Yooper Terms

• (906) – The area code for the entire Upper Peninsula of Michigan, USA, the land of six months of winter with another six months of rough sledding, and the gosh darned prettiest place on the planet. Pitbull may love the (305), but I’m sending dat love from da 906, eh? You betcha.
• Camp – The secondary residence of a Yooper, which may or may not include electricity or indoor plumbing. Yooper camps are primarily located in the woods and usually don’t have cell service for miles. Our Lost Lake cottage is our “camp,” but we’re pretty spoiled with not only running water and electricity, but also WiFi and cell service (if you keep to the breakfast nook area!). See also “Deer Camp.”
• Chook – because no one really knows how to spell or pronounce “toque” correctly. This is a type of hat that is very popular with Yoopers, which is like a cap which has flaps that can be pulled down to save your ears from frostbite. The most popular chook in the UP is a Stormy Kromer, which is to chooks like Kleenex is to facial tissue.
• Da swich from Ts to Ds – Another distinctive way to ID a person speaking Yooper-ese is dis very telltale habit of using da letter D in dere speech. Dat’s pretty much a dead giveaway.
• Deer Camp – noun – 1. A dwelling in the middle of nowhere, where Yooper hunters reside for two weeks in November during firearm deer season. 2. The actual two weeks of firearm deer season which is considered a Yooper-wide holiday. Schools are closed on the November 15 opening day; hunters make for the woods with a two-week supply of jerky, tobacco and beer; and spouses take off for local stores (or even as far away as Green Bay, WI) to shop the sales offered during this holiday.
• Eh? – A Yooper’s way of saying “right?” “yes?” or “huh?” You know what I mean, eh? Influenced by Native American Ojibwe/Anishinaabe, Canadian French, and Cornish English in this area, you can say that the “Fargo” movie had North Dakota making our dialect popular, but we all know where it really came from, eh? Also used with “yah, eh?” as below.
• Fudgies – Originally used to describe tourists who would day trip to Mackinac (pronounced MACK-a-naw) Island and buy fudge from one of their ubiquitous gift ships. It has since morphed to encompass any tourist who visits the UP or “northern Michigan,” which everyone knows is really just northern troll country below the bridge.
• Holy Wah! – The Yooper exclamation of surprise or astonishment. Can be used as a G-rated substitute for “holy sh*t.”
• Pasty – A Yooper staple food that is made from an entire pie crust and is stuffed with meat, potatoes, rutabagas, and other filling foods that will ensure that it equals 2,384 Weight Watchers points. The Cornish miners who brought them to the UP didn’t have to worry about WW points, but they did have to figure out how to take along a poratle meal which could be heated up over a candle flame. These guys were super smart to have invented the pasty, but not quite smart enough to keep it from getting confused wiht an item most commonly found in a strip club. The food is pronounced “PASS-tee,” not “PASTE-tee.”
• Plaidurday – That worldwide celebration of plaid held annually on the first Friday of October. Yoopers have a special fondness for buffalo plaid, but any plaid will do in a pinch. Plaidurday started back in 2011, after a Yooper working with some trolls in Lansing got heckled for often wearing flannel shirts. Anyone can celebrate Plaidurday by wearing plaid, gifting plaid, and attending special events scattered throughout the UP, where there is usually drinking involved. So get out your shirts this October and #plaidurday the heck out of it, eh?
• Sauna – The traditional Scandinavian pastime of sitting in a little tiny wooden cedar shack, heating up a fire in the stove like an oven, dumping water on hot rocks to steam-cook yourself, and then jumping naked into a snowbank to cool down. P.S. You’ll sleep like a baby afterwards. There is a hotly-contested pronunciation war between whether folks should call it a SAW-na or a SOW-na, but I’ve honestly heard Yoopers use both.
• Sisu – Many of the first UP settlers came from Finland, and so quite a few of their words appear in our Yooper dialect. Sisu is a Finnish word which loosely translates as “stoic determination, tenacity of purpose, grit, bravery, resilience, and hardness,” and it’s proudly touted as part of the Finnish character. It makes complete sense that this word survived, because it sure does take a lot of sisu to survive a UP winter!
• Troll – A resident of Michigan who “lives under the Mackinac Bridge” that connects the upper and lower peninsulas.
• U.P. – The Upper Peninsula of Michigan, also called the UP, the Yoop, the 906, or the Upper Hand (which refers to how Michiganders identify in which part of the state they live). Go ahead, try it. Place hour hands palms up and move the left hand above the right. The UP is the upper left hand that sits on top of the lower peninsula’s “mitten.” Detroit sits below the right thumb, and the Keeweenaw Peninsula is the entire left thumb. I dare you to find a Michigander who will explain to you where they live without whipping out their “map hands.”
• Yooper – Yay! We finally made the Merriam-Webster dictionary: Yoop·er /ˈyo͞opər/ noun informal•US a native or inhabitant of the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.
• Yah, eh? – Yooper for “I know, right?”
• You Betcha – Yooper for “hell to the yeah.” When I was growing up, I thought Joe Elliott from Def Leppard was a Yooper, because he sang those lyrics in their “Rock of Ages” song: “What do you want, what do you want? I want rock ‘n’ roll…you betcha.”