A listener in Weathersfield, Vermont, remembers going on car trips as a young child and wondering why, toward the end of the day, her parents would be on the lookout for motels with “bacon seed.” This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Bacon Seed”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.
I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
I have an email here from Catherine King. She lives in Wethersfield, Vermont, and she’s writing us about bacon seed.
Bacon seed?
Yeah.
What is bacon seed? Can you guess what it is?
This is a prank you pull. You say, I’m going to go out to the yard and plant some bacon.
I like that.
No. Well, let me just read her email. As a young child, summers always meant long car trips to visit relatives. Come late afternoon, my parents and older siblings would begin to scan for a motel to spend the night. I remember being utterly baffled why they always looked for ones with bacon seed and always passed by the ones that didn’t have any.
She misunderstood the word vacancy.
Vacancy, yeah.
Bacon seed, vacancy. Yeah, and she said what it took to figure it out was another road trip after I’d learned to read.
That definitely was an aha moment. And I really enjoyed that because I think of, you know, when you’re a little kid and you’re just at that point where you hear words but you don’t know exactly. You can’t differentiate them. Or you’re learning a foreign language. And at first it’s a wall of words and then you begin to see little individual bricks like that.
Now that my son is nine, he’s lost a lot of those cute little expressions. I really miss those. I mean, he reads to himself all the time, and there’s constant correction happening. But we still remember the cute little things that he said, like lemonade was limolade. And it wasn’t T-Rex as in the dinosaur. It was Team Rex.
Team Rex. Because there was a bunch of people all rallying behind Rex. Go Rex.
Those are cute, right?
They’re adorable.
And you miss those. And they do go away once literacy sets in. But the prize of literacy is worth the price of losing those cute expressions. And you’ll always carry those cute expressions with you.
Yeah, we do. They’re family jokes, and they’ll probably be until he has his own kids.
We’d love to hear about yours. You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send any story about language you like to words@waywordradio.org.
