Colder Than Blitney

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nick from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Welcome to the show. How can we help?

So my grandma used to say this phrase all the time, and my parents and I have no idea where it comes from. But when it got cold in wintertime and started turning into fall, she’d say it’s colder than Whitney outside. And I’ve Googled it over and over, and we have no idea what it means unless it’s like a mix between the word blizzard and wintry. But I’ve never heard anyone else say it my entire life, and I’ve always just wondered, where does this come from?

Blitney, like B-L-I-T-N-E-Y, Blitney?

Yes, just like that.

Okay, so where or what is Blitney, and why is it so cold?

Yes, exactly.

Nick, tell us a little bit about your grandmother.

She grew up in, like, Appalachia, Kentucky area. Grew up in the coal mines. And other than that, I don’t really know much about her.

It’s probably a variant of colder than blixen, B-L-I-X-E-N, or cold as blixen, which is analogous to saying cold as the Dickens or cold as hell. And we find this term in Illinois, in Indiana, West Virginia, Kentucky. Cold as blixen probably comes from the German word for lightning. Blitz meaning lightning.

But where Grant and I are going with this is that there are lots of variants about this. Colder than blixen, colder than blixes, colder than blixian or blixem. But there’s also colder than blixes. And I’m betting that that’s so close to colder than Blitney.

Well, the first time I said it was to my wife, actually, and she was just like, what does it even mean? I was like, I have no idea. It’s just cold up.

Tell her it’s at least 100 years old. Actually, you can find cold as Blitney in a 1921 novel, so at least 100 years old. And the other forms, the Blixen forms, well, they go back to at least the 1870s, so it’s got a long history. It’s not like you made it up last week.

There you go. So you’re going to have a great winter, right?

Yes. I’m going to say it every other day at least.

Yeah, exactly. Every time you talk to someone, it’s cold and Blixie’s out there, isn’t it? And they’re like, oh, here comes that Blixie’s guy again.

Or Blitney. I love your version. That’s a new one on me. But I’m pretty sure that’s what it is.

Yeah, I think I might stick with Blitney. It just sounds, I don’t know, it rolls off the top.

It does. Well, we may, you know, this show is heard all over the place, and we may hear other people who say, well, you know, he’s not the only one who heard Blitney. So we might just find that this is a variant that just happens to be unrecorded.

That’s right. It’s happened before.

That would be awesome. Free Blitney.

Well, Nick, thank you so much for calling.

Awesome. Thank you, guys. Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Well, if you feel like you’ve got a scrap of language that you need to know more about, this little bit of parchment that’s got some words on it, and you want to connect it to the larger body of language in the world, this is the place to go.

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