The playground "slide"

[Laurence Horn]

On May 3, 2012, at 1:25 PM, Jonathan Lighter wrote:

> I do recall a single, ancient, wooden slide at the end of a line of shiny
> new metal slides in the long-vanished 66th Street playground in Central
> Park.
>
> As for slidingpondophobia, some of us knew what a "pond" was, and we knew
> what a "slide" was.  You might as well have called it a "sliding
> cantaloupe."  It was surreal. Kids who thought it was some kind of pond
> were nuts. And their parents encouraged them. It was especially frightening
> to see adults so grossly deluded.

Now now.  We knew what a slide was and we knew what a pond was.  (There was one of those in Central Park too, after all.)   We also knew what a pool was, but we never looked for water under the surface of a pool table.  We'd never have said "this is a really fast pond" or "that pond is too splintery".  But "this is a really fast sliding pond" or "that sliding pond is too splintery", no problem.  Except for the splinters.  As mentioned, I did wonder at one point whether the name came from "slide upon", but we probably mostly figured it was just homonymy, like "too" and "two"; a sliding POND would have had to be a small body of water on wheels or the like, but a SLIDing pond wasn't a kind of pond at all.  (And let's not get started in again on peanut butter, phone sex, and cactus trees.)  And a jungle gym wasn't really a gym, or located in the jungle.  Go figure.

LH

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