Cajun Slang “Unclimb this Derrick”

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Guy Hemingway.

I’m calling from Dubuque, Iowa, that’s located along the Mississippi River, right where Iowa, Wisconsin, and Illinois come together.

I’ve been there, been there, been through there anyway.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I’ve just been talking to my wife about some Cajun folks that I have met.

Now, during the 1970s, I worked in the petroleum industry in western Colorado and in the oil patch, and I had occasion to meet roughnecks from oil states around the country.

I think my most memorable experiences were meeting people that self-identified as Cajuns.

And at the time, and even now, I really wasn’t sure what exactly that meant, although I knew that they came from the South, or the Gulf, as they would say.

And they spoke, I mean, they had a very unusual accent, and not only an accent, but their word structure and their use of non-English terms was really, I mean, something I had never experienced in the United States anyway.

And so my question was, it would be kind of interesting to know what the, you know, the origin or the evolution of the Cajun dialect was.

That’s a great question.

Did you have any examples from the Roughnecks, anything they said that really popped out at you?

Oh, yeah.

I mean, first off, again, they used words that were non-English, and then they also kind of put word order was different, and some of their phrases were just totally foreign to me.

But, I mean, as an example, I said, you know, how many beers are left in the cooler?

And they would say, oh, there are four or three beers left.

So instead of three or four, they would say four or three.

Four or three consistently.

Yes, and that was very foreign to me.

Or, you know, when they’d say, instead of, what were you doing last night, they’d say, what you was doing last night.

Oh, right.

But one of my favorites was, and this was a phrase, and I guess you just had to try to interpret the meaning, but I was having relationship issues with a girlfriend at the time, and I said, I’m about ready to call this entire thing off.

And one of them said to me, oh, my God, he said, don’t drop the potato.

And I think that something was like to hang on to what you have or something.

I guess that’s what I took from that.

That’s pretty good advice sometimes.

Don’t drop the potato.

But my favorite, if you have just a second, was, and I will use the less colorful version of the language in this, but we were working on the oil rigs, and we had a gentleman from Louisiana in the derrick, and he kept missing the pipe, which was a no-no, and our griller was getting very angry with him.

And finally he looked up at him and he said, you Cajun son of a gun, he said, if you miss one more of those pipe lengths, I’m going to fire you.

And the guy took a minute and looked down at him and he said, looked down at the drill and he said, a Cajun I is, but a son of a gun I ain’t.

And I’m going to unclimb this, Derek, and give you your satisfaction.

And that sentence stuck with me forever.

So I’ve always been fascinated with the culture and the language.

That is a beauty.

That is a beauty of a sentence.

He will unclimb this derrick and give you your satisfy.

Yeah, and needless to say, he unclimbed the derrick or climbed down, and there was a little bit of a scuffle.

So that was hilarious, actually.

It’s funny. I love how these have stuck with you all these years.

That is the effect that hearing remarkable language has on everyone.

I’m not an expert on Cajun history, but the short version is they have retained, as you’ve suggested, some of the syntax of French, which they came by from French-speaking Canada, a part of it called Acadia, corrupted to Cajun.

They came to New Orleans because it was still a French-speaking place, spread throughout the bayou and all of the Delta territory, retained a lot of the old words, made some new words.

They were isolated in some places, so some of the language stuck and some of it just kind of developed on its own.

Any isolated community will always have this happen.

Well, they’ll retain words where the larger language loses them, and they’ll make some new words and structures of their own.

But you will hear French cadences there, and you’ll hear French syntax.

And the other thing is there’s a great deal of cultural pride, and cultural pride has a lot to do with a place retaining some of the old words, old forms, and old meanings.

My colleagues who study Cajun culture and English report that most of the variants and dialects are disappearing, unfortunately.

But there’s still a strong identity.

And if the folks down there have their way, it will never leave.

It will never disappear.

That’s interesting.

You know what I’m going to do?

I’m going to do a little digging and find like the one or two essential works, books that you can read about this language.

Maybe you’ll find some mainstream stuff.

And that would be the great place to go.

I don’t have one on the top of my head.

No, I don’t either.

But there’s a lot of this.

And it’s really interesting to get into why they hung on to some of those old forms, whereas even French-speaking Canada doesn’t have them anymore.

Yeah, and I guess part of that would be the geographic isolationism that they kind of experienced down in the southern bayou areas.

Sure, and pride, I think.

I mean, think of James Colville.

Yeah.

Yes, that’s right.

Guy, thank you so much for your call.

Really appreciate it.

You bet.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye now.

Bye, Guy.

Bye.

Well, if you know something about Cajun culture and you’d love to share some of the language and some of the things that really delight you about it, we are all ears.

877-929-9673.

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