Thickly Settled

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marissa McGrath calling from Bellingham, Washington.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

I was listening to your podcast the other day when I was on a road trip on the Olympic Peninsula.

And I saw a sign that said congested area.

And which was obviously meant to let us know that even though it looked quite wooded and beautiful, that there were a lot of people living nearby.

And it reminded me of a vacation that I took to Falmouth, Massachusetts in 2010 with a bunch of friends where we saw a sign that we thought was hilarious that said, thickly settled, which took us a while to figure out meant the exact same thing.

So my boyfriend, Victor, and I that were on the road trip, he said, oh, you should call them.

And kind of on a dare, I called you to ask about this, about these signs and how they get worded and how they’re sort of affected by local vernacular.

I mean, thickly settled.

It sounds so much like a Massachusetts.

You can almost hear a Boston accent right there.

Yeah, I’m picturing pilgrims or something.

Thickly settled.

Yeah, it almost felt like, yeah, something that a person from old England rather than new England would write.

-huh, -huh. That’s a really interesting observation. Yeah, thickly settled was a term in Massachusetts law as far back as the 1830s, meaning someplace that has a lot of structures, either a business district or houses that were within 200 feet of each other, extending for a quarter of a mile.

It was a legal term.

So the signs on both of these cases are about warning you that you need to slow down because you’re coming across businesses and homes and cars and people?

Right. And we sort of thought it was in both instances in the car with my friends and my boyfriend.

We were like, why don’t they just say slow?

I mean, there’s so many different ways to do this, you know.

You can change what the speed limit is.

It just felt like a quaint quirk of this community.

But you’re saying that these kinds of signs would maybe be found all over Massachusetts?

Yeah, I think so.

Am I right?

They seem to be exclusive to Massachusetts?

I think so.

I mean, it seems like a road sign that Emily Dickinson would have written.

The thickly settled ones.

I know.

Yeah, and I thought about you guys in particular because that word thick, you know, it’s not how—

Well, congested is how we on the West Coast would talk about, you know, a lot of something.

But thick, it seems like a very old-fashioned way of expressing a large population or, as you’re saying, a lot of buildings in one place.

Yes, indeed.

And the word thickly has dropped, I think, in terms of its usage.

Just in general, we don’t say thickly so much.

And thickly settled is pretty specific to Massachusetts, as far as I know.

I was just up in Oregon myself, and I remember seeing a rose sign that either said, I think it just said congested, which, you know, I just wanted to take a picture of myself in front of it because it was a little congested at the time.

With the tissues.

Yeah, the congested area here’s my face right now.

Because if you were there during the fires, the forest fires, you would absolutely have been congested probably at that time.

Oh, right. Yes.

I want to go back to something that you hinted at there.

I don’t think that there’s a regional difference except that the regional laws are different.

That is to say, it’s not that the people are saying congested more in the Northwest than they are in Massachusetts.

But one of the things that I think you’re hearing that we haven’t really zeroed in on is that congested is a Latin word and thickly are old English words.

And I think you’re hearing this kind of this, we can kind of unconsciously classify these words by their origins in our minds.

The Latin romance words tend to feel a little more highfalutin.

They tend to feel a little more learned, a little more educated.

And the Anglo-Saxon slash dramatic slash Old Norse, Old English words, so forth, they tend to feel a little closer to the earth, a little more historic, a little more essential to the language.

They feel like the parts of the language that you build the rest of the language upon.

So it really reflects the culture of both places.

It’s funny because in the Seattle area, we’re often sort of called elitist or snobby or learned or book-loving.

I have to tell you, our fans in Massachusetts are some of the most—

There are so many universities and small colleges up there.

They are readers.

They are—I tell you what.

I would love to see the reading battle between Washington State and Massachusetts, because that would be something to behold.

I’m not trying to start beef.

No, no, no, that’s what I mean.

But yeah, but in Falmouth in particular, on Cape Cod, and Cape Cod in general, has such a, exactly what you’re saying, like an earthy, down-home, like old-fashioned sort of feel.

And I love that as a visitor, as a regular visitor to Massachusetts.

I love that about going there.

I think it’s really great.

And in fact, when we were there, my friends and I, we found Moxie.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of this.

It’s the sarsaparilla that is really common out there that my grandfather used to love.

And we actually invented, we were like, we have to come up with some Moxie, some cocktails made out of Moxie.

And we invented one called Sickly Settled, which was a combination of Moxie and bourbon.

So there’s also a cocktail recipe for your listeners today.

I think you need one cranberry in there.

You would be thickly settled after that.

I like the idea of a little mini cranberry bog floating.

Yeah, with a little rake.

Oh, my gosh.

Somebody who’s listening, please make this and take a picture of it.

Oh, I got to tell you.

I didn’t know when you started your question what we were going to break open.

Yeah, you’re welcome.

Yeah, that was a thank you.

And thank you very much for your call.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Okay.

Thanks so much.

Take care.

Bye.

Cheers.

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