Keith in Valparaiso, Indiana, wonders why his mother uses the term icebox for what other people call a refrigerator. Before electric refrigeration, people kept food cold by putting it in a an insulated box that was literally cooled with a block of ice delivered by the local iceman. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Icebox”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hey, guys. How’s it going?
Great. Who’s this? Who are we talking to?
My name is Keith. I’m calling from Valparaiso, Indiana.
Welcome, Keith. What can we do for you?
I’d like to preface this by saying my mom has always had an interesting language of her own.
Like when we were growing up for our math homework, we would use khaki-laters to help us out.
Khaki-laters.
She’d warn us about the dangers of sitting at the computer too much because you’ll get corporal tunnel syndrome.
Who I’m guessing is long lost cousin of Sergeant Bridge or something.
Corporal tunnel syndrome.
Okay.
So there is in most people’s homes in the kitchen, a giant metal thing that you keep food in that keeps it at a colder temperature than room temperature.
Refrigerator typically is what people call it.
And it has two parts in it.
It has a part where you keep your ice and your ice cream and your frozen meats and things like that, which may be like a freezer or something.
That’s what I always called it.
My trouble I run into is when I try to talk about that other part where you keep your milk and maybe your eggs and stuff like that.
Because growing up, my mom always called it the ice box.
And when I say that to anyone else, I say, oh, go get, you know, such and such. I keep it in the ice box.
They either go look in the freezer, assuming by ice box, I mean the literal box where I keep my ice, which I suppose is fair.
Or they just don’t know what I’m talking about.
I was like, what is an icebox?
I don’t understand what that is.
This is what my mom made up.
Are we the only family in the world that calls this an icebox or what?
Where does this come from?
Oh, heavens no.
No, my dad called it an icebox.
It’s still pretty widespread in patches of this country.
Yeah.
Where did your mom grow up?
Well, St. Louis.
St. Louis, Missouri is where we’re all from.
But that’s a common thing still for the part, because we refer to that just as that part where you keep your milk at that, you know, whatever, 40 degrees or something like that.
Right.
But I don’t know.
Everyone else I’ve ever said it to has not understood what I was talking about.
-huh, -huh.
Yeah, and it’s not so much a regional thing as a generational thing, I think.
The term icebox used for what you and I call the refrigerator goes back to the fact that until the 1930s or so, iceboxes were a pretty regular feature in people’s homes.
And these were wooden cabinets that were lined with metal like tin or zinc to keep the food cold.
And the Iceman would come and deliver blocks of ice.
And that’s how you would keep your food cold.
And when electric refrigeration came along, then that name was applied to that as well.
Does that make sense?
No, that does. Interesting.
I just don’t know why no one else has ever heard of that.
So I guess that’s not one of my family’s quirks.
Maybe I’ll lay off my mom a little bit for that one.
It’s fading fast.
I don’t know how old she is or what generation she’s from,
But certainly the last icebox users are probably among us now.
And probably 50 to 100 years, it’ll just be an artifact of history.
Okay, interesting.
So I guess in a sense, I’m keeping parts of the dying language alive.
Yeah, exactly.
Yeah, absolutely.
Yeah.
Okay.
You know, what’s really weird is that the word refrigerator itself goes way back,
Not referring, of course, to electric refrigerators,
But when you talk about something that has a refrigerating or a cooling effect,
That term goes back all the way to the 17th century.
Wow.
Yeah.
Right.
So you’re going to lay off your mom a little bit, at least in terms of that one.
I guess so.
I guess through that one.
I still don’t let a corporal tunnel slide.
All right.
Thanks so much for your call.
Really appreciate it, Keith.
Awesome.
Thanks, guys.
Appreciate it.
Take care.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
On the other end of this, by the way, there’s some evidence that in the UK, some people refer to the freezer as the ice box because, as Keith says, that’s where you get the ice.
That’s right.
It may turn out that your family’s not weird.
They’ve just got an artifact of history in their speech.
Give us a call, 877-929-9673,
Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.
In the movie “The Changeling” a few years ago, Angelina Jolie’s character tells her young son that if he’s hungry when he gets home there’s milk and a sandwich in the fridge. If I’d been on the set I would have made them stop and change the line; no single working mother in 1928 would have had a Frigidaire (the source of the slang term “fridge”) and she should have told him to find his snack in the icebox.
(Later in the same movie, a policeman refers to a “serial killer”, a term that would have been unfamiliar for about forty years after the scene takes place. And you’d think the director, Clint Eastwood, would have known better, because the term became public in the very case that “Dirty Harry” was based upon.)