Last time, the challenge was to come up with a word for “supermarket shoppers who leave their cart in the middle of an aisle and then wander off to get more groceries.”
“Easy one,” John Kjoller, of Sandwich, boasted. “Aisle blocker, as in ‘I’ll block ’er!’”
Paul McGillicuddy, of Malden, thought such a person might be called an aislehog; Edith Maxwell, of Amesbury, thought such people might collectively be called aislehoggers.
“How about aisleberightbacker?” Rosalyn Davidoff, of Brighton, proposed. Daniel R. Spirer, of the Berkshires, also proposed aisle be right backers and confessed, “I’ve been known to do this very thing, more often than I care to admit.”
Norm Quesnel, of Framingham, felt like coming up with something that resembles a person’s name, so he styled his submission Aisle B. Back. And when Edward De Vos, of West Newton, sent in aisle be backers, he reminded me it can be considered “an homage to Arnold Schwartzenegger.”
Aisle is such a peculiar word (I mean, look at it!) that I just had to research its history. The word’s past turns out to be a prime example of how haphazard real etymology is, as opposed to tidy fictitious folk etymologies according to which, for instance, posh is an acronym for “port out, starboard home.”
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Aisle has been with us in one form or another since the late 14th century. It originally referred to a “lateral division of a church” — that is, a wing of a cross-shaped place of worship — and comes from the Old French word ele, meaning “wing.” (The reason Old French often crops up in discussions of English etymology is that England was ruled for three centuries by French-speaking Normans and their successors descended from French nobility.)
But Britons kept getting the French-derived ele confused with the Middle English ile, meaning “island,” and ele morphed into ile. So when the s got added to make isle, it got added to both words. Then the initial a was added to the wing word to bring aisle more closely into line with the Modern French aile, for “wing,” but no one thought to delete the s — and there we have it.
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Back to the present day. A few readers got supermarket-chain-specific. Edith Maxwell suggested shop-and-stoppers, and Mary Cooney reported: “I frequent Stop and Shop in Dorchester, so abandoned-cart owners are Shop Stoppers.” John Lane, of East Falmouth, wrote: “I call those shoppers Market Bastards.”
Leslie Harris, of Hull, came up with shop blocker, as did Marli Townsend, of Concord, N.H., who gave the term a timely twist, declaring “I’ll admit to having the Boston Celtics on the brain — Kristaps Porzingis is a great shot blocker!”
Claudette Boudreau, of South Yarmouth, said she calls “oblivious shoppers who leave carts willy-nilly in the aisles moseyparkers.” Marian Glaser, of Auburndale, called them dumper-gatherers; Susan LeVan, of Nashua, N.H., called them shoplefters; and Tom Hayden, of Chelmsford, perceived them as shelf-absorbed.
But I think I must award bragging rights this time to the entire aisle contingent. Their contributions are easy to understand, and they spare those of us who occasionally commit this supermarket faux pas the judgment of some of the harsher terms. Congrats, aisle folks! Well done!
Now, what’s for next time? I told you last time, though I didn’t mean to. Several readers took as a second request for a word something I’d intended as merely a prompt — an example of the sort of challenge to which it might be fun to rise as spring turns to summer. It was “What might you call the struggle to find the perfect temperature in summer, when you’re too hot outside and too cold in the air-conditioned indoors?” The responses I got were pretty good — so let’s keep going with this. What would you call this frustrating state of affairs or persnickety frame of mind?
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Send your suggestions for the word to me at Barbara.Wallraff@globe.com by noon on Friday, June 7, and kindly tell me where you live. Responses may be edited. And please keep in mind that meanings in search of words are always welcome.
Barbara Wallraff is a writer and editor in Cambridge.