Learning that Fat Meat is Greasy

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Colleen Player. I’m calling from Dallas.

And I had a quick question about the origin of a phrase I heard when I was interning at the juvenile detention center here.

Oh, great. Okay.

One of the cafeteria workers would say when kids would inevitably get in trouble for doing something that she had told them not to do, such as running in the hallways or not throwing their food away when they were done, she would say, one day these kids are going to learn that fat meets greasy.

And I was just wondering where that originated.

That fat meets greasy.

And they’re going to learn what’s what.

Is that what it means?

One day they’re going to learn and not get in trouble because she just got through telling them something that they continued doing.

And she said, one day they’re going to learn fat meets greasy.

Was she an African-American speaker?

Yes.

This phrase is heavily associated with African-American vernacular English. As a matter of fact, the African-American linguist Geneva Smitherman has an entry for this in one of her books. The book is called Word from the Mother, Language in African-Americans.

And so she just studies this stuff and has lots of entries on this.

And it turns out it’s one of those phrases that has never leaped over from African-American English into mainstream American English.

So it kind of belongs.

And what’s really cool about this, you can find this again and again in the historical record. Novelists use it and newspaper writers use it and people just kind of throw it into their posts online.

And every single time that I can find, because we’ve talked about this once before on the show, every single time I can find it, it’s always an African-American user.

And the reason I’m delighted by this is because it just shows that there’s still a nice cohesiveness to this dialect of American English.

So fat meets greasy.

Yeah.

So there’s two ways to interpret this. It’s not just meat that is fat, but there’s a particular part of the pig that’s called fat meat. And it’s actually usually given as one word.

And so it’s cut. It’s like almost all fat and almost no meat on it. You fry it up. It smells good. You eat it maybe with some beans or some bread or that sort of thing.

And it’s super scrumptious.

But in general, it’s supposed to be considered obvious that fat meat, the tasty stuff, is going to get your hands and your face greasy, right?

Exactly.

So that’s the idea, right, that one day the kids are going to learn what is obvious to everybody else.

Obvious to everybody on the whole planet.

Of course. Fat meat’s greasy.

So, Colleen, what do you make of all that?

I think it’s great.

It sounds like something one of my grandparents would have said, but I wasn’t sure where it started, so that’s good to know.

Yeah, it goes back to about the 1940s, maybe earlier.

Well, Colleen, you must be picking up some great language there.

We’d love for you to call again if you hear more.

Oh, great.

I definitely will.

Well, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you, Martha and Grant.

You all have a great day.

You too.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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