Toboggan: Sled, Hat, and Slide

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Kara. I’m from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hi, Kara. Welcome to the show.

Well, thanks. Thanks very much.

So I had a question. I had an experience that happened to me really last year.

So I’m from the South, and I went up to visit a couple of friends in Canada, Canadian friends.

I’d only been there once before briefly, you know, to visit Niagara Falls.

So anyway, went up there, and they lived in New Brunswick, and it was late October and cold, and so they took me to a Tim Hortons, right?

I loved that.

It was great.

Went to the Tim Hortons, and they had all sorts of merchandise there, and so I thought, oh, well, I’m going to get a hat.

So I got a coffee, and then I asked for a toboggan, and the lady, the cashier, she looked at me, and she said, what?

She was really surprised.

I said, I said, a toboggan, a toboggan.

And I pointed to it.

And, of course, at that time, everybody laughed.

Nobody knew what I was talking about.

I finally, of course, I doubled down at that point.

I said, a toboggan, the thing you put on your head.

And they figured out what I was talking about.

And they gave me the toboggan, the beanie, the knitted hat.

And they told me that that’s not what it’s called there.

But they, yeah, so that was a bit of a culture shock.

And when I left, I realized probably that’s only known as a toboggan in the South.

But that’s always what I’ve heard it called.

So I just wondered what’s up with the toboggan.

It’s called a toque there, right?

A toque.

A toque.

A toque.

In a lot of places, a toboggan is a long, flat-bottomed sled.

So the question is, which came first?

Toboggan the sled or toboggan the hat? And the answer is that the word for the sled came first.

Toboggan, meaning a long, flat-bottomed wooden sled, comes from similar words for this type of sled in the Algonquian family of languages.

And speakers of Canadian French adapted this word into their own language in the late 17th century, and eventually it found its way into English.

And by the late 1800s, English speakers were describing the kind of knitted hat that you’d wear to keep warm while you’re on a toboggan as a toboggan cap or a toboggan hat.

Meaning often it was the kind of hat that is a woolen hat that’s really long, goes down your back, comes to a point.

And eventually the cap or the hat was dropped and people just talked about wearing a toboggan on their head.

And here we are with Kara on the phone.

You do hear toboggan used for a knitted hat in the South, in the South Midlands, through Kentucky and Tennessee and Arkansas and Louisiana and Oklahoma.

But it also appears in a strip across the inland north from New York State to all the way out to the coast of Washington State.

And sometimes in the South, it’s just called a boggan, B-O-G-G-A-N or B-O-G-G-I-N.

Yeah, I think I’ve heard that too. That’s right.

I’m sure that wouldn’t have made things any clearer, though, if I had actually said that when I went in.

That probably would have been worse.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, that clears it up.

Well, there’s another little bit here that we might add to why the hat took the name.

It might not just be because you wore the cold-weather hat while you were on the toboggan.

Some of the toboggans have a curved front that kind of curves up.

Imagine an elf shoe curving up.

This is where you might put your hands and hold on while you’re sliding down the hill.

And some of these original hats were curved back in the back.

That long part that Martha was talking about that had the tassel or bell on the end was curved back in a similar fashion.

So they kind of had a shape that was reminiscent of that shape of the sled.

Oh, how interesting. I had no idea.

Well, we appreciate your calling.

Thanks, Carver.

Thanks so much. Take care. Bye-bye.

Those cultural counters where you go to another country and you say something and they say something and you both laugh because you realize you don’t quite understand each other.

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