George the Garbage Disposal and Other Appliance Family Members

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.

We heard from Amanda Fair in Evansville, Indiana, and she writes,

I saw my parents over the weekend, and my dad used a phrase that I hadn’t heard in a while.

And when he said it, I actually had to take a step back and think about what he was talking about.

My entire childhood, they called our garbage disposal George.

I also refer to our garbage disposal as such for most of my life,

But when I moved out, I fell away from it.

As far as I know, they didn’t have a disposal with a brand that was similarly named,

But they used it as a proper noun and a verb, like,

Just put it down George, or I’m done, you can George it, or we need to run George, it has a smell.

Make sure you run cold water when you turn on George.

Amanda says she still chuckles when she thinks about it,

But she’s curious whether this might be, say, a small German family inside joke,

And if there are any other strange names that people call their household objects.

So they named their garbage disposal George, like it was the monster under the sink eating their refuse.

Right.

Wow.

That’s fun.

Because it’s like a cookie monster-like thing, only it doesn’t eat only cookies.

Right.

And George has his thing that he does.

I think we can at least rule out the German inside joke because garbage disposals just aren’t a thing in Germany.

I think in lots of municipalities, they’re outlawed.

You just don’t find that in a lot of Europe, actually.

Yeah, much of the world, they’re often really pleased to find them in the United States, in Canada, where they’re often called secretors.

Yeah, yeah, pleased or shocked.

In secretors.

Yeah, there’s some question as to how environmental they are.

But the other question is, are there people who give names to their household appliances?

And I was trying to think of that.

My mother was a schoolteacher, and I remember that they had a radiator in the classroom that they all called Herman because she used to tell them that the clanking in the radiator was some guy named Herman.

That’s good.

Did you ever name anything?

I don’t have anything like that.

I’d love to hear from the listeners, though.

I bet people do.

You just, humans name things, right?

Yeah, definitely cars.

We’ll name the clouds.

We’ll name the bugs.

We’ll name our cars.

But what’s the odd, weird thing that you name around the house that everybody now calls that name?

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