Nowadays we think of the gridiron as the football field, but in the 14th century, a gridiron was a cooking instrument with horizontal bars placed over an open flame. Since then, gridiron has lent its name to a Medieval torture device, the American flag, and it’s even the source of the terms grid and gridlock. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Gridiron”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Jared Kelly calling from Canfield, Ohio.
Welcome to the show.
Hi, welcome.
What’s up?
Thank you.
Well, I’ve been a football fan all my life, which is many decades. And the field that they play on is called a gridiron. And of course, it’s one of those things you just accept the term, not saying I wonder why they call it that.
This summer, my family was vacationing in South Jersey, and they have a colonial historic village there called Cold Springs. And they hire people to enact the period. And as we were in where they do the baking and cooking, this woman was showing us the instruments they would use at the hearth to cook food. And one of them was rectangular with slots evenly spaced across the width. And I said, well, what is that? And she said, that’s a gridiron. And it occurred to me that it looks just like a football field when you’re high up in the stands. So I was wondering, is there a connection between the cooking instrument and the reason why a football field is called a gridiron?
It’s a good guess. You’re right. You’re right. You win. Yeah, that’s exactly it. Yep.
Oh. Yeah, the term gridiron itself for that kind of cooking instrument goes back all the way to, I think, the 14th century or so. Quite a ways back. Yeah. And it’s been applied to other things that resemble that, including at one point people were calling the stars and stripes a gridiron as well, flying the gridiron. So these horizontal lines alternating either colors or spaces between the metal or what have you, right?
Yeah, exactly. But there’s an interesting backstory to the word gridiron itself, right?
Yeah. There’s a misunderstanding there.
You mean about griddle?
Yeah. Yeah, that we think that it looks like it might come from griddle or be related to that, but they’re different. But the word iron is a mishearing add-on where people misunderstood a version of griddle and thought that the word had iron at the end because the device usually was made of iron. Iron, yeah. But it just turns out that we just misunderstood it.
Yeah. Yeah. So it was applied to lots of different things, including an awful medieval torture instrument.
Yeah. I mean, exactly what you might think. Isn’t that what watching football is?
Only if you’re up in the nosebleed seats that Gerard was talking about. But yeah, that’s exactly the origin of it.
Oh, great. You confirmed my aha moment.
Aha!
Congratulations!
Thanks for calling, Gerard.
Okay, thank you.
Okay, bye-bye.
Take care, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Yeah, and we also get the word grid from gridiron.
Oh, I did not know that.
And therefore gridlock.
Gridlock, I see.
Yeah, all going back to that cooking instrument. Isn’t that cool?
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