yeah I always thought ‘swamp coolers’ were these things:
What you are describing is an evaporative cooler - but not a swamp cooler. That’s my distinction - the name ‘swamp cooler’ implies a level of hillbilly to associate the name - otherwise it’s just an ‘evaporative cooler’.
Nope, normal evaporative coolers are called either swamp coolers or desert coolers by everyone but you. It’s your right, of course, to use adjectives and nouns any way you want. As Humpty Dumpty said, “It’s all a question of who’s to be master, me or the word .”
They only work in dry climates, so they don’t have anything to do with hillbillies.
Yeah, but a an INTERNET OF THINGS swamp cooler. With an app! That’s gotta be worth $185.
BBshop, what if you pre-viewed your store’s product/sourcing ideas to the community before making decisions? Would you end up with a higher quality catalog? At least fewer stinkers?
Anyone who actually bought one of these, please provide your review.
They only work in dry climates, not swamps - no one argued differently. I don’t know where you found information leading you to believe that hillbillies can’t live in dry climate, however that is factually incorrect.
" Hillbilly " is a term (often derogatory) for white people who dwell in rural, mountainous areas in the United States, primarily in southern Appalachia and the Ozarks.
I believe what he’s getting at is that hillbilly is used to describe a class of people in a specific area. I think what you’re describing is a redneck which tends to be less bound to a particular region.
often disparaging + offensive
**:** a person from a backwoods area
1
sometimes disparaging
**:** a white member of the Southern rural laboring class
2
often disparaging
**:** a person whose behavior and opinions are similar to those attributed to [rednecks](https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/rednecks)
Wikipedia isn’t really the best place to define something - that section doesn’t have a citation btw. Redneck - seems to be specificaly Southern - and is slang so recent that it doesn’t even get picked up in a Thesaurus - where as Hillbilly has a list of synonyms :
Synonyms
bumpkin, chawbacon, churl, clodhopper, cornball, countryman, hayseed, hick, provincial, rube, rustic, yokel
I mean if you are going to be pedantic - Hillbilly has transcended it’s locality - whereas Redneck has not (in dictionary terms) - thus making one much more worldly than the other. But then again I’d accept Redneck as a synonym for Hillbilly myself - but as previously shown, I apparently have no idea what I’m talking about as ‘swamp cooler’ is a technical term that everyone uses - and it doesn’t use ice (unless you make one for Burning Man as my picture shows) so what do I know.
The Marketing Division of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation were a bunch of mindless jerks who were the first up against the wall when the revolution came.
—Douglas Adams
I was raised in the west, where hillbillies were only uneducated people from the Appalachian mountains who had specific accents and customs. Poor uneducated folk living in the mountains of the west were not called hillbillies.
So maybe the meaning of the word is different in different parts of the country, and we’re both partially right, partially wrong.
That could explain our different take on evaporative coolers, too. The people in the west I knew who called them swamp coolers were from families who had recently moved there from the midwest or the south - families who’d been in the west for several generations called them desert coolers.
New England here - and honestly I’d never heard of a swamp cooler until one was featured on CSI - IIRC that ‘contraption’ was a bucket of ice with a fan - there was melt and … well electricity and water don’t mix generally - it was a show about odd deaths.
Evaporative coolers wasn’t a thing either - too humid - the first time I’d heard about them was when a kid won a science award for a clay pot design intended for refrigeration in poor countries. It was on this site in fact - https://boingboing.net/2004/03/22/inventor-of-noelectr.html
This topic was automatically closed after 5 days. New replies are no longer allowed.
