Who Calls Sliding Doors “Doorwalls”?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Kirstie Skull, and I am calling you from South Mills, North Carolina.

Well, welcome to the show, Kirstie. What’s going on in North Carolina?

I have a friend who is from just outside of Detroit, Michigan, and she introduced me to a very odd word, door wall.

Door wall. And why is this odd to you?

So how it happened was she sent me a text message with a picture.

In the text message, it said, what do you think about the curtains around my door wall?

I was really perplexed by all this because in text message, I’m looking at this, and I’m trying to figure out why she wants to hang curtains between an opening between two rooms.

I was thinking this was, you know, I’m going to walk from one room to the other, and there’s going to be curtains there.

Okay.

And so after a very confusing text message conversation, we finally got on the phone, and I discovered she was talking about a sliding glass door.

Oh, okay.

This makes absolutely no sense to me.

So now it’s five years later. Every time a patient walks in from Michigan, we bombard them, and we have to ask them, do you know what a door wall is?

And in the five years since this conversation, only one person has known what a door wall is, and they were from Detroit.

Aha.

A little field work.

I love it, Christy.

So you’re working in some kind of medical office? You said patient, right?

We work in a dental office.

Yes, ma’am.

Oh, I see. I see.

Okay.

So just one Michigander knew it as door wall?

One.

Well, and then, of course, Monique’s parents.

So I told her it only exists within a one block radius of her house where she grew up.

But she told me, Google it. It’s on the Internet. And everything on the Internet is true.

So she wins.

Over the years, we’ve had maybe half a dozen people contact us about the term door wall.

And there is always some kind of Michigan connection.

I’m looking at an email that we got from Katie, who now lives in Seattle, but she grew up in Detroit, and she used the word door wall all the time for sliding glass door, and her family did too.

But the weird thing was that her local friends did not use it and made fun of her.

And now she always stops herself from using the word door wall there in Seattle because people just give her weird looks.

Because it makes no sense.

Well, it makes sense to people living around Detroit.

There is a story behind this.

Back in the early 1950s, home designers were promoting these homes that had large glass walls that opened out onto a patio through a sliding glass door.

And they were promoting it as, you know, you could feel like you were expanding your living space with all these wonderful vistas through this wall that had a door in it that was made of glass.

But the wall was glass, too. So that’s why it’s called the door.

Because the wall is glass and the door is glass.

Right. And as often happens with language, this term didn’t stick around everywhere, but it did hang around in much of the Detroit area.

It was popularized by Martin Blank’s wall side windows there in Detroit, which is now based west of Detroit.

Right. And what’s interesting, too, is that something similar happened in the Southwest, where a lot of people will call these doors Arcadia doors. Have you ever heard this term?

I have heard Arcadia doors. I just didn’t know what that was.

Same thing. Yeah. And there’s a company called the Arcadia Company that’s gone on to manufacture the kind of glass that you see in skyscrapers and office buildings. But they claim that they invented the Arcadia door.

And now you hear that usually in the Southwest.

But that is a sliding glass, what I know as a sliding glass door.

Yeah.

And it’s the same reason because it just so happened they were promoted as Arcadia doors in the Southwest, but they were promoted as door walls in Detroit and other places.

But the names only stuck there.

So door walls were promoted in North Carolina, believe it or not, in Charlotte, but it didn’t stick in Charlotte.

Get out of here.

It’s stuck in Detroit.

Yeah.

Get out of here, Grant.

Never going to live that one down.

Well, thank you so much for explaining this to me.

I do not want her to hear this conversation.

Well, you have to share it.

You sound like an honest woman. You’re totally going to share it with her.

Oh, she totally knows I’ve called about this.

Oh, okay.

She’s like, oh, I have to hear what they have to say.

And now I’m never going to live this down if you tell me this was started in North Carolina somehow.

Well, it didn’t start in North Carolina.

But we’re just saying it was promoted there.

You can look in North Carolina newspapers from the 1950s, and they were selling door walls.

Millions of other people might believe you, but I choose to live in my own reality.

I will send you the newspaper equipment, darling.

Well, this has been so great.

I’m so excited about this.

Well, Kirstie, it’s been a delight. Give Monique our best, too, all right?

I will.

Thank you so much.

Enjoy your day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.