Arlo and Janis by Jimmy Johnson for December 03, 2015

It Toque a long time for his hair to get that way!

i didn’t know that style of hat was called that….

@iT00ns,I live in northern Illinois and here a toboggan is a sled too.

Jimmy lives in Mississippi on the coast. Not too may toboggans down there, I think.

In Wisconsin and the UP of Michigan a toboggan is a sled as well. My Mom would call that a “chook” (the oo pronounced like in “took” or “brook”).

I always called them ‘Navy watch cap’. And since I wear them a lot, I keep my hair short enough to prevent that sort of hair style.

I have lived in Central Ohio for 56 years, and Arlo’s knit cap was known as a toboggan when I was a child and through my twenties. I don’t know what children and teens call it now.

Perhaps it IS an Ohio thing, for I, too, always knew it as a toboggan/

Must be an Ohio thing. I’ve lived in Minnesota, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana. Never heard it called a toboggan there.

In Canada a toboggan is a sled, exactly as bawana described it: http://pariconsleds.com/media/catalog/product/cache/2/thumbnail/29c3a6872612b0f82337f47fc4782134/t/o/toboggan_17.jpg .

We’d never actually call it a sled, that would be the thing with runners, but I’d say it’s a sub-set of the sled family.

The hat Arlo is wearing would be called a toque (pronounced “took” with a long oo sound like in too), although the design is a bit different.

Down here in the Carolinas that headwear is called a toboggan, never heard of that word meaning a sled.

I use “toboggan” for both, but growing up in MA it was a sled and living in NC it was a hat. Some other words that vary in meaning by region: Bubbler, Elastic, and Cabinet. (Water cooler, Rubber band, and Milk Shake)

I grew up in southern Ohio and that is definitely a toboggan.

In MN we used to call them toboggans, now they’re called sleds. Except this winter – We have some snow for sledding right now, but the next 2 weeks look to be in the low 40’s. :-(

Here in sunny Australia, where many of us have never even met a snowflake in person, a toboggan is a type of sled and the hat is a beanie.

In Tennessee the knit watch cap is called a toboggan. That threw me off, since I came here from Minnesota, where the only time I put a toboggan on my head it hurt!

Nope..isn’t called that in Wisconsin. This strip is set in the South.

Lived in Wisconsin my whole life, we call’’em hats. Now don’t get me started on bubblers/drinking fountains.

I have lived in Wisconsin since 1968 and have never heard a hat called that. To me, a toboggan is a sled as well.

Everyone knows (or should know) you put a toque on your head while you ride your toboggan. Someone must have pulled a prank on some folks, with the word and it stuck.

The British call a sled a “sledge”.

We call the hat a toboggan in the Southeast U.S. We call a sled a sled, but we almost never use either one of them – it’s warm down here and snow is so rare (once or twice a year for more than a dusting), we close all schools, churches, and most businesses, and stay home during the snow, even just an inch or two, because it’ll melt by the next day.

It’s clearly a regional thing. Several etymology websites say the origin of the word as a type of hat is that it was previously called a toboggan cap, eventually shortened to “toboggan” in some areas.

Bad hair day!

“Toboggan” is a word of American Indian origin referring to a style of flat bottomed sled used by Indians generally located in what is now Canada. Western Hemisphere Indians never discovered the wheel, so tobaggan-style sleds where to some extent also used throughout the Western hemisphere even in the absence of snow. Remember, also, that the Indians had no horses or other beasts of burden until the Spaniards bought them over to the New World.Anyone who’s ever done any tobogganing knows full well that you better wear a warm head covering that covers the ears.

If I remember correctly from my days in North Carolina, the hat is a TOE-boggan, whereas when I grew up in Wisconsin the sled was a toe-BOG-gan. I’ve also lived in Minnesota, Michigan, Iowa, Colorado, Illinois, Florida, and Australia, and hey, you just learn the local lingo and go with the flow. And did our Wisconsin friends know Australia also has bubblers?!!

I grew up in Ohio, never heard it called a toque…it was a “knit cap”. In California it is/was a watch cap. I don’t think here it’s a toque….I think that’s something else, and spelled differently, too. Plus you can get still arrested for it.

And in California…that’s “bed head” or “hat head” depending on how it got that way.

I grew up in Alaska and currently live in Oregon and a toboggan has always been a sled that doesn’t have runners. The hat is called a cap.

The first time I ever heard of a winter cap being called a Toboggan was when I lived in South Carolina. Then again, the locals had the propensity to refer to lunch as “dinner”, too. It took a bit to get my ears used to some of the local lingo when I lived there.

I’m from northern Ohio, and that’s a skull cap to me. My Canadian family calls it a toque, though.

With that hair, Arlo can be a member of Powerman 5000.

George AlexanderIt wasn’t that they never discovered them, it was that prairies were too soft in rainy rainy season (I almost bogged down in a patch of virgin prairie in a Texas August, with water visible in my footprints), and too cut by gullies. A travois was more suitable..I never heard toque until moving to BC; in my childhood (north Texas), they were longer and called stocking caps. A sledge is a heavy-duty, and often steerable, sled for cargo, a few capable of having wheels attached for year ’round use.

Always referred to them as “stocking caps”

One learns something every day! I grew up in California and have always lived in various states in the west, and I’d never heard the term “toboggan” used for anything for anything but the sled (I still have mine in my attic, and it is well over 50 years old). To me Arlo is wearing what I would now call a “knit cap” or sometimes a “watch cap”, but in my childhood years would probably have called it a “stocking cap”. Never heard the term “toque” either!

Having lived in n. Carolina for many years, I think the southern region knew what a tobaggan sled was, but really had no use for them. However, they also knew of the knit hats with a tassel or tossel on top and, as some fall and winter days are cold, applied the toboggan name to the hat style that northerners wore when toboganning.

I think “sled” is more of a catch-all term that can include toboggans. And I had never ever heard the stocking cap called a “toboggan,” but what david-reaves wrote makes sense to me.

In Michigan we ride on a toboggan, like a sled but no runners. Reference to it as a hat has to be an Ohio thing. There are a lot of words and phrases in Ohiospeak that northern people don’t understand.

Grew up in Maryland, live in California, and ditto what doublepaw said about a toboggan being a sled without runners. Never heard of the word applied to a hat. A toque, mentioned above, to me is a knit hat knit straight up and then sewn in creases at the top rather than knit so as to decrease stitches and gradually round off at the top.

From:

http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=toboggan..“As American English colloquial for a type of long woolen cap, it is recorded from 1929 (earlier toboggan cap, 1928), presumably because one wore such a cap while tobogganing.”

Static Electricity can really build up in winter…

My B-I-L is from West Virginia, and the first time he asked to borrow a toboggan we sent him down the cellar where the flat, non-steerable wooden sled was stored…

DavidHuieGreenThe desert and plains tribes had horses by the mid-1500s and northern European invaders didn’t get there until mid-1800s. In that short time, they not only learned to use them to a degree Sheridan called “the finest light cavalry in the world”, but had developed enough knowledge of genetics to produce the appaloosa.

I thought a toque was the tall white hat chefs wear.!?

Here in Europe, a toboggan is a slide, as one can find at playgrounds or water parks.