Brickbat Road

Above is a close-up of a court house street sign indicating the existence of a road known as Brickbat. The sign does say that, but in all my 495 45 years of life, I've never, ever, heard anyone say, "Turn right on Brickbat Road." (Or left for that matter.) It's just the road by Fleets. It has no name.

The word brickbat is not unfamiliar, however. My mother and grandmother both used the phrase "harder than a brickbat" often, and I grew up saying it myself.

A sentence using the word brickbat might go like this: "That cake that Chesapeake Bay Woman just baked is as hard as a brick bat. You'd break off an eye tooth biting into that thing. Quick! Throw it in the trash before she comes back."

I just assumed everyone knew what that meant. But then one day I left Mathews.

When I raced with flames at my heels trotted off to college in the early 1980s, the transition from sheltered Mathews County life to fraternity parties college life was challenging to say the least. My roommates all thought I was a freak of nature sort of like that boy who was raised by wolves a bit odd.

For example, if I said, "That poor woman is uglier than a mud fence," they just howled with laughter. "What is a mud fence?" my friend Iris would say.

Or they'd ask, "Why would you go to a court house to go shopping?"

Well, you can imagine how they reacted when I first said that something (probably a piece of bread or some science experiment in the icebox--another foreign word to them) was "harder than a brickbat."

Next came the inevitable question: What exactly is a brickbat, anyway? Anyone? Bueller?

I didn't--and still don't--know.

So to solve this mystery I called upon my BFF Wikipedia, who directed me to an on-line dictionary, which said this about brickbats:

Main Entry: brick·bat
Pronunciation: \ˈbrik-ˌbat\
Function: noun
Etymology: brick + 1bat (lump, fragment)
Date: 1579
1 : a fragment of a hard material (as a brick);
2 : an uncomplimentary remark

The term dates back to 1579? That's only a a couple of decades before the last time I cleaned out my icebox the Jamestown settlement.

But this still didn't sit well with me. Why would they call a street in the court house Brickbat Road?

Another website, oldhousejournal.com, brought me a little bit closer to a more likely answer. Speaking of historic buildings and how to properly replace and repair centuries-old brick, it referenced high-fired exterior brick and low-fired interior "bat" or "clinker" brick.

Since Brickbat Road hugs the historic court green, which is loaded with centuries-old buildings, I'm going to assume the road name has to do with the brickwork on those structures.

Has the one reader from Mathews anyone from Mathews heard that street referred to as Brickbat Road?

Has the one other reader from out of town anyone else ever heard the term brickbat?

Am I the only one who wants to do another Womanless Beauty Pageant, like next weekend?