A Bird in this World

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, good morning. This is Iris Chinook from High and Palm, California.

Hi, Iris. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Iris. What can we do for you?

Well, I was recently watching some reruns of the Andy Griffith show.

Nice.

And he had a phrase on there that I had never heard before, and I’m just kind of wondering what the history of that and what it means.

He said, he was talking to his girlfriend, and he said, you are just a bird in this world.

And he meant it as a compliment?

He meant it as a compliment.

Yeah, the context of it was very flattering. He was saying, you know, you are just something else. A bird in this world. A bird in this world.

That was appointment viewing for our family.

Yeah, yeah. We always got together.

Oh, yeah, yeah. Was it like that for you?

Well, it was. I’m 57, and I remember it from my childhood, and it was so fun to get it on DVD again and watch it kind of back-to-back and see Ron Howard.

I mean, what fit he was. Cutest little kid in the world, yeah.

Yeah, it was really a very sweet, kind show.

Yeah, does it still hold up today?

Yeah, yeah, it really does. I enjoyed it immensely. My husband and I watched it, and we just had a great time. It’s just a very sweet-hearted show.

Yeah.

You mentioned that you were watching reruns. Now, did you know that the fan club for the Andy Griffith Show is called the Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club?

No, I had no idea.

Yeah, so if you Google that, Andy Griffith Show Rerun Watchers Club, they have a ton of stuff on their site about the show. It’s a fun community of people.

But they have particularly called out this phrase in a couple different places as being noteworthy because Andy uses it in more than a few episodes.

There’s an episode where Aunt Bea has made a pie and she’s kind of fishing for compliments. And, you know, the line here is eating doesn’t always speak loud enough, meaning just because somebody eats your food doesn’t mean they like it.

Oh, that’s nice.

So she goes hunting up compliments. And so she’s kind of like deprecating her own pie, and Andy’s trying to build her up, and she keeps like putting down her pie.

And then he says, well, maybe your apples was too ripe. And she says, Andy Taylor, that was one of the best apple pies I ever made.

He says, well, I tell you, since it was so bad, maybe we better eat it up and get it out of the way so we’ll make room for another pie.

Ampy, you’re a bird in this world. You have to have a little bragging, don’t you?

And that’s the relationship right there, right?

Oh, my gosh. You are a bird in this world.

And I don’t see this phrase anyplace else except in the Andy Griffith community.

Yeah, I think that the people who wrote for that show coined this phrase, or else Andy Griffith himself came up with it.

Oh, really?

Yeah. We don’t see it in any of our dictionaries, none of the dialect books, a full-text search of the newspapers and the books. Everything that we have, it doesn’t come up anywhere except associated with this show.

Yeah, I was hoping that maybe it had something to do with Latin rara avis or awis, as you say in Latin, rare bird. Meaning an unusual thing.

Yeah, odd duck.

Odd duck, I see.

Odd duck, yeah, yeah. I was wondering if it just meant, you know, kind of, maybe they just liked the way they were saying the words bird and world. You know, they liked that aspect of it or something.

Yeah, I think that internal rhyme probably had something to do with it as well.

Well, Iris, I would say that you indeed are a bird in this world.

Oh, thank you.

And thanks for looking it up and trying to hunt it down. That’s fun.

Thank you so much, Iris.

All right, well, thank you so much. Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We hear all kinds of things as we read and watch and listen. If there’s something that occurs to you, something you want to share or find out more about, this is the place, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.