A Runaway Word: “Bindlestick”

I've recently been enjoying Christopher Miller’s American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, a fascinating encyclopedia of old-fashioned comic imagery.

I was particularly intrigued by the article “Bindlesticks” which discusses cartoons depicting hoboes and runaway children carrying their meager possessions in a bundle dangling from the end of a stick carried over the shoulder.

Miller comments, “As for the stick itself, was that ever really the easiest and most comfortable way for runaways and hoboes to carry their belongings? Couldn't they have rigged up some kind of rudimentary backpack? No doubt. But the stick was the whole point: like a walking stick in certain hands, the bindlestick, if it was ever used in real life, must have been a pretext to carry a weapon—to ward off angry dogs, fellow vagrants, hostile locals, and the like.”

This is an interesting bit of speculation, but Miller is clearly skeptical of the actual existence of bindlesticks outside of popular culture. After all, the longer the stick, the more weighty the burden and the greater the strain on arm and shoulder. Carrying a modest bundle dangling from one hand would seem to be more comfortable. It’s common to see street scavengers with large plastic bags slung over their backs, particularly when collecting recyclable cans; but I’ll bet you’ve never seen one dangling bindlestick style.

Search the Library of Congress Prints & Photographs catalog for “bindle stiff” and you’ll find 11 Dorothea Lange images of men carrying bundles but no sticks.

It’s difficult to say how far back the image goes, but Michael A. Chaney says in Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative that silhouetted figures pictured on early 19th-century runaway slave posters often carried stereotypical bindlesticks.

Trying to research the term I discovered that most dictionaries simply do not recognize this word. It’s missing from the online Merriam-Webster, from Dictionary.com, from the Apple desktop dictionary, and from the Oxford English Dictionary. What they all offer instead is “bindlestiff,” which refers to the person carrying the bindlestick. Writers occasionally confuse the object with the person and miscall a hobo a “bindlestick”

Merriam-Webster’s search engine offers another odd alternative to “bindle stick”—“blanket stitch”!

Wikipedia has no article on “bindlestick” but its entry on “hobo” does explain the term in its common two-word spelling: “bindle stick.” Microsoft Word recognizes only the two-word version, as does the blog software I’m using to write this post.

I’ve always imagined the bindlestick to be the whole ensemble: the stick and the bundle. And clearly so do a lot of other people. Here are a few examples I found in Google Books:

“Other hobo slang includes . . . bindle stick – belongings wrapped in cloth and tied around a stick”
(USA by Rail: Plus Canada's Main Routes by John Pitt)

“Snowie packed her bindle stick as she was planning on running away. . .”
(World of Horrotica: Underworld Origins by David Edward Collier)

“Your lunch will come attractively packed in a ‘bindle stick’”
(Great Family Trips in New England by Harriet Webster)

But it seems clear that to most people the bindlestick (or bindle stick) is simply the stick from which the bindle dangles. That’s what Urban Dictionary says.

There is a coffeehouse offering live music not far from where I live called “Bindlestick,” and there is also a New Mexico art studio and a Texas microbrewery using the name.

Somebody on Kickstarter has raised over $6,000 to market a handsomely carved “bindle stick.”

A Google image search on the word will bring up any number of images, including a rather famous one by Norman Rockwell entitled “The Runaway.”

Whatever you think it means, “bindlestick” is clearly a word, despite all the oblivious dictionaries.

Opening Pedals

I’m a big fan of Consumer Reports, but they made a lamentable linguistic mistake in the current issue (April 2015). The inside of the back cover of the magazine mocks ads and packaging that contain self-contradictory claims, wildly confusing illustrations, and other amusing blunders.

The first example this month features a photo of a storefront sign reading "Axion Auto & Bodyparts." The accompanying text reads: “Commuting Zombies Rejoice! This sign, spotted by Sandy Green of Lansdale, Pa, hints that the auto body shop is pedaling merchandise far more sinister than spark plugs.”

My first reaction was to think: “is ‘bodyparts’ even a word? Isn’t it “body parts” in both meanings? Neither Merriam-Webster nor the comprehensive Oxford English Dictionary recognizes the one-word form.

But then I noticed “pedaling,” This word is confused with “peddling” often enough that I cover it in Common Errors in English Usage:

If you are delivering newspapers from a bike you can pedal it around the neighborhood (perhaps wearing “pedal-pushers”), but when you sell them from a newsstand you peddle them.

I realize that my example is rather dated: papers are now usually delivered by adults in cars before dawn, not by kids on bikes after school. Beginning in seventh grade I delivered papers on a hilly five-mile rural route until I was a sophomore in high school. Toward the end of my route I had to pedal a full mile and climb a steep hill to reach one isolated farm subscriber. I earned a whopping $20 a month.

We were constantly pressured to sell new subscriptions. I was fine with pedaling, but not with peddling. We were sometimes dumped off in neighborhoods and told to ask at every house whether the occupants subscribed to our paper or would like to. Since there was an altogether superior paper published in a larger town nearby, the answer to both questions was usually “no.”

I hated it.

I am often reminded of my career in newspaper delivery by one of my favorite comic strips: “Red and Rover” by Seattle cartoonist Brian Bassett. The strip is set in the early ’60s and lovingly reflects many aspects of that era, including the fact that Red delivers papers from his bike accompanied by his dog, Rover.

And that in turn reminds me of the old dismissive expression “go peddle your papers.” The entry in the online Free Dictionary, citing McGraw-Hill's Dictionary of American Slang and Colloquial Expressions, reads: 

[get out of my face and] stop annoying me like an aggressive paper boy. Get out of here and go peddle your papers!

This sort of paper boy, rather than delivering papers to subscribers, hawked them on the street, as romanticized in the Disney musical Newsies. 

Then I began to wonder whether people often confuse “pedal” with “petal.”

It’s not hard to find Web pages offering such items as a “flower peddle plant stand,” a “flower peddle style baby link bracelet,” or a “flower peddle printed cotton scarf”; but I also found a number of amusingly named businesses such as “Petal Pusher” (a floral designer) and “Petal by Pedal,” (a bike-powered flower-delivery service).

Puns work only if your audience knows the usual definitions of the words involved, of course. Now that copyediting is frequently neglected in publishing, readers are less and less likely to be reminded of the correct spelling of words even if they are among the minority that still gets a daily newspaper.