9 Michigan Sayings That Leave Out-of-Towners Completely Lost

A first-time visitor to Michigan pulls into a gas station outside Traverse City and asks for directions to the nearest party store.

They picture balloons and paper plates.

Not that kind of party.

These are the Michigan sayings that leave out-of-towners completely lost.

1. Pasty

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula turns out hand-held meat pies called pasties, and many out-of-towners mispronounce the word on the first try.

It’s said PASS-tee, not PAY-stee.

A Yooper always catches it.

Cornish miners brought the recipe of meat, potato and rutabaga folded into a crust to the Upper Peninsula’s copper and iron mines in the 1800s, part of the same wave of immigration that shaped the region’s folk culture.

Order a pasty at a U.P. diner today.

It comes with ketchup on the side, a topping locals defend like a birthright.

2. Party Store

Michiganders use “party store” for the corner shop that sells beer, lottery tickets and a bag of chips, not a place stocked with balloons and streamers.

Outsiders picture Party City.

The clerk points them toward a beer cooler and a rack of scratch-off tickets instead.

The phrase belongs to Michigan alone.

Many clerks across the border in Ohio or Indiana have never heard it used that way.

3. Yooper

Michiganders born and raised in the Upper Peninsula call themselves Yoopers, a nickname built straight off the abbreviation U.P.

Merriam-Webster added Yooper to its dictionary, official recognition of a regionalism that only ever meant one place.

One state.

One nickname.

Outside Michigan, many people guess “Yooper” is a typo long before they guess it’s a person.

4. Troll

Michigan’s Yoopers call anyone living below the Mackinac Bridge a troll, a nod to the old folklore about what lives under a bridge.

It’s not an insult.

The nickname works because the geography lines up so neatly: Everything south of the bridge counts as troll territory.

Yoopers say it with a grin, every single time.

5. Coney

Michigan’s coney means a hot dog buried in beanless chili, mustard and chopped onions, nothing like the amusement park the word calls to mind everywhere else.

Detroit’s Greek and Macedonian immigrant families opened the first Coney Islands nearly a century ago, many after passing through New York’s actual Coney Island on their way into the country.

They kept the name and built an entirely different food around it.

Cincinnati has its own coney, a completely different dish outsiders still confuse with Michigan’s.

No boardwalk required.

6. The Thumb

Michigan’s Lower Peninsula has a Thumb, the flat farmland that pokes into Lake Huron, and Michiganders use the name for an actual place, not a joke about the state’s mitten shape.

A local might answer “the Thumb” without naming a single town when asked where they grew up.

Huron, Tuscola and Sanilac counties make up its core, sometimes stretched to include Lapeer and St. Clair.

No official map exists.

Michiganders have called it that for generations anyway.

7. Holy Wah

Michigan’s Upper Peninsula has its own exclamation, “holy wah,” an outburst visitors don’t already carry in their vocabulary.

“Holy wah” works like “wow,” “no way” or “holy cow,” stretched into a phrase that shows up almost nowhere outside Yooper country.

A Way with Words, the public radio show about language, says nobody knows exactly where the phrase came from.

The hosts guess it’s probably just a homegrown spin on “holy wow,” though one caller floated a tie to the region’s Finnish immigrant population that nobody ever confirmed.

Outsiders just blink.

8. Mackinac

Michigan’s Mackinac Island shares its name with Mackinaw City just across the bridge, and the two towns spell the same word two different ways.

Both come out “MACK-i-naw” out loud, never “MACK-i-nack,” even though only one of them carries a W.

Same word, two spellings.

French traders wrote down the Anishinaabe name for the island centuries ago as “Mackinac,” and the British later respelled the mainland town “Mackinaw” to match how it sounded out loud.

A hard C at the end draws a correction from a local almost every time it’s said out loud.

Locals hear the mistake before a visitor finishes the sentence.

9. Downstate

Michiganders use “downstate” for the entire southern half of the Lower Peninsula, lumping Detroit, Lansing and Ann Arbor into one catch-all word.

It’s not a city or a county.

It’s a direction, mild attitude included.

When a Yooper says a cousin “moved downstate for work,” every Michigander instantly pictures Metro Detroit.

No map required.

Out-of-towners just hear a direction, with no idea if it means the next county over or three hundred miles away.

Where “Pop” Still Beats “Soda”

Michiganders overwhelmingly reach for “pop” over “soda,” a Midwest-wide habit that still catches visitors from the coasts off guard.

About 64% of survey respondents from Michigan call a soft drink “pop,” compared with roughly 34% who say “soda.”

Illinois and Ohio lean the same way.

It’s not Michigan’s word alone.

Michigan simply logged more responses to that survey than any other state in the country.

At a Michigan drive-thru, ordering a Coke might still draw a follow-up question: What kind?

The Word for a Tourist Loaded up on Fudge

Locals on Michigan’s Mackinac Island call visitors loaded up on fudge “fudgies,” a nickname aimed at anyone who can’t leave without a box of the island’s famous candy.

Fudge shop owner Harry Ryba coined the term in the 1960s and wore it proudly as the self-declared “Fudge King of Mackinac Island.”

Locals spot the ferry crowd before they even open their mouths.

Everybody buys the fudge anyway.

Even longtime residents mix up which fudge shop started it all, since three or four Mackinac Island stores claim to be the original.

Many fudgies can’t say which shop is the original.

They just point to whichever line was shortest.