Sheds, shacks & hovels
Lately, much of my writing (revising, actually) is happening in the garden shed I re-built for recording audiobooks. I call it the Shedio. So this week’s post is a re-posting from six years ago, considering the word shed & its various synonyms.
Shed is of questionable parentage. It appeared in English in the 1400s. It may have its roots in the word shade, but no certain evidence has jumped forth into the sunlight to prove this theory.
Similarly, the term shack has no definite parentage. It first appeared in print in 1878. Some etymologists argue that it may be a variant of shake, or possible have come from ramshackle (both of which predate it). Others claim it may have come from the Nahuatl word xacalli, wooden hut, through Mexican Spanish. Still nobody really knows from whence the shack came.
The word hovel isn’t really a synonym for shack or shed, but a hovel is a small building, & I have a fondness for the word. I lived a year in a place friends & family referred to as "hovel sweet hovel." It was one of seven tiny, decrepit buildings near San Luis Obispo Creek. I had to duck to enter, I couldn’t sit on the toilet with the bathroom door closed, & the mushrooms growing from the floor were not an interior decorating decision. Hovel showed up in English back in the 1300s, meaning a vent for smoke, & within a century had come to mean a shed for animals. It wasn’t until the 1600s that it came to mean a rude or miserable cabin. This last definition is particularly apropos. I learned afterward that the compound of seven hovels had been used in the 1940s to house the county’s Japanese residents as they waited to be delivered to internment camps. Misery indeed.
So, dear readers, please leave a comment with a tidbit of a tale regarding any shed, shack, or hovel experiences you’ve “enjoyed.”
I love the word hovel too. And you might get a hovel prize for that place by San Luis Creek! It makes sense that it started out meaning an animal shed. living in an animal shed would definitely be hovel-izing.
ReplyDeleteShed-shade makes perfect sense too. It was probably first simply a canopy to keep the sun out. Interesting about shack having mysterious origins.
Hi Anne - A pleasure to "see" you. And thanks for weighing in on sheds & hovels.
ReplyDeleteThanks for sharing your "hovel, sweet hovel" story. Interesting, but sad, too, thinking about the Japanese Americans who were forced to live there. Are the shacks still standing?
ReplyDeleteGreetings 13grp -- the shacks were still standing last time I checked. Ironically, they are just across the highway from a huge, "elegant" pink hotel called the Madonna Inn -- while living there I loved the fact that people were spending Big Money to look across the highway at our scruffy little hovels.
DeleteLove the hovel story. I lived for a brief time in a chicken coop in New Hampshire. Sans chickens, thank goodness. It did smell a bit though, and got pretty darn chilly! Didn't have a bathroom. Had to trot to the main house. Ah the sweet memories of youth. Ha!
ReplyDeleteHi Christine -- If we were to re-live those "sweet memories of youth" most of them would involve no bathroom, inclement weather, & at least the faint smell of chicken manure. Thanks for coming by.
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