Party at the Hosie

Hey there, welcome to A Way with Words.

Martha, this is Lisa from West Grove, Pennsylvania.

Lisa, thanks for joining us.

I’m calling about a word that we used when we were kids.

I grew up in a small town in Pennsylvania, outside of a small town in Pennsylvania called Tamaqua, and kind of an anthracite mining area.

And there was a fire company up the road from us in this kind of rural on the side of the mountain area.

And we grew up calling it the Hosey because it was the Hosey.

And I’m not really sure if that word gets used outside of the area or if that’s specific to that area.

It’s called Schuylkill County.

I know that people in the region are kind of proud, as many people are, of this dialect that they have.

They call it the skook.

And I’m just kind of curious if anybody else uses it because my husband was a little surprised with it, thought it was funny.

He’s from Michigan, so it would be a completely different area.

So the hosie is the firehouse, but it’s more than the firehouse.

Yeah, it’s the firehouse, but it also had a community hall where they would have celebrations.

That was just kind of traditionally the place where they would have wedding receptions, baby showers, wedding showers, funeral dinners.

I mean, it was just kind of everything.

It was kind of the community center of the area where we would gather together and do things.

We would play outside while the adults were in doing their things.

The men would kind of hang out at the bar in the back, and the women would make the dinners.

And it was always a very lively place.

The Hosey.

You know, what’s interesting about this, I only come up with two mentions of Hosey in connection to the firehouse.

And one of them is right on the money.

And it’s from a website called coleregion.com.

They have a fantastic Colespeak dictionary.

And it’s about the language of the anthracite coal region of Pennsylvania, which includes Schuylkill.

Well, that would be right on target.

Yeah, and the way they define Hosey, and they spell it both with an S, so H-O-S-I-E, or with a Z, H-O-Z-I-E, is a place to drink beer and keep fire trucks.

That was very succinct.

But it also says a fire department or hose company.

And obviously the hose company is the origin of the hosie part.

The second place I find a term related is hosie is a noun referring to a firefighter belonging to an engine company.

And this is from a 1983 book by Leo Stapleton.

And it’s called 30 Years on the Line because he worked for 30 years as a firefighter in Boston.

So a different part of the country.

But the way that we abbreviate words and come up with this diminutive kind of these shortening of words and to make them colloquial and familiar is natural to add that E sound to the end.

So it’s probably a coincidence that you have these two hosies, that hose becomes hosier or hose company becomes hosier.

No, that makes sense. That makes sense.

It sounds like a very fond word, you know, like like lots of fond memories.

Oh, sure. It’s just full of it’s like a little vessel of all these childhood memories.

And I can, you know, you can smell the food cooking, you can hear the people laughing.

And it’s, yeah, it’s very, it was a very warm, warm place.

There’s a favorite passage of mine from the book Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon.

And he talks about when driving across the country, the best meals to eat are often the, you know, the fish fry at the firehouse and things like that.

Yeah, that makes sense.

But do check out that dictionary.

It’s called the Kohl Speak Dictionary at kohlregion.com.

I’m sure you’re going to have your memory button pressed a zillion times and lots of aha moments as you recognize some of the language there.

I’m sure I will.

It’s been a long time since I’ve lived there, but I still recognize it and still pick up little inflections when we go back.

So, yeah, it’s interesting.

Thank you, Lisa, for sharing your memory and take care of yourself now, all right?

All right.

Thank you, you too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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