live by the dictionary or submit!

[Arnold M. Zwicky]

Subject: Re: live by the dictionary or submit!
From: Arnold Zwicky (zwicky at csli.stanford.edu)

On Feb 29, 2004, at 12:04 PM, Herb Stahlke wrote:

> Dictionaries aside, I'm interested in this use of "region".  In
> Ontario (the
> real one, not that town south of you, Arnold),

i recognize ontario-sur-lac as the real ontario.  anyway, that other
ontario is in socal, which is a different country from the one i live
in.

>  region is used frequently to
> refer to an area served by the services of a city, e.g., the Barrie
> region,
> or the region of Oshawa.  Last fall while at our cottage we heard a
> London-Kitchener-Waterloo TV newsreader mention something that had
> happened
> "in the region of Cincin[na]ti", a usage that sounded decidedly odd to
> us (I'm
> from SE Michigan, my wife's from NW Ohio, and we live in East Central
> Indiana).

"in the Cincinnati region" would have been slightly less odd, but,
really, "in the Cincinnati area" is the way to go (in u.s. english).

there used to be a chicago radio station that advertised itself as
serving "the Greater Chicagoland Area", saying the same thing three
times.  a waggish friend of mine suggested that it should have been
"the Greater Chicagoland Regional Area".

but... it seems to me that there are plenty of uses of "region(al)"
that cover the same territory as "area": regional park districts, the
u.s. capital region (which might, conceivably, go beyond the beltway to
take in, oh, say, baltimore, but certainly couldn't embrace richmond),
and so on.

just to make things clear: there are ordinary-language usages here and
also technical/administrative ones, and they aren't necessarily the
same.