boot 'trunk of a car'

[Murrah Lee]

I was watching an old Roy Rogers movie recently, and he called the fabric covered luggage area on the back of a stagecoach a "boot."

From: Charles C Doyle <cdoyle at UGA.EDU>
Date: March 25, 2011 12:11:39 PM CDT
Subject: boot 'trunk of a car'


My town of Athens, Georgia, remains in a state of grief and anxiety from the shooting of two policemen Monday, the gunman as yet unlocated.  Besides what struck me as an odd use of the term “assassination,” another linguistically-interesting point has emerged:

One victim in the series of crimes was kidnapped and locked in the trunk of a car--or, as he explained to a TV interviewer, he had been tied up and “put in the boot.”  The speaker was an African American male, probably in his 30s or 40s, who spoke an unexceptional Georgia version of AAV--with no trace of British or Caribbean pronunciations.

DARE gives a small entry for “boot” with the meaning ‘trunk of a car’, showing four attestations:  one from Wisconsin (1950), one from Kentucky (1960).  The third, interestingly, quotes an Atlanta resident in 1972:  “As a child around Athens, Georgia, I heard ‘the boot of a car’ which we now know as the trunk.”  The fourth attestation, also from 1972, is marked “ncGA”; that’s where Athens is.


--Charlie
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