Pickles by Brian Crane for March 25, 2025

Yep—just like other people.

Well, we park in a driveway and drive in a parkway. Go figure.

Look up where the word hallway came from……………

It is so annoying when people use foyer for the entrance. Foyer is French for fire place, it just doesn’t make sense to use francophones.

Also, the living room used to be called a parlor. But, when I was growing up in the 1950s, we called it “The front room.”

Drawing Room, short form of Withdrawing Room, where someone could withdraw for more privacy when the main room was busy.

Not too many people take baths anymore.

I’d say ‘The Sitting Room’ made sense, but I never saw a room sit and how would you train it anyway?

Reminds me of that 4th season Monty Python episode where all the German bigshots get tossed out of a zeppelin and the couple whose house they land in keep correcting each other: “put them in the sitting room”, “this is the sitting room, you mean the drawing room”.

Then they decide that they need to ring the government, and one of them looks at the line of casualties and says “this is the government”.

The family room, a relaxing room.

The drawing room is short for withdrawing room. It was called that because in the old days after a dinner the hostess would invite the ladies to withdraw from the dining room to that room while the men stayed and smoked cigars and drank brandy (or some other liquor) and the ladies didn’t want to breathe in the smoke. After a while the men joined them in the drawing room.

They were all high on mushrooms at the time of naming them.

According to Wikipedia…

“A drawing room is a room in a house where visitors may be entertained, and an alternative name for a living room. The name is derived from the 16th-century terms withdrawing room and withdrawing chamber, which remained in use through the 17th century, and made their first written appearance in 1642. In a large 16th- to early 18th-century English house, a withdrawing room was a room to which the owner of the house, his wife, or a distinguished guest who was occupying one of the main apartments in the house could “withdraw” for more privacy."

At least they got the room part right!

Living room was the parlor because that is where people talked/visited. The drawing room was a place for the women to “withdraw” after dinner and do their women things while the men went to the study or library to smoke cigars and drink brandy. (Maybe the women did that in the drawing room as well.)

Now you got me thinking, living rooms are not alive, are they?

It used to be called the Drawing Room as a shortened version of WITHdrawing room as people in high society would Withdraw them selves from the dining room after dinner to this room after their meals especially if they had guests. If was just family there on the day they would all go into the drawing room to sit and talk as a family, but if they had guests the men would go into the drawing room and drink play cards or even do business with each other while the ladies would go into the parlour to drink, talk to their friends and catch up on all the latest gossip. Parlour for parlour room is derived from the Old French word parloir or parler and later parlez meaning “to speak” in French. It entered the English language around the turn of the 16th century. It became known as a Living or Sitting room in the late 19th and early 20th centuries as this is where the house occupants would “live” and relax in the house. You slept in the bedroom, ate in the dining room and worked in the kitchen so you would have a living room just as somewhere for you to live or sit and relax and take it easy at the end of the day with your family and friends.

If the living room was called the Drawing Room, where and what was the sitting room.

The pantry has nothing to do with panting.

Why isn’t the kitchen the cooking room?

My parents old house had sliding doors between the front room and the living room. I assume the front room was for guests and the doors were to hide the mess of the lived in room.

In the house I grew up in, the living room was a seldom used room, reserved for entertaining guests. Unless it was the holidays and then that’s where the tree was displayed as it was the front window.

Kid’s got a POINT

The same people who named the place you park your car a driveway and a road where you drive your car a parkway

Drawing room was short for withdrawing room. It was where the ladies withdrew to to get away from the men smoking cigars and drinking brandy at the table.

The drawing room name comes from being called the withdrawing room, I.e. withdrawing from other people. I think grandpa would like that.

And it’s not always The Front Room. On rare occasions, a Rumpus Room. (Otherwise, the space with cheap paneling in the basement.

Too bad some make comments before checking what others have said. The repetitiveness is redundant & stated too many times.

Foyer – they often had a fireplace in the large room at the entrance of a grand home. My gripe is that people pronounce it “foi yer”. It is ‘foi yay’. French, as has been mentioned.

I’d just call it the Couch Room.

As I recall it originally was the “Withdrawing Room,” where the women went (withdrew) after dinner, so the men could smoke cigars and drink Port. They also used to have another formal sitting room – the Parlor. But only if you were filthy rich.

Some people used to call it the front room.

I’ve heard that it was called the “sitting room” which seems VERY appropriate!

What’s considered the Living Room in our home is open concept with the Dining area. We refer to it as the Great room since it’s great to hang out in

they sure can be… :}

Call it what you want, it is nice to have a place to live!

My grandparents on both sides (a looooong time ago) called it ‘the front room’. As I recall, it wasn’t used much, either.

It also used to be called the parlor.

It was short for the “withdrawing” room, where the men would withdraw for brandy and cigars after the meal, while the women… did… whatever women do?

“F—- you real estate lady! This bedroom has an oven in it! This bedroom has a bunch of people sitting around watching tv.” The late, great Mitch Hedberg, on how it’s up to him to decide how many bedrooms there are in the house.

Our water closet is just off the sitting room, or salon as we called it. And there is a dumbwaiter between the galley and the refectory.

I saw my grandpa lying dead on 06/01/1958 in the parlor.

A lot of room names come from naming of rooms in mansions or castles where there were rooms for all kind of specialized purposes as pointed out in several comments. As everyone became able to buy smaller one family homes today’s living room served many of the purposes and acquired different of the previous room names. “Living room” was a new one becasue that’s where the family spent most of their daytime hours.

there’s also front room

names usually make sense at the time they originate. …like dialing a phone number

Now let’s talk about origins of the Master Bedroom! :)

I had to look up “living room”, apparently before WW 1 the room, before funeral parlors were common, was used for displaying dead bodies in the house and sometimes called the “death room”. In 1910 the Ladies Home Journal started calling it the “living room” to get rid of the stigma of death, and that “living” was because that’s where people did a lot of activities in the house.Sounds good to me, true or not.

A room with large glass windows or walls for exposure to sunlight:

The Sunroom

The Florida Room

The Patio Room

The Three Season Room

The Winter Garden

The Solarium

I have no explanation and I think I missed a few other names

8^)

I believe drawing room was originally withdrawing room where you went for a little peace.

It is called the “living room” because it is the part of the house where most of the “living” goes on. Talking, watching television, etc. Easy peasy.

How can anyone even consider renaming the Gulf of Mexico when they can’t name the rooms of their own house?

But not nearly as dumb as those who name new drugs.

A place to sit, listen to music (on the TV or record player), read a book, watch TV, play music (aside from my guitars I picked up a keyboard over the weekend:) so it’s my living/reading/ TV/ Music Room and sometimes it doubles as my bedroom if I fall asleep on the recliner. My snoring will wake me up so I can go to bed.

Parlor. Salon. Recreation room.

Grampa: “Yes…people really ARE kind of dumb”!

True words from the mouth of babes.

Does “lounge” sound better? To me, calling it a lounge seems like a liminal area of a fancy hotel. Somehow, it sounds old-fashioned too.