Stove, range just doesn’t sound right to me.
I think its because all my family was originally from the the mid west, prairie states. Once I was taking my grandma up to my Mom’s house on the Northern California coast and we were half way through the 45 mile drive when grandma said we had to turn back because she left the “fire”on. I said grandma, you don’t have a fire, you live in a mobile home. Well she was insistent and in a frenzy because she was recovering from a stroke. When we got back to her house we found that she had left a stove burner on low. Good thing she remembered and I turned back!
When we got to Mom’s house I told her the story about the “fire” being left on. I was only 19 at the time and had never heard this terminology before, or so I thought. Mom told me that this was Kansas speak, that they called anything that produced heat “the fire”, but she quickly also stated that she didn’t do this, because she’d lived in California since she was 7 years old, she was more modern.
Well, I was helping her in the kitchen to make dinner and lo and behold she said to me, “Eddie, turn the fire down on that pan!” I immediately jumped on it and said, “you did it, you say fire to for the stove too”, it was an electric cooktop BTW. We both laughed! I guess I was so used to hearing she and other family members use this terminology that it didn’t click that grandma was also referring to her stove when she said fire.
Eddie