Here We Go Again

The author’s roll-aboard stands stoically in a hotel room,
awaiting its next journey.

February 19, 2020

Son of a bitch. Here we go again with “rollerboard,” that odious, etymologically crippled term for wheeled luggage.

Originally I blamed the novelist Gary Shteyngart for mainstreaming this dismal word, scattering it throughout the opening pages of his latest book, Lake Success. Now, in a truly distressing blow, I discover that Jonathan Franzen — Jonathan Franzen! — is perhaps equally responsible. The word appears multiple times in “Missing,” one of the essays in Franzen’s 2018 collection, The End of the End of the Earth.

The End is a heartbreaking enough book to start with. The author and I share a love of birds (the feathered kind if not the metal ones) and I was having a tough time getting through his sober chronicle of all the depraved things humans are doing to ensure their destruction. To then stumble across “rollerboard” made it all a bit much. I had the same reaction as I did reading Lake Success, which was to fling the book in a corner and go pout.

Both books were published in the fall of 2018, which clearly points to a conspiracy of some kind. And both of my favorite authors having helped to normalize this lazy bastardization is something I take personally. I feel betrayed!

Of course, it seems pretty likely that “rollerboard” was accepted usage before Franzen or Shteyngart ran with it. It’s tough to imagine two authors of such eminence getting a non-word past their editors and fact-checkers. When and how the term entered the lexicon I can’t say for sure. If I weren’t so exasperated and afraid of what I might find, I’d look it up.

The problem is that “rollerboard” (sometimes presented as “roller board”) is a misconstruction. It’s a mis-hearing of the term “roll-aboard.” This is wheeled luggage we’re talking about. You roll it aboard. “Roll-aboard” (or “rollaboard”) makes sense not only logically and grammatically, but has a pretty sound to it as well. “Rollerboard” is something unrelated, that in no way evokes or describes luggage. A board with wheels on it? I picture a plank, or a surfboard, with wheels like roller skates.

Yes I know, this is the evolution of language. Our conversations, you’ll point out, are jammed with words that have come into general use through laziness or distortion. “Rollerboard,” meanwhile, has just enough of the right sound and meaning to be plausible, sort of.

I sense defeat. And there are, I suppose, worse words to pick on.

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