You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

We heard from Amanda Fair in Evansville, Indiana, and she writes,

I saw my parents over the weekend, and my dad used a phrase that I hadn't heard in a while.

And when he said it, I actually had to take a step back and think about what he was talking about.

My entire

childhood, they called our garbage disposal George. I also referred to our garbage disposal as

such for most of my life, but when I moved out, I fell away from it. As far as I knew, they

didn't have a disposal with a brand that was similarly named, but they used it as a proper noun and a

verb, like, just put it down George, or I'm done, you can George it, or we need to run George, it has a

smell. Make sure you run cold water when you turn on George. Amanda says she still chuckles when she thinks

about it, but she's curious whether this might be, say, a small German family inside joke,

and if there are any other strange names that people call their household objects.

So they named their garbage disposal George, like it was the monster under the sink

eating their refuse.

Right.

Wow.

That's fun. Because it's a, yeah yeah it's like a cookie monster like thing only it doesn't eat only cookies. Right and George has his thing that he does. I think we can

at least rule out the German inside joke because garbage disposals just aren't a thing in Germany. I think in lots of municipalities,

they're outlawed. You just don't find that in a lot of Europe, actually.

Yeah, much of the world, they're often really pleased to find them in the United States in Canada,

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