Jonathan, who lives in Dallas, Texas, is originally from Prince Edward Island, Canada, where he often heard the phrase fill your boots, an injunction that means “help yourself.” Variants include dig in and fill your boots, eat up and fill your boots, and muck in and fill your boots. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Fill Your Boots”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, is this Grant?
Yeah, this is Grant. Who am I talking with?
Hi, this is Jonathan Brownlee calling from Dallas, Texas. How are you?
Hey, Jonathan. Welcome to the show. What’s up?
Thank you so much. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas, but I’m originally from Canada.
And I spent a lot of time on the East Coast on an island called Prince Edward Island, which is very maritime-y, if that’s actually a word.
Sure.
And there’s just some wonderful colloquialisms that come out of that area, and one of them is a term called fill your boots.
And so when they say it, they sort of talk and they’re like, hey, boy, how you doing there? Hey, if you could give me like a little bit of that, you know, just fill your boots with whatever you like.
So it’s very much of an Irish, you know, almost mid-Atlantic accent when they say it.
And so I was always curious what fill your boots might mean.
So this is just when greeting people, are we talking about a dining situation or something else? Is this just a kind of a bit of politeness you throw about?
Yeah, sometimes I think it means, hey, do whatever you like, or it’s used in several different ways.
Sometimes it is almost like a thank you. Other times it’s kind of a help yourself or, you know, get as much as you can kind of thing.
But I was curious where that might have come from.
Yeah, it’s been around for at least a couple hundred years.
And fill your boots is this expression that sort of means to, at least in my sense of it, to embrace something with gusto, just to go for it.
And Grant was mentioning a mealtime situation. I think of it as just like drinking till all of you is filled up, including your boots.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
That’s the metaphor and the image that I’ve seen in the older text where this is people elaborate on the expression.
Although often it’s just mentioned as if everyone’s supposed to know what it means.
Right.
And it’s that kind of phrase that sort of lends itself to lots of fanciful explanations, too.
I’ve seen lots and lots of attempts to explain it. But I think the idea is just saturating yourself.
I just want to head off all the people who want to tell us the Lord Nelson story that the Lord Nelson story is not true.
But there are variants of this, too, like get your ears back, right, which kind of suggests – did you know this one, Jonathan, get your ears back?
Didn’t you do that on the show at one point?
We may have.
So it’s about the animal at the chough, right?
Oh.
The dog at feeding time with the ears back to kind of be more streamlined to go for the food.
Oh, yeah.
Different from getting your ears lowered, which is getting a haircut.
Yeah, different from getting your ears lowered.
But there’s longer forms like dig in and fill your boots or eat up and fill your boots or muck in and fill your boots.
It is, by the way, usually marked in the dictionaries, which between the three of us and anyone else who’s listening, I think have done a pretty poor job on this term.
I think, for example, the Oxford English Dictionary marks it as British. Some other dictionaries mark it as specifically Western Canadian.
Here you are talking about it as Eastern Canadian. Yet I know that I’ve seen plenty of evidence that it’s used in the American South.
So there’s clearly a lot more work to be done on this term.
So it’s all over the place.
Jonathan, thank you so much for your call. I hope we helped a little bit.
We rounded that out for you, right?
Yeah.
Well, you certainly filled my boots.
All right. Take care. Good luck. Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
