I’ve been told that the term “bubbler” is generally only used here in Wisconsin. Everyone here knows what it is, but folks in the cheeseless 49 usually don’t have any clue what the hell we’re talking about. I want to know if that’s true. Is this term used anywhere else in America, and if so, what does it mean? I’ll tell you what it means here when I get a few replies.
I haven’t heard the term before, but I’ll wager a WAG.
A beer?
A bubbler is a drinking fountain, I believe.
I think I heard this from Southern friends though. . .
Hey, that’s right. I’m surprised it only took 2 posts.
Now, is this term used aound the country? Is the “Wisconsin only” thing I’ve been told just a myth?
I’ve been to 40 states, and so far I’ve found nobody knows what it is.
I learned it from a girl when I was in the 6th (7th?) grade when I lived in Rochester, N.Y. That was 16 years ago. However, like I said, I think she was from somewhere in the south, maybe Georgia?
Then again, I don’t think I’ve heard it since. So how’s that for storage and recall of useless information? (I wonder if maybe I had a crush on her??? Hmmm…)
I’ve lived in Wisconsin for the past ten years and I have never heard “bubbler”. I call it a drinking fountain. I live close to the Minneapolis/St. Paul metro area, maybe it’s that strange “Twin Cities Metro Area” influence. I knew what it was because it has come up before that Wisconsinites call it a bubbler.
In downtown Portland, Oregon, there are the Benson bubblers. A Benson bubbler is a set of 4 drinking fountains branching out from a single pipe. There’s a number of them on various streets.
There is no button on the Benson bubblers. They just run all the time. At least they used to. Now they have timers so that most of them shut down at night during the dry season. The rest of the year, they run all the time.
The original ones were donated to the city in 1912 by Simon Benson, hence the name. More were added in 1976. There’s a picture of one near the bottom of this page.
Old-time New Englanders call drinking fountains “bubbluhs.” A “fountain” to them is a vending machine that sells “tonic”. Tonic is what is known in most of the country as “soda” or “soda pop”. (Where I grew up it was simply “pop.”) Unlike their older relatives, younger New Englanders tend to use the same words that are common in the rest of the country.
You can find just about anything on the Internet. See Use of Bubbler as a synonym for drinking fountain
Bubbler seems to be in common use in Rhode Island and neighboring areas, in eastern Wisconsin and adjacent parts of the U.P. of Michigan, and around Sydney, Australia. For the record, the old-time New Englanders I have heard use the term all come from southern New Hampshire and southwestern Maine.
Yup, in Sydney it is a drinking fountain. Bubblers are operated by the user (usually by a small lever for outdoors and older types, or by a button for newer and indoors types). Never seen an ever-running type, but we don’t have the water to spare.
Given the heat here, particularly in summer, fresh drinking water always used to be available in public areas like parks and bus stops from these fountains. Bubblers lost popularity in the (at a guess) '70’s due to concerns about disease transmission, particularly TB.
Newer designs which reduce the liklehood that a user would put their mouth to the opening overcame that concern to some extent, but were in turn overtaken by the designer water fad (there are a couple of shops here that only sell water - bottled water from different countries. With, I kid you not, tasteing notes).
Bubblers are still extant in school playgrounds - the popularity of jerking the lever, or sticking a finger across the outlet hole while a friend is drinking, and thus saturating the friend, seems to be eternal.
It’s a Milwaukee area term, IME. I don’t think it’s used much by cheeseheads in the western part of Wisconsin within that eeeevil Twin Cities influence. My husband and his family are from Milwaukee, and they all say it, and now he’s taught the term to my four-year-old daughter! She’s going to be mercilessly teased in school for this someday, I just know it…
FWIW I am aware of the term bubbler as a drinking fountain being used in Queensland, Victoria and the western districts of NSW as well as Sydney.
Of course, in rhymming slang ;
bubbler = bubbling brook = cook
I have a handy book, a dictionary:
bub•bler "be-b(e-)ler\ noun (1914)
1 : a drinking fountain from which a stream of water bubbles upward
2 : one that bubbles
©1996 Zane Publishing, Inc. and Merriam-Webster, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
Without claiming to read the OP’s mind, handy, I’m going to guess that pkbites already knew what a bubbler is, and simply wanted to know where that regionalism occurs. How, precisely, did your dictionary definition help in that effort?
I’m a former Chicagoan who is now in North Carolina, and I have never used the term. However, my Rhode Island relatives, young and old, use the term bubbler all the time. This is right in line with Bibliophage’s information. Also I did run across a newspaper article about drinking fountains in which the word bubbler pops up a few times. The weird thing is that this article was written by a reclusive genius in the Chicago area.
Why do some water fountains produce two streams of water that merge into one?
Bubbler is a Boston term for a bubbler.
From the Wicked Good Guide to Boston English:
http://www.boston-online.com/glossary.html
I’ve never heard it used outside of New England, but apparently it is. AFAIK, it is 99% a Boston word, but perhaps not.
For the record, although “Tonic” is being phased out (it is still found in the tonic aisle of grocery stores in some places, but not many), bubblaa is alive and well. As a 19 year old Bostonian, I have NEVER heard the term “water fountain,” except to explain to a non-native what a “bubbla” is.
Another Bay Stater checking in: bublah is the only thing we call a “water fountain.” When I went to college in New Haven, people would look at me like I had 3 heads when I’d ask them where the bublah is. Not as bad as asking for coffee milk or chourico (thats pronounced sher-eece) down there, but still pretty bad.
Grew up in Chicago, think of it as a Wisconsin term.
You can find the word in print in the classic children’s book The Shrinking of Treehorn, by Florence Parry Heide. I believe Heide was a Racine native…if not it was near there. The book was originally published in 1971 by Holiday House, an NYC company; I suspect it wasn’t easy for Ms. Heide to get the word past her editors–unless they were fellow Wisconsinites or, perhaps, old New Englanders…or from Sydney.
That was a good site bibi.
And yes Manny, I did know what a bubbler was. I’m just surprised at how many out of staters I meet that have no idea what we’re talking about here. For some reason they all think it’s some kind of bar or restaurant.