There are very few things Kentuckians love more than their home state.

A.B. "Happy" Chandler, a former governor (and UK alum, I'll add) once said, "I never met a Kentuckian who wasn't either thinking about going home or actually going home," and I have to agree with him.

Kentucky is a kind of place that gets in your blood and follows you around forever, and whether you're from up north studying at one of our universities, born in the Bluegrass living somewhere else for a little while, or living in the same Kentucky town you grew up in, if you were once a Kentuckian, you're always a Kentuckian.

Here are nine things that might get you thinking about home, and nine things we've just got our own way of explaining to people:

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1. Cats

No, not the pets with less personality than a pack of ink pens -- we're talking about the Kentucky Wildcats, one of the greatest athletics programs the world's ever seen. A Kentuckian's rally cry for sure, Go Cats can be heard and felt all across the world.

2. Cards

Given that I'm writing from Lexington, I've got to admit my bias for the blue and white, but I'd be remiss if I left out the red birds. The Cards are our state's other sports team, and in Kentucky, you either say Go Cats or Go Cards -- and never both. Don't get our cards confused with your playing cards.

3. Hometown

In Kentucky, many conversations begin with "Where are you from?" And a lot of times, you'll find that the answer is a county, not a city. That's because in many places, towns are too small to merit their own sense of "place," so a county is what's left. Also, many county identities in Kentucky stem from a high school, and in a lot of these counties, there's just one school -- and so a hometown becomes a county.

4. Cincinnati

Cincinnati, Ohio and the towns like Covington, Florence, Erlanger and Highland Heights in northern Kentucky are quickly growing into one entity. The Cincinnati airport even sits in northern Kentucky, and in Kentucky, when you say you're from Cincinnati, the next question is a lot of times "Kentucky side or Ohio side?"

5. UK

In the rest of the world, the letters U and K are synonymous with the United Kingdom, or "the UK." In Kentucky, there's no denying that UK refers to the University of Kentucky, our state's flagship land-grant institution in Lexington.

6. Versailles

Versailles, a small town just a few minutes outside Lexington, is named after the famous French palace, but it's pronounced a little differently here. In Kentucky, we say ver-saylz, not the fancy French pronunciation.

7. Highway

Having lived in Kentucky my entire life, I've very seldom heard someone actually call the interstate by it's real name. In most places, there's a big difference between the six-lane interstate and smaller highways that are four lanes at most. In Kentucky where state highways like the Bluegrass Parkway connect most of the state, interstates and highways become one -- and we prefer the highway.

8. The South

Ask someone from Georgia or maybe a UK student from Alabama about whether they're in the South, and they'd say no for sure. All the way back to the Civil War, Kentucky has been a border state, but if you ask a Kentuckian, we claim being Southern, because some things are just better down south.

9. Holler

Known in some places as a valley, "holler" in Kentucky isn't a verb, it's a thing. You can find these all over central and eastern Kentucky in the mountains, where hills make up a majority of the landscape.