Why do Rhode Islanders say bubbler when most people don't? Here's what we found out

Some words will always clue you in to where someone grew up.

Do they say Coke, soda or pop? Sneakers, tennis shoes or gym shoes? Sub, hoagie or hero? All of these are little pieces in the fun puzzle of guessing someone’s backstory.

And then there’s this term, that, along with the words wicked, soda and sneakers, is a pretty good indicator that the speaker is from Rhode Island.

And that’s bubbler, often pronounced bubbla.

As part of The Providence Journal’s “What and Why RI” series, we set out to answer why Rhode Islanders stubbornly call it a bubbler, while most of the country calls it a water fountain or drinking fountain.

Who calls it a bubbler? It's not just us.

First off, while we are in a minority, Rhode Islanders are not the only ones who use the term bubbler. Wisconsin is right there with us, and if you’re just over the Rhode Island border in Massachusetts, you likely call it a bubbler, too, though the farther you get from the border, particularly going west, the less likely this becomes.

This is based on the work of Bert Vaux, a linguist at the University of Cambridge in England, who conducted the Harvard Dialect Study in 2002 and continued it in the 2006 UWM dialect survey. This is the same study that became mainstream in 2013 when maps made by graphic designer Joseph Katz using data from Vaux’s work went viral.

But there’s a lot of evidence that the term is at least somewhat known outside of those geographic bubbles, even if it’s not used as intensely.  When The Providence Journal asked members of the American Dialect Society about bubblers, academics from all over the country chimed in to say that it wasn’t just Wisconsinites and Rhode Islanders.

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“I know ‘bubbler’ is used in Wisconsin, because I went to high school and junior college in Milwaukee, and that's the term we used," said Herbert Stahlke, a professor at Ball State University. “However, I grew up in Waltz, Michigan, a dinky village about 25 miles south of Detroit, and we used the term there.  My brother-in-law grew up in Clio, about 10 miles north of Flint, Michigan, and he also used it.”

Another person added that he had personally heard the term used in Minnesota, Iowa and Washington. That being said, it's not guaranteed someone would know what you were talking about in those other states.

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Why does Rhode Island call it a bubbler?

Here’s the popular story about it, although we should warn you in advance, it’s been debunked.

The story is that the Kohler Co. invented the bubbler in 1888, used that name for their new product that water bubbled out of, and the name spread from there. But Wisconsin historian Beth Dippel has definitively proven that story is an urban legend, as the drinking fountain wasn’t invented by Kohler, nor do they hold the patent for it, and Kohler didn’t start manufacturing them until 1926.

As one last nail in the coffin of that story, research by the American Dialect Society folks and the Rhode Island Historical Society found many examples of the word bubbler in print before 1926.

There was an article in a 1901 Tuftonian Magazine talking about how “the day of the wooden pump (for drinking water) succumbs to the modernity of a ‘bubbler’ fountain,” in the name of health and safety.

Then, putting it in Rhode Island, there was an ad from the 1900s, preserved by Columbia University, for drinking fountains for horses and people by the H.F. Jenks Company in Pawtucket that called their invention “their own patented bubbler.”

By 1911, it’s clear from looking at The Providence Journal archives that the term was in common use. The Rhode Island Historical Society found three stories where it’s clear that everyone was calling the new type of water fountain — that bubbles up rather than requiring the use of a drinking cup — a bubbler.

There’s a “State House Brevity” that starts with “Bubble, bubble, how do you drink from the bubble?” and ends with a line about lawmakers struggling to drink from the new technology and getting water up their noses. Then, there’s another article talking about the installation of a new drinking fountain on Prospect Street, making it clear that these water fountains are unlike others, because they will have the “bubble drinking apparatus.”

And then, there’s a (by modern standards) extraordinarily sexist account submitted as a letter to the editor of how men and women should drink from bubblers. Men were advised to “balance gracefully on one foot,” and the writer advised “the weaker sex to have courage and face the bubbler bravely.” And, he said, it doesn’t look good for a woman to stand on one foot in public, so she should keep two feet on the ground.

So what's the best guess?

It’s time to confess that no one who was asked could definitively say why Rhode Islanders call it a bubbler. But there is a plausible theory.

As you’ve probably gathered from the examples given above, when bubblers as we know them came out as a new technology, people wanted to distinguish them from the older styles of drinking and water fountains that required a cup. These were different — with water that “bubbled” up and allowed users to drink from them directly — and people wanted language to describe that experience. And that language made its way into the mainstream, into newspapers like The Journal, and in this region, it stuck.

At the end of the reporting for this article, The Journal asked Gerald Cohen, a professor of art, language and philosophy at Missouri University of Science & Technology, how common it is for a word like bubbler to stick in one region and not in others.

His answer was that it's very common, “that’s what the word ‘dialectal’ is all about.”

If you discover a new clue as to why we all say bubbler, or if you have another question you'd like The Providence Journal to look into, email me at klandeck@gannett.com.

In the meantime, if you discover a new clue as to why we all say bubbler, email me at klandeck@gannett.com. If you have a question you would like The Providence Journal to look into, email me or submit it here.

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This article originally appeared on The Providence Journal: Why do Rhode Islanders call it a bubbler? It's not because of Kohler.