Do you ever use a phrase that you heard growing up as a child that no one else around you understands?  Frequently I find myself having to explain the meaning behind a phrase to my student assistants.

One of the latest ones is the phrase bar pit.

Now, I don’t recall whether I heard this from my parents or someone else growing up, but the explanation is quite simple.  And the explanation itself includes a colloquial corruption of a word as well.

Often when you are driving down the highway, at least in South Georgia, you will see large tracts of land where large pit have been created by removing dirt for DOT projects.

These are the bar pits and this term comes from the fact that it is a pit where they are barrying the dirt from.  Now the word barry is itself a corruption of the word borrow.