Fenderbergs and Carnacles

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello, Martha and Grant.

Yes.

This is Joanne from Montreal.

Hey, Joanne, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

I’m doing fine. It’s a bit cold, but I’m doing fine.

Okay.

Well, that’s Montreal for you, right? Minus 10 is a bit cold, right?

Yeah. So my question is related to that, actually. I was wondering if there was a particular word for the dirty, frozen, solid pack of brown snow that gets jammed in the wheel wells of the car?

You want only one?

I got a whole bunch, and none of them are polite.

Oh, yeah.

Right.

The impolite ones are more fun.

Yeah, yeah.

None that you can share?

Well, no, not really.

Well, the only one I came up with was crud.

Yeah, really common one.

Good one, yeah.

And then car crud has a nice alliteration to it.

I like that.

Yeah, but it’s general. I mean, if I say I have to take care of the car crud, is it in the inside of the car or at the outside?

Right.

Is it the pizza boxes in the backseat or is it the ice in the wheel wells?

Exactly.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Yeah, I have car crud here in San Diego, I’m afraid. Both kinds. The internal kind.

Not the same kind.

Yeah.

But what about, so you’re in a bilingual city. Are there French words for this?

Well, actually, this comes from a friend of mine who was looking for the French version and asked all her Anglo friends, you know, is there a word in English? They didn’t come up with anything, so they invented sort of a portmanteau word, you know, with gadou, which is slush, and mutt, which is a lump, so it comes out as a gamut.

Oh.

Maybe.

Nice.

It might work.

But, you know, I think she’s going to submit it to some lexicographers or something. But in English, we didn’t come up with anything except car crud.

I like that.

Running the gamut is going to each of the wheel wells around the car, right? You make a loop, right?

Well, actually, it gets so frozen solid that you can’t kick it.

Oh, and then what happens?

And then you have to drive a couple of blocks before your wheels turn properly.

Wow.

Yeah, it gets that cold.

Yeah, I forgot about that.

Well, as Grant said, there are lots and lots of terms for this, I guess, because it’s something that people deal with all the time in wintry places.

How about fenderbergs?

Fenderbergs is good.

Yeah, I’ve seen carnicles. I’ve seen ice babies and slush flaps and snow goblins and snow boogers.

Yeah, and tire turds and snow turds and tire snots.

All the rude ones are in there.

You have to forget all the soft words.

Why?

You want hard ones.

Yeah, we need the hard ones.

How about chunkers?

Yeah, I’ve seen clunkers.

Oh, chunkers is good.

Yeah, or clunkers, just the sound that they make when they fall.

So grice wouldn’t work.

It’s too soft.

Yeah, another portmanteau is snert, but that is also a term that’s used for other things.

We had somebody recommend braxis to us. B-R-A-X-I-S. Braxis.

I don’t know where they got that from.

Snard.

Did we already do snard?

Slush puppies.

Yeah, well, slush, as I said, slush is really soft.

Too soft, yeah.

You sort of step through it and they leave a whole bunch of blah things on your driveway.

Two more, snow lactites and nabicles.

Snow lactites.

Snow lactites is good.

It’s hard to say.

It’s too long, right?

Yeah.

Did we say shark tooth?

Ooh, good one.

I like that.

I kind of like that because of the shape and just because it’s sort of something you don’t want to run into.

Yeah.

But something tells me we are going to hear a lot of other suggestions.

Yeah, this is something that comes up all the time.

And nobody’s really satisfied with the existing terms because they think most of the fun is in the coining.

Yeah, yeah.

Coming up with our own.

So, Joanne, we’re going to throw this out. You’ve got a bunch from us, but we’re going to throw this out and see what else we get this time, all right?

Okay, and I’ll share that with my Francophone friends and see if that doesn’t inspire them.

Okay, great.

Very good.

Let us know how it turns out.

All right.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I want to know what people call the fenderbergs where they live. Do you have a term for it, something your neighbors use that you’ve come up with, something else? What do you call the snow and ice buildup in the wheel wells of your automobile?

877-929-9673.

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