lanai

[Wilson Gray]

It depends on what you consider "new." A friend built a lanai onto the
patio of my mother's house in Sacramento, CA, in 1970. The person who
built the lanai was a native of Hawaii. He and my mother use the word
with such ease, correcting me every time that I tried to refer to the
lanai as a "sunporch," that I got the impression that the fact that *I*
had never heard this word before was sheer coincidence. This particular
lanai is, as described below, an enclosed, screened-in, roofed porch
built, in this case, around and over a patio.

-Wilson Gray

On Mar 5, 2005, at 7:01 PM, David Bergdahl wrote:

> ---------------------- Information from the mail header
> -----------------------
> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       David Bergdahl <einstein at FROGNET.NET>
> Subject:      lanai
> -----------------------------------------------------------------------
> --------
>
> I was in SW Florida last week where my wife had a workshop on Marco
> Is; on a
> rainy day we looked at open houses in new developments in Estero (bet.
> Ft
> Meyers and Naples) and was struck by the new-to-me-term "lanai" for an
> enclosed screened in porch which many of the houses had.  Ultimate
> origin is
> the name of a Hawaiian island--DARE has "A roofed structure with open
> sides
> built near or onto a house; a porch, veranda, or patio." It also notes
> that
> it was introduced in Sun City FL by 1982 and unknown in cities that
> surround
> it.  It obviously has spread since a google search reveals a
> Mississippi
> house with one.  I would suppose only new houses in the more tropical
> parts
> of the country would sport lanais.
> ________________________________
> "Raffiniert ist der Herr Gott aber Boshaft ist er nicht"
> --Albert Einstein
>