What People Call a Playground Slide

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hey, how’s it going? My name is Dave. I’m calling from Traverse City, Michigan.

Hi, Dave. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Dave. What’s up?

I got into a funny situation here in the office a few weeks ago. I was telling a story about my upbringing in southeastern Pennsylvania when I used a term that stopped the conversation dead in its tracks amongst my colleagues. I was talking about my time as a youth enjoying the sliding board. Something that seemed very natural and very normal to me was obviously very strange to this group of northern Midwesterners that I worked with.

How interesting. What did they call it?

After talking it over, everyone agreed roundly that their preferred term was the slide. And that is also familiar to me, but I always assumed slide was just a shortening or an abbreviation of sliding board, which in my mind was always the more formal word for this playground implement.

Right.

The group decided that sliding board was something that maybe was wooden or something that would result in a lot of splinters. So after much laughter and discussion, we hashed out what we were all kind of talking about. But the question remained, where the heck did sliding board come from?

That’s so interesting because that sounds perfectly normal to me. I grew up with a sliding board, but I believe, and I grew up in Kentucky, I believe Grant, who grew up in Missouri, called it a slide.

Just a slide, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s very curious.

But you see that term sliding board scattered around the country, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Maryland, places like that. Sometimes in the south it’s called a sliding plank. But I’m a little surprised that your friends didn’t understand it.

It was unanimous.

Really?

Not a single person.

Really?

And we’re in here, northern Michigan, not a single person had a clue what that word meant. Not even in the ballpark. They were all thinking it was something not even playground related.

I want to go back to their thought that it would mean splinters, because have they never seen polished wood? Have they never slid down a wooden banister? Are their childhood self-deprived?

I guess not.

I must work with a bunch of adventureless people. I think, and one other guess was that it was some kind of backboard or emergency equipment.

Okay.

Slide onto in case of an emergency of some kind.

No, it’s like Martha said, it’s just a slide. It’s a long, hard, flat thing, like a board. But I wouldn’t be surprised if there were people who had wooden slides, so sliding board made a lot of sense because metal hasn’t always been an inexpensive commodity.

Right.

And when I was a kid, we didn’t even have this board. I literally slid down the cellar roof just like in the song. You know, there’s one other term for this piece of playground equipment that you hear in mainly New Jersey and New York, and that’s sliding pond.

Yeah.

And we’re not sure why. Some people think it may derive from slide a pond. But probably not. There’s an idea that it might come from an old Dutch word, right?

Yeah, that, again, has to do with sliding across a pond.

Right, sliding across a pond.

Yeah, but it goes by lots of different names, but it’s still fun, right?

Right.

Well, that is really interesting, and that definitely helps clear it up. I know everybody learned something, I think, in the office that day.

Yeah.

Please tell your colleagues that you’re not a weirdo. They just need to read more. They need to see the world more. Everyone needs to get out to Philadelphia.

That’s right.

And slide down a band. It’s a wonderful Pennsylvania language that I grew up with.

Dave, thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.