Columnist John Moore doesn’t recall ever seeing gloves in a glove box. Courtesy John Moore

English is a language full of leftovers. It’s like the bottom shelf of the refrigerator. Filled with things we just can’t seem to toss out.

The difference of course is that at least with what we put on the bottom shelf of the fridge, we do throw that out. Eventually.

Conversation with my grandson:

Grandson: “Grandpa John, do you want me to scrape the rest of the food on my plate into the trash?”

Me: “Julian, in this house, we don’t throw out perfectly good food after a meal. We scrape it into a Tupperware container, put it on the bottom shelf of the refrigerator, let it go bad, and then we throw it out.”

Grandson: “Ok.”

With language, things that probably should go just seem to hang on.

Take the term, glove box. Almost every vehicle has one, but in all of my years of driving I can’t recall one time when someone opened their glove box and I saw a pair of gloves in there. We used to keep roadmaps in the glove box, but now most glove boxes are used to store piles of napkins from fast food restaurants. The napkins are intertwined with old, no-longer-used phone charger cables that flip out onto the floorboard when we’re trying to retrieve a Wendy’s napkin.

Floorboard is another term we likely have held on to for way too long.

Some of the earliest vehicles (late 1800s and early 1900s) had actual wood in the area where your feet rested. And wood was used to construct other parts of the vehicle. But it didn’t take long before manufacturers began using metal instead of wood. And I do have to admit that floorboard sounds much better than floor steel.

The dashboard in a vehicle isn’t. No wood there, except in Jaguars and other fancy cars. The dashboard was originally something found on a wagon that kept the mud from coming up from the horses’ hooves and into your face. But the term transferred to vehicles and we still use it today.

In the laundry room we have a clothes hamper. For something that actually helps, not hampers your laundry efforts, hamper seems like a name that should’ve been changed. The word hamper came from the word hanaper, which referred to a case in which you put cups or goblets. At our house we put cups in the cupboard, but being people who like to live dangerously, we also put bowls, plates, and sometimes even non-cup-related items in our cupboard.

Unlike the first folks to use a hanaper, we don’t put cups or goblets into the laundry hamper. Well, there may have been one or two New Year’s Eve guests who did, but that’s another story. They started out in the living room and wound up in the laundry room.

Laundry room makes sense, but living room doesn’t. The term living room isn’t a term that started out meaning one thing, but now means another. It’s a term that truly is baffling. Technically, aren’t all the rooms in the house a ‘living’ room? If you have a room that isn’t for the living, it’s likely we’ll learn all about you later on an episode of Dateline or 48 Hours.

Same goes for an area rug. Mull that one over for a second.

And a nightstand. I don’t know about you, but mine’s in use 24/7.

A dresser doesn’t, but a toothbrush, dustpan, dishwasher, vacuum cleaner, and mop bucket do.

The bed frame, bookshelf, footstool, armchair, hair dryer, space heater, coffee maker, and ceiling fan are. Unless your guest is named Murphy, a Murphy bed isn’t.

Our televisions really don’t require us to change the channel anymore. Most of what we watch is now online and therefore we are moving from one web address to another. But are they actually an address? No. We don’t go to them in the same way that we travel to someone’s home. A ‘web destination’ would be more accurate.

We no longer dial a phone, tape a TV show, carbon copy (cc) someone, use an actual mailbox for email, or have a white-collar job. But they’re all terms we still use.

The question is, do we need to modify what we say so that it’s more accurate to what we are actually doing?

Maybe what we need are some oxymorons to help clarify. Come by for some leftovers and we can discuss it. First, I need to clean the bottom shelf of the fridge with some steel wool.

By John Moore, author, Puns for Groan People and Write of Passage: A Southerner’s View of Then and Now Vol. 1 and 2,are available on his website TheCountryWriter.com, where you can also send him a message.

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