Monday, November 28, 2022

Stoops to conquer

 The late John Plunkett, for many years an assistant managing editor at The Baltimore Sun and overseer of its copy desk, insisted that in describing Baltimoreans sitting in front of their rowhouses,* one must write that they are sitting on their steps. Stoops, he insisted, was a foreign term imported into Baltimore by reporters hired from out of town, probably from New York, who didn't know the territory. 

Indeed, stoop comes to us from the Dutch stoep, "flight of steps, doorstep, threshold," and etymologists** suggest that it entered English from the Dutch-speaking inhabitants of New York, spreading into American English from there. 

If Mr. Plunkett was correct that the word was carried here by auslanders, the invasive species has taken root. Efforts, always feeble, to extirpate it from the pages of The Sun were abandoned years ago, and it appears without shame in other local publications. The popularity of the Stoop Storytelling series of podcasts and public events indicates a thoroughgoing acceptance.   

Stoop culture prevails. 


* Merriam-WebsterWebster's New World, the Concise Oxford and American Heritage are all under the impression that row house (terrace house in Britain) is two words, but in Baltimore it's rowhouse

** Including H.L. Mencken in The American Language, who also marks the Dutch contributions of bosscruller, coleslaw, dope, spook, snoop, and Santa Claus

6 comments:

  1. I think of "sitting on the front stoop" but "taking" or "walking up the front steps."
    Ruth T-C (can't figure out what URL to use not to be anonymous)

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  2. The Baltimoreness of the term is easily checked nowadays. An online search of Baltimore papers finds uses back to the 1850s. Some are about events in New York City, but others are clearly Baltimorean.

    The word does come from Dutch, which is indeed consistent with New York for its entry into English, but if Baltimore's use was borrowed from New York, this was done a long time ago. Ignorant immigrant reporters are an unlikely vector. But even were he right, so what? This is a variant of the etymological fallacy.

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  3. I may be wrong — it has been known — but I suspect in Britain it is more frequently “terraced house”.
    — Picky

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  4. Anon above is right: in Great Britain we say a row of terraces is made up of terraced houses with an end-of-terrace starting and finishing them; unless it's a circular terrace.

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  5. In my naivete I copied "terrace house" from the Concise Oxford.

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  6. Oxford could well be right; it's what I hear if I think of Noel Coward saying it. But the hoi polloi say 'terraced house', probably because adding the 'd' makes it that bit quicker to say by running the words together. I do say 'It's a terrace' when talking about a home which, now you've made me think about it, has an implied 'house' following it.

    Wiktionary says using just 'terrace' in that way is informal and gives 'terraced house' as a synonym. It has no entry for 'terrace house' but then it's not an authority, more a reflection of its editors. :-) https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/terrace#Noun

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