The Drinking Fountain

Kolohe says:

Ha, I get it, in the last panel it’s the drinking fountain that’s thirsty af.

Interesting that’s it’s ‘drinking fountain’, and not ‘water fountain’. Things obviously change over time, but these type of things change the slowest (a la ‘folkways’)

“Water Fountain” is the overwhelming choice in NY metro area (where this cartoon was drawn) and most of the East and South (which also had an overwhelming population majority, for the purposes of national syndication).

But curiously, his birthplace in Wisconsin appears to be ‘bubbler’ territory (and where he lived until he was nine). The remaining upbringing was in ‘drinking fountain’, as was his early career in Chicago. Though, on the other other hand, most of the dialect maps show that Milwaukee to Chicagoland and onward around Lake Michigan, have fairly sizeable variation and intermixing in the usage of all three at a comparatively granular level. And further confounding things, his college days and very start of his career was in Nebraska, firmly back in ‘water fountain’ territory

https://blog.hawsco.com/is-it-a-bubbler-or-a-drinking-fountain/Report