Essential English phrases

Fort Worth's own name for itself, from the cattle drives and the stockyards. It is used with pride rather than irony, and the twice-daily longhorn drive through the Stockyards exists precisely because the city decided to keep leaning into it.

From an 1870s newspaper jibe that Fort Worth was so quiet a panther slept undisturbed in the street. The city adopted the insult; the panther is on the police badge and half the local brands.

The civic motto, and the local framing of the whole Dallas rivalry: Dallas is where the East peters out, Fort Worth is where the West starts. Saying 'Dallas' when you mean Fort Worth is the one reliable way to annoy someone here.

The modern affectionate nickname, used mostly by people under forty and mostly about the Near Southside and West 7th. It coexists happily with Cowtown.

The Fort Worth Stock Show and Rodeo, running from mid-January into February at the Will Rogers complex and Dickies Arena. It has run since 1896, it is genuinely central to the city's calendar, and school schedules bend around it in some districts.

Dallas-Fort Worth as a single urban region, and the string of towns between the two — Arlington, Hurst, Euless, Bedford, Grapevine. 'Mid-Cities' is a real address category here, not a vague one.

The North Texas Tollway Authority transponder. North Texas has a lot of tolled road — the Chisholm Trail Parkway, TEXpress managed lanes, airport approaches — and driving without a tag means pay-by-mail invoices at a markup. Get one in week one.

The ring road around Fort Worth, and the tolled parkway running south-west out of downtown. Addresses are described relative to them constantly — inside the loop, out past 820, off the Chisholm Trail.

The one-way service road running alongside a Texas motorway, where the businesses and the exits are. You exit onto it, drive past your turn, and U-turn back under the bridge. Newcomers miss exits for a month.

In Texas the mineral estate can be owned separately from the surface, and across the Barnett Shale under Fort Worth it usually is. Buying a house here does not mean buying what is beneath it, and the mineral owner has real rights of access.

The cold front that arrives out of a clear sky and drops the temperature twenty or thirty degrees Fahrenheit in an hour, often with a dark blue-black leading edge. North Texas weather is not gradual; it is this.

Roughly a hundred miles of paved trail along the Trinity River and its forks, running from downtown out in three directions. It is the city's best piece of public infrastructure and how most people here get outdoors.

Joe T. Garcia's, the vast Tex-Mex compound north of downtown with a garden the size of a small park, a famously short menu and — for most of its history — a cash-only policy. Being taken there is the local welcome ritual.