, dinner, supper.

Ohio (but I went to college in Indiana) - breakfast, lunch, supper.

Another one with a lot of regional variations is sofa, davenport, couch, etc. Puma

The "dinner" issue seems more related to the financial and work background of your family. Farmers and laborers would typically have their biggest meal in the middle of the day and it would be called dinner. Bankers and office workers would have their big meal at the end of the day and called it dinner.

I remember my grandmother always serving the good meal at lunch time, calling it dinner. Supper would be leftovers or soup and sandwiches. But if you grew up with a more affluent family or closer to the big city, same generation would serve dinner at the end of the day.

This would be New England, but I know farmers and ranchers who have their big meal at lunch time and call it dinner, regardless of location.

Best of luck,

Jim Clark-Dawe

Mr. Maryn is a Kokomo boy, or was. He left Indiana for grad school right about the time you're concerned with.

He lived in town, his family white-collar. They ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, although occasionally his grandmother might call that last meal supper. When there was a big meal served mid-day or early afternoon, it was dinner. Christmas dinner, Sunday dinner, like that.

His cousins were the sons of farmers and blue collar. Their parents used breakfast, dinner, supper, but the teens in the house rejected that and used the same terms as Mr. Maryn.

The family kitchen had cabinets, plural, but he'd get something from the cupboard.

His sofa was a couch. An automobile's transmission was a tranny. If I think of other regionalisms, I'll edit them in. Edit: I talked to him about this thread. He said it's a davenport and he only started saying couch because I did.

One thing which may be hard to impart but which was certainly true of older Hoosiers in the 70s was odd pronunciation of certain words. Hawaii was huh-WOY-ee, goofy was just like goody only with the F sound (Mr. Maryn still messes that up occasionally), and dino-sours once roamed the earth.

Maryn, who's still got lots of family in Indiana

While dinner vs supper is a dialct marker, it is always also a class marker.

What makes it complicated is that the class distinction is tied to the dialect.

Note also that the influence of the Quakers in parts of Indiana is quite substantial even in terms of dialect.

I lived about an hour away from Bloomington for 18 years, but I was definitely not pushing upper-middle class so I'm not sure how much help I can be.

Us poor city folks ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner. We drank pop, not soda, and many of us (not my immediate family, but plenty of extended) did not wash dishes, but instead "warshed" them. I'm not sure if this is a personal or a regional thing, but as far as the cupboard/cabinet thing goes, cupboard = food, cabinet = not edible stuff, like dishes and cleaning supplies.

Here too, cupboard = food; cabinet = other stuff non-edible as in, we had a cabinet sink back in the 40's/50's when I was a kid. Puma

I grew up in Indianapolis, but in the 90's and 2000's, to an upper-middle class family.

We ate breakfast, lunch, and dinner, drank soda, and washed dishes rather than warshing them.

But then, my parents didn't move to Indiana until shortly before I was born, anyway. We lived in a poor neighborhood, but I went to schools with upper-middle class and rich kids.

*shrug*

I'm a terrible barometer for IN. I never much belonged here anyway.

Although our cupboards were for food and dishes, and cabinets were for... non-kitchen stuff.

One thing that threw me was the paper container you put your groceries in. Here in CT it's a bag - in TX and Indy both, they asked me if I wanted a "sack."

And this is circa 1990's, but in Indy I got all sorts of strange responses when I said I wanted my coffee extra light. I was questioned whether I wanted decaf, and one person thought I wanted my coffee watered down. I finally figured out the magic request to get what I wanted was "extra cream, no sugar."