Skid Row

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elliot. I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Elliot, welcome.

Thank you, thank you.

I have a question for you guys.

I was actually in the car with my girlfriend a few weeks ago,

And she’s originally Colombian,

And so she often likes to ask me about questions about English vocabulary,

Grammar, and all that kind of stuff.

And we heard the term Skid Row mentioned on a radio show,

And she turned to me and asked me what it meant.

And I realized that I actually had no idea at all.

And I was wondering if you could help me figure that out.

This is an easy one, fortunately.

So get your pen, all right?

Okay.

Skid Row, S-K-I-D-R-O-W, means, well, what do you use it to mean?

Somebody’s on Skid Row, they’re down and out.

They’re penniless and poor and probably without a job, right?

Mm-exactly.

Skid Row is kind of like the vague other place where you say people live when they’re down and out or their fortunes have fallen.

All right.

So it’s a bad area of town kind of thing.

Yeah, exactly.

But it’s usually not a specific area, although it started out that way.

Skid Row comes from Skid Road, R-O-A-D.

And a skid road is a, it’s not really a road, more like tracks almost.

Road will do.

It’s a road that you drag logs down.

It’s a part of timber cutting.

You cut down the timber, you cut off the branches,

And then you drag them down this road to the sawmill or to the river or wherever they need to go.

And here’s a description I found.

It’s a long stretch of mud, water, timbers, and treacherous wire cables.

And so it looks kind of like railroad tracks, but instead of metal rails across the top, it’s wood.

And there are these horizontal ties where there’s a little bit of a depression cut in them,

And the logs just kind of like drag right down the middle of all of these other logs on their way to the sawmill or the way to the river.

And as you can imagine, this is not a happy place.

It’s noisy and it’s dirty and it’s not a place you want to live.

But unfortunately, in the old days, whatever vague period that might be, loggers tended to live and play there near these skid roads because that’s where the work was.

You know, that’s where their jobs had them.

So that was probably where their entertainment was as well, right?

Sure, yeah.

There are probably all kinds of brothels and body houses and all kinds of strange stuff along the way.

And all the things that go with rough working environments and lots of men.

The earliest use we have, of course, of this transformation is from the early 1920s.

Although by the late 1920s, it’s defined in a collection of slang as the lowest strata of the underworld.

So it moved within the decade of the 1920s from being specifically another way to say skid road to being a way to refer to the class of people that might live there.

Wow.

Okay.

So definitely a place we don’t want to end up.

No.

Right.

No, you don’t.

And by the way, it probably came out of Seattle first with the logging community.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Well, now I have very in-depth notes.

Right.

So I think you may have saved me here.

Thank you guys so much for your help.

Thank you so much, sir.

All right.

Thanks for coming.

Yeah, thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you are trying to translate the world for your boyfriend or girlfriend, husband, wife,

Who is from another country and learning the language, you probably have a story like that as well.

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