9 Habits That Embarrass Illinoisans the Second They Leave the State

Illinoisans swear they don’t have an accent, a walk, or a single giveaway habit.

They’re wrong on all three.

These are the habits that put Illinoisans on the spot the moment they leave their state.

1. Calling Them Gym Shoes

Illinoisans reach for a pair of gym shoes, never sneakers, and the word comes out before they even think about it.

Ask for gym shoes at a mall outside the Midwest, and a clerk in Georgia will point you toward gym equipment instead of running shoes.

The Harvard Dialect Survey tracked the term for years and still marks gym shoes as a holdout found mostly in Chicago and Cincinnati.

Nowhere else says it.

An Illinoisan moving to Arizona learns fast that “gym shoes” gets a blank look at the mall, right before they catch themselves saying sneakers for the first time in their life.

2. Dragging a Hot Dog Through the Garden

Order a hot dog the Illinois way, and it comes loaded with yellow mustard, chopped onion, neon relish, a pickle spear, tomato, sport peppers, and a dash of celery salt.

Illinoisans call the whole pile getting a hot dog dragged through the garden, and they say it out of habit at a gas station in another state.

The clerk just blinks.

Ask for ketchup on that same hot dog anywhere in Illinois, and you’ll catch a look usually reserved for eating cereal with a fork.

Many vendors don’t even stock a ketchup bottle, so an Illinoisan traveling elsewhere sometimes forgets other states consider it a normal condiment.

3. Giving Directions by Expressway Name

Chicago and its suburbs run on expressway names, not route numbers, and the habit follows Illinoisans everywhere.

Take the Kennedy to the Eisenhower, cut over to the Stevenson, and you’re home before the Dan Ryan backs up.

No numbers needed.

A rental car counter in Florida doesn’t know what any of that means.

The Dan Ryan and the Kennedy rank among the busiest roads in Illinois, so locals learn their names before they ever learn the interstate numbers underneath them.

An Illinoisan giving directions in Florida will blurt out “take the Eisenhower” before remembering nobody there has heard of it.

4. Shrugging off the Snow

Chicago Public Schools has closed for snow only once since 1999, back in 2011 during a blizzard that buried Lake Shore Drive in stranded cars.

A few inches barely changes an Illinoisan’s schedule.

Commuters still merge onto the expressway, and nobody cancels a dinner reservation over it.

Move to a state where a light flurry shuts down the whole city, and the instinct to just drive through it looks reckless to everyone else.

It isn’t stubbornness so much as decades of practice, and a stocked salt truck fleet.

An Illinoisan transplant in the South learns the hard way that other states don’t stock road salt the same way, and a storm that would barely register back home turns into a genuine emergency somewhere else.

5. Calling Springfield Downstate

The state splits into two words in everyday conversation: Chicago, and downstate.

Downstate covers almost everything outside the Chicago area, including Springfield, the state capital.

Springfield sits nearly dead center of Illinois.

Not exactly south.

The label has stuck since long before Chicago’s suburbs spread as far as they have now, and even a resident of DeKalb, 65 miles west of the city, counts as downstate depending on who’s talking.

Explain that logic to someone from a state where north and south line up with the map, and watch their face go blank.

6. Pop Everywhere but St. Louis

Order a soft drink almost anywhere in Illinois, and the word is pop.

Cross into the Metro East, the stretch of Illinois across the river from St. Louis, and pop turns into soda without most residents even noticing the switch.

A regional word survey maps the split almost exactly along that river.

Illinoisans who grew up saying pop travel to Texas or the Northeast, order "a pop" at a restaurant, and get a server who has never once heard the word.

They just say it louder.

7. Talking About Clout

The word clout means political pull or who you know in Illinois, nothing about a punch.

The term grew out of Chicago's ward politics, where knowing an alderman could get a pothole fixed or a nephew a summer job, and it spread from there into everyday conversation statewide.

Say someone "has clout" almost anywhere outside Illinois, and people assume you mean muscle, not connections.

Same word, a completely different meaning.

8. Sox Means One Team

In Illinois, "the Sox" always means the White Sox, never Boston's team.

Say it any other way among Chicago fans, and expect a fast correction.

The Cubs and the White Sox split the city down the middle, North Side against South Side, and many Illinoisans pick a side before they can read.

An Illinoisan wearing Sox gear in a state with no White Sox fans spends half the trip explaining which Sox they mean, then answers the same follow-up question about Boston anyway.

9. Bragging About the Pumpkin Capital

Most of the country has no idea where canned pumpkin comes from, but Illinoisans grow up assuming everyone already knows.

Morton, Illinois, a village of about 17,000 people outside Peoria, is home to a Libby's cannery, and the town has long claimed it processes 99% of the world's canned pumpkin.