“Why isn’t the laundromat a real mat for laundry?”
Laundromat in Toronto, Canada (Image Credit: Joshua Sherurcij)
We all have our strengths. Doing laundry is not one of mine. Data collected over the past ten years of having a washer/dryer suggest that I do laundry at about 63% of the rate at which we generate it in our daily lives. There was a slight uptick around the time we bought a high-efficiency washing machine, due to what I realize now was simply a burst of new gadget enthusiasm. This effect was short-lived, and lugging laundry 25 pounds at a time into (and, after the appropriate bit of processing, out of) a spider- and cat-box infested basement once again became a bit of a chore.
Every four weeks or so we will run out of something, most often sheets and towels, but occasionally when the spiders are particularly active, more essential bits of clothing as well. When this happens, my husband will declare a laundry emergency, and we’ll pack up everything and lug it down to the local laundromat for a targeted assist.
A recent episode of Word World (my daughter’s favorite show at the moment) showed the crew of Word World changing the meaning of words by shoving two words together to create a compound word with a different, but related meaning.
“Mail” and “box” became “mailbox”, a box for mail; and “sand” and “box” became “sandbox”, a box for sand–you get the picture.
This episode was clearly running through my daughter’s head during our latest laundry emergency. With the typical literalism of a 4-year-old, my daughter wanted to know why these rules didn’t also apply to “laundromat.”
“Mommyo, why isn’t the laundromat a real mat for laundry?”
“Because it’s a place to do laundry and not a rug to stand on while folding clothes.”
The Four-Year-Old: “Why is it named after a mat?”
“It’s not.”
The Four-Year-Old: “What’s it named after?”
How did the laundromat get its name?
Turns out the term “laundromat” was trademarked in 1943 by Westinghouse, and most likely created by mashing together the terms “laundry” and “automat” (a self-serve restaurant where patrons purchased food from walls of coin-operated vending machines rather through waitstaff).
In a comment posted in response to the question “What is the origin of the word laundromat” on wordwizard.com, Ken Greenwald states that his father originally came up with the concept of laundromats and sold it to Westinghouse–comments I’ve made no effort to verify, but which make for an interesting story.
Where did people do laundry before laundromats existed?
And in case you were wondering: Before there were laundromats, there was simply the laundry. Until 1916, the word “laundry” referred to the place where one did the washing and to the act of washing, but not to the things one washed.
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[…] house shows it. I’m not a perfectly neat person in normal times, as evidenced by our monthly laundry emergencies and by the three hours I spend every other Tuesday morning frantically picking up the house so that […]
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