And hot dogs old enough to vote.

Dear Word Detective: I was raised in Chicago, Memphis, Atlanta and Omaha. Now I live in Detroit with my native Detroit-er husband. I am often going to little stores to buy things like Tums and cigarettes. I have always called these places “convenience stores,” or, perhaps, “corner stores.” But my husband calls them “party stores.” Why does Michigan insist on calling these places “party stores”? Certainly, I understand that liquor, beer and smokes often lead to a party. Is the rest of the country just not having as much fun as Michigan? — Fritz.

I don’t know why Michigan calls them “party stores,” but it makes me want to move there. Our little town here in rural Ohio doesn’t even have a convenience store anymore. A few years ago it was bought by a very nice man from Pakistan. I got along with him just fine, but apparently a critical mass of the locals decided that he was a one-man terrorist sleeper cell and boycotted him right out of business. I really wish I were making that up.

Regional dialectical variations such as “party store” for what the rest of us call a “carry-out” or “convenience store” are common in the US. There’s even an organization dedicated to studying the phenomenon (the American Dialect Society) and an ongoing scholarly project, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) cataloging local lingo in minute detail. Michigan shares many of the variations of what linguists call the Inland North along with Illinois, Indiana, Ohio and Wisconsin. Things get a bit weirder as you travel north in Michigan, where the residents of the Upper Peninsula (known as “Yoopers” from the initials UP) exhibit a vocabulary, phonological intonations and habits (especially ending sentences with “eh?”) more often associated with Canada.

Back at “party store,” I’d imagine the name arose because such places are where you buy the ingredients of an informal party, as opposed to the supermarket where one does “serious” food shopping (i.e., beyond beef jerky and cheese popcorn). In my ancestral home of New York City, such a little shop is known as a “bodega” (boh-DAY-guh), from the Spanish meaning “wine shop,” derived in turn from the Greek “apotheke,” store or depot, which also gave us “apothecary,” an old-fashioned name for a drugstore.

As to why “party store” became popular in Michigan and not in, say, Georgia, I’d chalk it up to pure happenstance, unless Michiganders really are having more fun than the rest of us.

River of bumps.

Dear Word Detective: On a recent visit to Savannah, GA, my wife asked me about the smooth cobblestones on the streets in the historic River District. When she asked me about the origin of the word “cobblestone,” I did not know. Can you help? — Wayne Bollinger.

Clippity-clop, clippity-clop, clippity-clop. There, I finally found an excuse to do my horse-on-a-cobblestone-street imitation (although it’s really much more impressive in person). Now if I can just work the screech of a red-tailed hawk into one of these columns, my life will be complete. You’d never guess that my childhood hero was Gerald McBoing-Boing, would you?

Cobblestones are cool. For those poor souls who have spent their lives trapped in the asphalt wastelands of suburbia, I should explain that “cobblestones” are small (usually six inches or less across) rounded stones set in sand or mortar, a method of paving streets common from the late Middle Ages into the 18th century. Long since replaced with asphalt and similar “smooth” (i.e., boring) sorts of pavement in most places, cobblestone streets still exist, frequently preserved in “historic” sections of cities. When last I checked, there were still several cobblestone streets in New York City’s Soho neighborhood, for instance. If you’ve never heard horses’ hooves on a cobblestone street, you’ve missed one of life’s most evocative sounds.

I have, on occasion, made a few snide jokes about the accuracy (or lack thereof) of the do-it-yourself online encyclopedia Wikipedia. Many parts of Wikipedia, as the curate said of the egg, are quite good. But every so often I come across a real clunker. When Wikipedia announces that “cobblestones” are so called because they are “cobbled (roughly assembled)” to form pavement, they stumble and land face down in the street. The verb “to cobble,” meaning “to join or mend clumsily” (source of the derivative noun “cobbler,” one who repairs shoes or makes simple repairs) has no connection to “cobblestone.” See me after class, Wikipedia.

“Cobblestone” is derived from the very old English word “cob,” which had a wide range of meanings, one of which was “rounded lump” with overtones of large size. The “cob” in “corn-cob” invokes a slightly different sense of “cob,” that of “top” or “head” (which, in some people, is also a large rounded lump, but I digress). “Cobweb,” since you were about to ask, has nothing to do with “cob,” and comes from the Middle English “coppe,” meaning “spider.”

“Cobble,” which appeared in the 15th century, simply added the diminutive suffix “le” to “cob,” and meant a small stone rounded by the flow of water, essentially a large pebble. It was these smooth “cobbles,” gathered from stream beds, that paved the first “cobblestone” streets.