Essential English phrases

How the city's name is actually said — roughly two and a half syllables with the middle one swallowed. 'Lewis-ville' and 'Loo-ee-ville' both mark you as new. There is a locally beloved T-shirt listing the wrong versions.

Louisville Metro Government — the consolidated city-county created on 1 January 2003. Metro Council, Metro Corrections, Metro Parks, MetroSafe. When someone says 'call Metro' they mean the merged government, not a transit system.

Ninth Street is the line where downtown ends and the West End begins, and it marks one of the sharpest divisions of any American city — in income, in investment and in life expectancy. It is discussed openly here rather than euphemistically.

A one-room-wide house with rooms in a line front to back. Louisville has one of the largest surviving stocks in the country, especially in Portland, Germantown and Schnitzelburg, and the 'camelback' variant adds a partial second storey at the rear.

The local tax on wages, collected by the Louisville Metro Revenue Commission and withheld before you see it. Residents of Jefferson County pay a higher combined rate than non-residents who commute in, because the school board portion applies to residents.

The two ring roads — I-264, the Watterson Expressway, and I-265, the Gene Snyder. Directions here are given by which ring you are inside, not by compass points or exit numbers.

The UPS Worldport overnight sort at the airport. Aircraft land through the evening, the whole facility runs through the night, and they leave before dawn. Thousands of people here work a shift that begins around eleven at night, which shapes traffic, shops and childcare.

The Kentucky Oaks, run at Churchill Downs on the Friday before the Derby. Locally it is the bigger day — Derby is for visitors, Oaks is for Louisville. Schools and a great many workplaces effectively stop.

The whiskey that evaporates from the barrel each year while bourbon ages. Distilleries and rickhouses ring the city, and the black warehouse fungus that feeds on the vapour is visible on buildings near them — a real planning consideration, not folklore.

The University of Louisville Cardinals and the University of Kentucky Wildcats. The basketball rivalry is a genuine social fault line across the state and the safest small talk available — until it is not.

An open-faced turkey and bacon sandwich under Mornay sauce, broiled, invented at the Brown Hotel in 1926 for dancers coming off the floor at two in the morning. Every restaurant here has a version and most are worse than the original.

A pale green cucumber-and-cream-cheese spread invented by Jennie Benedict, a Louisville caterer, around 1900. It goes on sandwiches at every party and funeral in the city and is essentially unknown outside Kentucky.

A caramel-wrapped marshmallow named after the Polish actress Helena Modjeska after she performed here in 1883. Still made by two local confectioners, still sold as a Louisville thing, still unheard of anywhere else.

Louisville Metro's non-emergency service line and app — refuse, potholes, code complaints, junk vehicles. Because the government is consolidated, one number covers the whole county rather than splitting city from county. 911 stays for emergencies.