A listener in Washington, D.C., says that his parents taught him that when guests were over for dinner and a family member had specks of food on his face, the polite way to surreptitiously nudge him into wiping it off was to say, “Look! There’s a gazelle on the lawn.” Is that unique to his family? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Code for “Food on Your Face””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello!
Hi, who’s this?
Well, hi!
Hi, this is John Burnap calling from our nation’s capital.
Well, welcome to the program.
John, what’s going on?
Yeah, what can we do for you?
All kinds of stuff. You know, I got a question.
You guys have such an awesome, fun show, and I’ve learned a lot, which is good because my mom said I was supposed to learn at least one new thing every day.
All right.
Have you guys ever heard of the term gazelle on the lawn?
Gazelle on the lawn.
Gazelle, like an animal with antlers that leaps about.
Is that like pants on the ground?
Pants on the ground, pants on the ground.
Gee, what have you ever heard in that term?
That’s part of a rugby song, I think.
No, so it’s nothing to do, it’s not like pink flamingos.
Maybe in the south they do flamingos, in the north they do gazelles?
I don’t know.
No, let me tell you how my family used it.
This is something that my family would use.
When we were eating dinner, typically a Sunday dinner at the house I grew up in or at the house I got older in, actually, I hope not to grow up, had a large glass window in the dining room.
And when guests were over, our parents taught us that instead of pointing out to someone in your family that they had left something on their face from the last bite, and they would say very politely and subtly, excuse me, Mom, gazelle on the lawn.
And then the guests at the table would look up and look outside, and it would draw their attention away from the fact that my mom could then pick up her napkin and wipe her face.
Huh. Very good. Yes.
Don’t tell me that’s a burn-app only thing.
Well, I’m delighted to be able to tell you that it is not a burn-app only thing.
Oh!
Yeah, yeah. It’s at least 100 years old.
Oh, no, actually, maybe I should wait to be excited and figure out where exactly it comes from.
This may not be good.
Well, you know, I can do a little bit of digging right here on the spot, and I’ve come up with a couple of things to tell you.
First of all, if you want some background on this term, I highly recommend Family Words book by Paul Dixon.
He has an entry for this.
It’s always the same story.
You’re at the dinner table.
Somebody has got some food on their face in an awkward place, and so just a polite way of nudging them and saying, you’ve got food on your face.
You say there’s a gazelle in the garden.
I assume this is when you’re having dinner with the minister and you’re putting on your best behavior.
I don’t know, something like that.
Actually, that’s exactly right, because our next-door neighbor was the minister.
Oh, there we go.
How did I know?
You’re really good.
Listen, how about a lottery ticket number for next week’s Powerball?
But, John, this would only work one time, and I could see saying, oh, is that the mailman or something?
But gazelle on the lawn, I mean, that’s so ridiculous.
Doesn’t it call attention to the crumbs in the beard anyway?
Wait, wait.
You say it would only work one time.
That assumes that we only had one guest that we would invite over?
Well, no.
I’m just saying how weird it is.
We had friends.
Whatever those other people have said about my family was not true.
We had friends who would come over to eat.
The late night digging in the yard meant nothing.
John, I can imagine saying, hey, look, a golden retriever.
But gazelle on the lawn?
Well, wait.
A lot of our euphemisms work this way.
We all know what they mean.
We all know, right?
We say the F word instead of actually saying the actual word.
And everyone knows what we mean, but we get away with it because we didn’t actually go all the way.
We went 99% of the way.
I don’t know.
We got a lot of pretty strange looks when we would say gazelle on the lawn.
That’s nice.
I bet you did.
That’s nice.
There’s a retriever in the tree.
There’s a retriever in the tree.
Let me share something with you.
And I don’t know that this is the origin of it, but I love this little anecdote that I found.
This is in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the November 1906 issue.
And there’s a story here from the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, which is basically now Yemen and part of Oman, I think.
Here’s the story.
It’s a short version of the story.
There are two men and their sons eating at a table.
And the father of one of the men gets some rice in his beard.
And the son says to him, Father, there’s a gazelle in the garden.
And his father says in response, we have sent after it the five expert shots.
And he takes his hand and he brushes the rice away from his beard.
So that was the response that he was basically calling his hand, his five fingers, the five expert shots to go get the gazelle to shoot it.
Oh, that’s nice.
Very interesting.
And so the other father sees this, and later he tells his son, well, why don’t you say that the next time this happens at our dinner table, then everyone will think that you are clever and that I have raised a clever son.
Unfortunately, the next time that it happens, the other little boy says, Father, you know that thing you said yesterday?
Oh, it’s in your beard.
The father says, no, no, no, your mother’s an ox.
Because, you know, the son didn’t get it right.
You know, he kind of ruined this whole, you know, they wanted to look incredibly clever and incredibly, you know, mannered and cultured and stuff.
What’s interesting about this story, to me, most interesting, is that in Arabic, the word for garden is often used as a simile for the beard.
And so it actually works very well in Arabic in a way that might not be obvious in English.
Oh, that’s really interesting.
You get a double layer there.
But then again, this is exactly the same thing that you use, only it’s a story translated from Arabic into English more than 100 years ago.
That’s very cool.
Yeah, isn’t it?
Now, I’m going to go share this with my family, and they’re going to think I’m really bright and clever.
Well, our pleasure.
That’s the idea.
You don’t have to tell them about us.
That’s fine.
No, I will.
I will.
I’ll tell them about you because I think plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and I’ll tell them that you guys were the smart ones that dug it all up.
Well, you know, whoever wrote this article for the journal 100-plus years ago, they get all the credit.
John, this has been fun.
Keep doing what you’re doing and keep edumacating us with those words.
Thank you for your call.
You have a great day.
You too, John.
Bye-bye.
That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.
