Before looking it up, did you know the meaning of this word?
(Not the city)
I never heard that term before.
Yes, and I’d bet many women attended Chautauqua wearing chatelaine
It appears quite frequently in Pirsig’s “Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance”, which I read years ago. So, yes.
Nope.
I’d heard the term in connection with people of literary achievement, but didn’t really know what it meant.
Same here.
I had encountered the term before and associated the term ‘Chataqua circuit’ with an itinerant speech circuit in the 1890s. I had always thought it was a political thing, however, I just read the wiki on it and found it was much more than that. It was a weird eclectic Frankenstein conglomerate of a whole bunch of different activities that took place under a tent.
Huh. My father’s family is from Chautauqua County NY, going back to the mid 1850s. Since I’m heavily into genealogy, it’s a word I’ve had to type many times.
I certainly did know, and that is only partially because of growing up in Chautauqua County and having attended some lectures and concerts at the original Chautauqua. I didn’t know that there were other Chautauquas until later in life, but having been exposed to the original made this a fact I didn’t forget rather than an interesting tidbit that had no other context to anchor it in my memory.
I’ve heard the term. It was probably most commonly heard in the early twentieth century. It’s a place where you can go (for a week or so, I think, once a year) to listen to lots of lectures and such. The most famous one was the one at Chautauqua, New York, and the general term for such things came from that. I don’t know of any such current equivalents.
I’ve only heard it as a Native American loan word used as a town’s name in Illinois. I’ve never heard it used for a traveling or stationary tent show or lecture hall. The Schaffner Players or “Toby and Susie show” was the only tent show I heard of growing up. I knew the son of the last people who ran that tent show before it shut down. (We did summer stock theatre together one summer in the 1980’s on the Golden Eagle - a landlocked “riverboat” dinner theatre.)
The interwebs tell me the word “chautauqua” is Iroquois/Erie and may mean “two moccasins tied together”, “bag tied in the middle”, “jumping fish”, or “place where fish are taken out.” I also learned that Lake Chautauqua in New York has the shape of two moccasins tied together, and it is where the Chautauqua Institute is located. Is that where the tent show lecture hall tradition started?
Is it something which is sold at Taco Bell?
I thought it was a brand of bananas.
I only heard of it because of the Lake Superior Big Top Chautauqua
Brian
Yes.
But I’m (by USA standards) not all that far from Chatauqua, which still holds chatauquas; though a bit too far to get to them easily.
– reading the thread, it occurs to me that I might also first have seen it in Zen and the Art, which I first read when I lived somewhat further away.
Same here.
So one is in your general locale. You decide to attend.
Do you say; “I’m going to the Chatauqua” or “I’m going to Chatauqua” ?
I think I first encountered the word in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which I read in college. I also regularly attend the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in Ashland Oregon, which sort of evolved from the chautauqua movement in the late 1800s, so I sometimes hear the word there when the festival’s history is discussed.
BTW, the word is spelled wrong in the title of this thread, although it seems to be a common misspelling.
To me:
- “I’m going to Chautauqua” means I’ll be traveling to a town of the same name (it turns out there are several in the US).
- “I’m going to a/the Chautauqua” means I’ll be attending a Chautauqua-style event, which could be anywhere.
I first heard the word as the name of a regional airline that operated flights on behalf of AA, I think, or maybe it was Delta. I never really put much thought into where the airline got their name from.
ETA: It was actually all three legacies, AA, Delta, and United.