New England Basements

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Pam Currier. I’m calling from Jeffersonville, Vermont.

Hi, Pam. Jeffersonville. Okay. What’s cooking?

Yeah, up north.

Well, what I’m calling about is I was listening to your program and was thinking about how the type of words people use change over time in a certain area. Because I moved to Vermont back in 1964, and I moved from the Washington, D.C. region. And at that time, Vermont really hadn’t had a lot of influx of out-of-state people. And when I started going to school there, I really noticed a lot of terms that I didn’t understand, and I didn’t know where they came from.

And I think the one that surprised me the most is in Washington, at my school, if you wanted to go to the bathroom, you went to the laboratory. But up here, they went to the basement. And I could never figure out why kids would get up and ask to go to the basement. There wasn’t one in the building, but they really meant going to the bathroom. There wasn’t one in the building. I mean, there was a bathroom in the building, but there was no basement. There was no actual basement. And the bathroom was on the second floor. People would still ask to go to the basement.

Whoa.

So did you spend your first year of school just not going to the bathroom?

Well, it took me a while to figure it out.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There were a number of things I did that definitely stood out, using different terms for things.

Oh, really?

In Washington, the nuns at my school were called mother. Up here, they were called sister.

Oh, boy.

And we could go shopping downtown in Washington, but here, everyone went down the street.

Mm—

Oh, interesting.

So it just took a while to kind of figure out how to ask for things and how to fit in.

Yeah, you looked like an outsider, right?

Absolutely. I even talked differently. They thought I was from England because I had that sort of East Coast accent.

Oh, right.

That’s so interesting.

A little O.

So let’s concentrate on the basement thing here. The basement thing is super interesting. It’s not just in Vermont. They do this in Massachusetts and a lot of other states in that part of the country, actually throughout the Northeast and Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine, Massachusetts, maybe even a little further westward, Connecticut, parts of Connecticut. Not completely and not everyone, but you will find plenty of people who report as far back as the 50s and the 40s saying they remember this from their schooling days.

For some reason, it’s strongly associated with schooling. And the best guess that we have here is that there’s been some serious semantic shift going on where maybe the basement was originally the place for the bathroom. And because we tend to euphemize the place where we do our business, I mean, almost all the major terms that we have for that room in American English are euphemisms. Right? Almost a bathroom. You’re not actually taking a bath. Restroom? Are you resting in there? There are tons of these. Lavatory is great. Really straightforward. There is a little bit of hand washing going on, so it kind of counts. But it doesn’t describe the whole act and everything that you’re doing there.

So the best that we can guess is there was a semantic shift happening here, and it became generalized such a way that you could have a basement on the second floor. There wasn’t a basement. There was a place that you did your number one and number two.

Yeah, it seems to have gone out. I don’t think any kids use that anymore. My kids never heard that in school. So I guess that’s gone by now.

Oh, has it?

Oh, that was a question I wanted to know. That would be kind of a shame because I love seeing those little remnants of the past. I love the idea of going upstairs to the basement.

Pam, this term might have been so widespread that it pushed out the other more standard meaning of basement in that part of the country. There’s a note in the Dictionary of American Regional English that basement, referring to the lower part of a house that is basically below ground level, is far less common in the Northeast. And it’s possible that this bathroom use of basement meant that people didn’t feel comfortable referring to an actual basement as a basement. So instead, most of them call it the cellar or the downseller.

Cellar. Do you use downseller or just cellar?

Just cellar.

Cellar. But you’ve heard downseller? Have you heard downseller?

No, actually, I haven’t heard that one.

Interesting. Fascinating. There’s a lot of ground other things, but I haven’t heard that one. Whereas in the rest of the country, the cellar tends to be a room or building that is mostly underground but isn’t connected to the larger house. Not always.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Oh, I haven’t heard of that. The apple cellar or the potato cellar or the vegetable cellar, the fruit cellar, the ice cellar tends not to be attached to the main building.

Fruit cellar, yeah.

Fruit cellar, yeah.

Yeah, fruit cellar here would be the way they might use it here.

Yeah, but it’s not attached to the house, right?

Might or might not be.

Might or might not be.

Well, this is really fascinating. Well, it sounds like you’re no worse for the wear, but man, that must have been confusing at first. Because starting a new school is hard enough as it is.

It is.

Exactly, exactly. So, well, I really appreciate your help. I just thought it was an interesting kind of quirk. Your instincts are good. You are correct. Call us another time. Remember something that you had to learn, all right?

Okay, thanks.

Thanks, Pam. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

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