Classic Caterpickles: “Why isn’t the laundromat a real mat for laundry?”
It’s summer, I have The Five-Year-Old to myself, and I’m taking full advantage of it. Today I’m running another Classic Caterpickle — a blatant attempt to give myself a day off by rerunning a year-old Caterpickle that I hope you’ll enjoy revisiting while The Five-Year-Old and I go out and play.
Laundromat in Toronto, Canada (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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.
Consequently, 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 (The Four-Year-Old’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 Four-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?”
Mommyo: “Because it’s a place to do laundry and not a rug to stand on while folding clothes.”
The Four-Year-Old: “So why did they named it after a mat?”
Mommyo: “They didn’t.”
The Four-Year-Old: “What’s it named after then?”
What is a laundromat named after?
It turns out Westinghouse trademarked the term laundromat in 1943. The crack marketing team at Westinghouse most likely created the word laundromat by mashing together laundry and automat (a self-serve restaurant where patrons purchased food from walls of coin-operated vending machines rather than 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.
So where did people do their laundry before laundromats existed?
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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One Response to “Classic Caterpickles: “Why isn’t the laundromat a real mat for laundry?””
[…] Here at Caterpickles Central, we believe that everyone in the family works together to keep our household functioning without expecting any particular compensation beyond having clean silverware to eat with, the ability to walk through the house without tripping, and clean clothes to wear. […]
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