No man is a coney

Today's quiz: Name three places where you could expect to find candidates for governor this weekend. (Non-US readers especially encouraged to play.)

Ah, the rewards of having a native informant in the other room. A coney island is not just a food item -- a chili dog without the slaw (Language Czarina says "coney dog" isn't used) -- but the place that serves it. It shows up in proper names, like American Coney Island, which calls the food both a "Coney" (LCz doesn't recall using this but won't rule it out) and a "Coney Island hot dog." I think this one's a specifically local usage* and would like to know how it sounds in readerland.

I didn't have any big problems with the lede -- certainly not as much as the glitch I get when the Canadian station says it's going to be 20 degrees, which I still have to translate into real money. I'm sure nobody at the News thought twice about it, and a suggestion to improve the lede by making it "coney island restaurants" might well have been laughed out of the room. 

That's probably a good thing. My first encounter with positive "anymore" was shortly after I signed on at Ohio's Greatest Home Newspaper in the mid-1980s; one of the writers out in first-edition** territory quoted the local sheriff along the lines of "anymore a bunch of kids are doing that meth." I thought the guy had to be nuts and said something to the effect of we can't run this; nobody will have any idea what he means. The rest of the desk (the bulk of them natives) looked at me -- quite fairly -- as if I'd grown another head.

"Write like people talk" isn't always a good answer. But it's often a better one than "write as if you've never heard people talk." What do you characters think -- fine as it is, do you need a translation, do you like it when a newspaper sends you Googling around to see what something means,*** or ...?


* A 1987 article from the Chicago Tribune contends that the "enormous specialty sandwiches" known as submarines, heroes, poor boys or torpedoes are also sometimes called "Coney Islands"; I've never heard that, and the author doesn't say where. (He does get an Elongated Yellow Fruit award for referring to submarines as "the undersea warships" on second reference.)
** In Charlotte's six-edition glory days, the first (which closed around 7:30 p.m. and went to the mountains and coast) was unkindly called the "practice edition." As always, more examples of journalism jargon are welcome.
*** In a quick spin through American Speech at the e-library, I couldn't find anything to shed light on the coney island question -- though there was a really cool list of pizza jargon. I just delivered 'em; I didn't work behind the counter, so most of these were new to me: "bondage pie" for sausage and mushroom (S&M), for example.