What word do you use?
For the third row (as it were) in a station wagon? Do you also use this term for the third row in a minivan or SUV? (If not, what do you call this row?)
My family was debating this, and though we all use the same term (first used when I carpooled to preschool), we don’t know if it’s specific to Montreal anglos, Montreal Jews, some other random grouping, or what. I couldn’t find it on google, though probably it was cause I didn’t care enough to look.
My answer in the comments so you can think about for a second before responding.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:20 am
We use backity-back.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:29 am
I call it “the row I don’t want to sit in”. I don’t think we had a particular name for it; actually mostly we removed that bench.
I think our minivan is now broken after I used it to transport my bed back from Boston… something about smoke from the engine.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:35 am
It’s the way-back.
May 15th, 2007 at 11:48 am
I think we used “back-back” (which would make it not specific to any Montreal group whatsoever) but I think we sometimes used “way-back” as well (and something about ‘from away’s name makes me think that could be specific to my part of the world. Or not.)
May 15th, 2007 at 12:03 pm
It is the row I don’t want to sit in (now; in carpool it was much loved). Actually, we also call it backy-back, which is much the same, really. The back-back is a fairly predictable name for it, where you just reduplicate the word for emphasis.
I destroyed my family’s minivan by using it to tow all my stuff to the US. Luckily it was under warranty.
May 15th, 2007 at 12:15 pm
I don’t have that many seats in mine, but I call the windows back there the way back windows. People who call them that are way cool.
May 15th, 2007 at 12:20 pm
we said backy-back — a different variation of montreal jew, i guess! hey i wonder if we were in the same carpool ever!
May 15th, 2007 at 12:24 pm
I am almost positive we were never in the same carpool.
May 15th, 2007 at 2:04 pm
It’s the “way-back”. (For research purposes: Seattle area, mid-1970s, with parents from the South).
May 15th, 2007 at 4:11 pm
In my mom’s station wagon in high school we had the back seat and the backward seat (the 3rd row faced backward).
In her current minivan we call them the middle seat and back seat.
May 15th, 2007 at 6:44 pm
Actually, maybe we were in the same carpool? At the end I know exactly who was in my carpool (by a weird coincidence it was all people in my grade and their siblings), but at the beginning?
People in New England: thank you. I now know what it is called there.
Yes, the third row that faced back, that was the back(it)y-back. It’s been stretched for use in a minivan, but it was initially about the backwards facing seat.
May 16th, 2007 at 6:39 pm
Ditto, New England says way-back.
We now have to separate our organic composty stuff from things that go to landfill. In my house, the landfill stuff is called trash-trash.
May 18th, 2007 at 4:13 pm
I think we called it “the very back” when I was a kid in the 60s and 70s. As #5 of 6 children, I spent too much time back there. The worst was when they went to two seats facing each other in the very back. I think I was 10 and my little brother 8 when we got a station wagon with that configuration. Nobody’s legs fit in that seat. Fortunately my older brother left for college around that time, so I could move up either to the middle row or the middle of the front.
May 18th, 2007 at 4:35 pm
I don’t really have a special (i.e., firmly lexicalized) word for this (probably because my family never had a car with more than two rows of seats), but I think I would call it “the far back.”