Davenports

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Rachel, and I’m calling from Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Rachel. Welcome to the show. Baraboo, Wisconsin.

Yeah.

If we came to Baraboo, what would you show us?

Well, there’s a Circus World Museum here that’s pretty popular. It’s where the Ringling Brothers, I think, made their winter camp.

Oh, their winter camp?

So I think that’s Baraboo’s claim to fame. It’s about an hour north of Madison.

Wait a minute, the Ringling Brothers spent the winters there and the summers in Florida?

I believe so, yeah.

What’s wrong with this picture? Okay, all right.

Well, welcome to the show, Rachel. What can we do for you?

Thank you. Well, I was curious about the word Davenport. My grandmother always called her couch a Davenport, and I wondered where that came from and if there’s a difference between the two things and just what its origins were.

And what do you call it?

Do you still call it a couch?

No, I call it a couch.

Do you sofa?

No, not too often.

I think my family does. But my grandmother came from Oklahoma, Enid, Oklahoma, and she was born there just as it had become a state in 1907. And so I didn’t know if it was sort of a southern thing or I know nothing about the word. And I recall asking her, and I think she said, well, this is just what I’ve always called it.

Well, that would fit the time frame because, Rachel, there was a furniture company in Massachusetts around that time that made Davenports, and it was the A.H. Davenport Furniture Company.

Oh.

So it seems to be a trade name, and sort of like Frigidaire and Fridge, it went on to become just a regular term.

But was it called couch at the same time or sofa during that same era, and it was just this person’s make?

Well, you know, I think couch and sofa became popular a little bit later. You know, if you look at dialect maps, you see Davenport sort of all across the top half of the United States. It’s really not quite as southern as you might expect, but it’s pretty well distributed geographically.

But what’s weird is that I think in terms of chronological time, I think it’s distributed a little bit differently. I don’t hear it that much anymore.

Yeah.

I heard one other person use it in the past, I don’t know, six months or something. And then when I was listening to your program, I thought, I’m calling. I’m going to find out.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a question about something your grandma used to say, let us know. We’ll also tackle things related to linguistics and language and grammar and spelling and punctuation and you name it.

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