As Cold as a Fridge

On hot summer days, some would-be wag might quip, “It’s as hot as an oven in here.” What would our wag do on cold winter days, what moldy simile would leap to mind? Does the kitchen offer any inspiration to the wag? Cold as a fridge? Sadly, the refrigerator has not taken its place in the gallery of phrase-worthy appliances. That great, unloved, necessary machine. Perhaps generations of English-speakers failed to grasp the magnificent metaphorical potential of refrigerators.

If the metaphoric failure of the fridge doesn’t lie in the thing, maybe it lies in the name. Scatter the word’s suffixes, toss them aside, and you leave frige. Sounds a bit like frigid. Cold, certainly, but not Maine-in-the-depths-of-winter cold. No painful breathing, no icicles from the nose. Hard as I try, I can’t seem to shake the intuitive sense that as comparanda, refrigerators just won’t do.

That same pity that draws me to unloved kittens draws me now to refrigerators. It’s probably not worth spending the entire party huddled pitifully in the corner with the fridge, but at least I can introduce it around. Maybe listen to an anecdote or two.

The sad news from Google is that since 1800, the word refrigerator has barely appeared in writing. In 1881, its use jumped 2 one-hundred-thousandths of a percent. Its high point in 2001 reached 5 ten-thousandths of a percent. These include company names and patent applications. Fridge fared worse. Poets and news reporters don’t seem to have noticed the appliance’s literary potential. Perhaps things would be different had James L. Cain changed slightly the title of his famous story, “The Baby in the Ice Box.”

As a champion of the underdog, it’s hard not to commiserate with the fridge. The Norse goddess Frigg would have been called fridge in Old English. Her name became the first element in Friday. Marvel introduced us all to Thursday’s Thor and Wednesday’s Woden. While we wait patiently for the movie premiere of Frigg to raise the goddesses’ profile, we might, out of object-pity, consider the occasional use of Fridgeday.

Words are pieces of a large network of meaning and allusion. Some serve well as similes because they call to mind networked connections—that is, connotations. The most efficacious of them lived long lives as similes and metaphors. Roses, wells, oak trees, dogs and cats all have their artistic and literary connotations. We let loose the dogs of war, try to be sturdy as oaks, quiet as cats, loyal as dogs, and beautiful as roses. These are the bright, shiny words at the party. From the earliest days, refrigerator never got invited.

Refrigerare is a Latin word that means to cool something either by means of water or shadow. The renowned Latinist Christine Mohrmann describes the word’s profound change as it moved between Classical to Christian Latin. It came to be associated with relief, ease, consolation, and a quickening of the spirit. A moment of peace, such as is found in Psalm 66:12, might be described as refrigerium. Soon, the word implied eternal joy. 

The word came into English in the early 1500’s as a direct borrowing from the Latin. Thomas More, in his Dialogue of Comfort (1534) writes of shoulders broad enough “suffycient to refrygerate and refreshe the man in that heate.” Francis Bacon in 1626 wrote of breezes that refrigerate him. Not until 1871 and the invention of the refrigerator does the word come to mean the machine we all know and love, or to put something into a fridge. 

One last thought on the intersection of fridges and literature. Irish poet Derek Mahon, listing bits of domestic life, complains that our nostalgia never reaches such pedestrian depths:

We’ve no nostalgia for the patristic croziers,

fridges and tumble-dryers of former years,

rain-spattered cameras in O’Connell St.

—St. Patrick’s Day

Too true. Wandering through poems, one finds an occasional fridge. Peeking out from the corner of a scene, it offers its mono-stress to an unscannable line of free verse focused elsewhere. Like waffle irons and tin scoops, it implies quotidian domesticity. What opportunities have been lost, left in the shealing, dropped through the grate. No odes to keeping food alive, and thereby the fridge’s owners too. No paean to the frozen bean. No emperor of ice cream. That unsung whirring whirligig of wonder. Unsung because one might at the very least expect fridge-magnet poets to enthuse about fridging their poems. No such honor.

Perhaps in the end, not every thing needs honoring. Not every machine needs its poet. Nor pressing need for monuments to clutter up our parks and block our views of the sea. Perhaps the fridge reminds us that they also serve who only stand and wait. Or refrigerate.