Are You a Bromide or a Sulphite?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sharon.

I’m in Tallahassee, Florida.

Tallahassee, Florida.

Welcome to the show.

The other day, we were working on writing or putting something on our website at work, and I hollered across the room to one of my coworkers and said, can you write a blurb for this? And suddenly I thought, where in the world did that word come from? We did a quick look, and then I went to your website, actually, to see if anybody had ever asked that question and didn’t find it on there. So we thought we’d email you and find out where blurb came from.

Yeah, the story of the word blurb is really cool, Sharon. It was coined by a guy named Gillette Burgess, and he was an artist and an author and a very funny guy. And in 1895, he wrote a poem that I bet you’ll recognize because schoolchildren for a long time now have had to memorize this one. He’s the guy who wrote, I never saw a purple cow. I never hoped to see one, but I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one. That’s the guy who wrote that.

That is crazy.

Yeah.

A few years later, he published another book, and to call attention to it at a bookseller’s convention, he had this book plate printed up that was shamelessly over-the-top promotional. I mean, the prose is really something. It reads in part, we expect to sell 350 copies of this great grand book. It has gush and go to it. It has that certain something that makes you want to crawl through 30 miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody on the neck. And he just goes on and on like that. And at the top of this page, he had a picture of a woman who was cupping her hand to her mouth and she’s yelling. And in big letters above it, it says, yes, this is a blurb. All the other publishers commit them. Why shouldn’t we? And then the picture of this woman shouting was captioned, Miss Belinda Blurb, in the act of blurbing. And so, you know, I mean, it’s a great example of advertising. It was ridiculous, but it was memorable. And the word blurb caught on as a result of that.

When we use the word blurb, we use it as a short, concise description to lead people into the bigger story.

Yeah.

So that sounds a little different.

Well, it’s in the family of it. He used blurb to mean something to entice you to go into the book. And you’re using blurb to mean something to describe the larger text that might lead you to read the larger text. So they’re related, I think.

Okay.

Well, that’s very interesting. I appreciate you.

This book, too, is called Are You a Bromide? And bromide is less common than blurb, but it was another coinage of his. And a bromide came to mean, from this book, a platitude or a cliche or something that people say all the time unthinkingly. Because the whole book is about bromides versus sulfites. And bromides are people who just say the ordinary repetitious thing. And sulfites are people who resist saying the ordinary repetitious thing. And sulfite didn’t catch on to refer to people like that, but bromide did. But bromide, instead of referring to the person, usually came to refer to the thing being said. And so he lists a bunch of them. And there are things like, you know, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, stuff like that.

Huh. Wow.

But that’s Gillette Burgess. By the way, you can find a lot of his books at the Internet Archive if you ever want to dig through them and see what this goofy man was up to.

Sounds interesting. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks so much for calling. It. Take care now. All right. Bye. Bye-bye.

Well, there are those everyday words that you pass around the office and you catch yourself short for a second. You’re like, wait a second. That’s a weird one. Where did that one come from? Why do we say that? Martha and Grant might know.

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