Holiday, That Unmowed Bit of Yard, or Unpainted Strip of Wall

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Fernando Rivas from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

I actually am calling because I wanted to know about a word that I use a lot at work, and I didn’t quite know where it came from.

Great.

What do you do?

I’m an art preparator. I’m a contract art preparator, so I work at different galleries. Right now I’m at the Briscoe Western Museum of Art, but I do other galleries, other museums as well. And I do a lot of art handling, moving pieces on and off the walls, preparing them for shipment, and then getting the galleries ready. Once a new show is going to start, we have to paint the walls. And it’s a lot of fun. I get to touch the art.

Wow, cool.

Yeah, no guard to stop you.

That’s cool.

So what’s the language? What’s the question that you had?

We have a painting term called a holiday. When you’re applying paint, often with a roller, if you apply the paint a little bit unevenly with your weight, like weight distribution is a bit uneven, it’ll cause a little bit of a line of drip, of excess paint to drip. And from the very beginning, my first gig at Blue Star Contemporary, Keaton Forman, my technician, the gallery head there, told me, go fix a holiday that you left over there on whatever wall. And I didn’t know what he meant. But since that time, I’ve had a few painting jobs in a few different museums and whatnot, and it’s used often.

Fernando, this is great. There’s an amazing history behind this word. Would you believe me if I told you it goes back to the 1700s?

Absolutely not. I think you’re lying.

We’re talking about this specific holiday, not the holiday where you take a day off from work, but the holiday related to a gap or a space or a neglected area when you’re trying to apply an even coating. As you note, it’s often a space when painting, but more often it’s a space missed, not a drip, not too much paint, but it’s a space that you’ve left a little bit off. And not just when painting, but like in the original use was shipbuilding when they were tarring the bottom of a boat. If they didn’t apply tar to the whole bottom of a boat, that was called a holiday.

Wow, that’s fascinating.

It’s been used many different industries, a lot of different ways, but always refers to something that isn’t consistent with the surrounding area. So either it’s a gap or a hole or it’s thinner there. So even in logging, like, you know, cutting timber, it can be an open area in the woods or a glade where the trees are thinner or there aren’t any trees. In lots of industries, it’s just a job that has gone undone where you’ve done everything except this one part of the job. And that’s a holiday.

During World War II, when they were mine sweeping, when they were looking for enemy mines on the floor of the ocean, they called the part of the ocean floor where they didn’t sweep for mines the holiday. Or even domestically, if you’re having somebody clean your house and they’re dusting, you’ll say don’t leave any holidays. I’d love to know where that came from because that’s way deeper than I thought.

In life, a holiday is something out of the usual. Ordinarily, you’re working a lot. You’re doing your daily business, and every day is like every other day. But a holiday is when all bets are off, and the date isn’t ordinary. So that’s why it’s called a holiday. It’s unusual. It’s exceptional. That’s it. It’s nothing. It’s just not the way things ordinarily go, and that’s why it’s called a holiday. How about that?

Wow.

That’s something.

So 300 years this word has been around, and you have just the latest version of it. So cool. Thank you for that. That’s way deeper than I thought it would be.

Well, you touched one of my favorite things. This is why I love doing this job. I love the jargon of the trades. And the aha moments, and now you can share that with your colleagues.

Yeah.

Fernando, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Well, is there a word at work that you keep running into and you keep puzzling over it and you talk with your co-workers about it and they just can’t figure it out and neither can you? We can help. 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.