Butt-Headed

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jody Perez, and I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hey, Jody, welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

I am from a small town in Southwest Georgia, and when we were young, my sisters and I used to occasionally get to ride into town with my grandfather in his pickup truck.

And we were sort of three silly, boisterous little girls, and I don’t think he ever really knew exactly what to do with us.

And when we would go into the stores and stuff with him, we would see, you know, candy or shiny things or whatever, and we would be like, I want, I want, I want.

And my grandfather’s response to us generally would be, well, you might want candy, but you’re going to die butt-headed.

And then the real way that the saying went was, you might want horns, but you’re going to die butt-headed.

But he would substitute the horns for just about anything that we wanted to ask for.

That’s great.

That’s great.

You might want horns, but you’re going to die butt-headed.

Exactly.

What did you take that to mean?

I’ve never heard it from anybody else before, and I’ve asked friends and other people, and no one’s ever heard it either.

Nobody else, huh?

What did you take it to mean?

We might want it, but we’re probably not going to get it.

Right.

If wishes were horses, then everyone would ride, that sort of thing.

Exactly.

Yeah.

This is a great classic expression.

It’s still not that common, but we’ve got it recorded in some of the writing of some of the best American authors.

Zora Neale Hurston has it in her writing.

At least two of the pieces, a novel that she wrote and a short story, she uses this exact expression.

And what we figure out when you get to the bottom of it is that butt-headed here just doesn’t mean stubborn or dumb like we would use it today.

Right?

Right.

What it means is without horns.

It means newly.

That’s like an agricultural word for not having horns.

If you deep hole a cow or a goat, they are muley or buttheaded.

And he lived on a farm, and they had goats and cows and all kinds of stuff.

So I can definitely see where that came from.

There we go.

So the whole expression, you might want horns, meaning you want horns because you think they’re an accessory or they’re beautiful or very useful, but you’re not going to get them, and therefore you’re going to die buttheaded.

That means without horns.

Exactly.

But yeah, so it pops up here and there, never that common, but it is such a vivid and colorful expression.

To me, I would call this a Velcro expression, which when you hear it and understand it, you can’t help but use it.

That’s how I feel about it.

I feel that way about Velcro expression. I’ve never heard that.

Well, there you go. I’m Edja McCate in the world.

Jodi, that’s fantastic.

Well, thank you very much. He was an interesting old fellow.

So I like to understand where some of these things came from.

Yeah, I love the image of the three goofy girls and the old gentleman.

Yeah, it reminds me of Duck Dynasty.

Yeah.

Did you ever watch that with Uncle Si and the girls in the car?

Absolutely.

Oh, you do?

Absolutely.

Nice.

Well, may you not die buttheaded.

Thank you.

You too.

Thanks, Jodi.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Have a good day.

So the Zora Neale Hurston, I mentioned she used these.

A great African-American author.

She used it in her 1937 novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God,

And in her short story, Conscience of the Court in 1950.

You can actually find that latter one in full from the Saturday Evening Post online.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

We love those language stories that involve your family.

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