Living Room, Family Room, Den

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha, Grant.

It’s so good to talk to you guys.

This is Kim calling from just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Hello, Kim.

Kim, how are you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was thinking the other day, I was talking to my mother and was thinking about as a child of the 70s and 80s, when we would gather as a family, we would all go to the den.

And then we moved houses when I was about 10.

And all of a sudden we were all gathering in the family room.

And I don’t know why that change happened, and I’ve not heard den in many, many, many years to describe that family gathering space.

We have a family room in my house, and everybody I know has a family room, but nobody has a den anymore.

-huh. And Kim, where did you move to and from?

It was all in Charlotte, North Carolina, just from one side of town to the other.

Okay. In that area. My dad was from that area. They pronounced area with an A sound.

I’ve never heard that.

Yeah. And I’m a North Carolinian. I’ve never heard area.

Just area.

Somebody’s going to back me up. Somebody’s going to call in and back me up.

Yeah. And I didn’t know if it was, I mean, I’m African-American. I didn’t know if it was a cultural thing?

I don’t know. There is something fashionable about what we call the rooms in our house because there’s something fashionable about the way we build our houses and there’s something fashionable about the way we market them if we’re real estate people or redesign them or, you know, remodel them.

There actually is a book about this very thing about that exact part of the country.

It’s called Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States by Ellen Johnson.

And she has a section of the book that is about that room, the room in the household where the family might spend time together.

And so she compares a list from 1930 of the names people called that room with a list from 1990.

So in descending order of popularity, Kim, the 1930 list was sitting room, parlor, living room, setting room, that’s S-E-T, and front room.

And in the 90s, the list in the descending order of popularity, the words were living room, parlor, den, sitting room.

Even though it’s on both lists in the 90s, living room was way out in front is the most popular term.

And parlor and sitting room had lost a lot of room by the 1990s, even though they do appear still in the 90s.

They’re just hard to use, and it was probably the much older generation.

So we can really see that change in those 60 years.

And so I think your observation about a den is probably true.

It probably had a heyday.

70s sounds right to me.

It sounds like you and I are probably roughly the same age.

And it’s kind of faded because people aren’t building dens in their houses anymore.

If they’re building dens, they’re not calling them dens. They’re calling them man caves or TV rooms or game rooms or something else.

Right. And you know, the house that we were in originally was a split level and you kind of had to go downstairs to go into the den.

So I don’t know, maybe it felt more like an animal den.

Yeah.

Yeah. Sometimes they had this recessed area, right? The furniture was around?

Yes.

Yes, absolutely.

And now everything is a lot more open and light.

Yeah.

Actually, what we had within the house was a family room.

We never called it a den.

When I first heard somebody call it a den, they felt like they were more upscale than our family.

Oh, that’s so funny because I think the exact opposite.

Oh, do you?

When I think of den, I think, you know, maybe a step down than the family room.

I think of the family room as being the upper echelon.

-huh.

That’s interesting.

You know, Kim, I’m looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, and it does say that den is more of a southern, it’s more commonly found in the south, den and den room, and that it was a new term for this space in the 40s.

Wow.

How about that?

And then we have a living room as well, which was always very formal.

You know, we could never play in the living room as children in either house.

And we had a living room in both homes.

The home with the den had a living room and the family room home had a living room.

But they were never accessible for just a regular everyday congregation.

Right.

That was for company.

Oh, I know those rooms.

Yeah.

We call those the front room or the Pope’s room because that was if the Pope happened to drop by.

Really?

No, that was the joking name for it.

Because it’s like, what’s this room for with all this expensive furniture that nobody can use?

Why is this here?

This doesn’t make any sense.

And clearly it’s just because they didn’t want the kids there.

But this is the nicest room in the house.

Why does this exist?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay, well, good.

Yeah, Kim, thank you so much for bringing up this subject.

I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about it.

Yeah.

Thank you, Kim.

Take care now.

Yeah, thanks so much, guys.

Okay, bye, Kim.

Bye-bye.

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