Hanging Around a Barbershop

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you doing? I’m Thomas from Bahamut, North Carolina, and I’ve got a question about a phrase my father used to tell me when I was a child.

Great. Let’s hear it, Thomas.

Well, when I was a kid, you know, starting school, he wanted to make sure I was hanging around with the right folks and whatnot, and he used to tell me if he thought I was around those sort of shady kids, even in middle school, just, you know, son, you know, if you’re going to hang around these kids, you can’t hang around the barbershop and not get your hair cut.

I guess he meant, you know, if you hung around there as a group of kids that long, eventually something bad happened, you’d get in that crowd. And I was wondering if it was something he kind of made up or if it’s something that’s more culturally wide. He said his dad told him, and I was just curious of the origin of it.

So he’s saying if you hang around the barbershop, you’re going to get a haircut.

Absolutely, yeah. If you’re going to mess with these kids long enough and they’re bad enough, you’re going to be bad, too, if you wait around too long.

I like it. And what did you take that to mean?

Well, I guess it just always told me to hang around the right kids, and if I didn’t, kind of try to keep it short, you know, so I wasn’t in the barbershop too long, I guess.

Yes, things are going to quickly seem normal, and it won’t seem weird, right, if you’re hanging around people who’ve got bad habits.

Yeah, exactly. It’s good advice.

It reminds me of an expression I heard a few years ago that’s been making the rounds, and I don’t know how old it is, but it’s something like, play stupid games, win stupid prizes. The whole idea that if you’re just playing for small stakes, you’re only ever going to win small stakes. Kind of like think big.

And then it also reminds me of the wrestling with pigs saying. You know that one?

Oh, no, I haven’t heard it.

There’s two variants, but the longer one is if you wrestle with pigs, you get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Yeah, it reminds me of if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Yeah, there we go.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one. I’ve heard that one.

But, you know, Thomas, I don’t know the expression that your dad used. I’ve never heard it before. I haven’t seen it in any of the folklore books that I have or any of the slang dictionaries or the idiom books or catchphrases or any of that sort of thing.

Well, my family sort of likes coming up with things like that and spreading around. I’m from sort of a rural place in North Carolina, so it’s kind of privy to that sort of thing. A lot of different things you hear.

What part of North Carolina?

Well, it’s really in the central part of North Carolina, sort of north of Durham, south of Roxborough.

Okay. Thomas, thank you so much for your call. Have a good day. Take care now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Some families do just have A Way with Words, don’t they?

They do. They have a knack. They’ve got this internal culture of saying clever things to each other.

Yeah. And the other thing that strikes me is that it’s a wonderful way to give parental advice to come up with something really colorful like that rather than wag your finger and say, don’t hang around with those people.

Right. Because he remembered it. Thomas remembered the words, and if he has kids, they’ll hear it too.

Yeah. If you hang around a barber shop, sooner or later you get a haircut. Tell us your family aphorisms on Twitter @wayword.