Chawed Rosin

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lola in Seattle.

Hey, Lola, welcome.

How are you doing?

I’m hoping that you can find the origins of a phrase that my mother used, and still uses as far as I know. She uses this phrase, the chad rosin, and I grew up hearing it. And I should use it like to talk about someone, a person, that was sort of the be-all and end-all, like, well, aren’t you the chod rosin? Or when I was a kid, I thought he was the chod rosin, she would say.

Okay. As a compliment? As a compliment, then, not sarcastically.

Well, yeah, she, yeah, I guess so. Yeah, it’s a positive thing, although she can, you know, use it sarcastically, too.

And where was she from?

Well, she grew up in Missouri, on the southern border of Missouri in the Ozarks. On the west to southwest corner, kind of?

Yeah, but she lived in a bunch of other places, too, so I’m not sure where she picked it up.

Okay, and do you know what rosin is?

Well, that’s the thing. When I was a kid, the words themselves might as well have been nonsense to me. But I asked her about it at some point, and I asked her, where did that come from? And she said, I think it must have to do with sap that’s sweet. And so it’s like a treat, you know.

Exactly.

When she was a kid, she remembers chewing sap from certain trees that was very sweet. But she wasn’t sure. That was just a theory she had.

That is exactly right. So let’s break this down. Chawed rosin, and we’ll talk about rosin in a second, but chawed just means chewed. It’s a dialect form of chewed. And then rosin is another name for the sap that comes out of sweet gum trees. If you peel off the bark, the sap will come out. It’ll harden a little bit. And you just break off that hardened sap. It’s still tacky. And you chew on it. And it’s a sweet treat. And in a time and a place when sugar was expensive or almost altogether unknown, that and chewing on sugar cane were about the best sugar that you could get if you were a kid. Or chewing on the stalks of corn, too. The white part, you know, where it’s super sweet. But in any case, that was considered a special treat for children to chew on that. And maybe it wasn’t approved by the parents.

Sometimes people talk about chad rasen as a derogatory term, and it means that you were low class because you thought chad rasen was the end-all-be-all of the world.

-huh.

Yeah.

Rasen chow—

Yeah, rasen chow—and sometimes used in a derogatory way. The reason I said we’ll talk about rasen in a second is some folks say rasem or rasem or razing. And you’ll find all of these pronunciations throughout the American South and Midlands and that sort of thing. It’s not altogether that common as an expression outside of the American South. And I do count Southwest Missouri as the American South. It definitely has some of the linguistic traditions of Oklahoma, Arkansas, and Texas.

See, I’ve never heard anyone use it but my mother.

But it is an expression that’s used by other people.

Oh, definitely.

Yeah, definitely. Chawed rosin, probably at least 100, maybe 150 years of recorded use of that expression. And as a phrase, chawed rosin as a phrase.

Mm—

Yeah.

And one bit of folklore that I saw said that my informants were the chawed rosin, a dialect term which means better than the best.

All that and a bag of chips.

Yeah, something like that. You know what, as a kid and I asked her, what does that mean? I was just little. She said, oh, it’s like the bee’s knees or the cat’s pajamas. It’s entirely unhelpful.

Yeah, chad rosin.

But it’s exactly the same sort of thing. It’s this abstracted expression which is kind of removed from its origins. And so it’s a little opaque to understand if you weren’t somebody who ever chewed the rosin from a tree.

Right.

So there you go. That’s it, Lola.

Excellent.

Thank you.

I bet coming from southwest Missouri, she’s got a ton of those. I’ve got family from all around that part of Missouri. And, you know, some of them have lived there for 150, 200 years, and they’ve got tons of this Ozark or hillbilly speech.

Yeah, my Ozark relatives are the cleverest conversationalists, for sure.

Yeah.

Cool. We’ll call us with some more sometime.

All right.

Thanks, Lola. Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Bye.

You know, we do love it, these special encounters that happen between generations where Grandma or Mother says something, and the children or the grandchildren just don’t get it. We’re here to sort it out, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it in an email, words@waywordradio.org.