Another Country Heard From

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Christina from San Diego.

Thanks for taking my call.

We’re happy to. What’s up?

Well, I’m calling you about a phrase that I’ve heard from my in-laws in Pennsylvania, and the phrase is, another country heard from.

Usually we bring our babies to visit, and a lot of times we’ll have a baby sleeping in another room, either napping or asleep for the night.

And if they peep up, if we hear them crying or just a little baby noise, my in-laws will say, oh, another country heard from.

Oh, goodness.

So I thought it was an interesting, really interesting expression.

And I started asking around other people if they’ve heard it.

And one of my friends said her mother-in-law uses it.

Interesting.

And then my mother said that her mother would use the expression if there was a discussion and she felt it had come to an end.

And then somebody would pipe up, and she wasn’t really interested in their opinion.

And she would say, another country heard from, kind of with exasperation.

Oh, and where was she from?

She was from the Boston area.

Okay, so Pennsylvania, Boston.

And so it’s always another country heard from.

Yes.

Okay, so California, Boston, and Pennsylvania.

So far.

So far.

And it’s always another country heard from, right?

Yes.

I ask this because the older form of this is another county heard from.

Without the R, C-O-N-T-Y instead of C-O-N-T-R-Y.

And you might be surprised by this.

I say this all the time on the show, don’t I?

I find something really old.

I have found this phrase back as far as 1868.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, and it’s widespread.

It’s got a great history.

Here’s the thing.

Imagine a world pre-telephone.

For that matter, basically the Morse code was a new thing and the telegraph was pretty rare.

And if it existed at all, it was just a few miles.

It wasn’t like a cross country or even an intercontinental thing.

So when you do national elections or even state elections, it takes a while for the ballots to come in, right?

Either they’re bringing the count in or they’re bringing the actual ballots in from all these precincts from far away to do the counting.

And so you don’t it’s not like you just wait a couple hours on election night to find out who wins.

You may wait a week or two. And so over the course of the days of counting these ballots, the newspapers would report another county heard from Wayne County went for, you know, Hayes.

And here’s the tally now. And so they would literally I mean, I have a I have a clip from an Iowa newspaper in 1868.

Great. That’s the headline on this election tally. It says another county heard from the election returns of Sioux County became manifest at the Capitol yesterday.

The presidential vote stands Grant 6 Seymour 5. And it goes on to talk more about the election.

And so this was just a standard journalistic kind of method of just updating people in a really precise, concise way.

So people picked it up.

Yeah, and then really quickly, by the 1870s, it comes to be used a little humorously and a little ironically.

You’ll see it show up in advertisements where some magazine would say, so-and-so in Tallahassee renewed his subscription to our fine journal another county heard from.

And then it starts showing up in stories and tales and fiction.

And by the time radio came along, you started hearing it in radio scripts and television and movies.

And it’s kind of rare today, which is what’s really exciting, Christina, because most people don’t use it anymore.

Yeah, that’s another thing.

I hear about people’s parents and grandparents using it, and I was surprised that my own grandmother used it, but it kind of hasn’t come down to my generation.

Although one time when my baby woke up from a nap, I said it, and I was really surprised that I had picked it up.

It was just a reflex, huh?

Yeah, we all do that.

We all end up speaking like our parents, don’t we?

Oh, that’s a great expression.

So, Christina, you’re going to keep using it and spreading it around?

I’m going to do my best.

Okay, yeah.

Raise that kid to say it.

Thank you so much, Christina.

Thanks.

Okay, take care. Bye-bye.

What are the things that you tell your children that your parents told you?

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