When you were growing up, what did you call that piece of playground equipment that you climb up and then slide down? A former New Jersey resident recalls that when her family moved to Indiana, her playmates were startled when she called it a sliding board. They called it simply a slide. So is sliding board a regional term? Yes, indeed. Depending on where you grew up, you might have spent your childhood whooshing down a sliding pon, a sliding pond, or a sliding pot. Then there’s the British name for it, chute, the Yiddish glistch, and the Australian slippery dip. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Sliding Board”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Sally McCarty from Indianapolis.
Hiya, Sally. What’s going on?
Well, I have a question. This has bugged me for years.
When I was younger, my family lived in New Jersey out of the East Coast.
About middle school, junior high, we moved to Indianapolis.
The playground equipment that you slide down, the name for that piece of equipment that I was familiar with from the East Coast was called a sliding board.
And I was using that term, you know, with my friends when we moved out to the Midwest, and they all looked at me like I was crazy.
They didn’t know what I was talking about. What’s a sliding board?
Because in the Midwest, that piece of equipment is called a slide.
And I wonder if you know the difference, why there’s a difference in the parts of the country, the term for that piece of equipment in different parts of the country, or if you’ve heard of this from anybody else before.
-huh.
Well, you know, I had a somewhat similar experience.
I grew up with sliding boards in Kentucky, and I was shocked when people just referred to them as slides.
I thought, what language are you speaking?
Well, that’s strange because Kentucky is closer to Indiana than New Jersey is.
Yeah, well, I tell you, Sally, you do see this attested in places like New Jersey.
I’ve read about it being documented in Pennsylvania, Maryland.
But I have seen, as you go farther west, that you do see slide in a number of places.
Wisconsin, Michigan.
Grant, you grew up in Missouri.
Yep, slide was all we knew.
It was only a slide.
A sliding board to me sounds kind of splintery.
I hadn’t thought about it that way, but it sure does.
There are several terms for this piece of playground equipment, and one that was really striking to me, Grant, was sliding pond.
Sliding pond. I’ve heard of that.
Yeah. That was used in New York City by kids.
Sliding pond or sliding pond, P-O-N.
And it may be a partial translation of a Dutch word, meaning sort of sliding path, which would make sense because of all the Dutch influence there in New York.
Yeah, but the problem is that the sliding pond doesn’t go far enough back to when people actually still had even a memory of Dutch being spoken in New York.
Is that right?
There’s a gap there of quite a number of years.
I think more likely it’s related to the pastime in the very cold winters in the northeast of actually sliding literally on ponds.
Really?
Yeah.
It was a pastime.
You’re going to read about it in books from as early as the 1900s, maybe even a little bit before that.
They talk about going out and sliding on the, you know, just get a good run.
Do you go down a slide?
No.
No.
You just find a good smooth stretch of ice and you get a good run, get a good head start, and launch yourself on the ice.
Head first, butt first, feet first, whatever, and then go as far as you can go.
Sally, did you guys do that in New Jersey?
Yes, but I don’t think we called it anything.
Just sliding on the ice.
I wonder if sliding palm, though, got translated to board as it moved south in New Jersey.
I have to tell you something, Sally.
When I was a kid, there was always a kind of a one-upmanship between me and my siblings, my sisters and my brother, of always trying to do something a little more outrageously than the other guy.
And one of our pastimes, and this sounds so stupid, but I’m going to tell you anyway, was trying to slide the furthest distance on the concrete floor in our basement in one of the houses that we lived in.
We would use can after can of pledge.
We would spray it on the floor, you know, furniture polish, and get out just the right kind of socks or several pairs of socks and run as fast as we could and see who would slide the furthest.
And I could see how a child might innovate with a board and go, this isn’t fast enough.
I need to do something else.
How can I make this look more slippery?
And, you know, going and finding a piece of scrap metal and kind of working it out so that it would be super fast.
That’s just a theory of mine.
Well, Sally, does that make you feel better that you’re in good company?
Yes, it does.
It does.
All right.
Well, thanks for calling.
Well, thank you.
All righty.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye now.
Whee!
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