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Toronto: Difference between revisions
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One can easily detect outsiders in Toronto by hearing them pronounce it "Tow-Rawn-Tow". City natives, or those from closely neighbouring regions who talk with city natives constantly, typically drop the last T, and sometimes the first O, so it's "Toronno", "T'ronno", or even "Ch'ronno" (with the first consonant being the "ch" in "chair").<ref>This fact trips up quite a few actors portraying Canadians, e.g. in ''[[The Proposal]]'', where [[Sandra Bullock]]'s character is supposed to be a native Torontonian but immediately spoils the fact by pronouncing the city name as it is spelled</ref> Nicknames include T.O. (an acronym of '''''T'''oronto, '''O'''ntario''), the T-dot (a shortening of the former), Hogtown or The Big Smoke (names arising from historic industries associated at different times with the town), and "Toronto the Good". Peter Ustinov famously described it as "New York run by the Swiss", though the appellation isn't quite as accurate as it once was.
Toronto is actually a "[[Mega City|mega-city]]"; in 1998 the downtown core of Old Toronto and its neighbouring municipalities, all of which were their own cities at the time, were amalgamated into one single City of Toronto (as were many other Ontario metropolises at the same time). This has generally been regarded as a serious dick move by the offending Tory provincial government, and led to all kinds of confusion and annoyance. For convenience's sake, the post office still treats residents of the City of Toronto as residing in the no-longer-extant former cities they would have been inhabitants of before amalgamation, and claiming you live in Etobicoke on government documents is perfectly licit, meaning exactly the same thing as claiming you live in the City of Toronto.<ref>though as mentioned above, few people living outside of Toronto will show any recognition to a name other than T.O.</ref> This explains why one still finds, for instance, "North York Hydro" written on manhole covers in streets north of the core.
Not all of Toronto's suburbs are part of the mega-city; cities like Vaughan, Richmond Hill, Mississauga and Brampton are sizable cities in their own right. The whole giant monster is known as the Greater Toronto Area (GTA for short). In general the core is known as the 416 area and the surrounding GTA as the 905 (these being the dominant phone area codes in the two segments). The term "Golden Horseshoe" is also used for a larger area surrounding Toronto, containing the GTA and nearby towns and cities wrapped around the north-western shore of Lake Ontario. Particularly expansive definitions of the Golden Horseshoe include most of Southern Ontario as well as [[Perpetual Poverty|Buffalo]], New York. The question about which cities or suburbs are part of Toronto or not has led to some confusion and general mockery among Canadians. The consensus has become the farther away one is from Toronto, the larger the city becomes. For example, while in southern Ontario, a citizen of Mississauga is ''not'' from Toronto and will be insulted if you declare them as such. However that same Mississaugan will claim to be from Toronto while traveling overseas (or more than two provinces away) just to keep things simpler. And, as mentioned, if you happen to live ''in'' the amalgamated megacity, some of your neighbours may well be [[Serious Business|willing to fight you to the death]] over whether you're both residents of Toronto or not.
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