A Blue Million

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hey, this is Ian calling from Clyde, North Carolina. How are y’all?

Hey, Ian, doing well. How are you? Doing well. Welcome to the show.

I’m great. Thank you so much for having me. I’m calling because I have lived in rural western North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains for about 20 years. And in that time, I’ve come across, you know, a lot of kind of colorful turns of phrase. But I had a co-worker the other day who was talking about a previous job and having sold a lot of a particular thing at that job. And she said, I must have sold a blue million of those, of that product. And it was something that I had just never heard before.

In the 20 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never heard the phrase blue million before. And I thought I knew exactly who could probably shed some light on that. So I wanted to give you guys a call.

Who?

The two of you, of course.

All right. So this is another one of our hyperbolic numerals, hyperbolic quantities to add to things like zillions and a bunch, you know, just where we talk about things and say, I’ve got a bunch of something. I’ve got a zillion of something. And we all know that a zillion is a lot and a bunch is more than a few, but it’s an indeterminate amount. Right.

So billion million means a lot, but maybe not exactly a million. Probably more than a million, I would think.

You think more than a million?

Yeah, to me it sounds like an intensifier.

Yeah, it is.

Blue is an intensifier.

Exactly right. It comes from probably expressions like blue blazes or true blue or talk a blue streak or shout blue murder. And all of these, blue is used to emphasize and to just kind of express more, you know, just to add on to.

So that there’s more terror in screaming blue murder, and there’s more talking and talking in blue streak, and there’s more loyalty into the be true blue, and there’s more hell and fires in the places, you know. It means extremely or completely in this case.

But yeah, at least 120 years old, we have blue million used this way. And there’s actually been papers written about, at least a couple of papers written about blue used as an intensifier in this way.

So do you have any idea why it’s the specific color blue and not, say, some other color?

Yeah, the theory that is proposed by the sociolinguists and folklorists who’ve worked on this is that all of these expressions together kind of overlapping created this kind of blues and intensifier. But a lot of it is centered around the idea of blue blazes, blue being the hot fires of hell. And so when you talk about blue blazes, you’re talking about this extremeness, right? You’re talking about very hot hell. We don’t just talk about a mild hell ever, right? We always talk about the place where you really pay for your sins, right?

Yeah.

And so the blue comes away without no color attached. The color is sapped out of it. But what’s left behind is this extremeness, the extremity of the heat, the extremity of the ferocity. And so that’s left behind. And so all of these other places have this too.

So being true blue, what is there blue about being loyal? Nobody really knows.

Or cursing a blue streak.

Yeah.

I mean, that’s a mouthful.

Right. So it’s not one thing that causes blue to behave this way, act like an emphasizinger. It’s all of these things together.

That is fascinating. So does blue million, as far as you know, is that regional to Appalachia or do you see it in other places?

It’s never been all that common, but I would call it dated, which is not common at all anymore and say that it was never very widespread and it wasn’t widespread enough to even put a geography on it. Oh yeah, I mean so little. Yeah, so little data can be gathered on it that we can’t really put a pin and say, oh, it’s from here, it’s from there. But I’m not surprised that it’s that some people still use it because, as you know, as a listener to this show, there are pockets of language hanging on around the English-speaking world, frankly in any language, where people just continue to use stuff unaware that the rest of the world has stopped using it.

And that’s the lovely thing about language. And Ian, you just helped popularize it some more.

I hope so.

I love it. And I, you know, honestly, I want to respect the people of this area and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes, but I do try and incorporate some of those things into my own speech that I just think are particularly colorful.

Well, in this case, literally colorful, right?

Literally, yeah.

Excellent. Well, thank you guys so much. I really appreciate your expertise. I’ve been listening for 14 years, actually, and I just absolutely love your show.

You’ve been listening for a blue million years.

That’s right.

That’s right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Take good care.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Ian.

Bye-bye.

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