Johnny Gown

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marianne calling from Jackson, Wyoming.

Marianne, welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

Thank you.

What’s going on?

Good, thank you.

What can you help with?

Well, I was calling to ask about the word Johnny, and that’s, I’m a nurse, and I went

To school in Boston, went to nursing school in Boston, worked there, and worked in the

For the first six years I was a nurse,

And then moved west to Wyoming,

And nobody uses that word out here.

What’s a Johnny?

Everyone says hospital gown.

Oh, hospital gown, the one with your butt exposed.

Yes, exactly.

When I used Johnny out here,

People didn’t quite know what I was talking about.

So I said, oh, hospital gown, can you grab me a gown?

That’s always an uncomfortable moment, right?

Yeah, it’s a different language.

Interesting. So did they think that a Johnny was a bedpan or something?

No, people would just look at me like, what are you asking for?

And you didn’t encounter Johnny until you got to the hospital in Boston to do your work there?

I had used it all through nursing school. We had always called the hospital gown Johnny.

In Boston, though?

Mm-in Boston. And I used it in Vermont as well. I worked there for a while.

Yeah, you would think that medical terminology would be standard across the country, but no.

Sounds like we’re talking regional here.

It is, yeah.

The bit of slang is really particular to Boston and the surrounding states that are influenced by it,

Which is an ever-shrinking sphere but sufficiently still encompasses New Hampshire, Vermont, Connecticut, parts of New York.

And it’s been going on for more than 100 years.

We find early uses of Johnny, Johnny gown, Johnny shirt, terms like that from the early 1900s,

But almost always associated with New England or Boston in particular.

So how did it get the name Johnny to begin with?

There are a lot of half-cocked theories on this.

Some suggest it makes it easier to go to the John, which I don’t think is correct.

It makes it more embarrassing to go to the John.

Some suggest that it’s derived from long Johns, which doesn’t really fit because they’re very different kinds of garments.

But we’re going to put this firmly in the nobody knows category and just stop speculating about it.

Nobody knows.

Okay.

There are a lot of Johnny terms.

There’s tons of slang where Johnny can mean a lot of things,

And some of them we can’t even talk about on the air,

But it doesn’t seem to be related really to any of them.

Okay. Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for calling. I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot.

Bye, Mary.

Have a good day.

Give us a good word.

Bye-bye.

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