Babushkas, Davenports, Ice Boxes, and Tree Lawns

Growing up in Euclid, Ohio, we spoke an exotic dialect of English--though we didn't know it. My dialect (which was a mixture of family "idiolect" and our socio-regional dialect) might be described as an inland Northern variety of American English, flavored by our lower middle class socio-econmic status and our Irish-Catholic religion--with a dash of family peculiarities! Now that is a mouthful, I know.

There was a Euclid twist on our language because outside of Ljubljana, Slovenia, Euclid probably had the largest concentration of Slovenians in the world. We had Slovenians, Polish, Irish, Germans, Italians, English, and other ethnic groups in our town. We had many Jews and a Jewish temple, Ner Tamid, at E. 250th and Lakeshore Boulevard. As far as I knew, we had no Blacks in Euclid of the 1950's and 1960's. I've since heard that there were a few African American families around Babbitt Road and the railroad tracks (Nickel Plate and New York Central). This might seem astonishing in the year 2011 because Euclid is now around 40% African American (the Euclid public schools are much higher than that).

One possible linguistic contribution of the Slovenians and Polish Euclidians might be the word "babushka." I know the word in Russian means "grandmother," but to us it meant a scarf head covering that women wore. It probably was the most common head covering in St. William's when I was growing up (at the time women were required to wear head coverings in Catholic churches). My very Irish mother always wore a babushka in church. The word was as ordinary and common to us as the word "hat." When my wife moved to Euclid in 1982, she encountered this word for the first time--and I discovered it was not a commonly known word outside of Euclid and Cleveland.

Another common word in Euclid was "tree lawn." A tree lawn is the strip of land between the sidewalk and the street. I found out as a graduate student at Ohio State (1979-1982) that this was also not a universally understood word. In fact, there are interesting regional variations of this. Some people have no word at all for "tree lawn"; in Barberton, Ohio they call a "tree lawn" a "devil's strip." In fact, if you ever hear that term, you can bet the ranch the speaker is from Barberton.

In our family, the long overstuffed chair in the living room was called a "davenport." Now I get a blank look or a giggle when I use the term. I have a feeling we davenport-speakers are losing ground! This is probably also true for the Canadian chesterfield-sitters.

Another term used in our family was "ice box." That's where we kept the milk, the beer, and the Cheez Whiz.

I feel like a dinosaur these days, mowing my tree lawn, wearing a babushka (well, not really), sitting on my davenport, and grabbing a Great Lakes "Edmund Fitzgerald Porter" out of the ice box. Some days I like to eat my pirogi and potica as I drink my beer.