How are Polka Dots and Polka Music Connected?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Judy from Huntsville, Alabama.

Well, hello, Judy. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Judy. What’s up? What can we help with?

Well, I’m one of those people that has about hundreds and hundreds of song lyrics that play on auto shuffle in my head.

And the other day one popped up and it was the polka dot polka.

And it occurred to me that those two things seemingly don’t have anything to do with one another.

So I wondered how polka dots became associated with that lively polka dance.

Oh, that’s a great question.

And well put, because that’s a complicated topic.

Do you have a lot of polka music in your head?

I do.

I grew up in Wisconsin, and we did a lot of polkas and shottishes and waltzes and so forth.

Nice.

That’s cool.

I can hear the accordions now.

I can hear the Wisconsin.

Judy, it’s an interesting story about the 1830s or so, early 1830s, a cool new dance trend hit Europe.

And it was called the polka, which is the way that you refer to a Polish woman in that language.

She’s a polka, whereas the man is a Polak.

And the dance was huge.

I mean, we’re talking like it was the lombada plus the macarena of its day.

You know what I’m saying?

Just a really, really, all the dance floors were doing it.

All the kids were doing it.

And because this trend was so huge, the word polka kind of borrowed out of the Polish language began to be used for a lot of products and things that you could buy in the store.

And we’re talking different types of clothes, different types of all different sorts.

And it wasn’t really the fabric necessarily so much as the shape, the pattern, the cut, the style, that sort of thing.

But one of the things that came out of that, and probably the only polka thing that’s left from that trend of naming things after the dance, is the polka dot pattern.

So we have…

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

So that dot pattern of the big round dots, they were just called polka dots after the song.

It didn’t mean that people were wearing polka dots to do the dance.

It didn’t mean that Polish people wore those dots.

It was simply borrowed just to take a little bit of the halo from the huge success of the dance.

-huh, the marketing scheme.

Yeah, marketing scheme.

And you can see this happening all the time today with products, right?

Remember when everyone added I in front of something to indicate that it was having to do with Internet or the digital world, borrowing it kind of from Apple and all their I products?

Yes, indeed.

That’s very interesting.

I would have never put that together as a reference to the Polish dance.

Yeah, it was a wild craze.

I mean, people were just nuts for that stuff.

They’re still wild and crazy for it in Wisconsin.

For polka dots or the polka?

The polka.

The polka, yeah.

In any case, the dot pattern dates to around the 1850s or so.

So it was a couple decades after the dance.

But it’s not like today where when we have some hot new thing, some trendy item, that it peaks like after just a few months or six months or maybe a year.

Like at the time, trends really lasted because culture moved a little bit more slowly.

Yes, I’m sure.

Judy, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thanks for answering that question because now when I sing the polka dot polka in my head, I will know what I’m talking about.

I love that, by the way, that they borrowed the word polka back to make a song of polka music.

That’s cool, right?

Yes, indeed.

Bye, Judy.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thank you.

Bye now.

You know, Judy reminded me that I am ever so grateful to whoever the listener was who called us to tell us about their word for if two people are walking on the sidewalk and they’re headed for each other.

And so they sort of go back and forth, you know, doing this whole dance.

Who’s going to pass on which side.

Yeah.

Yeah, they call it a polka dodge.

Polka dodge.

Nice.

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