JJ spent much of his life in Rhode Island but now lives in Racine, Wisconsin, which has led to some hilarious misunderstandings involving the different dialects of those regions. For one thing, his neighbors in the Midwest made certain assumptions he hadn’t expected when JJ described a problem that forced him to take a dump on the ice. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Taking a Dump on the Ice”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, Martha and Grant. This is JJ calling from the western shore of Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin.
Hi, JJ. How you doing?
Pretty good. Pretty good. I have a little language mystery I was wondering if you might help me make my way through.
Oh, yeah.
I grew up in Coventry, Rhode Island, and I moved to the Midwest in the early 1980s.
I learned pretty quickly that there were a lot of different words for things in Racine compared to Coventry, although both areas do use bubbler correctly.
One idiom, however, has a very distinctly different meaning pretty much, I guess, everywhere in the world except for where I grew up.
One cold winter day, I was walking to my friend Dan and Sarah’s house, and I slipped on an icy sidewalk.
When I walked up to their door, I guess I must have looked distressed because I said, hey, are you all right? I said, as I was holding my lower back, no, I just took a dump on the ice and I think I hurt myself.
Laughter ensued. And I felt pretty incensed because I really thought I had hurt myself. I said,
No, I think I hurt my tailbone. And it wasn’t until I rephrased myself that, hey, I slipped and fell and I think I hurt myself. And they’re like, what are you talking about? And that’s when I realized that the idiom that I had used did not mean the same thing that it did in Rhode Island.
Where I grew up. Not at all. When you said you took a dump on the ice, they were imagining something else. They actually were for a good, probably 10 minutes because you took a dump and you hurt yourself in the process. I did not get a lot of sympathy. And you know, what’s most strange is when I’ve been back in Rhode Island, I’ve asked people about this and they deny it. They deny it until we were driving on the road and a motorcycle swerved and the guy almost fell off and my friend Nina said hey that guy almost took a dump and she turned around and looked at me she’s like we do use it other than on that momentarily unthought response they won’t admit it.
But yeah, you know what and actually the oldest meaning of dump back as far as middle English was about falling. It’s about somebody falling. It was used in passages like, they dump in the deep and to death they pass, things like that. So the earliest usage was about people falling. And then later it was about things being kind of jumbled together in a pile or poured out into a pile or dropped in a pile.
Well, I would always tell my fourth graders at the start of the year, as I would explain how I would say things differently, that Rhode Island was settled first, so the way we used it was the first and right way.
The linguist and me will argue, but I appreciate the comedy in that.
Yeah, I’m sure the fourth graders appreciated it too.
Yeah. JJ, thanks for sharing. We really appreciate it.
Thank you so much, guys. All right. Take care now. Be careful out there.
Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
Grant, of course, the word that also comes to mind here is polysemy.
P-O-L-Y-S-E-M-Y, polysemy.
That’s right.
Lots of words are polysemus. That means that they have more than one meaning.
Sometimes they’re similar meanings. They’re shaded a little differently.
But yeah, dump has multiple meanings, and they can cause hilarious conflicts of misapprehension if you’re in a circumstance like JJ was.
We know that you’ve had these things happen as well where two people just didn’t understand each other and it led to hilarious confusion.
We love those stories and we’d like you to share them with us.
Or tell the story in email to words@waywordradio.org.
