Why is an exciting event called a barnburner? A real barn on fire can be a spectacular sight, with so many combustible materials inside. Metaphorically, then, a barnburner is a “humdinger” or a “doozy.” There’s also a political sense of barnburner, referring to certain politicians and activists. A radical wing of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 1840s was known as the Barnburners, a spinoff of a faction called the Locofocos, a reference to a wooden match with a name that likely derives from loco suggesting “speed” and the Italian word for “fire,” fuoco. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Why Exciting Events Are Barnburners”
Hey there, you have A Way with Words. Hey, how are you? My name is Jeff McDonald. I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina.
What’s on your mind today, Jeff? Well, I grew up in the South and I always heard the term barn burner to describe an exciting athletic event. And I mentioned that to my wife a couple of weeks back and she looked at me quizzically and was obviously I knew that I’d said something that she hadn’t heard before.
And so we were curious as to what the origin of that might be. A barn burner about a particular kind of athletic event?
Well, not really. I mean, you know, I guess a lot of basketball, played basketball in high school. And so, you know, you hear a lot of around sporting events mostly where, oh, it was a barn burner.
And so I just kind of wondered where that originated. Meaning it was very exciting.
Exciting. Yes, I’m sorry. Yeah, like if it was a close game, very exciting. You know, people refer to it as a barn burner.
Yeah, a couple different ways to go with this, but let’s just talk for a second about why burning a barn is exciting. The short answer is really simple.
They’re usually made of wood and filled with things that burn. So they burn very easily and very quickly.
And if you have arsonists, arsonists may go choose a barn over something else just because they’re known to burn well.
And if you’ve got tractors or other gas-powered equipment in there, you might get some gas and oil fires too.
A barn burner, meaning a humdinger or a doozy, is just something that goes off very well like a barn on fire.
But there is another barn burner. Have you ever heard the political barn burner?
No, I haven’t.
So there’s this kind of joke or aphorism or saying about a farmer who is so upset with the rat infestation that he has that in order to get rid of the rodents, he just sets the whole barn on fire.
And it’s been used as a metaphor to talk about, particularly in politics, about people who just go to extremes.
They’re radicals. And as a matter of fact, there was a radical wing of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 40s that was known as the Barn Burners.
And they had another layer to their name there. They were a spinoff group from the Loco Focos, L-O-C-O, F-O-C-O.
And that was a kind of friction match. You know, those little redheaded matches, those sticks of wood that you can scrape along the side of the box.
And so Barn Burner was a playoff, that little faction’s name, Loco Foco.
And the Foco, by the way, comes from the Italian word for fire, Foco.
And Loco probably comes from the word locomotive, indicating speed or mobility.
But in any case, yeah, your barn burner, the happy, fun barn burner, is just about something burning quickly and easily.
Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.
All right. You take care now.
Will do. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.
Thanks for calling, Jeff.
Thank you.
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