Wardrobe

The house that I lived in while I was in my early teens was built in 1860.  It had some structural oddities.

I’d say the most odd oddity was the fact that, to get to the master bedroom, you had to walk through one of the other, adjoining bedrooms.  As this was probably more inconvenient for my sister than for myself (my parents always cut through her room instead of mine), the oddity that caused me the most anxiety was my room’s complete and total lack of a closet.

By this, I do not mean that the room was lacking in “closet space” (indicating that closet(s) were present, just small).  There was no closet.  At all.  My sister didn’t have one either.

Instead, we each had a wardrobe.  But it could just as easily have been an armoire.  Or chifforobe.  Or even a clothes press.

If you give people a picture such as this one (of a way fancier wardrobe than I had, by the way):

What do you call this?

You get things like wardrobe, armoire, chifforobe, and clothes press, and, in addition, terms such as cabinet, bureau, closet dresser, cupboard, and shift robe.  I know because that’s what I did and those are some of the responses that I got.

Wardrobe is a good follow-up to chest of drawers, as the two forms are linked by a common ancestor –  the cupboard – which is basically a wooden box turned on its side with shelves added to the open space.  The rudimentary cupboard form becomes, in its medieval life, the press, which is a simply constructed, sometimes painted, and often massive, cupboard.

The press form acquires different names and iterations as it travels across cultures, and several of this form’s more specialized descendants can be observed – both structurally and linguistically – within the history of American case furniture.  The initial offshoot of the press appears to have been the wardrobe form, consisting of a cupboard stacked atop a chest of drawers.  The name “wardrobe” was taken from the medieval name for a guarded room, usually one adjoining a sleeping chamber, set aside to store clothes, linens, and other valuables.

Wardrobe is a variant of warderobe, which has as a synonym garderobe, an Old French-derived variant used in NE England, which nicely illustrates the historical (and semantic) relationship between the words/concepts guard and ward.

This type of guarded (or warded) room was also commonly used to store armor, hence the French name for the same kind of room and, later, the similar furniture form: armoire.

Eventually the wardrobe becomes a case with paneled doors set atop a drawer, topped by a cornice and set upon feet.

The wardrobe carries on, with this four-part construction, in England, sometimes called a clothes press, a version of the form that often had drawers behind the doors as well as beneath them.  In 17^th c New England, this piece was also referred to as the press cupboard, and was noted to be “among the most imposing pieces of furniture in early [Am] households”.

Linen Press

Other European forms immigrated to the New World as well.  In 17^th c Germany, we see the Schrank (sometimes heard as shonk), a massive piece that travelled here with the Pennsylvania Deutch.

The kast (aslo seen as kas) was the 17^th c Dutch contribution. In the US, this wardrobe variant was found among the Dutch settlers in New York’s Hudson River Valley area and along the New Jersey Long Island shore. Kast is the Dutch word for ‘cupboard’, but became the designation for a very large (almost wall-sized) wardrobe used by American furniture purveyors.

Kast

The French form is the armoire, a piece that is big, often decorated, usually found with no drawer below the paneled doors, and sometimes with no feet.

From 16^th c Italian furniture makers, we have the form that Americans called a cabinet.  This form, called a armadio or guardaroba in Italian (names that obviously also contain the element of ‘arming’ and ‘guarding’), is a cupboard-like space filled with small compartments or drawers and fronted, once again, by paneled doors.

Cabinet

Thus, to America (and American vocabulary) came various European-inspired constructions, the wardrobe, the press cupboard, the Schrank, the kast, and the armoire, all of which are variations of the basic, medieval ‘cupboard’ form described above.

Continued contact with France and interest in French fashions, especially in areas surrounding Charleston and New Orleans, ushered in a great many French-inspired furniture forms.  These Franco-inspired furniture items include names for all sorts of different pieces: commode, chiffonier, divan, bergere, buffet, chaise, étagère, and recamier.

Speaking of cultural influences, New Orleans specifically served as the cultural hearth of the Gulf States area, and its cabinetmakers, including the famous “freemen of color”, produced a wardrobe form made in “Creole style” – a blend influences from the Caribbean, Louisiana French, and other Anglo-American styles.  One rather ornate form was the New Orleans cabinetmakers’ signature piece: the armoire. In this area, even the trusty chest of drawers fell to the “ubiquitous armoire” as the chosen piece of household case furniture. In New Orleans, the traditional chest of drawers form was also passed over in favor of the semainier, a tall, slender, seven-drawered chest called after the French semaine, “week”.

Semainier

I think the term semainier contributed to the geographical spread and longevity of “chiffonier.”  Chiffonier is a term found in the Linguistic Atlas data as a response for both the ‘bureau’ and ‘wardrobe’ questions.  ‘Chiffonier’ was borrowed from French, derived from chiffon for ‘rag.’  A chiffonier is a tall, slender chest of drawers, a description very similar to that of a semainier; in fact, the Dictionary of Furniture defines the ‘semainier’ as a  “chest of drawers, often a chiffonnier, with seven drawers”.   Structural similarities coupled with phonological similarity (“shiff-own-yea” and “se-man-yea”) could have led to the ‘merger’ of the two forms and terms into one.

Chiffonier

In addition to a host of French-descended items, there is one other ‘foreign’ language influence on the Linguistic Atlas ‘wardrobe’ responses worth mentioning. There was one Pennsylvania Dutch speaker who responds to the “wardrobe question” with Kleidereck (German for ‘clothing corner’, another example of loan translation).

History also gives speakers options to use a variety of productive word-making processes, such as blending (creating a portmanteau). One of the blends that we see amid the Atlas responses to each of the case furniture questions is wardroom, which was used exclusively by Gullah speakers, a blending of “ward” from wardrobe with “room”.  Wardroom is a naval term for the ‘officer’s mess’, though I am inclined to think the use of wardroom by Gullah speakers as an independent invention.

Chifforobe is a blend of wardrobe and chiffonier, a form that may reflect function.  A chiffonier (the smaller, slighter stack of drawers) combines with a wardrobe (two tall doors and clothes rack inside) to create the chifforobe, a wider piece with two tall doors, but shelves on one half inside and narrower rack for hanging on the other.

Other blends in use include robeward and sideward.  Between blends like these and the plethora of compounds (such as upright bureau, box wardrobe, etc.), what strikes me here is how productive English speakers are in their naming of household items. The fact that furniture designers (new and old) have also been highly productive has probably further encouraged the creation of names that reflect slight variances in shape and function. The seemingly endless combinations of doors and drawers that the basic ‘wardrobe’ shape can hold have left their mark on the American furniture lexicon.

Blends. Not just for lexical items anymore.

Chester Drawers

What do you call the piece of furniture in your bedroom that has drawers, the place where you keep your socks, underwear, and other small items?

In the 1930s and 40s Linguistic Atlas data, bureau was the most common answer to this question.  These days, the most common answer would be dresser.  Personally, I call this piece a chest of drawers or even just a chest.  The Atlas fieldworkers collected over 35 different terms for this piece of furniture, including sideboard, highboy, chiffonier, commode, dressing table, and stand of drawers.

I’ll be honest, when I first saw the Atlas list, I was concerned that the people they had talked to were, in fact, referring to very different pieces of furniture (I mean, a sideboard?  In the bedroom?).  So I did my own survey and I used pictures.

And guess what.

I got as many ‘weird’ terms with the illustrations as the Atlas guys had gotten with their original questions 60 years before. I felt compelled to figure out why there were so many different names for ‘chest of drawers’.  And that’s when I started to get interested in the way that history leaves us with a lot of different ways to talk about everyday things.

Thus we have the story of Chester Drawers.

Chest

Chest as a word is pretty old (at least in relative terms to English), appearing first in writing in 700CE.  The chest in America began with a hinged lid and was used for the storage of linens and clothes. As conditions in early America improved, cabinetmakers added decorative features such as paneled fronts, painted fronts and short legs. The addition of a wide drawer fitted below the well of the chest created the form of a blanket chest, a form that is still familiar today.  In New England, the blanket chest often had two wide drawers below the boxed well, covered with a lifting top.

Blanket Chest

This basic form continued to change as more drawers were inserted into runners that became part of the structure of the interior of the chest. The drawers filled the well of the chest, making it necessary to change the lid into a fixed top. With this addition of drawers, we find the piece labeled literally as a chest of drawers.

Chest of Drawers

Terms that reflect this same idea are nest of drawers and case of drawers. 

As chests start getting bigger and taller, supports are added either in the form of brackets or feet.  Tall forms on short yet slender legs was called a chiffonier, a term borrowed from French. In some instances, long legs were added to the bottom of the drawered chest, creating the highboy or chest on frame.

Chest on Frame

Chest on frame is a literal moniker; the large, box-shaped drawer section was set on top of an open frame with legs as a base. Also called a highboy (or tallboy in western VA, NC and SC), this tall chest of drawers became very popular in America.

Highboy

Each variation of form signaled a variation in terminology. The chest on chest, or chest upon chest, is literally one slightly smaller chest of drawers stacked upon a larger chest of drawers. (The linen press carries out the same idea, but instead of one chest upon another, a press stacks a small cupboard on top of the larger-dimensioned chest of drawers.  We will return to the offspring of the press when we take up the story of wardrobe.)

Chest on chest

As the demand for decorative features increased, new forms with greatly detailed woodwork and painted decoration emerged.  These “fancy” pieces were often given fancy names. The commode has a front of decorated doors instead of drawers and was intended for use in a dining room or formal sitting room.  The commode moved to the bedroom as decorative features in “private” rooms gained importance.

Commode, borrowed from French, originally denoted a tall, wire-framed headdress worn by fashionable ladies in the late 1600s.  By the first quarter of the 18^th century, commode (in English only) is used as a term for a “procuress” (which is exactly what you think it is: one who procures a prostitute for a gentleman).  It’s not until the late 1700s that commode appears in use as a piece of furniture (most likely, it was reborrowed from French with the new meaning of “elaborate chest of drawers”).

As furniture, the commode was often the bearer of a washbowl and basin (which explains the later semantic shift of the term to ‘toilet bowl’). Another term for the same piece, which was common in the southern Back Country, is washstand or wash hands stand.

During the early 1800s, we see a new role for the sideboard, as it moves out of the kitchen, where it was used for the storage of plates and dishes (a form and function related to, of course, and not at all confusingly, to a piece called a kitchen dresser).  The sideboard comes to be used as both storage and decoration, usually placed in the dining room or living room.  The Back Country term for a sideboard, slaboard, can still be heard in rural parts of North Carolina.

Other new names for forms come from cabinetmaker’s guides from the period, terms that advertise the function of the pieces represented within their pages. We see dressing drawers, dressing chest, dressing case, and even dressing commodes. One cabinetmaker described his piece as perfect for service in the bedroom as a receptacle for clothing, linens, and other dressing “equippage”.

So far, dresser is a term obvious in its absence in the discussion of the evolution of bedroom furniture and dressing accoutrement.  Dresser is a medieval term whose original denotation was an open-shelved sideboard used in the kitchen for the dressing of meats. In Europe, the same piece was called a cupboard in the 15th and 16th c and a kitchen dresser in England in the 19th c. In the mid-17th c, one variation of this form lost its open shelves and resembled a table with long legs and small drawers under the top boards.  In another variation, the piece was filled in with drawers, causing it to resemble a chest. With one form similar to that of a dressing table and another form similar to that of the chest, it is easy to see how the semantic shift from ‘dressing meats’ to ‘dressing a person’ could have been made.

The development of a sibling form, the desk or bureau, mirrors that of the chest. Prior to the late 1600s, American cabinetmakers did not make “desks.” Instead, an upright box coupled with a stool served the function of a writing surface. Prior to 1700, a box with a slanting lid served as a writing surface, sometimes referred to simply as a writing box. After 1700, the bureau desk appeared as a multipurpose form. The piece had three or four drawers beneath a slanted writing surface, often called a slant-front, so that it could function as a desk as well as storage for papers or linens. The form consisted of a set of drawers topped with a movable, flat surface that could be lowered for writing and in the upright position served as a cover for a space filled with small drawers or cubbyhole compartments.

Slant-front bureau, open

Slant-front bureau, closed

Bureau was used originally for the slant front, and later generalized to become the name for the entire piece and for other similar forms.  In the late 17th and early 18th c, a bureau was a desk. Soon, the desk was lifted onto a frame, and the resulting form, desk on frame or desk with stand, was renamed with the French term secretaire, which was later Americanized to secretary.

Eventually, we see an alteration in the form of bureaus, as they come to be made not with a slant-front but with a movable writing surface that, when upright, was flush with the drawer fronts below. When closed, the bureau would look exactly like a chest of drawers. Some pieces had, instead of the slant-front or false top drawer, a board that pulled out from above the first drawer

Flat-front bureau

When not in use, this piece too looked just like a chest of drawers.  These two innovations were probably responsible for the shift in meaning that follows, as the term bureau moves from referencing a piece that functioned as a desk to referencing various forms of the chest of drawers.

Bureau, in this sense, would have been at its heydey in the 30-40s and American speech has since moved on to prefer dresser.  And yet, all of the terms that I have mentioned still float along in American English somewhere (even if it’s just on handwritten antique store price-tags).  I like to think that a collection of terms such as these capture bits and pieces of American social and cultural history.  At the very least, a history such as this one can give us a glimpse of the reasons behind the large number of terms involved in the story of Chester Drawers.

Bacon

Let’s be honest.  If I want to have bacon for breakfast (or for dinner, as we sometimes have “breakfast for dinner” here in the south), I go to the grocery store.  If I think of it enough ahead of time, I go to the farmer’s market-type store, where I can get locally made, smoked bacon.  Either way, the bacon comes to me in narrow, pink slices edged with a little fat, ready to lay down in the frying pan.

But bacon doesn’t start there.

Without going in to (too much) gory detail, let’s look at what our parents or (great) grandparents would have to do to procure bacon and what kinds of regional terms you might still find for the slices of cured pork that go with your eggs.

Late fall or early winter is the traditional hog killin’ time, and this is when young boars or sows (ones without arachnid-run PR firms) might start to worry about their future.  And  we don’t want a worried pig, because the taste of the resulting  meat is negatively affected if the animal gets too ‘excited’ before being butchered, so panic – on the part of the butcher or the swine – should be avoided.  Apparently, an excited pig won’t bleed correctly after being killed – blood collected in flushed skin won’t drain – and that will make the meat underneath taste funny.

In order to have as sedate an animal (victim) as possible, it is common to not feed the pig for the 24 hours that precede the slaughter. It also helps to keep the pig in question isolated for a few days beforehand, which serves to calm (depress) the animal.  When it comes time, you can stun the pig with either a shot from a small caliber gun (or a blow from a big hammer).  After the animal is knocked out, the throat is cut and the carcass is hung upside down to drain the blood.

The draining may take a while and it’s important to be patient because blood left in the carcass sours the meat.  The blood that is drained can be saved to make blood pudding.

After blood slows to dribble, the carcass is lowered into a vat of hot water for a few minutes, long enough to loosen the hair (but not long enough to start cooking the meat).  Then you have to scrape off the hair and scurf (thin layer of membrane on top of the hide) and hang it back up to gut it and skin it.  To skin the pig, you use a couple of natural ‘handles’ that, once cut, can be used to pull off large sections of skin.  The pig’s ears are such a handle.  The pizzle (yes, that is what you think it is) is another.

Lovely.

Once flayed, and if the weather permits, you can hang the carcass outside to cool.  After that, it’s time to go to work.

Butchering a pig in particular is a time-consuming process as practically every part of the pig can be used (“everything but the squeal” they used to say).  Pig skin can be fried and eaten.  The fat around the kidneys is what’s used to make lard.  As anyone who has walked into a rural gas station and seen that big, murky-watered glass jar on the counter can tell you, the pig’s feet can be cooked and pickled.  You can make headcheese.  The jowls can be cured and smoked.  Various trimmings are used to make sausage.  And you can grind up odd parts (ears, tail, excess skin) for scrapple.

We’ll get to regional names (and recipes!) for headcheese and scrapple later on.  For now, we’re just going to look at bacon.

The word bacon ultimately comes from an old Germanic word for “back”, and you see it in Old French also, to mean “back meat”, which makes sense as traditional bacon comes from the back and sides of the pig. (Contemporary bacon comes from the more fatty belly meat.)  Whatever the specific cut, these hunks of meat are cured (salted, dried, smoked – there’s more than one way to cure a pig) and sliced into what we think of as “bacon”.

The Linguistic Atlas survey responses from the 1930s and 40s include terms like breakfast bacon, sliced bacon and breakfast strips, all of which were pretty commonly used across the mid-Atlantic and the south.  What this suggests is that, at least at that time, American English hadn’t yet settled on one generic term for the crispy breakfast sensation we know now as bacon.

And so we see a number of regional terms for ‘bacon’ in the US, terms that reflect different aspects of the bacon-making process.  One such term from the mid Atlantic is middling (or middling meat), a reminder that bacon meat comes from the middle of the pig.

Another regional term from the southern states is streaked bacon (in fact, “streaky bacon” is a British term for American-style bacon), a nod to the fact that meat from the pig’s belly is visibly streaked with fat.

Some ‘bacon names’ come from various measurements for bacon, such as flitch and rasher.

Pennsylvanians might know bacon as flitch, a name that reflects what is actually another ‘old word’ in the big scheme of things, as it may be related to a more general Germanic root that meant “fleck” or “flake”.  Flitch originally referred a slab of unsliced bacon, but narrowed for these speakers to stand for the slices as well.

Rasher is a term that also shows up in Linguistic Atlas data that, in terms of bacon-talk, originally referred to a serving (3-4 slices) of bacon and is probably descended from the verb “to rash”, which, in the 14^th and 15^th centuries, could be used to mean “to cut or slash”.

Another interesting regionalism is biltong (pronounced “bill-ton”), a borrowing from South African Dutch, bil “buttock” plus tong “tongue” (yeah, don’t think about that one too much).  This is a term used in South Africa as a name for ‘strips of lean meat (antelope, buffalo, etc.) dried in the sun’.  The Linguistic Atlas has a speaker in South Carolina using this term in the 1930s.

More about variation in the kitchen soon. . .

Cornbread

The Linguistic Atlas survey of the middle Atlantic and Southern states collected over 330 terms for cornbreads.  I love cornbread, but that’s a lot of different names for bread made from cornmeal.

Why so many terms?

History.

Again.

Corn traveled up from South America into New Mexico and then up through the plains to the east coast, arriving in the New England area around 700 BCE. By the year 1300, corn had been a successful crop on the east coast for a long time.  Native Americans had dozens of different preparations for corn and, specifically, two main ways of making corn-based bread. One preparation made use of fresh corn kernels while another preparation called for cornmeal. Fresh corn could be pounded or grated to release its milk, the watery, crushed remnants mixed with eggs (and perhaps other ingredients such as green onions or oysters) to make a thick paste. Cornmeal was the result of drying or roasting the corn kernels and then grinding them into a fine meal.  Cornmeal was mixed with water, salt, and animal fat to make a batter. Depending on the amount of liquid added, the resulting ‘batter’ could be of varying consistencies. By either preparation, a thin paste could be used to make thinner, flatter cakes, while a thicker mixture could be treated as ‘dough’ and shaped by hand into loaves. Sometimes the loaves were placed on top of a flat surface beside the fire (on a stone or board) and sometimes the loaves were wrapped (in cornshucks or cabbage leaves) and buried in the ashes of a fire. In any case, wrapped or not, the charred outside of the bread would later need to be scraped or washed away. In addition to larger cakes or loaves, small bits of the cornmeal batter could also be boiled in water until cooked.

The Native American bread makers had a variety of names and terms for their breads and for the maize plants. Several of these native terms are purported to have given rise to terms for cornbread, including different Algonquian languages’ names for baked cornmeal, suppone, appone, and apan.

Romanticized tales of the first pilgrim-oriented Thanksgiving aside, the Native Americans did share corn harvests and corn growing methods with early English colonists. This begins what we can observe as the first of three cornbread ‘eras’. During the first era, after initial contact with the native population, colonial cornbreads were made with the ingredients and techniques of native bakers, making, for example, hearth cakes or ashcakes (and its derivatives ash bread, ash pone, ash hoecake, and ashes cake).

In this era, we also see that pudding, as a looser culinary construction, could be baked into a dense bread. Native Americans’ use of pulverized corn, dried or fresh, mixed with water, as the basis of their various cornbreads is something colonists would have perceived as “pudding”. The colonial puddings, which at first had to be stirred over the fire, later developed into mixtures that were baked in crusts or boiled in bags. These hasty puddings required no stirring and therefore could be made more quickly and closer to dinnertime. Thus, a single preparation could yield two dishes, porridge (or mush, if served in a ‘less fancy’ manner and without adding milk) and bread. Here we see a good example of the incorporation of European cooking techniques into an early understanding of indigenous ingredients and techniques, and this mixture represents the transition into the second cornbread era.

The second era can be characterized as an era of ‘hybridization’, as colonists incorporate additional ingredients and techniques to indigenous dishes, most likely in an attempt to approximate ‘homeland’ baking. This second era of cornmeal-based breads included the addition of ingredients such as flour, baking powder, baking soda, eggs, and buttermilk, yielding dishes such as battercakes, eggbread, and corn cakes. We also see the addition of meat scraps to cornbreads, yielding dishes such as scrapple, ponhaws (spelled variously, including “ponhaus”, which demonstrates more clearly its Pennsylvania Dutch origins), goody bread, and cracklin’ bread.  Evidence of this era is bountiful in the early American publications about cooking and ‘housewifery’. By the time we see these first American cookbooks published, the recipes reflect the different grains, leaveners, wet ingredients, and cooking techniques that had been thrown into the mix.

Colonists’ initial attempts at making cornbread using traditional English cooking techniques must have been frustrating. Bread made with cornmeal just will not rise, even if yeast is added. Wheat-flour bread rises easily with the addition of yeast because of the high gluten content of its proteins, the dough becomes elastic and when the yeast releases carbon dioxide, the dough can expand and trap that gas inside, keeping the texture of the resulting bread light and airy. Less gluten in cornmeal means the mixture is less elastic during the cooking process so that the bubbles from the fermenting yeast simply dissipate, resulting in a flatter, more dense, bread. Leavening agents can be added in the form of a carbonate (from whipped eggs) or from combining an acid and an alkali; the resulting bread will rise if one works quickly after adding such leavening. The Native Americans used wood ash, lime and lye as leaveners. The colonists had their own versions: potash (“pot ash” from leaching wood ashes in a pot) could be used with fat to make soap or it could be mixed with molasses or sour milk to leaven bread. Potash (potassium bicarbonate) was later refined through recrystallization into pearlash. Both potash and pearlash were also referred to saleratus (from Latin sal aeratus “aerated salt”). In time, we see the addition of sodium carbonate (“soda ash”, developed in France in the late 1700s) and, finally, sodium bicarbonate (“baking soda”, developed by bakers in New York in 1846).

The third era of cornbread represents an emphasis on innovation, technology, and on ‘culinary’ arts. As we move beyond the ‘colonial’ era, we see the addition of cornmeal-based bread terms that reflect the different cooking preparations and baking vessels now available. There is now a range of pans and tins available for shaping small breads into muffins, popovers, sticks, and gems in addition to the larger loaves and cakes. There is also a wider range of grains available with which to make breads, including wheat, barley, oats, rice, and rye. This range is reflected in the numerous recipes found in early American cookbooks for dishes such as brown bread (generally, any mixed-grain bread), thirded bread, or corn light bread (half cornmeal, half flour). Cornbreads also see the addition of pumpkin, sweet potato, and other non-Anglo European ingredients (pumpkin and sweet potatoes following a similar route as maize up from South America). These additions lead one food historian to assert that, in post-colonial South Carolina, “culinary splendors were Asian and African in origin and African-American in execution”, a statement that reflects the popularity of rice and rice flour in antebellum kitchens and the influence of African slaves on the culinary traditions of the American South. It is also surmised that the use of a flat, broad hoe as a beside-the-fire cooking surface was also an African contribution to the cornbread complex, resulting in literally-named hoecake.

Today, the traditional Southern dish frequently placed at the pinnacle of cornbread evolution is spoonbread. Often cited as having the “humble suppone as its ancestor”, this dish has been described as the “apotheosis” of cornbread and has been referred to by Charles Wilson as “a testimony to the perfectability of humankind”. Spoonbread is a souflee-like pudding that developed as a mush bread or batter bread that, due to its consistency, must be served with a spoon. One Low Country version is Awendaw cornbread, named for an Indian settlement outside of Charleston, South Carolina.

With cornbread, we see the adoption of Native American names and techniques, the hybridization of Native ingredients and European cooking techniques, and the explosion of cooking modes, vessels, and preparations that follows.

Know what this is called?

Do you know what this is?

Maybe it looks a little strange to have just one.  How about this?

Just in case you’re still not sure.  How about a little context?

That’s better.  So, what do you call those things?  These days, the most common name for these would be andirons, but there are a lot of regional terms for these as well.  Some of them are not as common now, maybe your (great) grandparents might have used them.  Linguists who study dialects love andirons (and dragonflies) because of all the different names that are used for these things by people in different places.

In slightly more linguisticky terms, andiron is a great example of regional vocabulary differences in American English.  In a survey conducted for the Linguistic Atlas in the 1930-40s, speakers in the Atlantic states gave a number of different responses to the question: What do you call the things you use to hold the wood in the fireplace?

The most common answers were andirons, fire dogs, dog irons, and handirons. With family in Appalachia, I was already familiar with the terms fire dogs and dog irons. In fact, I’ve always liked those terms and the visual image. When I talk about the Linguistic Atlas with my classes, I always the andirons and fire dogs example and I usually end up drawing something like the following to explain to my students why it makes sense that an andiron might be called a “fire dog” :

Yeah, I’ve yet to have a class that truly appreciated my artistic efforts, but thanks to the magic of the internet, I can better illustrate my point with images such as these, literal, “dog irons”.

Ahem.  Perhaps the internet would be of use in my class as well. . . At any rate, there were other (less common, but still very fun) responses to the ‘andiron question’.  Such as dog hobs, pig irons (I’ve yet to try a sketch of those), sadirons, fire basket, fire horse (don’t worry, I wouldn’t dare), and Feuerhund.

Feuerhund?

In case you’re wondering, Feuerhund is not the German word for “andiron”.  It’s a literal translation (or loan translation) of “fire dog” into Pennsylvania German by one speaker who spoke “Pennsylvania Deutsch” and lived in an area surrounded by English-speaking folks who used firedog.  Feuerhund is word-level example of the coalescence of cultures that has been taking place in America since its inception.

Chare

Stool

Ah, the lowly stool.  It seems such a simple thing – a support for feet, bars, and toads – but its beginnings are much more lofty.  From ancient civilizations through Medieval Europe the stool communicates power.  Having a seat up off the ground was a symbol of the elevated the status of the sitter. With conjoined X-bars as a base, the fold-stool (perhaps more exotic looking in its older spellings faudesteuil and fauteuil), served as throne for kings and princes and priests.  These stool-like thrones collapsed flat so as to be portable, so that the physical elevation of the high-ranking sitter could occur anytime, anywhere.

 Stool has a probable Germanic root, a root which also appears in an etymological cousin stol, Gothic for ‘throne’.  The stool-throne connection highlights the notion that stools were for important people.  An early ‘throne’ was what we think of as a ‘stool’ today, a seat for one person with no arms or back, set upon three or four legs.  Initially in English, the Germanic stool was used as a synonym of throne.  Oddly, stool also carries with it the (now obsolete) sense of “lair of a hare”, found in the 1607 work History of Four-Footed Beasts.

The fold part of fold-stool may not have been entirely a reference to the collapsibility of the seat.  Fold as a noun holds earth-related senses in addition to the ones associated with the verb ‘to overlay’, as it is related to the Old English word for field; in fact, one obsolete sense of fold is “the surface of the earth” (the ground).  This sense leads to later, more familiar, senses of fold as enclosed spaces, such as pens for sheep.   And rabbits.   A 1325 treatise “Names for Hare” contains the entry foldsitter, defined as a hare “who sits on the ground” (as opposed to a stool).

Over time, fold-stools became highly decorated and, in cases where the necessity for a light and portable seat was alleviated, high backs were attached to the seat to form the chair, a heavier and even more ornate seat.  From the stool and the chair spring benches, settles, and upholstered pieces (such as armchairs and sofas).  That means that the corduroy sectional I am currently using as my office is in fact descended from royalty.

Parlor

As a child, I often wondered what the deal was with the living room (or, as my sister and I called it, the forbidden room, the room of mystery and wonder, perhaps also the room of great and magnificent hidden treasure).  As a parent, I now understand the futile desire for a room that could be presentable on short notice; in other words, a room not strewn with stuffed animals, legos, and hard plastic dinosaurs.  These days, a knock on the door inspires a frantic look-around our living room area, to see what kind of disaster will be there to represent our family.  It kindles a slight nostalgia for the days when my mom would open the door and confidently turn to lead a guest into our untouched, uncluttered, un-lived-in living room.

What do you call the room you use to receive guests?  And is that the same room where you hang out with your family?

The general American understanding of (and need for) a room for visiting with company has changed.  This change is reflected in the terms we have for ‘parlor’ (such as living room, family room, great room, sitting room).

Parlor itself is from French parler (“to speak”), ultimately from Latin parlatorium, used initially as a term for a private room, especially one within a convent or monastery.  Later, parlor moves out of the confessional as it comes to be used for any room used to receive visitors for conversation.

While the American colonists probably had plenty to talk about, they wouldn’t have been able to converse much in private at home, as the earliest colonial homes didn’t have parlors.  These houses had no ‘rooms’ at all; the bottom floor was like a medieval hall, one room in which all aspects of daily living took place.  Additions were made to the initial structure of these early American houses as families grew and accumulated more ‘stuff’. Rooms were tacked on to the back and sides, but the hall remained in the front as a place where guests could be entertained. This front room was also referred to as the best room (as well as parlor or chamber). This room was the space for sleeping (sometimes for everyone, sometimes just for parents) and the place where valuables were displayed.  One of the most valuable possessions on display in the parlor was the bed; the family’s “best bed” was in the “best room”, and in some homes, the display was such the “best” that no one slept there at all.

Architectural drawings, commissioned as part of the WPA under the Historic American Building Survey (HABS), show us how early Americans divided up their home spaces.  The HABS folks took photos and drew floorplans for buildings in New England (and it’s good that they did; most of these houses have since been demolished).  Although the room labels would be contemporary to the survey, not to the homes’ actual construction, these drawings provide valuable information about early American home life.

Allow me an example.

HABS includes this 1740 example of a saltbox house, a floorplan that illustrates a chimney-centric American home, with the parlor on one side and the sitting room on the other.  Note that you have to go through the parlor to get to the kitchen and through the sitting room to get to the dining room, which means that, in this house, the sitting room was probably the more formal of the two rooms (you wouldn’t drag dinner guests through the family’s “parlor” and then the kitchen to take them to the dining room).  This simply shows that the terms parlor and sitting room were interchangeable and could each be applied to formal and informal spaces (probably during colonial times as well as during the WPA era).

This general plan – of keeping a public spaces in the front – is reinforced by the onset of American Federal style (which was inspired by classical Greek design), in which the home’s façade faces the road and some sort of entryway separates the front of house from living spaces in back.  Federal houses also introduce the idea of a central hallway, which makes it unnecessary to walk through one room to get to another.

As houses gain rooms, there is a move toward the ‘individualization and privatization’ of sleeping (in other words, family members start to sleep separately and alone), resulting in the removal of beds from the parlor during the early 1800s.   Victorian discomfort with sex and sexuality takes hold shortly thereafter and the bed moves upstairs, out of the parlor for good, taking its aura of undressing and sex and other ‘inappropriate’ things fully away from public view.

Sitting room and living room become even more popular as designations as they now more literally describe what goes on in the space.  Bigger houses had a sitting room and a parlor, one for the family and one to serve as a memory palace, a room for the display of family artifacts. Descriptions of Victorian parlors note that women ‘cultivated’ or ‘tended’ these family museums as if they were gardens. The memory parlor was a room-sized scrapbook, and a signal of refinement and gentility in Victorian society.

This 1878 Victorian stick house has the parlor front and center architecturally, acting as the gateway to the dining room.  The Victorian house is set up for entertaining and display.

Moving toward the close of the 19^th century, we see cultural changes take place that change how people viewed the home and the role of the home.  The home shifts slowly from ‘showpiece’ to ‘retreat’.  The parlor moves from being a place for special occasions to being a place for spending time with children, and ‘special occasions’ move out of the house.  For example, instead of a family using their own parlor for the rituals surrounding death, such as viewings, visitations, and funerals, these ceremonies were moved to funeral parlors.

This 1925 plan for “The Madison” has a front door that enters directly into a large living room. The living room feeds into a hallway that leads to the dining room, as well as a bedroom and kitchen in the back.  This plan hints at the cultural shift taking place.  There is a separate dining room, but having the front door open into the living room shows a loosening of the strictures that bound the front rooms as strictly ‘for show’. I know I wouldn’t want to traipse my kids through a fancy room every time I entered or left the house, especially if it was a room I wanted to keep clean.

In the time between 1880 and 1930, we see the push into the modern era, and with this push, we find a shift from parlors (public spaces) to living rooms (private, family spaces).  We see this in the bungalow craze of the early 1900s, which marks a trend toward informal, multipurpose floor plans with a living/dining area (a combination that replaces the parlor and hall).  The important aspect of the bungalow is the blending of public and private spaces.  Merged living and dining areas became more and more popular as American culture shifts away from formal rooms to rooms that are multifunctional.

The parlor disappears.  Why?  Probably a combination of factors: tastes, pragmatics (who wants to maintain a room that no one is allowed to be in?), and the increasing desire to put family in the forefront of social life.

During the 1950-1970s, the ‘open-concept’ home gains a permanent place in America’s home landscape, characterized by large areas of uninterrupted space.  Open floorplans persist as a culturally desirable layout (as any episode of House Hunters will demonstrate).  Everyone wants a large family room that flows out of the kitchen and fewer families feel the need for a formal dining area, tending instead to prefer eat-in kitchens or ones with a breakfast nook.

In the end, multipurpose rooms win out over single-function spaces, especially those whose function is simply to ‘appear’ genteel.  In a way, our home spaces have come full circle.  Early American homelife took place in a central room – for the most part, families ate, talked, and slept together.  Though no longer out of necessity, today’s homes again have a central gathering-space, a common area for socializing with family and with guests.  There’s not as much of a division between public and private spaces these days.  And, in our highly mobile society, where a lot of us live a long way from our families, our ideas of ‘family’ and ‘friend’ seem to have merged also.  In our houses and our social lives, “multipurpose” serves us well.

The ‘home’ part

What do you think of when you think of home? I think of a quiet spot in front of an old grandfather clock where the floorboards had warped and pushed up a bit, a spot in our small foyer laid with rainbows cast by the beveled mirror in the neighboring (off-limits) living room.

So your definition probably differs from mine. But that’s just the point, right? How can you define home? Home is an old word.

Home shows up in early Old English writings, used in much the same way as we use it now, to mean ‘a place where a person or animal dwells’. Other Germanic languages have similar words – Old Icelandic has heimr, which denotes a mythical dwelling and was used as a word for ‘earth, world, universe’. Going back even further, home shares an Indo-European root with the Old Irish cóim and Welsh cu, both of which mean ‘beloved, dear’. Our homes are dear to us. And they are the world we live in, our universe, as it were.

We see the importance of home in early English place names. The common suffix –ham was often paired with a family name to denote ‘home of this important family’. Thus we have Billingham as ‘home of the Billings’. Or Fincham as ‘home of the finches’ – remember, I said ‘place where person or animal dwells’. We have also Shipdham (yes, ‘home of sheep’) in Norfolk, England.

As an aside inspired by my ex-Army, Arabic-teaching husband, in Arabic, the word for ‘home’ is bayt, and it means ‘movable tent made out of goat hair’, but more importantly (and less stereotypically), bayt is also the term for a verse in poetry. In Arabic, poetry is the home and home is in poetry.

Ah, so now we see the home part . . . I’m not touching the word bit.