Rubber Match - 3 September 2012 (rebroadcast)
A Way with Words - language, linguistics, and callers from all over
A Way with Words
4.6 • 2.3K Ratings
🗓️ 3 September 2012
⏱️ 51 minutes
🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS
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| 0:00.0 | 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 be beanies, but I'll be darned 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 the maybe having a propeller, not by like multicolored with like a triangular panel. Sure, that's what I think of. |
| 0:23.0 | Yeah, me too. |
| 0:23.7 | 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. |
| 0:39.1 | Who knew? |
| 0:39.9 | In the South, maybe you know this, being a nice southern lady. |
| 0:43.1 | Did you call them toboggins? |
| 0:44.6 | No, we used toboggan to mean sled. |
| 0:46.9 | Which you wouldn't put on your heads. |
| 0:49.8 | Not often, no. |
| 0:50.9 | 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 puppy top, but they use it |
| 1:11.7 | for a wide variety of hats, just any, but a lot of times it's the knitted cap. The other thing |
| 1:18.5 | that I found that the sock hat and stocking hat that I use are primarily in the Midwest, around |
| 1:24.4 | the Great Lakes, and in the Northeast. And so I was just really interested to find that there was this different 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? No, it's called the Great Knitted Hat Survey, I believe. Oh, that sounds so August. |
| 1:45.6 | And I've got three pictures with a variety of terms that you might describe this hat with. |
| 1:49.6 | It takes just a minute to fill out. |
| 1:51.4 | You record your location. |
| 1:53.3 | And I'm compiling the data in a spreadsheet. |
| 1:55.2 | And I'll put that out for everyone so we can see exactly where in the country people are calling this hat a beanie, |
| 2:04.4 | where they're calling a toboggan, where they're calling a sock hat or a stocking cap. |
| 2:06.6 | I know this kind of thing gets you all hot and bothered. |
| 2:07.7 | I know my face is flush. |
| 2:11.0 | I'm sweating. Sorry for that. |
... |
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