live by the dictionary or submit!

[Peter A. McGraw]

--On Sunday, February 29, 2004 5:22 PM -0800 "Arnold M. Zwicky"
<zwicky at CSLI.STANFORD.EDU> wrote:

> 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.

Exactly, and unless Canadian English is different from American on this
point, it sounds to me as if the reader wasn't referring to some
quasi-official designation but was using "in the region of" to mean
"somewhere near."  I'm pretty sure I've heard "region" used in this context
as a substitute for "neighborhood" where the area in question is felt to be
too big to qualify as a "neighborhood."

Are you sure that "the Barrie region" would parallel "the region of Oshawa"
in Canadian usage?

Peter Mc.

*****************************************************************
Peter A. McGraw       Linfield College        McMinnville, Oregon
******************* pmcgraw at linfield.edu ************************