Blow the Soot Out

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Stacey from Dallas, Texas.

Hiya, Stacey.

What’s up? How can we help?

First of all, I love your program.

Thank you.

And I have called before, but this time I’m calling about a particular phrase that my father used to use, and I have not heard it anywhere else.

But what happened is that I grew up in a family with a number of children, or five of us, and so on Sundays, my dad would take all the kids in the station wagon out to the country, and he would drive as fast as he could down these country roads, saying that he was, quote, blowing the soot out.

So this would be about when?

Between 1950 and 60.

Was he a Navy man, perchance?

Not at all.

Not any kind of military experience at all?

Yeah, there was military, Army.

Army.

Was he, okay.

Do you know if he worked on a ship?

No.

Okay.

Was he a fireman, perhaps?

No.

Okay.

I’ve got some leading questions here because I’m just looking for data.

He was an engineer.

What kind of engineering?

Petroleum.

Perfect.

Petroleum.

That exactly explains it.

Let me tell you about this.

In particular kinds of engineering where you were burning carbon fuels, you will get a soot buildup, and you will spend a great deal of your time trying to figure out how to get that soot buildup out.

Now, first of all, what is soot and how would it build up?

Well, it happens in the flue.

If you have a gas stove, if you have a gas furnace, it’s this black residue that’s left inside because of the chemical reaction that happens when the fuel burns, right?

And so it accretes, and you’ve got to get it out of there or else you’ll have a flue fire.

In a bigger machine where you have a smokestack or a chimney, you have exactly the same problem, and it’s harder to get it out.

Now, when you’re at sea, there are a lot of remedies, and you can actually find this back as far as like quite a ways back, 1800s even, to blow the soot out.

They had a variety of techniques, but one of them on these bigger boats was to take a blank charge like you might put in a cannon and put it in there and fire it.

And it would blow up through the stack and just blow the soot out of it.

They were literally blowing the soot out.

Wow, that’s really vivid.

And there’s these funny stories.

I don’t even know if they’re true.

There’s these funny stories where in a kitchen galley, you also have a flue to, like, you know, release the fumes from the stove out.

They would fire a pistol up there to blow the soot out.

Really?

Yeah.

Whoa.

And so you’re literally blowing the soot out.

And now, of course, this term was widely used in the Navy and a number of kinds of engineering and all these different domains and arenas.

But I found a few uses of this term being used by people who were racing motorcycles or who were driving trucks for recreation.

And when they use it, they are talking about going fast, but they’re also talking about going fast to relieve the stress of life.

To kind of like, you’re blowing the suit out, meaning like pedal to the metal, driving full force, just to kind of, you know how, when you drive fast, your cares fall away from you.

That’s what they’re talking about.

Well, that’s what I was wondering.

Yeah.

You know, people just wanted to blow the suit out of his head or out of the car.

So I would not be surprised if he got it from his career as an engineer in patrolling, because it fits exactly.

Because he did work on oil rigs and things like that.

So, Stacey, I want to know what that effect was on you.

What effect that had on you when he blew the suit out?

Well, I mean, back then, you know, we didn’t have seatbelts.

I was going to say.

So you’re like bouncing around, find your head in the glove compartment.

So it’s good for him, not so good for you.

You know, and we miss a lot of those Burma shave signs.

Unless you were a speed reader.

So he’d say, we’re going to blow the suit out, and we’d all just hold on.

That’s great.

Hold or newt.

Well, thanks a lot.

It’s our pleasure, Stacey. Thanks for calling.

Okay. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s one follow-up to make to this.

There’s a related slang term that you’ll find in a variety of slang dictionaries that has to do with the Navy or different merchant marines and that sort of thing.

And it’s to shoot Charlie Noble.

To shoot Charlie Noble.

And supposedly what this has to do with was a particular captain, a British captain who liked to have the flue in his galley, which was copper polished to a perfect shine.

And so if you’re shooting Charlie Noble, you are shooting the soot out from inside of that flue.

Oh, wow.

Right?

And so there was a prank that they used to play to the newbies on the boat.

And they would say, oh, they’re going to shoot Charlie Noble down in the galley.

And so you’d say, you’ve got to stop them.

And so you’d send the newbie down to stop Charlie Noble from being shot.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.