As the snow falls this winter, many a good Yankee may find a curse rising from frozen
lips as they negotiate the slippery roads, asking themselves, “Why didn’t I buy new snow tires?” But there is one group whose enthusiasm for snow drowns out those curses: the children playing on the slopes with their sleds. Once a friend from Los Angeles referred to this activity as “sledding” which I hastened to correct, having spent my entire boyhood in the winter “sliding” with my brothers and friends, undeterred by freezing fingers and toes. However, it seems all of my descendants for two generations now call it “sledding,” and scornfully reject “sliding.” A Reddit thread from Maine supports them, with a majority insisting it’s “sledding,” with several adding that “sliding” was an older term. I am vindicated however, by a vigorous Facebook thread from Vermont that makes it clear that “sliding” is the preferred term, and accuses sneaky “flatlanders” of bringing the invasive species “sledding” into the Green Mountains. Some tried to have it both ways, writing that if it’s a sled with runners, you’d say “sledding,” but others would have none of it and I’m with them: whether on Flexible Flyers, tubes, saucers, toboggans, cardboard, shovels, or on your backside, it’s all “sliding” (or more accurately “slidin’ ”).
In “Ethan Frome,” that bleak but powerful story by Edith Wharton that many of us had to
read in high school, one old New Englander recounting Ethan’s tragic nocturnal “smash-up” on a sled, wonders what he was “doing that night coasting.” It turns out that “coasting” gave “sliding” a run for its money in a good part of New England, apparently coming out of Boston by the 1830s and eventually spreading out to the south and west to the Pacific, wherever there was snow. By the 1960s, it was dying out, used mainly by older people. Now, “sliding” may be ready for last rites, too.
Even more interesting is when daring children run with their sled, throw themselves
down on it headfirst, and speed down the hill, feeling every bump in their solar plexus. That’s a “belly-flop“ or “belly-flopper” from coast to coast, but there are lots of other names too, nicely catalogued in the Dictionary of American Regional English from surveys conducted in the 1930s and 60s, reaching back to old-timers born in the 1830s. “Belly-tunk, belly-to-butt, bellity-bunt” were found in Maine; “belly-board” in New Hampshire; to go down “belly-bumper, -bumber,” or “-bumbo” was common in Connecticut and Rhode Island; while northern New England favored “belly-bump” or in the upper Connecticut Valley and around Worcester “belly-bunt, -bunk, -butt,” or even “belly-buttin’” (influenced by “belly-button”). “Belly-plumper” was in eastern Massachusetts, and on Nantuckett it was a “belly-flouncer.”
As if that weren’t enough, New England also had scattered instances with an
onomatopoeic onset, the same one we use for “ker-plunk”: “belly-kabonk, -kabump, -kachug, -kachunk.” There was even one that drifted down from Quebec into New Hampshire, “belly-cahoot” (from French “cahot”— a jolt from a rut in the road). In the Midwest and West it was a “belly-buster,” or “-booster,” “belly-down” in the South, “belly-grinder” in western Pennsylvania and Ohio. You would slide “belly-fashion” in Minnesota and North Dakota (which sounds kind of posh), take a “belly-ride” in the Midwest, and do a “belly-smacker” in the Great Lakes region, while New York and Pennsylvania favored “belly-gut(ter), -guts, -cutter, -slammer.”
But that’s still not all. “Belly-whopper, -whop, -whomper” were found especially in New
York, New Jersey, Maryland and “belly-whack(er), -whacky, -wocker” in New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio. It’s enough to give you indigestion, thinking about all the bumps, whomps, and hacks kids’ bellies are getting.
Or were getting. Does anyone belly-flop anymore? At my grandsons’ school, it’s been
outlawed as too dangerous, and maybe rightly so. Don’t want any Ethan Fromes. But maybe
on a big open slope like Carnival Hill? It’s the perfect week to go sliding.
By the way, these “belly” words are also applied to diving, but let’s save that for summertime.
Dale Coye is a member of the American Dialect Society. He has taught English and the humanities at several universities and worked in area theaters as a dialect coach and director. He grew up on a dairy farm in central New York and now lives in Wilton.
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