Wheel Well Ice Chunks

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Gene. I’m calling from South Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Gene. Welcome to the show.

What’s going on, Gene?

Okay, the word I have for you is crustical.

A little bit of background on this.

I have worked as a deckhand on the Lake Champlain ferries.

There’s three crossings on Lake Champlain.

And in the wintertime, I don’t work the winters anymore,

But we used to have arguments, friendly arguments,

About the accumulation of salt and dirt in the wheel wells of cars and trucks

That would get deposited on the decks of the ferries.

And it got to be a pain, actually, to move these chunks.

They had some indelicate words to use to describe these chunks of ice, frozen material.

And then one of the guys came up with the idea that he had heard somewhere

That the word was crustical, that was inside the wheel well of a truck or a car.

And I was wondering if it was just a regionalism.

He didn’t know where the word came from except that he heard it from somebody else and whether it was invented.

Or if you have any idea of a history of the word or if it’s been used in that context before.

Interesting.

I was going to ask you how you felt about crusticles because, of course, we don’t live where there’s snow and ice.

But I sort of have fond memories of them, of kicking them out of the wheel wells.

Oh, so satisfying.

Yeah, it’s kind of like bubble wrap.

You know, squeezing bubble wrap or something?

When it comes out perfectly formed with the shape of the inner wheel well, that’s the best moment.

Well, I can tell you that my wife just about 30 minutes ago,

She had to go outside and scrape the melted crusticles off the garage floor,

And she wasn’t too happy about it.

No, no.

I guess it’s different when you don’t live there.

Now, we haven’t come across this term before, Jean.

In Vermont, actually.

Yeah, we’ve got an email from Judy Bond in 2015.

We talked about something like this on the show before.

Okay.

And she said that she knew it and learned it from the Burlington newspaper.

Oh.

Yeah, I think you all had some kind of contest or something to name those things.

And somebody came up with.

And we didn’t have a contest, but we had so many people with their own terms.

So the snow snot, I think, was one of them.

I liked Fenderberg.

Fenderberg is a great one.

Fenderberg, yeah.

No, I hadn’t heard those, no.

Yeah, or Carseco.

Maybe that’s where he had heard the word.

It could be.

It doesn’t Google all that well, or it does Google, but for some more offensive things.

Don’t go to Urban Dictionary’s definition for it.

But I looked in the newspaper databases, and it just doesn’t come up that much.

But it’s a logical word.

It makes a lot of sense.

And the ickle suffix is what we call in linguistics very productive.

Lots of things have ickle added to them to mean something made of hard ice.

Yeah, yeah, because some of these that would come off of 18-wheelers on trucks,

And we would have as many, the ferries are pretty long.

They’re 200-plus feet long, and we would have as many as four or five tractor trailers on.

And on a winter’s day, they would come up the ramp, and they would bounce along,

And they would get onto the boat.

And these chunks, some of them are pretty big, you know, five, ten pounds worth of ice.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, we would have to shovel them off.

And when you have just a channel on the crossing, you would be shoveling this stuff off,

And you’d see it on the lake for the next three or four weeks.

You know, it would still be there because the temperatures would stay really low.

Right, right.

Well, I can see why you might have an off-color name for those things if they’re making your life that difficult.

What’s interesting to me is that there are so many different names for these things that people have just made up and use around the country, like slush puppy or kickies because you kick them off, but nothing really canonical.

Right, nothing that’s stuck for everyone.

Yeah.

Well, Fenderberg sounds pretty good, too.

I like that one.

That’s a nice sound, too, right?

I like that one, too.

Gene, you have our sympathies out here on the West Coast.

Good luck with the crusticles.

That’s part of what it is living up in the north, yes.

Take care.

It’s a beautiful town.

Okay, thank you. Bye.

This is unrelated, but it reminded me of one of the tricks we used to play on people when I worked in fast food as a teenager.

What?

Well, he was talking about his wife cleaning the ice off the floor of the garage and how much she hated it.

Yeah.

We used to tell the newbies to get a wet mop and go mop the walk-in freezer floor.

Oh, no.

How can I have known you all these years and I never knew until just now that you used to do that?

I’m sure we talked about this before.

You used to do that to new days.

Yeah, and they don’t quite realize that the mop is going to freeze and it’s going to be ugly real soon.

Really?

Did they do that to you too?

Oh, yeah.

There was all kinds of little miniature hazing.

But my brother and I, we instituted all kinds of new hazing.

Oh, like sending people for striped paint?

Yeah, yeah.

I even brought up one that I’d learned from Mark Twain, the hazing that he went through when he worked for his brother’s printing press.

They had to look for type lice, which doesn’t exist.

Type lice.

And so we invented ice cream lice, and we told the frontline people who worked the soft ice cream machines to be on the lookout for ice cream lice.

They had to be, yeah, there’s no such thing.

Oh, my gosh.

I’m glad I was a freelancer all those years.

Anyway, 877-929-9673.