Talk Elections

How come we say bubbler? You can probably credit the Kohler Co. The regional dictionary researcher who mapped bubbler's isogloss (the line on a map that defines where the word is generally used) found that the line was very close to the market-area boundaries of the Kohler Co. in 1915. That's according to a podcast by the Madison-based Wisconsin Englishes Project.

Back then, Kohler made drinking fountains (or whatever you call them) with a "bubbling valve," a ball-shaped thing in the middle of the bowl, out of which water shot vertically. The whole unit came to be called a bubbler, and the term was generalized to include devices that sent out a single stream of water, such as the ones we have today. Joan Houston Hall, chief editor of the regional dictionary, says on the podcast that she thought a similar process must have happened separately in New England, though they don't have specific evidence of it.

But Bert Vaux, a linguist at the University of Cambridge in England who used to be at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and who created those cool maps I linked to, says he thinks bubbler started in Wisconsin and then spread east to New England, eventually dying out everywhere but here and there. In an e-mail to me, he said, "This is a common pattern with linguistic changes, in fact – the core innovates, and the periphery is conservative."
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I should add that bubblers can also be found in Portland, Ore., where a teetotaling lumber baron once installed "Benson Bubblers" to cut down on local beer consumption, as well as in Australia, of all places. A City of Sydney Web site says bubblers were installed there in the early 20th century because the practice of drinking out of shared cups and city water taps was considered unhygienic.