What Do You Call Your Junk Drawer?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nell Bekaris. I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hey, Nell.

How are you?

Doing well. What’s going on in Madison?

So there’s a drawer in, you know, probably your kitchen, but maybe your dining room where you put maybe birthday candles, keys that you don’t know where they go to, matches, you know, a pencil with a broken lead, a battery that you don’t know if it works or not. You know what I’m talking about? You know that drawer?

Of course you put the battery in there.

You mean that one drawer?

You have only one of those?

One of those drawers, yes.

So in my family, we always called it the mystery drawer because you never really knew what you might find in that drawer. And, of course, I thought that was the term that everybody used for that particular drawer. But when I’ve talked with people and, you know, said, oh, go check the mystery drawer, they have no idea what I’m talking about.

So I’ve heard other people call it a junk drawer, but I just was wondering if the terminology my family used had any background other than my family.

Mystery drawer.

Oh, I love the idea that you might blindfold yourself and reach in and see what you get out.

Exactly.

And actually, I didn’t just invent that idea. That possibly is connected to the name mystery drawer. If you look in party books from as far back as the 1950s and 60s, so these are books about how to throw parties for kids, you will find one party favor idea is a mystery drawer where you fill a drawer with a jumble of small prizes for children. And then they cover their eyes and they reach in to draw out a surprise.

Now, I don’t know that there’s a connection, but I thought it worth mentioning because it just comes up again and again and again as a way to, instead of just giving the kids a gift, you give them this opportunity to kind of have this moment of, I don’t know, everyone kind of likes this mystery moment, right? Your eyes are covered. You reach in. You kind of feel around. You try to guess which one’s the best, and you pull it out.

Yes.

I love that.

Yeah, but you’re not the only family that uses it for the drunk drawer.

Okay.

I know in looking in the digital archives of all these newspapers, by the mid-90s, it really starts to show up mystery drawer with some regularity in newspapers and books about organizing your life and organizing your house.

Oh, really?

Yeah, when people are looking for another word for junk drawer and don’t want to say junk drawer again, it’s kind of the other term that they pull out is mystery drawer. It’s got a little jocularity to it, a little humor.

Yeah, interesting.

My family, I am a child who grew up in the early to, you know, early 70s to mid 80s, I would say. And then, you know, by by 1990, I was in college. So, you know, in my family, its it’s been in use for a long time. My parents actually are from Chicago and they would have been children in the 1950s. Well, 40s and 50s. I wonder if they picked it up, you know, somewhere at a party, perhaps.

Maybe. The other thing about this, Nell, is mystery drawer is kind of an obvious term, right? I mean, I think it could easily be recoined again and again and again. I think it’s the kind of term that somebody, when they’re just trying to be a little humorous, could come up with on their own without having gotten it from someone else. And so your family might just be the sense of humor that your family has. It might just be the little giggle that you give yourself, the mystery drawer.

I’m feeling kind of deprived. We called ours the work drawer.

Oh.

I would have loved to have had a mystery drawer.

A work drawer, yeah.

Maybe that’s why in my adult life I have a mystery office. I just close my door. You wouldn’t believe what’s in there.

That’s funny.

I’m going to switch the name of our utility closet to the mystery closet from here on out.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Rebrand that thing. It’s the one with the brooms and the extra grocery bags and the spools of tape on a peg and that sort of thing.

Duct tape, yeah.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Nell, I hope that helped a little bit. But that is a fun term, mystery drawer.

Oh, yeah.

The drawer of mystery.

Yeah, the drawer of mystery sounds even better.

Thank you so much for taking my call. I appreciate it. This has been a fun conversation.

Bye, Nell.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Email us words@waywordradio.org.