Bumbershoots

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leanne in Mission Viejo, California.

Welcome!

Hi, Leanne, welcome to the program.

Hi, thank you so much.

I just wanted to tell you that we had a funny little thing here in our office one day when it was looking like it was going to pour.

I looked out the window and said, and me without my bumper chute.

And the other office mates looked at me like I had two heads.

They said, what do you mean bumper chute?

And I said, well, you know, my umbrella.

I said, haven’t you ever heard of that word before?

And they said, no, they hadn’t heard of it.

So I looked it up in the dictionary.

I said, I think it’s a real word.

And we’ve been using it in my household for, you know, the last 50 years.

Nowhere it came from.

So then the next day, another storm was coming in, and I said, oh, nuts, and me without my broly.

Just another one.

You just keep your coworkers on their toes, don’t you?

Yeah, so we decided to make a list of words that we need to know,

And we’ve all sort of chipped in and added a word or two here and there

To this little list that we have, and we’re all trying to improve our vocabularies.

Nice.

Bumbershoot at the top of the list, huh?

And Broly is next.

Yeah, so everybody’s adopted those two in the office?

Exactly.

So everyone wanted to know where I heard it, and I said,

Gee, I have really no idea.

No idea at all.

Do you or did your parents use it?

I imagine so.

My grandmother was British, and it sounds like something that would be a British word.

And also, I think it might have come from Dickens, and she was a librarian, so she read a great deal, and we talked funny in our family.

Well, Brawley, yeah, I think that one comes from, doesn’t it come from university slang?

Yeah, definitely.

It’s more common in the UK and the Commonwealth countries.

It’s short for umbrella.

V-R-O-L-L-Y.

Raleigh.

Definitely not in Americanism, although Americans might know it.

Bumbershoot, though, that’s more American, right?

Yes.

And you can find that one more than 100 years ago recorded in different lists of slang and dialects.

And there are a lot of variations, actually, on Bumbershoot, right?

There’s a list in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

They’re all very similar.

Blunder shoot, brumber shoot,

Bumbler shoot, bumble shoot,

Bumper shoot, bumpter shoot, and

Bum shoot.

Oh, come on now.

And don’t forget bumberrell.

Yeah, I think I’ve seen

Bumberrell on it too. But it just kind of shows

As we talk about on the show repeatedly

When you have all those variations in a word

It usually means that it’s primarily transmitted

By voice and not through reading

Or learning in school. The theory on

Bumber shoot is that the bumper part comes

From the same root as umbra, which means shadow in Latin, right?

And just kind of put a B on there because it sounds funnier, right?

It’s a jocular word.

It’s used almost always to entertain someone else.

It’s not the kind of thing that you’ll find usually used in a serious tome or anything like that.

Right, just like you did.

Yeah.

And the chute part probably is related to the chute and parachute.

Parachutes have been used long before the airplane era.

During all kinds of periods of hot balloon exploration, the parachute became an unknown thing.

And besides a variety of other words with a C-H-U-T-E in them.

Although this is spelled B-U-M-B-E-R-S-H-O-O-T.

Different spelling there.

Yeah.

But in any case, so there’s strong etymological roots there.

Pretty natural kind of creation of a word.

It is definitely a fun word, wouldn’t you say?

It is a fun word.

And I think we have lots of fun words in the English language.

It is a beautiful language.

And certainly it is an evolving language.

Hey, Leanne, this was a lot of fun.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bumbershoot.

You know, you mentioned parachutes, and in the UK, brawleyhop, did you see that?

No.

Brawleyhop is a jump made with a parachute.

Oh, very interesting.

Yeah.

What’s the strange word that you got caught using?

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