Asafitidy Bag

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, you guys.

This is Brad calling from Grapevine, Texas.

Hi, Brad. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Brad.

Grapevine, Texas. Love that name. Fantastic.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, this is an etymological mystery that I have had for decades, and so I hope you guys can help me with this.

Oh, boy.

When I was a kid, back in the 60s, there were several network comedy shows that poked fun at backwoods folks, right? You remember?

And on one of them, one of the characters was afraid that her family was going to get an infectious disease, and she started putting together what she called an asificity bag.

Now, I was in elementary school, so that was a word that stuck in my brain.

I’ll bet.

And so the next time we went up to see my grandparents, I asked my grandmother, have you ever heard of this?

And she pronounced it asificity bag.

Mm—

She had the exact same reaction that the characters on the show did, that this was a stinky thing that people wore around their necks because they thought it warded off disease, but it probably didn’t do anything.

And I have never been able to figure out where that word, well, which one’s right, astificity, astificity, and where that word came from.

Was that the Beverly Hillbillies?

It sure was.

That was Granny Clampett.

Yeah.

Jen!

Martha has her deerstalker cap on over here.

She’s all ready with answers.

Well, she’s jumping up and down too, Brad.

I’m so excited that you asked this question, because my dad used to talk about this.

My dad was a hillbilly from the hills of North Carolina, born in a log cabin.

And they did wear these things.

And he called it the same thing that your grandmother called it, asaphidgety.

So it’s a bag around your neck.

And what does it do?

It has really, really, really stinky stuff in it.

It smells just awful.

What, like frog legs, rotten frog legs or something?

I think rotten feet is pretty much what it smells like.

But yeah, Brad, my dad was made to wear that as a little kid in a little tobacco bag around his neck.

And it’s this folk medicine tradition in the hills that if you wear this, you’re not going to get the flu.

Of course, I would think it would be because nobody would want to get near you because it’s really smelly.

It comes from a plant that’s called asafetida.

That’s the more official name.

Asafetida.

A-S-A-F-E-T-I-D-A.

Yeah.

Slightly different spelling in the UK.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I know this term.

It sounds like the root is feted.

It is.

Exactly. It is related to that.

It’s a sap. It’s a really smelly sap from this plant called azafeta.

So the idea appears to be, if I’m reading these citations from a variety of books correctly, and I’m looking here at just some great tales and stories.

There’s a Booth Tarkington story from 1914 and some tales collected from black folks in Missouri.

I guess the idea is it just scares the disease away, right?

I think so.

There’s a great quote here.

One fellow tells this folklore collector, he says, we didn’t catch colds. We didn’t catch nothing. Those asafidity bags scared off everything but the cold weather.

Back in the day, they thought that you could get disease by breathing bad air.

That’s the miasma theory of disease.

There you go.

Maybe the asafidity bag surrounded you with safe air or something.

Well, it kept others away from you, so you weren’t likely to catch their flu because they were a good hundred yards off.

Yeah, right.

Yeah, Brad, I’m so glad you brought that to everyone’s attention.

Yeah, thanks you guys.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for giving us a call. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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