He Tried to be Helpful: Other Terms for Drinkers and Non-Drinkers

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

The workers who handle curbside check-in at the airport or help you with your luggage are called skycaps.

And what’s interesting about this word skycap is that it joined the English language because it was the winning entry in a competition.

In 1940, the Airlines Terminal Building in New York was about to open, and a contest was held to invent a word for the porters who would be working there.

A man named Willie Wainwright suggested the word skycap, and he won $100 for that.

And he was apparently inspired by the term redcap, which at the time applied to railway porters who wore red caps to make them stand out in a crowd.

In the 20th century, there were lots of these contests to create new words that would stick in the language and ideally bring a lot of publicity.

In 1923, three years into Prohibition, there was a Boston philanthropist and staunch anti-alcohol crusader named Delsevere King.

And he sponsored a contest offering $200 for a term to denote somebody who flouts the law by drinking illegal liquor.

And he wanted a word that would stab awake the public conscience to the fact that such lawless drinking is a menace to the public itself.

And more than 20,000 entries came pouring in, and they included words like Bushivik and Klinker and Wedocrat and Slacklaw and Lawjacker.

And none of those quite worked for Delsevere King, but one entry did, and it was actually submitted by two different people.

And their word was, do you know what I’m going to say?

Scofflaw.

Scofflaw, exactly.

Scofflaw ended up sticking around, although these days, you know, it’s used in connection with minor offenses like parking tickets.

But I have a couple of footnotes to this story.

A Harvard student magazine shortly after Delcevier King ran his contest, they ran their own contest and they offered $25 to come up with a word for a prohibitionist.

So they had all kinds of entries like, you know, college students.

They got entries like Fear Beer and Jug Buster.

But the winner of that contest was Spigot Bigot.

Did not catch on.

No, I guess they eventually won out.

But one more footnote.

Delsevere King, whose contest gave us this word scofflaw, is buried in Quincy, Massachusetts.

And if you go there and take a look at his gravestone, his epitaph reads simply, he tried to be helpful.

Oh, that’s a great one.

Yeah, right?

That’s what the best of us do, right?

Yeah.

The best people are trying to be helpful.

That’s a very good one.

Martha and I get into names and naming every chance that we get.

And we’d love to hear your stories about the clever names in your life, be it your name, a family member’s name, a pet’s name, the name of your business.

How you decided to name the book that you wrote, let us know, 877-929-9673,

Or tell the story at length in email to words@waywordradio.org.