Sallyport

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Amber. I’m calling from Berlin, New Hampshire.

Hi, Amber. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Amber. Is that Berlin or Berlin?

You know they pronounce it Berlin, like rhymes with Merlin.

Okay, Berlin.

Berlin.

All right, very good.

What can we do for you?

It’s different, but I just started working at a prison, and there’s a whole lot of terms that, some of which I’ve heard from, like, gang movies and some that are more military-related.

Cool.

But there’s a term that I didn’t know where it came from, and it sounds bizarre to me, and that’s Sallyport.

Sally Port.

Yep, that’s what they call the doors that we go into that close behind us.

There’s actually two doors, and only one of them is open at any given time to kind of restrict entrance.

It just sounds so feminine to me, just because of the word Sally, that it seems odd that it’s a prison word.

These are like aviaries, the doors at aviaries at zoos, right?

Yeah, exactly.

So the birds don’t get out?

Yeah.

It’s a word that has a long history, and it refers to things that are fortified, like a fort, you know, that kind of building where you want to keep people on one side or the other and keep people from coming in and only letting your people out when you want to let them out.

And as far back as the 1600s, a sally port in a fort, like a military fort, was the place where it was really fortified.

And people would go out of this safe place and do things to the enemy, you know, take their stuff or kill them or whatever.

And it was a way of getting people in and out of the fort safely.

With no risk of a surge of the enemy coming inward when you were going outward.

Yeah.

And the sally part comes from, it goes all the way back to a Latin word salire, which means to go out.

To leave.

To leap forward or rush forward.

So it doesn’t have anything to do with it.

And then port is a word for door.

Yeah, like porta in Spanish, yeah.

So the sally part is about speed?

It’s about going.

It seems like it just slows things down.

No, it’s about exit.

It means leaving, actually.

Yeah.

It’s not about speed.

It’s about the act of going from one place to another.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

Yeah, sometimes on doors you see salira, which means exit.

You know, in Spanish.

And so it has to do with rushing out.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, cool.

Thanks for calling, Amber.

Glad to help.

Thank you so much.

All right, cheers.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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