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Comment by rosseloh | Hacker News Reader

>perhaps everything between California and Oklahoma = Midwest

If you're right and that's the definition some people use, I'm not surprised they're confused. Considering I see most people using "midwest" referring to places like Ohio and Michigan.

I've always preferred "Great Plains" when trying to describe my general location to folks online. You say "I live in the midwest" and everyone seems to assume you're in Ohio or Indiana or thereabouts. Nope, I'm in South Dakota. America's a big place, y'all. The middle of Colorado is where I draw the line - west of there you're not Midwest or Great Plains, you're in The West.

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Yeah I try to avoid "midwest" at all, except when being vague is a goal. The distinction between "Great Lakes" & "Great Plains" seems quite useful both geographically and culturally and "midwest" seems to just splotch right over that boundary.

I agree with your western boundary, though I'd probably just call it "The Rockies" myself, and let Nevadans and Utahns get absorbed either into "West Coast" or "Southwest" as they personally desire.

This system does create some problems for e.g. Missouri & Arkansas, which are in the confluence of 3-4 other regions, and you have to accept that Pennsylvania and New York get cut in half, but it's what my brain has settled on.

Utah is not West Coast. As rosseloh said, it's the West. (And I agree - I draw the line at Denver.)

I don't agree with "Midwest" where people place it on the east side, though. Take Pittsburgh, for instance. Look at a map, people. It's not "west", and it's not even "mid". It's East. "Mid" starts at Chicago.

(Pittsburgh was once midwest, but it's not 1870 any more.)

Culturally though, The Pittsburgh area (as resident of 10+ years) is caught between the East / Midwest, but the rural areas North and West feel solidly in the Midwest culture to me. Very different from all parts East.

That's fair. And rural Indiana or Ohio feels similar to rural Iowa. So... there's geography, and there's culture. Geographically, the term feels wrong to me for someplace that far east, but culturally, maybe it still fits.

I think the term "midwest" came from back when "West" meant "west" of the Mississippi. Ohio, is definitely not East, and definitely not West, but is pretty mid-west from that perspective.

You could say anything between the Great Divide and the Eastern divide is "midwest" and nobody would look at you funny.

https://www.theadventurecompany.com/continental-divide-in-co...

That heuristic works right up to the second you find yourself south of the Mason-Dixon line.

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