Bumbershoot = Umbrella = rain = Seattle. Makes sense to me.
Quote:
Perhaps surprisingly, that word dates from the early days of Montgolfier ballooning and first appeared in English in 1785. (Umbrella itself dates from the early seventeenth century, originally from an Italian word for a sunshade, with the first part traceable back to Latin umbra, shadow.)
The first example of bumbershoot in Professor Lighter’s Random House Historical Dictionary of the American Language is from 1896. There were some variations around in the early days, such as bumbersol (with sol presumably taken from parasol) and bumberell. By the first decade of the twentieth century it had settled down to bumbershoot.
This fairly rare example of the word in print comes from L Frank Baum’s book Sky Island of 1912:
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Last edited by xoxoxoBruce; 07-18-2007 at 05:32 PM.
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