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.

 

Homewords

What do you call this piece of furniture?

I call it a chest of drawers.  My grandmother called it a bureau.  Maybe you call it a dresser.  Or, better yet, maybe you say chester drawers.  It’s funny how English has a lot of different words for one thing.  Why do we have all of these names for one piece of furniture?

History.

I realize that we all grow up surrounded by history, but I mean it more literally than most.  My childhood home was a house built in 1826, located in the middle of the historic district Old Salem, a popular tourist destination in North Carolina.  It was a big house that two front doors (as the colonial home of the town physician, there was a separate entrance that opened straight into the room that was his office) and narrow hallways bisecting the main and top floors.  The house boasted a large, formal living room that ran the length of the structure, a room that my sister and I weren’t supposed to play in.  My parents bought and sold antiques, which means our house was also filled with a lot of things my sister and I weren’t supposed to touch.  Somehow, through the years, my sister and I managed to break only two things: a wooden bowl (my sister used it as a Sit-n-Spin) and a glass lampshade (toppled by the blanket streaming behind me as I ran down the hall upstairs).  Visitors to the house often commented that our house had a museum-like aura, though it always seemed pretty normal to me.

The way I think about it now, all houses are like museums, the things in them and the words we have for those things catalog the history and culture of the people who live (and have lived) there. So, what I want to do with this Homewords blog is explore the vocabulary of the household by looking at the ways that words for household items paint a portrait of American culture.  On one level, I’m looking at the various words we use for our rooms and for the objects found within them, but, on a deeper level, I’m also looking at the relationship between words and history and culture.  I am hoping that the entries that follow will help tell the story of the social and cultural histories that inhabit the things around us, histories that are reflected in the array of names we have for the everyday objects that share our homes.

We’ll look at names for rooms, furniture terms, and terms for various food items, spending time on their history as well as the various names we attach to them.

I’m quite qualified to talk about these topics, since, in addition to growing up in a museum (well, almost), I am now a linguist and teach at a University in the deep South.  I study language variation and one of my favorite topics is regional variation in vocabulary.  I’ve written on this topic academically, focusing on terms for dresser, wardrobe, and cornbread.  And now I’d like to write about this topic more generally (and less formally).

I hope you learn something from these explorations and I look forward to learning from your comments as well!