Essential English phrases

The historic city between the Ashley and Cooper rivers, south of the Crosstown. Locals say 'downtown' and 'the peninsula' interchangeably, and everything else — West Ashley, James Island, Mount Pleasant, North Charleston — is named separately.

The flat coastal plain of tidal creeks, salt marsh and sea islands running from Georgetown down to the Savannah River. It is the regional identity here, the way 'the Bay Area' is in California — and it is one word, not two.

The US-17 Septima P. Clark Parkway, the six-lane cut across the peninsula. It is also the most reliably flooded road in the city, which is why locals talk about it as a weather condition rather than a street.

The black, sulphurous, thigh-deep mud of the tidal creeks at low water. It smells like rotten eggs, it is the smell of home to anyone raised here, and it will take your shoe.

Mount Pleasant, the large suburb across the Cooper River. It is a separate town with its own government and school attendance zones, and it is where a lot of families end up.

The area code for the whole South Carolina coast, used as shorthand for the Lowcountry. The 854 overlay exists but nobody claims it.

Tidal flooding with no rain at all — the sea coming up through the storm drains at high tide. Charleston gets dozens of these days a year and the number rises. If someone tells you the street floods on a clear afternoon, believe them.

The highest astronomical tides of the year, around the new and full moons at the equinoxes. Charleston publishes the dates and half the peninsula reroutes around them.

The culture, cuisine and English-based creole language of the descendants of enslaved West Africans on the Sea Islands. Congress designated a Gullah Geechee Cultural Heritage Corridor along this coast; this is a living community, not a heritage exhibit.

Charleston's nickname, from the church steeples that still top the skyline — no building on the peninsula may rise above them — and from a colonial charter unusually tolerant of dissenting congregations.

The Board of Architectural Review. Charleston created the first historic district zoning ordinance in the United States in 1931, and the BAR still rules on paint colour, windows and doors in the old city. If you buy on the peninsula, it is a real constraint, not a formality.

A sherry-laced cream soup made with blue crab roe. It is the one dish every visitor orders and it is genuinely local, invented here in the 1920s.