What do you call plastic shopping bags that litter the landscape? Some know them as witches’ britches or witches’ knickers. Others prefer urban tumbleweeds. In the film American Beauty, Ricky Fitts famously called them one the most beautiful things he’d ever seen. Either way, despite the effort to introduce reusable bags, the plastic variety continues to accumulate. Lori Robinson of Santa Barbara has even gone so far as to collect them from Tanzanian villages and distribute the more sustainable variety. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Plastic Bags”
You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette.
You ever notice how if you’re running errands all day and you’re not careful, you can end up with a big handful of those annoying plastic bags?
Even if you’re thoughtful enough to plan ahead and take a canvas tote bag on your shopping trip, there’s still no escaping them.
If you look around, you see them everywhere, floating along in the breeze, caught in the fence, flapping lazily in a tree, or maybe there’s a bag lying by the curb collecting water as you’re stepping over it.
But my question, of course, is do we have a term for those escaped plastic bags out in the environment?
Should we have a term?
Well, we do have some terms, at least in different parts of the world.
A few years ago, I discovered that in Ireland, they sometimes call them witch’s knickers.
Witch’s knickers.
You can just imagine white underpants hanging from a tree, right?
Yeah, magically appearing.
Sometimes they’ve been called bag hawks.
Bag hawks.
Because they just float up high in the sky, right?
And a number of different places, if you look in the newspaper archives, you will see that in this campaign to rid certain communities of these disposable bags, people will say they’re so common that they’re almost our second state bird.
Or they’re so common they look like our state flower.
Right.
The state flower of X.
Or the national flower of this or that country.
Yeah, I’ve also seen shoppers’ kites.
And you mentioned hawks.
I’ve seen retailed hawks.
Retailed hawks.
Nice.
As opposed to red-tailed.
I think my favorite, I like witch’s britches, although I know that’s not really common.
Right.
Witch’s knickers is a little common, but the rhyme is nice, isn’t it?
Yeah.
But I like urban tumbleweed as well.
Oh, urban tumbleweed.
Yeah.
Very good.
Well, you know, my problem in my house is we reuse these bags all the time.
We put kitty litter in them or just things that need to be wrapped up extra tight in the trash can.
But now we’re at the point where the recycled bags that are made from recycled plastic, the promotional bags that you get at conferences, they cost a quarter at the register and the ones that you’re supposed to reuse.
Now I have 40 of those.
And there’s no way I’m ever going to use 40 of these recycled bags, right?
And I can’t really justify throwing them away.
Right.
Well, there is a woman in Santa Barbara who takes them to Africa, to Tanzania, where there’s a real problem with those plastic bags everywhere.
And she has people collect 25 bags and then bring them to her and they get a free canvas bag.
We’ll link to her site on our website.
It’s a cool project.
It sounds fantastic.
Do you have a special name for those ubiquitous disposable bags that you get at the register, at the supermarket, or the drugstore?
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