Sometimes I lie in bed and think about words (sometimes I think of other stuff as well). Happened just the other day. I was rummaging through my memories to come up with some of our favorite slang phrases during my adolescence in the early-to-mid-’70s.

I grew up in suburban New York, and having subsequently met folks in my age group from all around the States, it’s clear that we did not all share the same vernacular. 

When I first came to Florida after finishing college in upstate New York, I didn’t fit in too well with the social cliques in St. Pete. Some of it was a language barrier. I couldn’t stand to hear someone say “y’all,” let alone say it myself. “Y’all” was pretty common down here at the time; I don’t hear it as much anymore.

One word I brought down from up north was “pisser,” or, more accurately, “pissa.”

This article appears in Aug 6-12, 2008.

Eric Snider is the dean of Bay area music critics. He started in the early 1980s as one of the founding members of Music magazine, a free bi-monthly. He was the pop music critic for the then-St. Petersburg...