Do you know what a “buffet flat” is? Is it A) a type of shoe you wear to all-you-can-eat dinners, B) a lull in economic growth predicted by Warren Buffet, or C) a squalid apartment found in the Rocky Mountain States? Find out when Grant gives you the whole megillah.
Transcript of “Buffet Flats (minicast)”
Welcome to the summer podcast edition of A Way with Words.
I’m Martha Barnette.
And I’m Grant Barrett.
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Patti Parson.
I’m from Denver and I get to hear you on podcasts.
All right.
Welcome, Patti.
Hello.
Every time I hear your show, I like came up with all sorts of new questions.
And I heard your show where you did the word buffet as in a piece of furniture.
And I remember when I moved to Denver in 83, all these apartment buildings had signs up front that say buffet, $500, buffet, $700.
And we didn’t think they were all selling furniture.
Or breakfast.
Or breakfast.
Right.
So we finally decided it meant studio apartment kind of thing or a place maybe only big enough for a buffet or something.
But I’ve never had seen it any other place, and now it’s really decreased the usage here.
They’re starting to use studio apartments.
And I was just wondering if that was really what it meant and where it came from.
It’s interesting that you should say that because this use of buffet to mean a studio apartment is one of those things that a lot of Coloradans put pride in.
They think of it as one of the distinctive characteristics of their own language, a little bit of kind of what I call civic pride in this oddity.
So it’s a Colorado term? I mean, it’s a regional?
It is, but I’m going to give you a couple different avenues that might have brought it there.
All right.
And here’s the story as far as I know it.
As early as 1792, buffet shows up as a term for a refreshment bar in Britain.
Or perhaps I should say Buffett because the Brits tend to say Buffett and not buffet.
All right.
Now, you’re saying to yourself, what’s the connection here?
Just hold on just a second.
By 1887, there was such a thing as a buffet car.
And it shows up in American English, meaning a railway carriage containing a refreshment bar.
So the first one means a bar, more or less, a place where you get a drink.
And the second one means a bar on a train car, right?
Now, there’s a Scots word with a variety of similar spellings, some of them like B-O-F-E-T or B-U-F-F-A-T-E,
Very similar to the word buffet or buffet that means stool.
So this is my theory without evidence.
Imagine, if you will, that in buffet cars or in a small little bar somewhere, that what people sit on are stools.
If they’re small, let’s say a railway car is, maybe they can only be furnished with a stool.
That’s just imagining it here.
Okay.
Later, though, and this is where we run into the apartment connection, we talked about buffet flats, didn’t we?
Right.
Is that what we talked about?
And a buffet flat is a type of apartment.
Now, flat used to be common in American English.
When I grew up in Connecticut, it was flat rather than apartments.
Really?
In some parts of the United States, you can still say it, but it’s far less common than it was,
And it’s never been as common here as it is in the United Kingdom.
So I think perhaps that buffet in buffet flat became more generalized and blended
To mean any kind of cheap, small, squalid place.
And I’ll tell you why I threw the word squalid in there.
You will often find people talking about a buffet-styled apartment,
Meaning a studio apartment.
That’s a one-room apartment
Maybe with a kitchenette in the corner.
They’ll talk about them in terms of being less than desirable.
A place you only go, say, if you just got a divorce
And you got no money.
Or you’re a college student right out of school
And you’re flat broke.
Or you’re an alcoholic and you got nowhere to go.
So you find the cheapest buffet flat you can
And you live there.
So, Patty, did you say you lived in buffet flats before?
No, no.
I just saw the signs outside the apartment building when we were driving around looking for a place to live.
Yeah, I see.
Any indication whether or not they’re desirable places to live?
No.
I mean, the outside of the building didn’t look that bad, but you never know.
Right.
Could have been like some basement thing with like a backed up sewer.
Yeah, right.
Right.
Well, thank you so much.
All right.
Thanks for calling.
Thanks so much, Patty.
Bye-bye.
Yeah, Grant, I remember we were talking about buffet flats when we talked about the word Hankty.
Yeah, I can’t remember how we got there, though, from Hankty to buffet flats.
Who knows? I think it was some lines from a song or something.
Oh, that’s right. There was a blues song in 1929.
Yeah.
As a lady in our neighborhood
Who runs above faithless
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Woo-hoo!
Going, read the news
Cause I’ve got them soft, tarot and blues
Early in the morning
Yahoo!
I’ve got them soft, tarot and blues.
I had missed that episode. Thanks! Perfectly addressed.
The only things I can think of are sarcastic. I have, in a similar situation, used “OK” with at tone that implied that it was not.
“Baby storm”, “Dad-fest”, “Dad-bash”, “Papapalooza”, or if you want to be really edgy try “Baby shower”.
If i’m going to be truthful here, which is something my dead mother does love, I’d tell you that I’ve never really been shook in my life, therefore the need for this argument is invalid, as ive never needed to use the word. Recently, I’ve been shooken with crippling depression, which leaves me in a state of “woah” or “whoa” on a daily basis. Tasks that were simple to me, now leave me with that tiny little word, dripping from my mouth. If someone would like to actually gather some information, meet me at the park. Love you mom.
A steamed stuffed bun was walking on the street and he felt hot. So he took off his coat and then he became a meatball. XD
I first came across this word in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos–he uses to describe someone showering — as in “potching around in the shower”
The first week I moved to Massachusetts, the grocery store person asked me, “Do you need a carriage?” I kept staring at him and asking him to repeat his question. He said it four times before I realized he was talking about a shopping cart.
i know this is an old thread but in Philippines we call it the “Dyahe” piece.
In modern Swedish, “dal” is a valley, or relatively low land. “dell” and “dale” are likely related.
We used it in my family in East Texas. I Googled the term several years ago and found a post by someone from Washington, DC, noting that his grandmother used it.
My mother told me once that she couldn’t see through me. I laughed and repeated a phrase she used on me, “My daddy wasn’t a glassmaker!” She quickly replied, “No, but you sure are a pain (pane)!”
For Long Suit as a positive position in game, an equivalent slang for Magic the Gather, Netrunner, and other modern card games could be ‘Good Hand/Grip’, or ‘Godly Hand/Grip’, or even ‘Kung Fu Grip’.
In modern games though it could also be a negative, where having to much of one type of card in hand is usually bad. Terms like ‘Mana Flood’, where your hand is mostly comprised of land leaving you short on spells and options, or ‘Mana Screw’, when you have mostly spells in your hand and don’t have enough land available to cast anything useful, would match the Long Suit meaning of holding more than the average number of cards in a suit.
But the term ‘Topdeck’, drawing the cards you need, might be more on point with the use of Long Suit as someone doing well or gaining in advantage; though it has more a luck connotation to it and I’ve never heard it outside of game talk.
Possible examples:
“I had a good grip, but they topdecked and won.”
“I’m so mana flooded right now, my only hope is to topdeck this game.”
“That guy has been topdecking this entire poker game.”
“I haven’t even seen the slides; I’m going to need to topdeck this presentation.”
“I topdecked all year at work and got a promotion.”
Hello, I just listened to this interesting episode on your podcast.
I wanted to comment that there is a similar double-meaning in German. A shoemaker in German is a “Schuster” and the verb “schustern” has a negative connotation, meaning careless or incompetent work.
See the entry for “schustern” in the Langenscheidt Dictionary:
https://en.langenscheidt.com/german-english/schustern
Best regards, -Wolfgang
My mother and her sisters (born 1920-1928 in Memphis TN) would often say, when commenting on something unusual, “well ain’t that a bird!”.
So I don’t think the particular comment is unusual at all. I’ve heard it all my life. So “ain’t that a bird!”.
It’s also a common term in poker, for a pre-planned multi-stage bluff. Not a missed-my-draw-bet-anyway, or a he-looks-weak-try-to-steal bluff, but a planned from square one “I’m going to raise this round, check the second, then raise his bet on the third round and follow up without even looking at my cards”.
Hello! I just listened to this segment yesterday, and have a solution for the caller who wished to find good books by looking for books that were classified in the same categories as books he already liked. It’s called a library shelflist, and can be found digitally these days. I don’t see a place to attach a PDF here, so I’ll send it directly to Martha and Grant. Alternatively, people who read this can look online for the phrase “library shelflist.”
I am from the Isle of Man, and I thought this was a Manx saying!
Late to the party here, but could it come from the Dutch word schat? Defined as treasure, honey, darling, or sweet person.
I heard a slightly different story on my visit to the Yorktown Revolutionary War Museum. Maybe I can share it on your show sometime.