Sliding Ponds and Paths

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Nancy.

Well, I’m calling you from Western New Jersey in a county called Hunterdon County.

But I’m actually asking about a word from my childhood where I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Okay, great.

Well, Grant lived in Brooklyn for quite a while.

Yeah, that’s where my son was born.

Tell us about your language there, Nancy.

Okay, so I grew up in an area of Brooklyn called Bay Ridge, and it’s along New York Harbor. And I’d really like to know the origin of the local name for a piece of playground equipment.

When I was growing up, we called the piece of equipment that the kids slide down, we called it a sliding pond.

P-O-N-D, pond, like the body of water, sliding pond.

P-O-N-D, like a body of water, even though there’s no water involved.

Yeah, yeah.

When I moved away from Brooklyn, I went to college in Philadelphia, and I realized that everybody called it something else.

My roommate called it a sliding board, and some of my fellow students called it a slide.

And I realized what a peculiar term it was because, you know, there’s no water involved.

And, you know, I was really curious.

I’ve always wanted to talk to a linguist about it.

And here I am.

I have an opportunity.

Yeah, you found the number.

Here we are.

All right.

So there’s several layers to why this is so interesting.

One is most of the country is listening to you now going, sliding a pond?

The thing I slide down?

The metal thing at an angle?

Slime up the ladder, sit on your bottom, and you slide down.

Sliding pond?

Yes, yes.

As a matter of fact, it’s so centered on New York City and even northern New Jersey.

Interestingly, it did originally start out as frozen water.

So you might have just an actual, I don’t know if it was the Lake and Prospect Park or what have you,

But you might have actual water in the gutter or the sidewalk, whatever, a frozen patch of some kind,

Where you could run and glide as a child, the kind of thing that children love to do.

And so that could be a sliding pond.

But then the term became applied to the playground equipment.

But that P-O-N-D is an English misunderstanding of a Dutch word.

Oh, that makes total sense.

There’s a Dutch word B-A-A-N, B-A-A-N.

It means a path or a course.

And you will find it in compounds like Gleibon, which means a slide path.

But that Dutch heritage of New York, when it was New Amsterdam, left behind that word

Bond, so you would get an interesting combo of English plus Dutch, you’d have a sliding

Bond, which is misunderstood by English speakers who did not know Dutch as sliding pond, sometimes

With a D, and sometimes sliding pond with no D. Now, there is a folk etymology that

Says that sliding pond comes from the idea of sliding upon the thing, but that is a false

Etymology that is not the origin of it. It does come from Dutch. We have concrete evidence for

This. Well, you’ve solved my mystery for me.

Yeah, but if you don’t look at old newspapers,

As Martha and I love to do, you’ll find sliding pond mentioned all over the place in New York.

And you see it’s changing from being just any kind of frozen section of ground or water that

You could slide upon, you know, take a run on the land and then you coast on the ice,

To turning into the word for the playground equipment.

Oh, that is very, very cool.

Which I think is a natural semantic extension.

It just seems like a really normal path for that word to take.

Let me just note here that most of my reference works say that sliding pond is now archaic,

Not even old-fashioned, but that the new generation of children does not use it.

Yes. So it’s definitely a remnant of a different time.

Isn’t that interesting? That’s really interesting.

Well, now I have to ask all the children I know from, you know, who still live in that area, what they call it.

And I would love to be wrong on that.

Yeah, do some more field work. Let us know.

If there was some residual use of it in Brooklyn still, I would love to hear about it.

Oh, that would be great. Well, thank you so much. It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

And I can’t wait to hear more about, I love your program.

I really love that.

Thank you very much, Nancy.

You take care of yourself, all right?

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye, Nancy.

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