I hear it in movies so the time. We’re going upstate. I went upstate. Etc
I never hear downstate, or similar. Does it just mean going north?
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.
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; it’s 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… 🙄
I feel like the answer to this lies within the word itself
You’re being downvoted because your question makes no sense. Both NYC and New York State are mentioned, so what are you even asking for clarification on?
I live in Southern California and we don’t really use that phrase around here. I think it’s almost entirely used to refer to basically any area of New York north of NYC.
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 wouldn’t be totally surprised if the expression got picked up by a wider crowd to mean “north”.
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’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.
Def depends where you’re at. In Virginia we call upstate Nova (northern VA). In NJ it’s North Jersey (I’m 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”).
My understanding is that it means going, loosely, to the opposite side of the state of the major metropolitan area in that state. Upstate NY is the northwest part, upstate MA is the west part, upstate PA is the northeast part. I’m looking around, and it seems to also 1) only be used on a few states, 2) usually is on the north half (but not always), and 3) is somewhat interchangable with “rural”.
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.
Outside main city? For NY it’s any area outside New York City. Like Albany or Rochester.
this really only applies to New York, as New York City is in the bottom little bit of the state’s southern nubbin and the rest of the state is commonly called “Upstate New York” since when people outside the northeast refer to New York, they’re talking about New York City, rather than the state of New York. thus Upstate New York was shortened to Upstate. (it seems to hold that most people i know who grew up in the northeast call New York City “NYC” rather than what i used growing up which was “New York.”
I am an american, I grew up in a state in the south west, no one ever used the term “going upstate” for anything because there was no such place to go.
I guarantee you only see dialog such as this in media set in NYC.
Sending someone upstate means sending them to prison
