Bascarts

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jamie from Nashville.

Well, hi, Jamie. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. But I am originally from Louisville, Kentucky. So hi, Martha.

Yay, Louisville!

Well, my question is, I grew up calling a shopping cart a bass cart.

And, I mean, it makes sense. It’s a basket. It’s a shopping cart.

But I’ve only met one other person that called it a bass cart,

And she was from New Albany, which is just right across the river.

And I wondered if I’m alone in bass carting.

I hear them called buggies and, you know, all kinds of different things.

This is one of those everyday objects that linguists love to ask about

When they’re going around and collecting dialect.

I grew up calling it a shopping cart,

And that’s what the vast majority of people in this country call it.

But if you look at these dialect maps, it’s really cool because some people call it a grocery cart.

In the south, that’s where the buggy name is really concentrated.

In fact, I can remember going into a Piggly Wiggly in North Carolina, going into the Piggly Wiggly and being shocked by the buggies.

You know, I just I never heard that expression. But and on the coast, people call them supermarket trolleys. And in the northeast, especially, you hear shopping carriage or shopping wagon.

So it’s kind of odd, isn’t it?

It is.

Yeah.

But Baskart, I can tell you I’m not exactly as sure where that is common because I haven’t even seen it on the dialect maps. But, Jamie, I can assure you that it is in Merriam-Webster’s unabridged dictionary.

So you didn’t just make it up.

Good.

Good.

And I was listening to a previous show, and I say tumps as well. I just wanted to let you know.

Oh, very good.

Tumped over.

I’m from Louisville, and I tump things over as well.

Well, Jamie, I hope you don’t tump over your buggy.

Me too.

Or your bass cart.

That could be messy.

I’m going to tump my bass cart over.

What did you call them growing up, Grant, in Missouri?

A shopping cart only.

Nothing else.

I didn’t even know until I became an adult that there was anything else in the world that you might call them except for a shopping cart.

Very boring.

Well, maybe we can find out who else calls it a bass cart and draw some conclusions.

B-A-S-C-A-R-T, right?

That’s right, yeah.

A mix of basket plus cart.

And I find some uses from 1949 and early 1950s, even in Ann Arbor, Michigan and a few other places.

And not much else to be said about it except to me, and this is strictly a guess, it has the air of a brand name.

And I wonder if there was a grocery store provider who made these carts, and that’s the name that they smacked on them, and they sold them to stores around the country.

And that’s how the name spread because those kinds of blends at that period were not that common where you take two words and mash them together.

Could well be.

I do have family from Michigan, from that area, so maybe I picked it up from them, too.

Interesting.

Well, we’ll ask our listeners.

All right.

I look forward to hearing what they say.

Okay.

Well, thanks for calling, Jamie.

Okay.

Thanks, guys.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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