Creemees

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Russell from Burlington, Vermont.

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

What’s up, buddy?

Well, I have a question about one of my very favorite words, one of my very, very favorite things in the entire world, which is what we in Vermont call creamies. And they call soft-serve ice cream in Vermont creamy. And there’s nothing better on a hot summer day than a real maple creamy from Vermont.

But I’ve noticed that when you travel to New York State or New Hampshire or Massachusetts or Quebec, they never call it that. I’ve even been to a creamy stand that had a translation that was near the border, and it said creamy, and then in parentheses, soft serve ice cream, near the New York border.

So I’m wondering, how would that happen? How a word can follow the state line so closely and where it comes from?

And Russell, how are you spelling creamy?

Well, I usually see it spelled C-R-E-E hyphen or dash M-E-E, but I’ve sometimes seen it C-R-E-A-M dash E-E.

How’s it served? On a cone or in a bowl or both?

Either way.

Okay, so this is basically like soft-serve ice cream, right?

It is. It’s pretty much soft-serve. Traditionally, they’ll use a commercial mix, but they’ll put it in real Vermont maple syrup if it’s maple flavored.

Oh, okay. You still have all the other flavors that, you know, you get it.

I have heard that some Vermonters believe that the maple creamy is the epitome of the creamy, and it’s the one, if it’s on the menu, that you should automatically get. It’s the creme de la creemies.

Absolutely.

Okay. So it’s no different from if I went to Dairy Queen in Kentucky?

Except that you’re getting it in Vermont.

Except that I’m getting it in Vermont, and possibly with maple syrup, but not necessarily.

I’m liking that. I haven’t had that before. That sounds outstanding.

But your larger question is the one that I want to answer, Russell. Why did it stick to Vermont? And I think we have an answer for that, or some kind of answer.

No kidding. It is kind of astonishing that you can find geopolitical borders in the world that don’t align with, say, a river or a mountain or any other kind of physical obstruction and find that the language on this arbitrary line is different on one side of the line from the other.

And there’s a reason for this. We stick to our communities and we are conscious at all times of who we are, where we’re from, and where our center of gravity is. We gravitate toward the center of our area rather than the edge of our area. And we become more like the people that we’re already like. And I know that sounds kind of circular, but that is exactly what it is. It is a self-reinforcing loop of behavior.

You can find this at the Canadian-American border. Absolutely. You can go just find the border and you’ll be astonished that on one side of the border, even in the states that aren’t particularly French, or provinces that aren’t particularly French-speaking, you will find on the Canadian side, it feels Canadian. And on the American side, it feels American. There’s a lot of reasons for this that have to do with commerce. For example, is it Tim Hortons? Tim Hortons isn’t really going to appear south of the border, right? Yep. And American chains won’t appear north of the border and so on and so forth.

Well, are you saying that calling them creamies is sort of like a matter of linguistic civic pride, sort of in the same way that youpers will say, holy wah, and they sort of do it maybe in a self-conscious kind of way?

It could be, but it also could be unselfconscious. It’s the thing where you’re like, oh, inside, in order to feel like a Vermonter, I say the word creamy.

That’s it. And you might not even think about it. You just adopt the behavior of other people whom you want to be seen as allied with, right? That’s the way we behave. We want to be a part of the larger group. And this kind of term fits perfectly into that. We adopt the language of the people that we want to be like.

And I don’t want to be seen as if I’m from New Hampshire. I want to be seen as if I’m from Vermont. So I will use all the different expressions that Vermonters use.

How did we do, Russell?

That was great.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

But that regional language, just to kind of summarize, the language that belongs to a place is incredibly common. There’s tons of it, particularly with food words. There’s the speedy, for example, S-P-I-E-D-I-E, in northern New York that’s a kind of sausage. It really is regional, and that word just doesn’t exist in the rest of the United States for that particular kind of sausage.

Yeah, that’s the way a lot of people discover differences in dialect, right?

Right, right. We start with the food words, and we move on from there.

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