Laundromats and Washaterias

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Erica.

Hello, Erica.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Well, I had a question about the word washi-teria.

I’m not originally from Indianapolis. I’m from Texas, and I always thought of what I now know as laundromats as washi-terias.

And we have a lot of Hispanics from Mexico, so you’d either hear washi-teria or lavanderia, which is just a place to wash in Spanish.

And so when I moved out here to Indianapolis, I noticed there weren’t very many, and so I asked my husband, where are all the washeterias?

And he said, what are you talking about?

And I had to explain to him what that was, and he said, oh, you mean a laundromat.

And I heard of the word laundromat, but I kind of thought it was like another word maybe for like a laundered service for you to get your clothes dry cleaned.

So I looked it up and I don’t know, saw a bunch of different things.

It seems like it’s a word that they commonly use in the South, or it’s like a trademark of laundrette, but I’m not sure.

So washeteria, so are you from San Antonio, perhaps?

No, I’m from Houston.

Okay, Houston. Okay, very good.

Not the same place.

I ask because in the historical record, there shows a number of uses of washeteria in San Antonio.

This is a little, this is interesting.

Cafeteria probably was originally an English word. So we got cafeteria from the Spanish speakers.

And then after a while, we took the tira suffix and we started applying it to a whole host of things.

H.L. Mencken has like more than two dozen examples of tira words in his 1930s American language book.

It’s just a ton of stuff.

Now, the vogue of making words with tira on the end has kind of passed, but a few of those words existed for a long time.

There was a chain of hundreds of laundromats or washeterias in Texas, 1930s through the 1950s, all throughout Texas, and they were called washeteria.

It was a chain.

A chain.

One chain.

That was the name on the place.

Interesting.

And so you can find old ads for washeterias in the old newspapers, and you can find mentions in books and novels from the period, like I went down to the washeteria, and there was a little bit of a generification there.

And it’s really natural then, because it has that familiar terea suffix, for the Spanish speakers just to say, oh, that looks like one of our words, and we can pronounce that because the sounds aren’t too weird for Spanish.

Let’s just borrow that.

And it became a part of the Spanglish spoken in Texas and some other states.

But do they say huacheteria or huacheteria?

Probably, yes. They probably do say huacheteria.

Yeah, and then they say huacheteria too.

But is that why, if it’s a trademark, or if that was a name of an actual business, is that why some of them are spelled W-S-H-A and some of them are spelled W-F-H-E?

That’s part of it, but also just because it’s kind of variable.

It’s like pizzeria.

You’ll see pizzeria, P-I-Z-Z-A, and P-I-Z-Z-E.

It just depends what they’ve chosen.

Well, it’s interesting, too, because the word laundromat was originally a trademark name.

And then it became genericized as well.

Yeah, once you’ve lost control over your trademark and your brand through generification, it’s almost impossible to get it back.

But I’m really interested in this experience that you had with your husband, where he didn’t even know that Washateria was a thing.

Yeah, what did he think it was?

He didn’t know what I was talking about.

And he just thought maybe I was talking about, like, car washes, because car washes are a lot different in Indianapolis than they are in Texas.

You know, maybe because it’s hotter, they don’t have the same type of car washes.

So he thought it was a car wash place.

I said, no, it’s a place where you wash your clothes.

Interesting.

Because, you know, if you didn’t know, it could have been a car wash, right?

Why not?

Yeah.

There may actually be Washeteria car washes, for all we know.

Yeah.

Erica, how did we do?

Great.

It was just interesting.

It’s just funny how just different words and, you know, but I guess here it’s just laundromat.

I still call it a Washeteria.

People still look at me funny, but that’s what I know of it as.

I was raised in Missouri and lived for a long time in New York City.

For me, laundromat is the term for it.

That’s pretty much what it is always, no matter where I go.

Thanks so much.

I love your show.

All right.

Thank you for calling.

Call us again if you come across any of those things that your husband doesn’t know, all right?

Okay, thanks.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

About five years ago, I wrote about Spanglish and English, you know, and there’s this great paper, I’ll have to hunt it up, where they’re talking about bringing Spanglish speakers.

These are people who speak a mix of Spanish and English all together in a room to see how different their Spanglish is.

And it’s surprising.

You get somebody from the Bronx.

You get somebody from Florida, somebody from Texas, somebody from California, and one other person.

They brought them.

So we’ve got Cuban influence and Dominican Republican influence and Mexican influence and what have you.

And you bring them in the room.

And they had this crazy, like, couple hours of intense trying to figure out what the other people were saying.

Oh, fun.

Because they were told, speak Spanglish as you would at home.

And wash it teary.

It was one of the words that people who weren’t from Texas didn’t really know.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

So it plugs in perfectly to what Erica is telling us.

I love these encounters.

Two languages meeting, something new happening, like a words being born like children are born when two people come together, right?

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