Talking Southern No. 92 : Old-Timey Terms

     The other night, your compiler’s young grandson asked where his daddy (your compiler’s elder son) was.  Your compiler told him, “He’s upstairs drawing your bath,” a reply which seemed to satisfy the young fellow.

     “Drawing a bath?”   Why did he say that?   Your compiler supposes it’s because that is how he has always heard it said.   It rather obviously harkens back to the days when the water for a bath had to be drawn from a well, bucket by bucket, heated on the stove, and emptied into a tub.

     Turning a faucet and quickly running a bath is a much simpler process – and the only one your compiler has ever known —  but he still “draws” baths rather than running them.  And he doesn’t even do it consciously – it’s as if he’s hard-wired to say that.   Does any reader still draw baths?

    Another thing your compiler and probably most folks of his and older generations say is “cranking a car.”   Now, one hasn’t had to use a literal crank to start a car since the days of the Model T – literal crankshafts aside – but many of us still say “crank” instead of “start.”   It, too, is automatic – those of use who say it are not choosing to – that’s just our go-to.  Who among us still cranks a car?

     Your compiler’s younger brother, Jon, despises the term “mash” more than any other word in the language, and he hates it when people – and many Southerners say this – mash buttons or other things he would prefer that we press.  (Your compiler thinks Jon’s aversion to this word might stem from their late mother, who, as a stickler for personal hygiene, was capable of spotting a blackhead at one hundred feet.  The removal thereof, which was facilitated with a small metal extractor her children were convinced she and Lucifer himself  had colluded to devise, hurt like h-e- double l, and nobody liked it when Mama got into blackhead-mashing mode.  But it apparently traumatized Jon to the point that he winces when he hears someone say he or she is fixing to mash something.)

      “Let me make a Xerox of that,” your compiler hears folks of a certain age say, and says himself.  We all know that Xerox is just one of many brands of multi-function devices in today’s world, but the term became your compiler’s generation’s go-to, for both noun and verb, when machines of that brand (only, your compiler thinks) began to replace mimeograph machines in the 1970s in schools and offices.  (Modern copiers are much more capable and efficient than mimeograph machines ever were, but their products don’t smell nearly as wonderful as freshly-run mimeograph pages used to!)

     Your compiler’s grandparents, and many other folks he knew from that generation, referred to refrigerators as “ice boxes,”  hearkening back to the day when zinc-lined oak boxes that held literal blocks of ice for cooling food were the latest technology.   The friends and contemporaries of many of your compiler’s parents referred to a refrigerator as a “Frigidaire,” regardless of its brand, much as his own generation uses “Xerox” machines.  But your compiler’s parents, who were small-town Southern to the core, never called them “Frigidaires” – they just called them, “refrigerators,” interestingly enough.  But all his grandparents talked about “ice boxes.”

    Concluding for now on the old-timey terms, your compiler just might hit the sack with hope the Sand Man will  bless him with at least forty winks.