It's a New York thing to refer to the rural Northern and Western parts of New York State that are not New York City. No one (or at least very very few) outside of New York State uses it to refer to any other place.
this post was submitted on 06 Mar 2024
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Really? Well, I'm from Utica and I never heard anyone use the term "upstate."
seymour you fucking liar, everyone here calls it upstate new york
Not in Utica, no; itβs an Albany expression.
New York the state or NYC?
Edit: I am terribly sorry for not knwing all citiies and to what state and where they belong on the us map as someone not from North America... π
I feel like the answer to this lies within the word itself
I guess you might be hearing it movies set in New York City, which is in the southern tip of the state of New York. All the other notable cities, the Catskill mountains, Niagara Falls, and other attractions are all further north, or upstate. I wouldnβt be totally surprised if the expression got picked up by a wider crowd to mean βnorthβ.
Since a lot of people have upstate, there are some places that have a downstate in the southern part of the state, the best examples I can think of being Illinois and Maine.
It just happens to be that you've heard upstate more because New York City is a lot more depicted in American media.
Thats what Frodo said to Gaffer when he asked where he was going, "oh, just upshire."
He didn't trick old Proudfeet though, he knew Frodo was weavin porkies.
In Illinois you might hear "downstate" to refer to anything south of Champaign-Urbana
Anything south of Kankakee, more like.
It's common in states that have a lower population center, geographically. I'm in Minnesota, and our Twin Cities are in the southern third of the state.
"Going up north (to the cabin)" is our spin on "upstate", because (for most people) there isn't much of a reason to go much more north than we already do.
I'm probably wrong, but I think it means somewhere north of the capital city, and maybe it's only used in New York
Only New York. It means all the parts of New York state that aren't New York City
Long Island is excluded too
Is Long Island named Long Island because its long?
It appears so, it was called other things by native people but the Dutch seem to be the first to call it Long Island in the 1600s. Many geographic features in the area have similar sort of names, like Short Hill, East River, West River, Indian Hill, Short Beach, Beaver Swamp, the colonists really weren't very clever with their naming.
yes. 100 miles or so
It means the Northern part of the state, typically when the state has a North-South cultural divide. It's not exclusive to the US though, I've seen it used in places like Sao Paulo and Lagos before. Anywhere where one locality serves as a drain on the rest will get people to refer to different halves of the place, I guess nobody learned from Athens and Sparta.
Similarly the small town I grew up in had βthe other side of the tracksβ
Def depends where youβre at. In Virginia we call upstate Nova (northern VA). In NJ itβs North Jersey (Iβm originally from South Jersey) PA is more east west oriented since Philly and Pittsburgh are east and west ends of the state.
I find Jersey quite silly because there's a distinct North and South Jersey, but then people in the middle still have some ambiguous Central Jersey pride to them
Lol yeah to me central NJ is just Trenton
it's very common in the greater NYC area to refer to the rest of the state, esp. the more rural parts (even if a lot of the state does not consider itself "upstate").
Upstate is used in South Carolina as well, used to refer to the western and more mountainous part of the state. The eastern non-mountainous part of the state is called low-country.
With the Midlands to mean everything from Rock Hill through Columbia and to Aiken!
It refers to the northern part of whatever state the speaker happens to be in. It's mostly used by New Yorkers to refer to the more rural part of New York State which is North of New York City.
Downstate is a thing, I guess, but neither upstate nor downstate are used much outside of New York in my experience.
In Michigan, there is "downstate" it means heading to the southern part of the state.
Where does the line for this lie? I've lived in Northern LP most of my life and I've never heard it
I'm also in northern LP. We use it for when we are planning a trip to Detroit, for example.
Now that you say it like that maybe I have heard it in this context. I just avoid that area lol
Yes, the northern part of the state. Typically its also far away from major cities into a more rural area.
Sending someone upstate means sending them to prison