Eavesdropping Comes from the Eavesdrip around a House

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Stephanie calling from San Diego.

Hi, Stephanie. Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

So I have a question. My pastor was speaking in church the other day,

and he was talking about this story in Genesis where Sarah and Abraham are at their house.

And God actually comes in the form of a man, and he tells Sarah that he’s going to have a child,

or he tells Abraham, but Sarah is listening inside. So the pastor said that he was

eavesdropping. And he realized that he said the wrong word. It was actually eavesdropping,

but he always thought it was eavesdropping. So I was just curious if it was eaves or eaves,

and if so, where it came from. So your pastor was saying E-A-S-E dropping instead of E-A-V-E-S

dropping, right? Exactly. And I thought maybe it came from people sitting on eaves listening down.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe there was more of a story to it. Oh, that’s funny. I could

what’s he easily making that mistake even in front of a crowd where you’re practicing speaking?

It’s kind of easy to listen in on people.

It’s a common mistake.

You’ll actually find eavesdropping in the egg corn database.

Which is a list of terms that people tend to mistake for legitimate terms.

You can find it. Just Google egg corn database and you’ll find it.

But eavesdrop itself is pretty interesting. There used to be a law or at least a rule or a custom to make sure that the space around your house was sufficiently wide so that when it rained, the drips wouldn’t drip down onto your neighbor’s property or neighbor’s house. And this zone around the building was called the eaves drip, D-R-I-P. It became over time eaves drop, D-R-O-P. And it also started to refer to the place that you could stand where you were sufficiently close enough to the house to hear anything that was happening inside through the windows or the doors, or maybe even by pressing your ear to the wood, I don’t know.

And so in that way, the eavesdrop zone around the house became eavesdrop as in to listen in that space.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s a little bit different than what I thought.

Yeah? What were you thinking?

Well, I was thinking people sitting on top of the eaves listening above.

Oh, yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

But they’re actually underneath where the water wasn’t dripping on them.

Yeah.

A little more sneaky that way.

It’s pretty hard to climb up on top of the tiled roof and not be heard.

Or seen, right?

Or seen, yeah.

But to sneak around.

I was imagining that scene in Aladdin, you know, where he’s on top.

There we go.

That’s a good scene, right?

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

So that’s Eavesdrop.

It’s pretty cool.

It goes back hundreds of years, too.

Oh, okay.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure, Stephanie.

Thanks for calling.

Have a good one.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, that was a timely call, wasn’t it?

Eavesdropping?

Why is that timely?

Because of the NSA?

Yeah.

They’re listening.

And you’re listening to A Way with Words,

And you can call us, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.