Folderol is an old word which means "baloney," "malarkey," or in other phrasing, nonsense.
Today in this A to Z Challenge post, I'll be talking about the old-fashioned words I used to hear from my grandma, Mary LeSourd Reed (1889-1978). And I promise, no folderol.
Counterpane -- Fancy word for a bedspread, which is another word for coverlet, which is another word for a thin fabric of particular dimensions, either single-bed size or double-bed size, used to cover your bed, over your top sheet.
Davenport -- Yeah, it's a town in Iowa, but it's also an old word for a large, upholstered sofa which can convert into a bed. Generally, the way my grandma used the word, it was any sofa. Grandma had one, in her living room, that was upholstered, with removable cushions, that pulled out to a bed. When my mother brought me and my brother and sister back to Florida from California after my father died in 1954, we stayed with my grandma and aunt, and the three of us kids slept on that davenport. It lasted many years, passing through my mother's house and then ours, until it finally gave out in the 1990s. That couch was nearly seventy years old when it finally gave up the ghost.
Highboy -- No, not a male teenager using marijuana. What we might call today a dresser or a chest of drawers, it was a bit more specific than that in its archaic usage. (And we who do genealogy are fortunate in that we can have archaic and eat it, too.) It was a very tall -- sometimes over 7 feet tall -- chest usually consisting of two parts. So it was basically two chests, and quite possibly designed for a usage similar to old Spanish chests that came in two parts. The top part had handles, so that it could be quickly removed and carted off in an emergency such as fire or enemy attack, a feature quite popular in Spain's New World colonies.
Consumption -- Not what consumers do, often conspicuously. In olden days, it was a medical term referring to the disease now properly known as tuberculosis, a highly infectious disease of the lungs. Before a skin test to detect its presence in the human body became available, tuberculosis, or TB, was responsible for a lot of suffering and death, killing 1 out of 7 people in the U.S. in the last quarter of the 19th century, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In my generation (born after World War II and before 1970), we all had to have the skin test before we could start school. Into the 1960s, patients might be separated from their families and sent to TB sanitoriums, large hospitals for the treatment of the disease with fresh air, healthy food, and at times, lung surgery.
Salt Cellar -- Not a basement full of sodium chloride. A salt cellar was a small container, often with a lid and a tiny spoon, for dispensing salt at the dinner table. My grandma had one that was milk glass, in the form of a chicken. It did have the little spoon.
Milk Glass -- Milk glass was a white glass formed into shapes,usually for dinner accessories like the salt cellar my grandma had, in the entry above this one. It could be other colors, but usually was white.
Coin silver -- an alloy of silver (90%) and copper (10%). It was frequently used in earlier centuries to make flatware (knives, forks, and spoons). I have a few surviving pieces of coin silver that had belonged to my great-great grandmother Emily (Hoyt) Packard (1823-1904).
Those are just a few of the old words I heard in my childhood and youth from older relatives, mostly my grandma.
