Couch, Sofa, Davenport, and Chesterfield

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vince from Norristown, Pennsylvania.

Welcome to the show, Vince. What can we do for you?

Well, I was listening to your show and I was curious about the word couch versus sofa, whether it was a regional thing or not. I also know my grandmother used the word Davenport. I don’t know anybody else who’s ever used that word, but I don’t know where that came from. Also, I know there’s, for example, there’s couch potato, and I also know that couch is sometimes used as a verb, but I was just curious as to whether it was a reasonable thing or what the origin of those two or three words are.

And you’re in Pennsylvania?

Yes.

And what do you say?

I think it’s interchangeable. I think generally I would say couch. This is a super complicated question to answer because we have all these different terms and plus a whole bunch more that you haven’t mentioned. And it’s only an hour-long show, so I’m going to just kind of skim across the top of this. I do want to talk about Davenport for a second. You said it was your grandmother who used Davenport?

My grandmother and maybe my great-aunt, her sisters, they would refer to it as the Davenport.

Yeah, so this is kind of like a couch, basically a couch, although some people do make a distinction. One thing that immediately leaps out is that our British listeners are going, that’s a couch because in the UK, a Davenport could be a writing desk. It’s not a couch-like thing at all. Also, there are other kinds of Davenport, such as a Devon or Devonette or a Devino, which was a brand name for a time of a kind of Davenport. So all these different kind of, they’re just different.

The overall message is that couch is winning out throughout North America, Canada, and the United States. Couch is beating up on the rest of these terms. Sofa is a strong second, but it’s still second. Couch over the last three, four decades has kind of come to the fore. Now, I know you mentioned some other terms. We talk about sofa beds. We don’t talk about couch beds.

That’s true.

But in those idiomatic expressions of the compounds, we don’t kind of count those. When we’re talking about the standalone words, couch is winning. And it doesn’t have anything to do with couch potato. That didn’t make it win. That’s just a coincidence there.

So is it a north versus south thing? Is it all across the country?

No. Davenport, though, Davenport is the only one of these that really had a hugely regional aspect to it. Davenport was fairly common throughout the United States, although not in the South and not really in the North Atlantic. But pretty much everywhere else, Davenport was used. But it is really fading. There are still people who say Davenport before you get angry and want to send me an email or call angrily on your telephone. The Davenport Society. But I got to tell you, if you say Davenport.

Davenport, Iowa.

If you say Davenport for a couch-like piece of furniture, you’re probably over 60.

Probably.

Even older than that. And in Canada, there was always the term Chesterfield, by the way, which is never all that common in the United States, but that’s faded. Maybe people who were born before 1945 still use it, but Chesterfield is almost completely gone now. There is a book I want to recommend to you, and it covers mostly the mid-Atlantic states, but it’s fantastic. It’s by Alison Burkett. It’s called Language and Material Culture. It is about the words we use for the things in our homes, the words for the rooms themselves. We think of ourselves as being in one culture. We are not one culture. We have lots of different words from state to state, region to region, geography to geography. We talk differently and we describe our homes differently.

And what’s the name of that book?

It’s called Language and Material Culture. It’s by Alison Burkett, B-U-R-K-E-T-T-E.

Hey, thanks so much for calling.

Oh, you’re very welcome.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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