Skip to main content

Park on the parkway

George Carlin was a master of wordplay.  One of the bits of his that I hear quoted most often is under the subject of how confusing and arbitrary language can be: "Why do we park in the driveway, but drive on the parkway?"

Without even looking it up, one can see that it's a matter of context, and a language where compound words are so easily made up and added to the vocabulary.

From the context of one's home and yard, if you were to set aside one area where you can drive up and park, why not call it a "driveway"?  And if you're building a scenic highway (which might actually pass through a park), it's not a big stretch of the imagination to call it a "parkway".  It's only when the two examples of apparent opposites are put side-by-side that it seems crazy.

It's amazing how many different modes of transport humans have invented, and most of them have their own "ways" for getting around.  There's the seaway, waterway, runway, airway, skyway, byway, highway, thruway, parkway, driveway, beltway, freeway, railway, trailway, pathway, ...

Like usual, the words rise and fall in usage.  Check this out:


All kinds of alternatives can be imagined.  Would the opposite of a freeway be a payway?  I've heard "tollway" actually used, it seems clumsy but it gets the point across.

Since all roads go through somewhere, isn't "thruway" a bit useless?  And poorly spelled?

And if a "parkway" is the scenic sort, would the opposite be "uglyway"?  I've been on a few stretches like that.

I always thought that the uncommon "beltway" was clever: it's a highway that circles a city like a belt.

For a different perspective, "airway" is fun.  It can be the route you use to travel through the air (on an aircraft), or the route that air uses to travel through you (in your lungs).  Sadly, it doesn't apply if you're just falling through the air, or if air were just blowing in one ear and out the other!


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Poor Frankenstein

Names can get mixed up, too. Real or fictional people can become legends, or end up garbled and forgotten. A classic case is poor Frankenstein. If you're picturing the big lumbering monster with the bolts in his neck ... oops. Frankenstein was the doctor who created the monster. The monster was simply known as "the monster" or "Frankenstein's Monster." Strangely, "Franken-" has become a prefix on its own. I've heard big ugly things named that way, from a Frankencouch to a Frankenpuppy. I wonder if this was urged along by the old FrankenBerry cereal? Sure is a weird thing to make a prefix out of, especially considering the original Franken- thing was not a monster, but a mad scientist. Now, where does Al Franken fit into all this?
2 comments
Read more

RULY, RECK, and RobWords

There is a certain amount of linguistic Zen that comes from playing simple word unscrambler games, spinning around the question of why some words are accepted and others are not.  A few nights back we played UNRULY, and for fun, I tried RULY on a whim, and the game accepted it, when I know other games have rejected it.  I tried explaining it to Anne.  It felt like a word to me, and it's in Merriam-Webster with the same example I thought of at the time: "I have seen some ruly crowds."  It turns out that MW has a fascinating story about these two words, see here .  "Ruly" did exist for centuries, got replaced by UNRULY, only to come back as a back-formation from UNRULY to fill the gap it once filled.   It turns out that these cases are considered "Lost positives", words where the positive root word has faded from usage while the negation of the word is still going strong.  Here is a video from RobWords that gives a good overview.  I have been enjoy...
Post a Comment
Read more

why not SQUUUSH?

There is a strange and cartoony clump of words centered around SQUISH, or the idea or sound of squishing things.  This includes SQUUSH, SQUSH, and SQUOOSH, and an Ngram view of these shows all kinds of ups and downs in the noise of word history ... The first of these to appear was SQUSH, around 1830, and it was used in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, chapter 29.  SQUUSH came about in 1850, peaked well below the others in 1970 and is headed down to obscurity these days, while SQUOOSH first gets a blip around 1880 and had a big upturn from 1950 to 2010, but it now sinking as, much to my surprise, SQUSH is taking off. Since these are all verbs, they have the full range of strange-looking endings which would be fun for a Scrabble night: SQUUSHED, SQUUSHES, SQUUSHING, SQUSHED, SQUSHES, SQUSHING, SQUOOSHED, SQUOOSHES, SQUOOSHING and can be turned into adjectives as SQUSHY, SQUUSHY and SQUOOSHY. OMG, it's never ending, there are comparative versions SQUSHIER, SQUUSHIER, SQUOOSHI...
Post a Comment
Read more