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You're listening to Away with Words. I'm Martha Barnett.

And I'm Grant Barrett.

Martha, when I got to California, I thought I was going insane. People were talking about beanies, but I'll be durned if I saw anybody wearing a propeller cap. You didn't like mine? No, I was envisioning a beanie being this little kind of skull cap thing with maybe having a propeller, but like multi-colored with like a triangular panels.

Sure.

That's what I think of.

Yeah, me too.

But here in California and on the West Coast, Beanie refers to a knit sock hat. I think it's a younger term. That's probably. I mean, I'm serious. Younger than me anyway. Okay. You know, in your 20s and younger. And so there are regional terms for this throughout North America.

Who knew?

In the South, maybe you know this, being a nice southern lady. Did you call them toboggins? No, we used toboggan to mean sled. Which you wouldn't put on your heads. Not often known. So toboggan is a term mainly in the American South for a sock hat. I call them sock hats in Missouri or a stocking hat or a cap.

Tobagon is often short a toboggan. In Canada, they're called a took or a toke.

Really? Yeah, which is interesting because it comes from a French word. And in cooking, it's that particular chef's hat, the tall white one of the puffy top. But they use it for a wide variety of hats.

Just any – but a lot of times it's the knitted cap.

The other thing that I found that the sock hat and stocking hat that I use are primarily in the Midwest, around the Great Lakes, and in the Northeast.

And so I was just really interested to find that there was this difference that I didn't know anything about.

So I made a survey online. Online. You can find it at wayward radio.org slash hats.

What's it? It's called what's that on your head?

I know. It's called the Great Knitted Hat Survey, I believe.

Oh, that sounds so august. And I've got three pictures with a variety of terms that you might describe this hat with. It takes just a minute to fill out. You record your location. And I'm compiling the data in a spreadsheet. And I'll put that out for everyone so we can see exactly where in the country people are calling this hat a beanie, where they're calling a toboggan, where they're calling a sock hat or a stocking cap.

I know this kind of thing gets you all hot and bothered.

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