Junk in the Frunk

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I aspire to own an electric car someday, but I am still trying to wrap my mind around the word frunk.

Yeah, frunk, trunk, frunk.

VW Bugs have frunks.

Yes, yes, frunk.

It’s a portmanteau, as you suggest, of front and trunk because that’s where the trunks are in electric vehicles. And I read an interview in Car and Driver magazine with the woman who designed the front cargo area for the Ford F-150 Lightning, Nancy Reppenhagen. And she said, it just seemed like an efficient way to say front trunk. So it didn’t bother me, which makes sense to you and me, Grant, because, you know, it’s jargon and you’ve got to use it every day in that job. And so I can see why she wouldn’t have been bothered.

And then I was thinking about the fact that, of course, in the UK, the trunk of a car is called the boot. And I see that the Jaguar company for a while was calling its front trunk the fruit. But that looks too much like fruit loops, right? Right. I just wonder if that’s going to fade and it’ll just become the trunk again.

That’s my thinking. I mean, yeah, you don’t really need, since we’re not designing the Ford F-150 Lightning, we don’t really need to specify. No. And also, unless you have a front and a back storage area that look similar, you don’t need to specify front and back, right? Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that. A pickup has a bed and it might have to have a frunk, but the bed and the trunk aren’t confusable. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’re making me feel better about it.

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