Jeannie in Spring Branch, Texas, says her grandmother, who far outlived her husband, described herself as a weeds widow. Since this term is extremely rare, it’s possible her grandmother conflated the terms widows weeds and grass widow. The former is the garb of a woman mourning her deceased husband, and the latter is woman who is separated from her husband, either because he has deserted her or is simply away traveling. This is part of a complete episode.
Leave a comment
1 comment
More from this show
A member of the ski patrol at Vermont’s Sugarbush Resort shares some workplace slang. Boilerplate denotes hard-packed snow with a ruffled pattern that makes skis chatter, death cookies are random chunks that could cause an accident, and...
A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...
In this episode, I believe that the caller’s grandmother was referring to the fact that her husband worked away from home, so she was a “widow” in a sense. Whether or not she was conflating “widow’s weeds”, I do not think that she was referring to actually being a widow as she used the term prior to her husband’s death. I’d be curious to know his occupation as that may provide some context.