Dan from San Diego asks about sass in don’t sass me, a line he heard on Two and a Half Men. Sass is a dialect pronunciation of sauce, which developed a figurative sense of sting, bite, or zest added to speech, much as a sauce adds flavor to food. Over time, sassy and saucy parted company a bit: saucy can carry stronger sexual overtones, while sassy more often suggests cheeky insolence or talking back. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Sass” Is a Dialect Pronunciation of “Sauce””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Dan from San Diego.
Hi, Dan.
Hello, Dan. What’s going on?
Not too much.
My wife and I were watching Two and a Half Men on TV, and John Cryer’s character says to his son, don’t sass me when the kid was talking back to him. My wife and I kind of thought of each other that that’s such a strange statement, and what does sass really mean? And we tried to look that up, and we found it in the Oxford English Dictionary as impudence. And it suggested that the origins were from sauce. But we looked at each other after we were like, who would ever sauce somebody?
Sure.
There’s a mental picture for you.
Exactly.
Yeah.
This is a great example of the subtle ways in which language changes. The verb probably springs from the use of sauce, the noun, which refers metaphorically to something that adds sting or bite to what you do or say, the same way that a sauce might add flavor or zest to your food, right?
Right.
There’s a noun sauce and a verb sauce kind of like working hand in hand there, basically taking the same role but a different part of speech there. And so it’s a direct reference to the food. It’s a direct reference to, I think, making something spicy. So if I’m sassing you, I’m kind of putting vigor and energy and zest into our conversations by kind of raising the bar a little bit, kind of like provoking you, right, with my impudence and my insolence and my petulance. Sort of adding a little Tabasco to the topic.
Yeah, yeah.
So it’s really a direct reference to the food, and sauce becomes sass simply by a normal vowel change. It’s kind of just a dialect pronunciation. Sass is a dialect pronunciation of sauce. That’s it.
And so somebody who’s sassy, then, is somebody who’s saucy.
Yes, except with sassy and saucy, we’ve kind of had the two words diverge. Their meanings have forked over the centuries, so that saucy tends to also have these undertones of flagrant sexuality, where sassy doesn’t.
Oh.
Did you guys get that far in the OED?
No, we didn’t get that far at all.
You went back to two and a half men. I was going to say, when you hit the flagrant sexuality part, usually you have to move to another room of the house.
Yeah.
I’m not sure I’m going to use this with my kid in the future.
How’s that?
Did it work for you, Dan?
It did very well. Thank you very much.
Thanks for calling, Dan.
Okay, bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Anyway, if you have a saucy question for us, give us a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673, or you can email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.
