10 Phrases You Only Hear From People Born in Florida

You can fake a Florida tan. You can’t fake the vocabulary.

Born-and-raised Floridians talk in a way that gives them away in one sentence.

Here are the phrases that only Floridians say.

Pub Sub

Order a Publix sub in Florida, and a local will fix your wording.

It’s a Pub Sub.

That’s the deli sandwich from Publix, and to a Floridian, it’s practically its own food group.

People plan their week around Publix’s sub-of-the-week deal and argue over the right bread.

Call it anything else, and you’ve marked yourself as new in town.

Chicken tender on the sub, all the fixings, the right amount of mayo.

The order is muscle memory by adulthood, and out-of-staters never quite get the devotion until they try a Pub Sub for themselves.

Florida Cracker

Call a Floridian a Cracker, and if they were born here, they’ll say thank you.

A Florida Cracker is someone whose family has worked the land for generations, back to the cattle drivers who cracked their whips across the scrub.

It’s a badge of honor, not an insult.

Newcomers flinch at the word. Florida natives wear it proudly.

Ask a Floridian about their family tree and settle in for a long, happy story.

There are Cracker cattle and old Cracker farmhouses that carry the name too, a whole slice of frontier Florida most visitors never see.

Palmetto Bug

There aren’t big cockroaches in Florida.

There are palmetto bugs.

It’s the same giant, winged, horrifying roach anyone else would scream at, just with a friendlier name that lets a Floridian keep their dignity.

One flies at your face on a summer night, and you’ll understand the need for a nicer word.

Natives say it with a straight face. Everyone else knows what it means.

They fly, which is the part nobody warns you about.

A Floridian keeps a shoe within reach and never lets a palmetto bug win.

No-See-Ums

Mosquitoes are far from pleasant, but at least you can see them coming.

You can’t with no-see-ums.

No-see-ums are tiny biting midges that swarm at dusk near the water, slip right through a window screen, and leave a welt on your skin out of nowhere.

A Floridian smacks the back of their neck, mutters “no-see-ums,” and heads inside.

No-see-ums love a calm evening down by the marsh, right when you want to be outside.

Bug spray barely slows them down.

Tiny name, tiny bug, surprising amount of misery.

Love Bugs

Twice a year, Florida’s air fills with bugs flying stuck together.

Those are love bugs.

They swarm in May and again in September, splatter across your windshield by the hundreds, and bake onto the paint if you wait too long to wash them off.

Every native knows to scrub the front of their car before the sun does its damage.

Car paint aside, they’re harmless, just relentless for a few weeks at a stretch.

Locals plan their car washes around lovebugs.

Snowbirds just call them a nightmare.

Lanai

A Floridian doesn't have a screened porch.

They have a lanai.

It's the screened-in patio out back where you ride out the heat, dodge the bugs, and watch the afternoon storm roll through.

The word came from Hawaii, but Florida adopted it and never gave it back.

Coffee in the morning, a ceiling fan going at night.

The screen keeps the bugs where they belong (minus, sometimes, no-see-ums), which in Florida is no small thing.

Half of Florida life happens out there.

Jit

Listen to a Floridian talk about a kid, and you'll catch it.

Jit.

It means a young person, a youngster, sometimes a rookie who doesn't know better yet.

Florida natives said "jit" from Tallahassee to Miami long before the rest of the country borrowed it.

Use it right, and a local will raise an eyebrow, impressed.

It's affectionate more than anything.

A grandfather will call his grandkid a jit with a grin and a pat on the head.

Sugar Sand

Not all sand is created equal, and a Floridian will tell you so.

The Gulf coast has sugar sand.

It's that fine, blinding-white, squeaky sand that somehow stays cool under your feet even in July.

Step on it once and you'll get why natives look down on coarse, gray beach sand elsewhere.

Siesta Key built its whole reputation on sugar sand, nearly pure white quartz.

Listen hard, and you can practically hear it squeak when you walk.

A1A

To a Floridian, A1A isn't a route number. It's a destination.

It's the highway that hugs the Atlantic coast, past the beaches and the little towns and the salt air.

You don't take A1A to get somewhere faster.

You take it because it's the pretty way, and a native always knows when it's worth the extra time.

Windows down, salt air in.

Every Floridian has a favorite stretch of it.

The Mouse

When a Floridian says they're "going to see the Mouse," they don't mean a rodent.

They mean Disney World.

Locals know the back roads in, the cheaper parking, and exactly which weeks to stay home.