Pittsburgh is a city in and the county seat of Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is the second-most populous city in Pennsylvania, after Philadelphia, and the 68th-most populous city in the U.S., with a population of 302,971 as of the 2020 census. The city is located in southwestern Pennsylvania at the confluence of the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River, which combine to form the Ohio River. It anchors the Pittsburgh metropolitan area, which had a population of 2.457 million residents and is the largest metro area in both the Ohio Valley and Appalachia, the second-largest in Pennsylvania, and the 26th-largest in the U.S. Pittsburgh is the principal city of the greater Pittsburgh–Weirton–Steubenville combined statistical area which includes parts of Ohio and West Virginia.
Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. The institution was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools. In 1912, it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology and began granting four-year degrees. In 1967, it became Carnegie Mellon University through its merger with the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research, founded in 1913 by Andrew Mellon and Richard B. Mellon and formerly a part of the University of Pittsburgh.
Western Pennsylvania English, known more narrowly as Pittsburgh English or popularly as Pittsburghese, is a dialect of American English native primarily to the western half of Pennsylvania, centered on the city of Pittsburgh, but potentially appearing in some speakers as far north as Erie County, as far west as Youngstown, Ohio, and as far south as Clarksburg, West Virginia. Commonly associated with the working class of Pittsburgh, users of the dialect are colloquially known as "Yinzers".
Henry Clay Frick was an American industrialist, financier, and art patron. He founded the H. C. Frick & Company coke manufacturing company, was chairman of the Carnegie Steel Company and played a major role in the formation of the giant U.S. Steel manufacturing concern. He had extensive real estate holdings in Pittsburgh and throughout the state of Pennsylvania. He later built the Neoclassical Frick Mansion in Manhattan, and upon his death donated his extensive collection of old master paintings and fine furniture to create the celebrated Frick Collection and art museum. However, as a founding member of the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club, he was also in large part responsible for the alterations to the South Fork Dam that caused its failure, leading to the catastrophic Johnstown Flood. His vehement opposition to unions also caused violent conflict, most notably in the Homestead Strike.
Robert Doyle Marshall Jr. is an American film and theater director, producer, and choreographer. He is best known for directing the film version of the Broadway musical Chicago, which was based on the play of the same name by playwright Maurine Dallas Watkins. His work on the film earned him the Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Directing – Feature Film, as well as nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director, the Golden Globe Award for Best Director, and the BAFTA Award for Best Direction. He also directed the films Memoirs of a Geisha, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Into the Woods, Mary Poppins Returns, and the Disney live-action remake The Little Mermaid.
Downtown Pittsburgh, colloquially referred to as the Golden Triangle, and officially the Central Business District, is the urban downtown center of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located at the confluence of the Allegheny River and the Monongahela River whose joining forms the Ohio River. The triangle is bounded by the two rivers.
Yinz is a second-person plural pronoun used mainly in Western Pennsylvania English. It is most prominent in Pittsburgh, but it is also found throughout the cultural region known as Appalachia, located within the geographical region of the Appalachians.
Western Pennsylvania is a region in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania encompassing the western half of the state. Pittsburgh is the region's principal city, with a metropolitan area population of about 2.4 million people, and serves as its economic and cultural center. Erie, Altoona, and Johnstown are its other metropolitan centers. As of the 2010 census, Western Pennsylvania's total population is nearly 4 million.
Mark A. Nordenberg is the chancellor emeritus of the University of Pittsburgh and chair of the university's Institute of Politics. A professor of law and university administrator, Nordenberg served as the seventeenth Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh from 1996 to 2014. Nordenberg served as the Dean of the University of Pittsburgh School of Law between 1985 and 1993 and other various administrative positions before becoming interim Chancellor of the University of Pittsburgh in 1995, a position which became permanent the following year. He became known as Nordy to many Pitt students, who voted to name a recreation center and arcade in the William Pitt Union as Nordy's Place, and is also the namesake of the university's endowed Nordenberg Scholarships and the Nordenberg Hall dormitory on the university's campus.
The culture of Pittsburgh stems from the city's long history as a center for cultural philanthropy, as well as its rich ethnic traditions. In the 19th and 20th centuries, wealthy businessmen such as Andrew Carnegie, Henry J. Heinz, Henry Clay Frick, and nonprofit organizations such as the Carnegie Foundation donated millions of dollars to create educational and cultural institutions.
Randolph Frederick Pausch was an American educator, a professor of computer science, human–computer interaction, and design at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Yinzer is a 20th-century term playing on the Pittsburghese second-person plural vernacular "yinz." The word is used among people who identify themselves with the city of Pittsburgh and its traditions.
Midland American English is a regional dialect or super-dialect of American English, geographically lying between the traditionally-defined Northern and Southern United States. The boundaries of Midland American English are not entirely clear, being revised and reduced by linguists due to definitional changes and several Midland sub-regions undergoing rapid and diverging pronunciation shifts since the early-middle 20th century onwards.
Thomas Henry Coulter was a Canadian-American professional ice hockey defenceman who played two National Hockey League games for the Chicago Black Hawks during the 1933–34 season as a way to pay for tuition as an engineer. He was brother to Arthur Coulter and was the first NHL player to play in an Australian ice hockey league, playing one game for St. George's IHC. Coulter also worked as CEO of the Chicago Association of Commerce and Industry for 27 years.
The Carnegie Mellon Tartans football team represents Carnegie Mellon University in National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division III competition.
New Ways of Analyzing Variation (NWAV) is an annual academic conference in sociolinguistics. NWAV attracts researchers and students conducting linguistic scientific investigations into patterns of language variation, the study of language change in progress, and the interrelationship between language and society, including how language variation is shaped by and continually shapes societal institutions, social and interpersonal relationships, and individual and group identities.
Jagoff or jag-off is an American English derogatory slang term from Pittsburghese meaning a person who is a jerk, stupid or inept. It is most prominent in the Pittsburgh area and Pennsylvania in general, along with wide use in Chicago, particularly in the Irish taverns. The Dictionary of American Regional English defines the term as a "general term of disparagement". It is an archetypical Pittsburgh word, evoking feelings of delight among Pittsburgh expatriates. Despite the term's phonetic resemblance to jack off, the two possibly have different origins and jagoff, while derogatory or playful, is generally not seen as obscene among Pittsburghers and Chicagoans.
Conflict Kitchen was a take-out restaurant in Pittsburgh that served only cuisine from countries with which the United States was in conflict. The menu focused on one nation at a time, rotating every three to five months, and featured related educational programming, such as lunch hour with scholars, film screenings, and trivia nights. After opening in 2010, the restaurant introduced the cuisines of Iran, Afghanistan, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Palestine, and most recently, Iroquois. Referring to the informational brochures distributed with meals, NPR described the restaurant as "an experimental public art project—and the medium is the sandwich wrap."
Barbara Johnstone is an American professor of rhetoric and linguistics at Carnegie Mellon University. She specializes in discourse structure and function, sociolinguistics, rhetorical theory, and methods of text analysis. She was the editor in chief of Language in Society from 2005 to 2013, and is the editor of Pittsburgh Speech & Society, a website about Pittsburgh English for non-linguists. She has published several books, including Speaking Pittsburghese (2013) and Discourse Analysis, 2nd Ed. (2008). She has also written for The New York Times.
Tartan Laboratories, Inc., later renamed Tartan, Inc., was an American software company founded in 1981 and based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that specialized in programming language compilers, especially for the language Ada. It was based on work initially done at Carnegie Mellon University and gradually shifted from a focus on research and contract work to being more product-oriented. It was sold to Texas Instruments in 1996. Part of it was later acquired by DDC-I in 1998.
