How do you pronounce ‘toboggan’? And do you wear it on your head or ride it in the snow?
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If you put “toboggan” on your Instacart list when you heard this week’s weather forecast, your delivery may have left you wondering if your personal shopper had spent too much time in the cold.
Not only are there regional differences in how to pronounce the word, we can’t even agree on what it means.
Toboggan: Do you wear it or ride it?
In most of the South, a toboggan is a close-fitting knit or fleece head-covering.
You have at least three in your coat closet right now that were gifts from people who don’t realize that it rarely gets cold enough here to wear a tasseled hat that makes your scalp sweat and then mashes your hair into the dampness.
At least one in your forgotten collection has the logo of a college or professional sports team on it. One was too small when you got it, and now when you try to pull it over your frozen ears, it recoils uselessly to the top of your melon head like a misshapen Yarmulke.
“That’s a tuh-BOG-un,” Darrick Wilson said Friday, while sporting an appropriately adult-sized Duke Blue Devils version of his own. Wilson, a shift manager for Tyson Foods, had the day off because of the threat of snow, ice and freezing rain in Sanford, where he lives. He was taking care of some chores outside as he awaited the arrival of whatever precipitation might come.
Wilson was familiar with an alternate pronunciation, with its emphasis on the part of the body farthest from where the hat is worn.
“TOE-bog-un,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve heard country people say it that way.”
Not once had he heard anyone use either pronunciation in reference to a gravity-powered snow vehicle.
At the Sanford Antique Mall downtown, Beth Peterson said the word with almost no accent at all: Tuh-BOG-un. Peterson grew up in Iowa and South Dakota and moved with her military husband to other cities around the country, plus Germany and England.
But until Friday, she said, she had never heard anyone use the word to describe any kind of a hat.
“That’s a cap,” she said. “A toboggan is a wooden thing with a curve at the end that you use to ride down the hill in the snow.”
That curlicued rudderless deathtrap is the classic version of the toboggan, which most of us in the South had never seen until we caught glimpses of the Iditarod on TV.
My generation preferred the Flexible Flyer, whose steel runners could be sharpened to such a fine edge they would slice through your best leather gloves and leave a smear of your blood on the new-fallen snow. But it had a steering mechanism, so you had a chance to avoid the biggest trees.
More popular now are the plastic sleds some people also call toboggans, which, like the originals, sit on top of the snow or ice rather than cut into it. They also lack steering, but there’s a rope to help you hang on.
Does it matter which, if either, is a toboggan?
Not a bit, as long as we get some snow.
This story was originally published January 10, 2025 at 3:30 PM with the headline "How do you pronounce ‘toboggan’? And do you wear it on your head or ride it in the snow?."
