Fess Up

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant, this is Paul Ahi in Atlanta, Georgia.

Well, hello, Paul. How are you doing?

Hiya, Paul. What’s going on?

Well, I have a quick question, actually.

I have a friend who’s, I figure she’s from North Carolina, so that probably plays a part of it.

And she sent me an email recently where she said that she had to fess up.

And that’s really the question.

I think everyone knows that it means that you’re going to, you have to admit something.

But what is fessing and why up?

Can I fess to the left or can I fess down or anything like that?

Well, you know we have a question for you, Paul.

Oh, what’s that?

Tell us your darkest secrets.

My darkest secrets.

What was she fessing up to?

Oh, we were going to go on a trip, and at the last moment she had some other plans, and so she just had to admit that she was going to do one of these other plans.

Oh, wow. And then you got into a discussion about grammar and vocabulary and linguistics?

Actually, that was last night at a dinner when we were all talking about it, and one of my friends came up that the fess up part, at least the fess, might be to confess.

But as far as up, why? She also says gussied up, so I don’t know if that’s similar.

But I figure that it has to be a Southern thing.

It’s a chopped off form of confess.

Makes sense.

Yeah, and there’s a linguistic term for that, isn’t there, Grant?

A pharicist.

And this is when a syllable is dropped from the beginning of a word.

The key is your friend is right.

It’s confess with a con, the C-O-N, drops from the beginning.

So yes, fess was the shortened version of confess, and for a while you just saw fess by itself.

Somebody might say, I’m going to fess to mother or fess clean about what you just did.

But over time, it acquired that extra up.

And I think that part of the reason might be that there was also another expression like that around for a long time, and that was own up.

So own up may have influenced fess up.

And this is an Americanism.

This is not something that’s widely known outside of North America at all.

I don’t know that it’s specific to the American South, but it’s certainly something that we are most known to use.

A lot of times when you see verbs like this that have up or on or down at the end of them, there is no rhyme or reason that it’s up or on or down, like carry on.

Why don’t we say, you know, if you carry down something, you don’t carry it on, right, or carry it up.

It’s always carry.

If you carry on, we’re carrying on here on the radio.

You couldn’t really, right?

Right.

Right.

I mean, you chop down a tree and then you chop it up.

I mean, it’s wacky.

You know, it’s just crazy, Paul.

Well, great.

I’ll have a fun passing that on to my dinner group because that was kind of the consensus was that it came from Fess.

What’s your big secret that you want to fess up to us?

Just tell the two of us.

We won’t tell anybody else.

Right, we won’t.

Well, I’ll tell you what.

Since I’ve been listening to your show, I know that you also pass on people’s favorite slang term.

Oh, please.

And I had to think about this one for a while, and mine would be MIGO, which was from back in college when we’d all sit around and, you know how it is in college, you’re sitting around and you’re discussing very huge topics and politics and stuff like that, that for some reason you do that in college and you don’t do that a lot later in life.

But we used to say after one person would be talking just too long and you’re tired, we’d say MIGO, and that stands for My Eyes Glaze Over.

Yes, of course.

Great acronym.

Yeah.

I like that one.

I thought for a second you were going to say something that was associated with the IGO in volleyball, which is a really quick way of saying, I get it.

It’s my turn, right?

Oh, I didn’t know that.

IGO.

Yeah, it’s a really quick way of saying that I’m the one getting the ball.

Well, I hope that we didn’t cause YIGO, or your eyes, to glaze over here.

Not in the least.

Doesn’t work as well, does it?

No, it doesn’t.

Oh, well.

Well, thanks for answering my question.

That’s fantastic, Paul.

Thank you for the question.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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