Gramer Girl here. I'm Minion Fogarty and this week I have a quick and dirty tip about

what to call yourself if you split your time between two cities. A meeting middle about

Kurt Vonnegut's semicolon quotation and a tidbit about the phrase off the cuff. And now

on to inter-urban. When you split your time between the East Coast and the West Coast,

you can call yourself by coastal. But what about when you're splitting your time between

two cities, like a listener named Jeff, who splits his time between New York City and Boston,

and they're both on the East Coast? This seems like an answer only Charles Dickens

could provide, a tale of two cities. But instead we want a Gramer Girl readers and listeners

to weigh in on the matter. So we asked people on the Gramer Girl Facebook page, what word

they would use? Two of the most popular suggestions were by Metro and by Urban. But a few people

suggested the word inter-urban and pointed out that it already exists. For example, the

entryaddictionary.com lists inner urban as an adjective, meaning of located in or operating

between two or more cities. And also as a noun, meaning a train, bus, etc. or transportation

system, operating between cities. Popular for about three decades during the early 1900s,

the inter-urban, which was a type of electric railway car, similar to a trolley tram or streetcar,

specialized in stops between cities. The inter-urban allowed people living in rural communities to

experience suburban life by riding the few short miles instead of traveling by horse and buggy

and dealing with unpaid roads. Other suggestions from the Facebook group included Unicostal

Nomad, Buy Municipal, Buy Statal and Buy City. As you can tell, the Buy prefix was popular

because it means two or twice. Your Buy Focals have two lenses and your bicycle has two tires.

So if you're splitting your time between two cities, it seemed common for people to gravitate

to that Buy prefix for ideas. As an aside, a hyphen isn't typically required after the Buy prefix.

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