Transcript of “Where Do People Call a Grocery Store a “Food Store”?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Polly from Issaquah, Washington.
Hey, Polly.
Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?
Well, about 30 plus years ago, I was talking with my friend Marcy, and I was telling her about how we’re going shopping and that I was going to the food store. And she started teasing me for calling it the food store, and I didn’t understand why. And she said, no, it’s the grocery store. And I, at that point, was in my mid-20s. Nobody had ever corrected me or mentioned anything about that before. So I figured, well, it must be that she grew up in Indiana and Michigan, and I grew up just outside of Washington, D.C. In Chevy Chase, Maryland, and it must be a regional thing.
And then I started polling a few of my friends back in the D.C. area, and none of them thought food store sounded strange, but none of them called it the food store. And so I just kind of had this floating around in my head for on and off for years. And then a few years ago, I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and she mentioned the term food store for a grocery store. And I started thinking, maybe this is because Terry Gross is, I believe, originally from Brooklyn and my parents are from Brooklyn.
Then I put it on the Facebook Way With Words group, and the thing that I found there is that people from New York and Brooklyn didn’t necessarily say, yeah, they called it the food store, but people from Pittsburgh did. And somebody said, hey, Terry Gross has lived in Pittsburgh a long time, but I don’t have any connection to Pittsburgh. Then I thought my last guess was that maybe coming from descendants of Ashkenazi Jews that spoke Yiddish, maybe this was a direct translation from Yiddish, which I don’t speak, and that that got passed along. I can’t figure out where it comes from.
As far as I know, it doesn’t have anything to do with your Jewish or Yiddish background, but you’ve really hit on something here with the New York connection. And I did see that thread in our Away With Words Facebook group. And there was a lot of back and forth there. And I kind of put together the different pieces. And it really fits a pattern of this East Coast usage that kind of starts in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia. Kind of make a big circle in that metropolis. And goes down to the East Coast, along the Atlantic Coast, down to the Gulf of Mexico.
And the reason that we can say this with some certainty is that there is something called the Linguistic Atlas of Gulf States that surveyed people. I believe it was in the 50s and 60s. I might be having my dates wrong here. But Lee Peterson and many other researchers worked on this. And you can find the raw data online. But people reported using food store in the Gulf States. And then you connect that to the data that we have collected on our own from your post on the Facebook group. And we add on New Jersey and New York, New York metropolitan area and the Philadelphia area and probably the little westerly there in Pennsylvania.
So we have a kind of like a nice, what we might call an isolect of a region that says food store or can say food store. And as to the why, the best guess that has ever been made, and this hasn’t been closely studied, I think Martha and I need to probably retire from the radio show and study this at full time.
Oh, please do, because it’s been on my mind for 30 years. So I would love it if you did that.
Martha, I think Paul—
Please retire from the radio show. Study food store.
No, no, no. Not that part. Myself and my two teens love your show. Don’t do that.
Oh, okay. In your free time. Spend all of it to anything. But I want you to think back to a time when you might have gone to town and there was the hardware store. And there was the feed store for your animals. And there were other kinds of store. And the food store was separate. So you didn’t have these multi-purpose stores like we do now where you could get your medicines. And they had a, you know, right now when I go to the supermarket, I can get housewares. I can get medicine. I can get my meat, right? The butcher even used to be separate.
Yeah, you can go to the drugstore and get lawn chairs.
Yeah, exactly. So think about a time when there was a little more division for this stuff. And so it made a lot of sense to say the food store because that’s all that was there for the most part was food.
Okay. So it was being specific in the same way that, for instance, like people used to go to like the fish market if you wanted to get fish. And so would this have been produce?
Yeah. It might have been food that would, unpackaged food. Yeah, produce. Stuff that didn’t come prepared or pre-prepared.
Yeah, exactly. And this is generally not always true. Obviously, there have always been kind of general purpose stores that sold whatever they could get their hands on that people wanted.
Right. But that’s probably the origin of this. And again, we have some data on this. So we know that there are people who have said this and still say this. It’s never been all that common. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn’t include an entry for it, but it does include one citation for it in the entry for Hoagie, where somebody is talking about going to the food store. And it’s from the large metropolis that is, you know, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City.
So would you think then that this would generally have been more common in the big cities because if you were in a rural place, you might have more of a general store, whereas in the big cities, you would have lots of different stores.
That’s a good guess. But like I say, I don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing here, but nobody has done a full study on this. No real extensive work, as far as I know, has ever been done on the expression food store versus grocery store.
So congratulations, Polly. You’re not alone.
Me and Terry Gross.
Yeah. Good company. It got me on your show. So you know what? This is wonderful on all accounts. And to my friend Marcy, see, I told you, it’s not weird. It’s me, Terry Gross.
Yeah, Marcy.
Yeah. Yeah, Marcy.
All right. Thank you so much.
Take care of yourself, Polly.
Be well.
Okay. Bye-bye.
Take care, Polly.
