Reader survey: do you cut, butt, or budge in line?
Waiting for the bus this morning, CJ told another kid not to budge in line. ”You mean butt in line,” I said. ”DADDY,” CJ said, giggling, “you are being silly.” ”No, seriously,” I said, “it’s butt, not budge.” So we asked the other kids in line, and all agreed — when you force your way into a line, you are “budging.”
I researched this, and indeed — “budge in line” is Wisconsin / Minnesota dialect. (It’s also apparently common in Western Canada, for some reason.) This was news to me. Tanya reports hearing “ditch in line” as a kid, which is apparently some kind of Ohio thing.
So: do you cut, butt, or budge? And where are you from?
(Subsidiary question: is there a poll site, a la surveymonkey, that will allow me to set this up as an online poll, ask respondents for the zip code of their home town, and then plot the answers on the map?)
Filed under: cj, language, offhand | 34 Comments
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Personally, I jump the queue. When I was at school, I queue-barged. I’m from the south coast of England.
Similarly, in Ireland, we skip the queue.
Definitely cut. Grew up in So. Cal. You butt into a conversation, but not into line. And budge? What is that?
We budged in Central Iowa.
Concur with the usage of “budge” in western Canada. Well — actually, “don’t budge in line” sounds odd to my ears, but “hey, no budging!” is fine.
For me, it’s definitely “cut”; I grew up in Oregon.
Jordan, I think you should be able to set up a poll from your wordpress dashboard. (Tenth item on the sidebar, a circular button, just above the Ratings button and below the feedback button.)
Oh, and “cut”/Australia.
I thought “cutting in” was purely an Americanism— for me (Australia, but rural Victoria rather than Adelaide) it was “pushing in”. But “queue-jumpers” is now used a lot.
Dear Julie,
I was desperately trying to remember what we said. (I’ve been away for too long!) But now, reminded by your post, I can confirm that in rural Victoria, and also in Melbourne, we said “pushing in”. Thank you!
I know I can set up a WordPress poll, but I don’t just want the numbers, I want the locations!
Cut is active vocabulary for me, butt is passive vocabulary, budge is newfangled and get-off-my-lawn-you-kids. From Ohio/raised in California/Arizona.
Cut in line, for me, but it’s butt into the conversation.
I’m from North Carolina.
Cutting in line is bad form in Milwaukee. There’s a book: http://dare.wisc.edu/
I own the A-C volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English and was extremely disappointed not to find “budge in line” there!
Cool! Do you have the whole set?
Whoa! I’m surprised and disappointed too! (I also should buy a copy, it seems like a fun thing to have around.)
“Budge in line” is new to me. It’s too many years to remember with certainty, but I think we said “cut in line” in northwestern Wisconsin where I grew up.
Cut / grew up in VA
“cut”. Never heard of “budge into” anything, nor “butt in(to) line”. [Zip = 10002, now 02138]
In Philadelphia we cut in line.
Agreed.
Cut in line, and butt into a conversation. I grew up in Seattle. But I also request that we “budge up” if we need to squeeze more people onto a bench, which I think is a recent acquisition (when you’re little you’re not in charge of seating), and I’ve been living in England for about nine years.
Another California vote for cut in line & butt into a conversation. I’d never even heard of the other North American variants till now.
Three things:
* cut, FL
* As far as written english, the data suggests that my Floridian ways are in the right, at least for lines:
http://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=cut+in+line%2Cbutt+in+line%2Cbudge+in+line&year_start=1800&year_end=2000&corpus=0&smoothing=3
“Butt in” makes a respectable showing.
* Obligatory: google docs will let you make a form in a Google spreadsheet, and enter the results into particular columns of the spreadsheet. New spreadsheet, Tools -> Form -> Create a Form. There are a bunch of options once you’ve got that part done.
I grew up in Atlanta, and I cut in line and butt into a conversation.
“Jump the queue”, or, somewhat less frequently, “cut in line.” New Zealand.
Maybe “budge in” originates as “barge in” in an R-dropping dialect?
In northern New Jersey and New York City, we talked about cutting the line (but I’m not sure we talked about cutting *in* line).
Around NYC in the 70s/80s the term was cutting *in* line (it sounds right to me…). We also stood *on* line, but I wonder if that’s used less often there after online acquired a meaning.
I now remember something else about inconsistent regional terminology. A friend from New York was in Ohio, went into a pizza place, and asked if he could have “a slice”. The guy behind the counter said “Sorry, we only sell 7-Up.”
We definitely still stood on line in the 90s/00s.
My roommate from Michigan says “cut in line” is the usual expression.
Cut in line, butt into someone else’s business, and refuse to budge when asked to move over (from Massachusetts). But my father, who’s from New York, frequently said “Don’t cut in” to mean “don’t interrupt”.
I live in Vancouver, BC and use “cut or butt in” but hear “budge in ” quite a lot and it annoys me.Use budge for trying to move an overly heavy object. As in” i pushed and pushed but it would not budge an inch”