I received in today’s mail a copy of Charles F. Haywood’s Yankee Dictionary: A Compendium of Useful and Entertaining Expressions Indigenous to New England (available for borrowing at the Internet Archive), which frequent commenter cuchuflete had offered me, saying:
Was going through books, for planned donations […]. Found one you might enjoy, whether or not useful for The Hattery. Entries include Pindling, Stivver, Throw a Tub to the Whale, and more mirthful stuff. This is not the work of a linguist or scholar of any stripe; he loves the expressions and describes them reasonably well.
It is indeed both entertaining and instructive; here’s the entry for ruddle:
The attic of a house. In New England the ruddle or attic, is the place for things not presently needed but which may be useful someday, somehow, somewhere. Here one may expect to find anything from a genuine Benjamin Franklin signature to a suddenly needed chamber pot. The uniformed fireman who calls for the annual inspection never approves of the multitude of items of possible future value stacked in the ruddle and often gives a lecture, but does not have the slightest notion that these treasures are going to be thrown out.
(Note that “notion” here = ‘expectation.’) The interesting thing is that the OED is unaware of this pleasing word, and I find few mentions of it elsewhere; it is, however, in Crescent Dragonwagon’s Bean by Bean, p. 219:
The students collected the reminiscences of then-octogenarians (now all deceased, of course) and transcribed them, creating a paperback book called The Ruddle (an old New England word for an attic or garage, a place where you store old things you don’t use but that just might come in handy some day).
As lagniappe, here’s the entry for “Everything’s drawing”:
A Yankee mariner’s reply to the common question ‘How are you,” if it so happens life is using him well just now. The expression originally referred to a ship with all sail set and a following breeze filling all of her canvas. It came to be used not only as to a ship for which all was going well, but for a man who was functioning to the very best of his capabilities. But a true Yankee will reserve this answer for a friend he judges really wishes to know how the world is using him. As for those who say “How are you” without sincerity and for want of something intelligent to say, he does not venture to commit himself.
Thanks, cuchuflete!
The Dictionary of American Regional English put out a query in the ADS newsletter, v. 30, no.1, January 1998 (here):
This is what was eventually published in DARE, v. 4 (2002), p. 662:
Thanks! A useful reminder that there are such micro-words, used only by a group so small as not to make it into even so capacious a work as the OED.
With absolutely no documentation to support the following guess, I offer
scuttle, as an attic storage space mispronounced by our Massachusetts neighbors who are known to talk funny.
“ Simply put, a scuttle attic is a small, often accessed area above the ceiling of a home, typically entered through a hatch or a small door. In essence, it serves as a space for additional storage…”
source: https://trapx.io/blogs/news/what-is-a-scuttle-attic
Apart from also being a variant of riddle, ruddle can mean “a red ochre used to mark sheep” – variant of reddle, which I remember from my early obsessive reading of Thomas Hardy. Forms and derivatives of reddle occur 161 times in The Return of the Native (1895):
Hatters will remark the use of epoch to mean “turning point” as opposed to “period”.
This PDF article analyses the theme of concealment in Return, sometimes associated with besmirchment by reddle-ruddle-raddle (“false colours”?).
(Heh, all of these are attested: raddle, reddle, riddle, roddle, ruddle, with various uses.)
Like Noetica, I first thought of Thomas Hardy’s reddleman.
Then I thought of Ruddles beer (no longer in existence as an independent brand).
But not attics.
Yes, Hardy’s novel was my first thought too. (Man, I hate that book … “perversely memorable”, though. Like Maud.)
Man, I hate that book
You and me both. I love his poetry, but spare me from the novels.
Ruddles beer (no longer in existence as an independent brand)
Oh, shame! After a long battle by CAMRA, it seems boutique breweries are succumbing to the booze megabarons. (Or becoming very peculiar, like Samuel Smith.)
I love his poetry, but spare me from the novels
Me too.
I was actually first pointed at Hardy’s poetry by the mother of my then girlfriend, after she heard me moaning about the novels. She was absolutely right.
(Formidable woman: I’ve mentioned her before, as having very much liked C S Lewis’ lectures when she was at Oxford.)
“Before Life and After”: the last of eight settings of Hardy poems: Britten’s Winter Words, Op. 52, 1953. Some apt commentary:
His novels? I don’t know what impelled me as a youth to read so many of them, but they did help to form my literary sensibility – despite doing time at a government high school where one was supposed not to develop such things, under pain of bullying and summary exclusion.
spare me from the novels
I remember wading through the grimness that is Jude the Obscure a long time ago. It did provide one laugh-out-loud scene, when Jude comes home to his meager dwelling place to find that Little Father Time has hanged himself and his sisters in a clothes closet. I think I may have put the book aside at that point, unless I trudged on out of a youthful sense of duty.
it was definitely my worst high school english teacher (“…’tossed’! it’s such a casual word! ‘he tossed the dead baby out the window’…”) who assigned us Tess of the d’Urbervilles. i’ve never felt a need to follow it up with more hardy (which might mean that it was successful pedagogy, but certainly was not the intent).
As we seem to have established that ruddle is limited to a small slice of New England—in my experience it hasn’t crossed from Mass. through New Hampshire and up into Maine—I turned my attention to throw a tub to the whale. I’ve never heard it spoken among my lobstermen friends, but it appears to be real, if antiquated.
https://www.worldwidewords.org/qa-thr3.html