Yowie wrote:

So I'm thinking maybe "down cellar" is a Boston-ism.

I always find it weird to hear the American term "I'll write you" rather
than saying "I'll write *to* you". I don't know when the dropped "to" or the
"to the" in your case above first started to be thought of as correct
grammar in American English, but to these Commonweatlth English ears, it
always sounds wrong.

It sounds wrong to me, too. Actually, I always thought it was one of
my mother's linguistic peculiarities. Her one mandate in life (at least
when I was young) was to do everything with the least amount of effort
possible. So if you could get your message across saying "go down cellar",
then why bother with the "to the" in the middle? I guess that's why
I was so surprised to hear someone else say it. I was sure she'd invented
it!

(Hope you don't feel too self-concious, Baha! You'll soon find that we
do this sort of thing a fair amount around here. We love to point and
laugh at each other's odd expressions! Just kidding - but we do like to
compare them and sometimes analyze them.)

But being quite ancient in terms of cuber-life, I've learnt that even
"English" has distinct sub-languages, and no one particular dialect is
any more "correct" than any other - just that some are "older".

A case in point: what does "cuber-life" mean?

Joyce