Cultural mishaps

i am discovering more and more weird cultural things about PA...
yesterday i said something about 'macadam' and everyone was like "what? what word is that? Is that a word?' i explained that it is pavement and everyone laughed at me!

today at lunch i brought it up again. so far, out of about 10 people that I asked, only two had heard that word before. one guy actually said, "macadam? is that latin or something?"

being very confused, i naturally turned to wikipedia. here is what I found:

Tar-bound macadam
With the advent of motor vehicles, dust became a serious problem on macadam roads. The area of low air pressure created under fast-moving vehicles sucks dust from the road surface, creating dust clouds and a gradual raveling (pulling apart) of the road material. This problem was later rectified by spraying tar on the surface to create tar-bound macadam, more commonly known as tarmac or blacktop. While macadam roads have now been resurfaced in most developed countries, some are preserved along stretches of roads such as the United States' National Road. Due to uses of macadam as a road surface in former times, roads in some parts of the United States (as parts of Pennsylvania) are often referred to as macadam, even though they might be made of asphalt or concrete. Similarly, the term "tarmac" is sometimes colloquially misapplied to asphalt roads or aircraft runways.


I found my answer! It is amazing where an inquiring mind will take you. And I'm glad to know that macadam is a Pennsylvania thing...I'm not going crazy. :)