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.