Death Cookies and Escargot Among the Boilerplate

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how it is it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And one of the things that gets Grant and me really excited is workplace slang. And we love getting examples of this from our listeners. And we got some from Ned Green, who shared with us some of the vocabulary from his workplace, which includes escargot, boilerplate, and death cookies.

This is a French restaurant, right? Escargot? Cookies? Chicken? No.

Ned is a member of the ski patrol at Sugarbush Resort in northern Vermont. Oh, famous. Yeah, classic ski place. Sure.

Right. And one of the terms they use is escargot. He says that at the end of the ski day, we sweep the mountain by skiing every trail after the chairlifts have closed, looking for stray guests. And so if they have to radio each other to let them know that there’s somebody still up on the mountain, you know, they’ll say, we have some escargot here.

Oh, because they’re slow. So the guests who are slow, they’re slow like snails. Therefore, they’re escargot. Got it. Right.

And then, you know, sometimes the snow’s condition will deteriorate because of thawing and freezing and thawing and freezing. And he says when the trail conditions get hard and unpleasant, we can end up with boilerplate. That’s a hard surface with some rumpling that makes your skis chatter. And he says if the texture gets particularly nasty, they might refer to that as death cookies, referring to the fact that there are all these random blobs sticking up. Sometimes they’re called frozen chicken heads. But anyway, it’s just a way of making your job a little more interesting.

Yeah, that sounds really unpleasant, like all those bumps. It’s like when you work in a restaurant and there’s all that stuff in the walk-in freezer back in the corner that hasn’t been moved in years. You know, that’s what it sounds like, that kind of frozen stuff.

And what would you call that? I think that’s death cookies.

Thank you, Ned, for the slang from Sugarbush. We really appreciate it. And if you have some slang from your workplace, send it along, words@waywordradio.org, or gavel it into our voicemail at 877-929-9673. That’s toll-free in Canada and the United States, 24 hours a day. And if you’re somewhere else in the world, we have a WhatsApp number. Find it on our website at waywordradio.org.