A Florida Gators football fan grew up travelling to road games in an RV. When it came time to wash up, her family members would take “Georgia baths,” meaning they’d wash their important parts in the RV sink. Beats the alternative Marine shower, where no water is necessary—just a ton of perfume or cologne to douse yourself with. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Georgia Baths and Marine Showers”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Kelly Garner from Tallahassee, Florida.
Hey, Kelly. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?
Well, there is a phrase that I grew up hearing my grandparents say, and it’s called a Georgia bath.
A Georgia bath, like Georgia the state?
Correct.
And we would travel to football games to watch the University of Florida play, and we would travel in our RV and we would be in parking lots of stadiums. And the morning of the game, you know, we would wake up and they would say, okay, go take your Georgia bath. And we all knew what that meant. And that was to go into the small bathroom of the RV and take your washcloth and a bar of soap and you could fill up the very small sink in there and you would wash the important parts. And that was your Georgia bath.
And I never realized that it was a phrase that other people did not use. And I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know if they made it up. But I still say to my kids today, you know, even in the bathtub, when I’m talking about a quick bath, we’re not going to play in the bathtub. I say, let’s go take a Georgia bath.
I don’t know that term. I’ve never heard that before. I mean, I know a bunch of other terms for different kinds of showers and baths, but not that one.
Yeah, the ones where you wash just the important parts.
Yeah, yeah. Like Kelly said, right? There’s some crass stuff that we can’t say on the air, but there’s things like sponge bath, which that kind of amounts to, right?
Well, growing up in Kentucky, I heard French bath all the time. Take a French bath.
What’s that?
Just washing the, you know, just sort of sponging off where you need to sponge off.
You know what, Kelly? I’ve never heard the Georgia bath. Let me throw a couple at you. Have you ever heard Marine Shower?
It goes by other names, a Marine Shower, as in like the military Marines.
Yeah, I haven’t heard of that one.
That’s when you just douse yourself with cologne or deodorant.
Oh, right. Throw on some Axe body spray and consider yourself done.
Just cover it up, right? Or maybe in the previous generations they were used high karate.
And then there’s another one, Navy Shower. And this has actually been widely used in parts of the country, such as the Southeast and the West, by officials to describe the kind of bath you take when you want to save water. And the Navy shower is you turn the water on briefly to get wet, you turn it off, and you soap up. And you turn it on to rinse, and then you’re done. And that’s it. So your water is on maybe for two minutes max.
I haven’t heard of that one in particular, but I’ve done that before. You know, if the water is really cold at a place, you don’t want it on you. Of course, you only use as much water as you have to just to get clean.
And, Kelly, you mentioned that you went to sporting events.
We did. We are big University of Florida Gator fans, and we would go to all the away football games. And I did kind of wonder if my grandparents had made that up, because since we’re Florida fans, one of our rivals is the University of Georgia.
That was my question. So I wondered if it was kind of a derogatory term. Like a bulldog bath or something.
Yeah, Georgia bulldogs smell. A put down of your opponents.
We need to hear from some Bulldog fans to find out if they take Florida bats, clearly.
Gator bats.
Gator bats.
Well, Kelly, you’ve sprung a new one on me, and I always love when that happens. But we’re going to toss this out to the universe who listens to the show and find out if they know more about it and if they use it too.
All right?
All right. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I love y’all’s show. Take care. Go Gators.
Thanks so much, Kelly.
Thanks. Go Gators.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Well, how do you take a bath?
Well, we don’t really want to know the details.
No, please. But if you’ve got a word for these, like, exceptional baths, the unusual ones, the one you take when you’re a little hard up, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.
My Grandmother and her friends at our summer cabin gave themselves a PTA before parties. As a little boy, I was laughed at when I wanted to take a PTA. All I knew for years was that the phrase did not apply to boys and that it made little old ladies giggle to say it.
I had always called this one the “Bus-Stop Bath”, but not too many folks understood what I was talking about. In attempting to explain, I stumbled on its new name “Pits and Bits”, which my immediate family now uses.
I call it a ‘splash and dash’, but rarely use it spoken. I mostly just use it in my head, as in think I need to take a ‘splash and dash’ because I don’t have time to take a luxurious shower and need to hit the important bits.
Not sure if anyone mentioned “whore’s bath.” Kind of like the aforementioned “PTA” bath.