Whitewater rafting has a rich tradition of jargon and slang that includes such terms as boulder garden, strainer, and drop pool. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Whitewater Rafting Words”
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.
We received an email from Sarah Ammerman in Central Ohio, who sent us a treasure trove of slang involving a certain activity that she and lots of other people engage in.
And I wanted to see if you could guess what it is.
All right.
Okay. Here are three of the slang terms she sent.
Strainer, drop pool, and boulder garden.
Strainer, drop pool, and boulder garden.
Mm—
Lawn care or xeriscaping or I don’t know what.
That’s pretty good.
Scrap booking.
Just throwing that out there.
Well, all the kayakers and whitewater rafters are going, oh, oh, I know those.
I know those.
She just sent us this wonderful long list, and I checked all these out.
They’re great.
Like a strainer is a fallen tree or collection of rocks or other debris that does little to obstruct the water but will block your path.
A boulder garden is a rapid formed by a collection of massive boulders that are right there in the riverbed.
And a drop pool is a rapid or a drop that’s followed by a calm pool.
Oh, that sounds nice.
Yeah.
Kayaking, right?
Right, or whitewater rafting.
There’s something called a smiling hole, which has to do with the way a wave crest curves downstream at both ends.
And it actually looks like a smile.
You can look up on Google Image pictures of smiling holes and squirrely water.
I don’t know any of these.
I’ve only been whitewater rafting once.
I was in Ecuador, high in the mountains.
It was, I think my heart nearly leapt out of my chest.
I was so frightened of what was happening.
Because these guys have been up and down this river, you know, hundreds or more times.
And so they get a couple of noobs on their boat and they decide to mess with you.
And they dump you in like as soon as they can in a place that seems dangerous but isn’t.
Yep.
And I thought for sure.
I was like, this is it.
Bye, cruel world.
I’m done.
That’s over for me.
And, of course, I was fine because here I am.
I’m so glad you mentioned that because one of my favorite bits of slang comes from a specific river, the Gauley River in West Virginia.
They used to have an area there that they called Guides Revenge because, you know, that’s where you could kind of mess with people.
But the insurance company, supposedly for this whitewater rafting company, decided that they couldn’t use that name.
So they renamed it Fluffy Box of Kittens or Fuzzy Box of Kittens or Box of Fuzzy Kittens.
But it was the same place where they would still mess with their guests, right?
Right. Sort of like the Cape of Good Hope.
But I’ll never forget the terrified look on my friend’s face as we both were like poured into the drink.
It’s scary.
It was.
But they did the thing where they flipped the end of the boat up.
And like you’re basically trying to stay upright standing on an upright boat that’s kind of end on end, you know.
And you’re going down.
There’s no way not to go down.
You just hope you don’t hit a rock on the way down.
Yeah, I enjoyed about as much of that as I could stand.
We made it to the end, though.
And Ecuador was beautiful.
So that’s a plus.
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