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Comment by codelikeawolf | Hacker News Reader

I grew up in the Chicago suburbs and I didn't realize how weird the term "Chicagoland" was until I started traveling around a bit. I'm not aware of any other city in the world that tacks "land" onto the name to describe the surrounding area. Do this with any other city and it sounds like a weird amusement park: Dallasland, Indianapolisland, Seattleland, etc.

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I grew up in the Chicago suburbs, and nobody says "Chicagoland" in conversation. It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials.

Even dumber is "Chicagoland area."

My copyediting professor (who worked at the Chicago Tribune) loved to mock this dumb term, pointing out that nobody says "Detroitland" or "New Yorkland" or "Indianapolisland."

> It's only used by newscasters, and car dealers in their commercials.

When I was growing up in Southern California, “the Southland” was used in the same way to mean the Los Angeles area. I heard the term only in the mass media, never directly from a person in conversation.

A little googling turned up this list of media-only geographical terms:

https://www.cyburbia.org/forums/threads/nicknames-for-metrop...

I noticed this phenomenon when I moved to Chicago in 1978. I liked the city, but I thought that “Chicagoland” sounded stupid.

Ha, I moved to L.A. from Chicago and immediately noticed "the Southland" used in exactly the same way.

Another WTF is "the inland empire," also used for some nebulous part of the L.A. area by newscasters only, as far as I can tell.

But then CA absolutely loves meaningless names for stuff, like the perennial "red flag warnings." So... we're being menaced by red flags? Why do we fear them?

And "sigalert." Whatever, man.

People say "Tristate Area" and "Metro Detroit"? Don't necessarily need to tack "land" on there but there are colloquial terms for these large metro areas.

There seem to be lots of "tri-state" areas, and "metro Detroit" is probably the least dumb way to include an entire metropolitan area. I wouldn't even call it colloquial.

Growing up in Chicago, I only ever heard the term on TV or radio.

"Frisco" anyone?

No?

"The OC" anyone?

Also no.

It's probably because of two reasons:

1. Most of northwest Indiana (Lake County) is considered part of Chicagoland, but is a different state. For example: Growing up there, I remember my parents crossing the state line on Sundays to buy alcohol, which was not legal to sell on that day in IN. But NWI had all the same radio and TV as Chicago.

2. Outside of of said Chicagoland, Illinois and Indiana are very different, especially the more south you go in both states.

It was a particular housing development and not a whole city AFAIK, but what first comes to mind is Hollywood(land)

https://www.theeastsideagent.com/history-hollywoodland-story...

Switzerland has a whole Canton named after the surrounding area of Basel: Basel-Landschaft, which is often called "Baselland" [0]

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basel-Landschaft

Münsterland - https://en.wikivoyage.org/wiki/M%C3%BCnsterland#Q7920 - with Münster as the largest city.

I first heard it from a co-worker, who found that it took less explaining than to say that he was Valparaiso, Indiana.

Every time I hear "Chicagoland", I think of the douchebag television exec from Wayne's World played by Rob Lowe.

Portlandland

Well hasn't the term chicagoland invented to sound like the Legoland theme park in the first place? I guess if another large city name was terminating with -ney its metropolitan area would also be called in a similar way.

Etymology. Chicago +‎ land. Generally thought to have been popularized by Robert R. McCormick, editor and publisher of the Chicago Tribune, first using it on page 1 of the July 27, 1926 issue, although it may have been coined much earlier.

Even Hollywoodland is just Hollywood now.

My stepmom from Torrance pretty commonly referred to LA as Lalaland in jest.

FWIW, it's not specific to her. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/La_La_Land_(disambiguation) lists it as a nickname for LA, https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/La-La_Land#English gives a 1958 citation in TV Guide, and it's the reason the 2016 movie "La La Land" got its name.

Dallas’ unofficial motto is “Keep Dallas Boring”.

This is our strategy to hide from real estate speculators and homeless millionaires from California.

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