Hello, Hand Truck

or is it Dolly?

Throughout this spring and summer, I’ve been involved in an ongoing saga centered around my old neighbor in Laramie. She’s in her 80s, is a bit of a ‘hoarder’, and needed help moving. Her house that she had been renting changed owners and she suddenly (or perhaps with plenty of warning—I’m not too sure) was being forced out. Aside from having a couple viral tweets arise from this process,

I moved a lot of stuff— most of it twice — and I used this device quite a bit:

During one evening moving session, I enlisted the help of my Nebraskan friend who kept referring to this thing as a “dolly,” which I have also heard, but to me this is a “hand truck.” A dolly, to me, has four wheels and has entirely different applications. This led me to consider the regionality of this term, so I put the question out to Twitter and received quite a few interesting responses. I thought it was going to be basically a binary argument: Hand Truck versus Dolly, not realizing that this device is called all sorts of weird things across the world. My favorite was Diablo/Diablito (Mexico) and Diable (France and French Canada). Also Sack Truck, and Sack Barrow (Australia, UK, and New Zealand)

This is a quick map I did showing the results based on the twitter responses.

While there is some definite regionality, the sample size is pretty small and somewhat surprising. I learned that I have many Twitter followers from Michigan, which makes sense. I was disappointed to learn, however, that most of these Michiganders say Dolly. East Coast is pretty well split between the two, while the interior is solidly Dolly Country (with the exception of Arizona which has some “Diablo/Diablito” influence from the hispanic population).