April 3, 1997

sliding pond

Many children grow up playing on sliding ponds...those fun long metal (now plastic and not quite as much fun...) playground apparatus. Typically (and hopefully) there is no pond at the end of the slide. Is the origin from "slide upon"? I'm also wondering if this is a regional term and has other names in other playgrounds around the country.

Your question will no doubt mystify anyone not from New York, since the apparatus you're asking about is normally called a slide. The expression sliding pon(d) is almost exclusively connected to the New York City area. An interesting observation about sliding pond is that many people who use the term are unaware of any other term. My mother, for example, didn't know that the apparatus could be called a slide (the term I grew up with) at all.

The origin of sliding pond is obscure. One problem with tracking down a source is that, like many words for children's games, sliding pond is not recorded in print until rather recently. Scholars are forced to work with memories of older people, since even common expressions or practices weren't regarded as important enough to study and record.

One possibility is, as you suggest, that it's from slide-upon, with the pond form arising by folk etymology. Two problems with this are that upon is a more formal word than children would normally use, and also of course that slide-upon is not known to have ever been used.

A somewhat more likely possiblity is that it comes from a Dutch source. A Dutch dictionary in 1599 gives the term glijd-baene, literally 'glide-road', for a children's slide (on ice, in this case), showing that the term was used at least in European Dutch around that time that Dutch had an influence on New York speech. Sliding pond could thus represent a partial translation of the Dutch term, with the glijd translated as sliding and the baene taken as pond.

A German word such as Rutschbahn or the phonologically more likely Schlittenbahn is also possible, and from a purely linguistic standpoint as likely as Dutch. The main objection to a German, rather than Dutch, source is the observation that sliding pond is found only in New York, and not in other areas with large concentrations of German speakers, such as Milwaukee, Minneapolis, St. Louis, and parts of Pennsylvania.