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| "Everywhere is walking distance if you have the time.." -- S. Wright | |
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| home / ask the human / | |
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First Group |
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Ask the Human First Group Bras & Panties Success Free Will Cryptic Message Bagels & Gravity There & Back Medieval Value Big & Hairy Second Group Brave Soul Toilette Paper War & Dance Assessment Fatal Love Sex & Gravity Rhyming Orange Michigander Third Group Domination Picking Things Helen's Secret Sane Advice 42 George Orwell Male Ladybugs Boning the Ham Fourth Group Declaration Colorless Odor Microwaves Cow in Pants Find the Tower Wellspring Wax Paper Other Shoe Watchmen ---------------------------------------- Ah... weird people.
God love 'em.
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Pamela - of Espanola, Canada - quizzed: Why is it we drive on a parkway and park on a driveway?
The Human Responds: You'll be pleased to know that during the intervening time between when you asked and when I answered, I've been conducting some pretty rigorous field experiments to unlock this riddle. Here's what I did: I took my car out on a parkway and parked it without any difficulty. In fact, if you can ignore the screeching brakes, the blaring horns, and the well crafted profanity thrown in your direction, you'll discover that parking on a parkway can be quite pleasant. But after a short time it became boring, so I drove on... Next, I pulled into my driveway and drove around for a while. Again, it was a fairly pleasant thing to do once I learned to ignore the cat's furtive attempts to leap out of the way and to ignore my wife's well crafted profanity thrown in my direction. But I got bored again after a little while and parked the car. Conclusions: You can drive and park on a parkway, and you can park and drive in a driveway. It's up to you; the names "driveway" and "parkway" are interchangeable. Therefore the problem is with the words, not the actual physical cement edifices. So I went to a linguistics professor at the local college. Together we delved into the dimmest recesses of the library and discovered the origins of "driveway" and "parkway." There, under many layers of dust and neglect, lay the answer. "Parkway" is from a lost pre-Germanic dialect, pronounced something like "pvookveigh." And according to this text, it generally means "pwook weigh." A pwook, as any competent anthropologist will tell you, is an immense hairy beast with downturned tusks that pre-Germanic barbarians rode prior to the animals being obliterated by an airborne virus. As the book describes, these pre-Germans used to line up their beasts (which stretched in line for miles) and would sit and chat for great lengths with each other. These meetings were called a pvookveigh (animal +wait, or +weigh - the book is not clear). The ground under these heavy creatures would become flattened and devoid of bumps. These long flat strips of land, in turn, were used as the foundation for roads by the clever Romans. Hence, later generations used the pvookveighs to travel without any regard to the etymology of the word. They viewed it as something you travel on. Not surprisingly, "driveway" comes from these same mysterious pre-Germanics. Here the meaning of the word comes from "driwveigh," which literally means to drive away. Again, the enigmatic pwooks enter the tale. Pwooks, though impressive in stature, were very slow moving animals, capable of going only a few meters before stopping to rest. When invaders came to plunder the pre-Germanics, the men and women emerged from their thatch huts, mounted their huge hairy pwooks, and charged the oncoming invaders. Without fail, the invaders upon seeing these monsters and realizing that their impotent spears had no chance to pierce the tough hide, would run off in fear and never return. The pre-Germanics would then turn their mounts and ride back to the hut entrance, a very short distance. Again, the Romans found the remains of the huts and the short well worn paths that the pwooks used to charge up and down from. Being clever builders, the Romans erected massive forts next to the flattened run and parked their chariots on the smooth surface. Again, their ignorance in the origin of the driwveigh stamped over it's once mobile meaning into the now accepted "driveway" where people park vehicles. And that, my dear Pamela, is why we drive on parkways and park on driveways.
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 © sklender, 1996 - Until My Death, and then three weeks beyond that. |
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