Essential English phrases

The consolidated government of the City of Baton Rouge and the Parish of East Baton Rouge, merged in 1949. Almost every official thing here is signed 'City-Parish', and the Metropolitan Council is the body that runs it.

Employment in the petrochemical corridor — refineries, chemical plants, the contractors and turnaround crews who service them. It is the single biggest private-sector category here and it has its own vocabulary and its own hiring rhythm.

The annual motor vehicle inspection sticker on your windscreen. In East Baton Rouge it includes an emissions test, and the rest of Louisiana is about to stop needing one at all — which is going to cause a lot of confusion here.

What Louisiana calls a county, and the only US state that does. The word is everywhere on official forms and it is not a church reference — it is the local government unit.

The area code for Baton Rouge and the parishes around it, used as regional shorthand. It is also the name of the city's monthly magazine.

The median strip of a divided road. Louisiana usage statewide, and it becomes practical advice when heavy rain floods the low lanes.

A little something extra given for free — the thirteenth in the baker's dozen. From Louisiana French by way of Spanish, and used entirely seriously here.

'Go', spelled the Louisiana way. Geaux Tigers, Geaux Cajuns, and increasingly geaux anything. It is a genuine local orthography rather than a joke, and businesses use it in earnest.

Tiger Stadium at LSU on a night game. It seats over 100,000, the whole city empties into it seven Saturdays a year, and the traffic plan for a home game is a civic event in itself.

The reversal of interstate lanes so all of them run away from the coast during a hurricane evacuation. Baton Rouge is where a lot of that traffic ends up, which is worth knowing before a storm.

Doing the food shopping. A calque from the French 'faire son marché' that survived into Louisiana English and still sounds odd to everyone else.

A crawfish boil — a communal outdoor cook of crawfish, corn, potatoes and sausage, run from roughly February to June. It is the region's central social institution and turning down an invitation to one is a real snub.