We had an issue in my college town in the Midwest. Someone almost got expelled because he called out loudly a ground squirrel, which in his local town they called... Squinnies.

This was in college, which hosts many Asian students and he did it in front of them. I believe his phrasing was pointing in a general area and yelling something like "look at all the squinnies".

Now, to many it could definitely be misheard as "squinties" a derogatory term. He got into a lot of hot water and if I remember correctly, a professor who studied local dialects actually knew the term and was able to save him.

i was so confused when i visited a friend in kentucky and they were talking about the lightning bugs and how pretty they are.

they were dumbfounded when i had never heard of them; they talked for the rest of the day about how much awe i would be in once i saw them.

...... they were fireflies. i had to pretend like it was the most amazing thing i had ever seen because i told them i hadnt even heard of them before.

Spawning my own enclave of 'glitter bat' users.

“Sun shower” or “The devil is beating his wife”

Chocolatine or pain au chocolat?

Then we have this little region who calls them croissant au chocolat...

I thought a glitter bat was a goth wearing colorful accessories.

My favorite of these, which unfortunately I didn't grow up there to experience it first hand, is that in Minnesota and Wisconsin some people call doing donuts in your car "whipping shitties".

The town I grew up in has a longish name, most people in the area shorten it to just the first syllable with a y at the end, similar to how Philadelphia gets shortened to Philly

But there's a slight difference between how the people who are from town pronounce it and how everyone else does and you can pretty reliably pick out the townies based on that.

how to pronounce "Appalachia" is a contentious subject. Harpers Ferry and south we say "App-uh-latch-(ee)-uh" (the ee is in parentheses because it's such a small sound most wouldn't hear it). north of harpers ferry they say "app-uh-lay-tcha". then there's one small town of mostly people descended from eastern Europeans who say it "app-uh-lack-(ee)-uh". fun fact, tekking on YouTube, the manga reviewer, is one of those weirdos who are somehow both simultaneously the most wrong and less wrong than most northern Appalachians.

i mean come on, the name comes from the appalachee tribe, and the "lach" there is pronounced mere like "latch" than "laych." at least with "lack" i can reason through that my Ukrainian friend can absolutely not say her "ch"s the way western Europeans do so if you have an insular community of people that pronunciation will stick.

Then there's Belgium and The Netherlands, where the same words have straight up different meanings.

Everyone knows they're properly called "sparkle butts".

So we said both where I grew up

And sometimes there's a comparison to 50 years ago and there were 3 dozen different rare to semi-common linguistic variations for it back then. But somehow only this one small one didn't get assimilated into the two prevailing ones. Makes you wonder what kind of secrets that town is up to.

Feathers = Bird Leafs

we didn't call them anything because they don't live here.

John's Beetles.

Where I'm from we call them Butt Lights