The playground "slide"

[David Barnhart]

East Texas, you say.

IN DARE for _sliding board_ (for which I do not recall that term, it was
just a slide) the quotations show:

Pennsylvania 2
Maryland 2
Wisconsin 2
Kansas 1
Florida 1
Missouri 1
Ohio 1
New Jersey 1
Alabama 1
Mississippi 1
South Carolina 1

For def. 2 (a sled)

Pennsylvania 1
Tennessee 1

Regards,
David

barnhart at highlands.com

On Thu, May 3, 2012 at 2:12 PM, Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at yale.edu>wrote:

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> Sender:       American Dialect Society <ADS-L at LISTSERV.UGA.EDU>
> Poster:       Laurence Horn <laurence.horn at YALE.EDU>
> Subject:      Re: The playground "slide"
>
> -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> 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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