We’re starting a new category of posts for some local vocab we are learning.  First is gutter punk.  Jim offered a new take on this to mean ‘rich kids from up north who come down here, live on the street, and live dirty on purpose’!  One of the students encountered a couple of such folks on the street, playing homemade instruments.  Jim doesn’t have much respect for them, as you might guess. This is a variation on the usual definitions of gutter punk that you’ll find at urbandictionary.com.

Perhaps I should add cuban cupid [thanks, Jasmine, I knew better, but the brain failed]shuffle, for those of you, like me, who’ve never heard the song!  See the link at the right to one of many YouTube videos, this one by Cupid himself.

More:

neutral ground — up north this is what we call the median , the stretch of grass going down the middle of a highway or boulevard.  In NOLA, it is neutral ground because Canal St, which is a broad boulevard, used to be the dividing line between the French quarter and the rest of the town. Hence, the median really was ‘neutral’ ground.

hurrication — a trip up north to avoid a hurricane, aka an evacuation, that becomes a holiday.

contraflow – when they make all lanes of a highway go out of town to facilitate rapid evacuation of more people faster

shotgun house – no, not a house filled with shotguns, but a common style of home in NOLA.  In the original shotguns, you could stand in the front door and shoot a gun through the house and out the back door without hitting a wall.  Many houses are double shotguns, i.e., side-by-side duplexes each of shotgun style.