Fringe vs. Bangs

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Pat from Eureka in the far north of California.

Oh yes, of course, we know where that is.

Hi Pat.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s going on?

I didn’t grow up in the U.S., I grew up in the U.K., but I’ve lived here for 20 years, and I think I’m fairly well assimilated language-wise.

There’s one American term that I’ve never been able to wrap my tongue around.

The term that I can’t deal with is bangs for a fringe of hair.

So you would call it a fringe of hair?

I would call it a fringe.

So what’s the difficulty with bangs?

I can’t see the relationship between the words and what they’re representing.

Makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, I can see why that word sounds strange.

Because, you know, you have the song, the Surrey with a fringe on top.

Sure.

Just like a fringe of hair.

Right, right. Okay. Yeah, well, bang has an interesting history. You know, at first it meant to strike violently back in the day, and then it referred to any kind of sudden or violent movement.

And bang took on this other meaning of abruptly or suddenly or completely. I went bang up to somebody and talked to him or sort of like smack dab in colloquial English.

But if you cut your hair bang off in front, you cut it straight across.

So it’s a bang cut.

And there’s a word in the horse world for a bang-tailed pony.

That is, their hair is literally cut straight across.

But in American English, we took it and kind of modified it a little bit, right?

So no longer is it just the straight cut.

It’s any hair that hangs in the front.

Exactly.

So it’s related to that idea of a bang-tailed horse, too.

That was a way to count them, too.

And you had a whole big roundup.

You could keep track of which horse was which by starting to cut the ends of the tails off.

And if you look in the old, I don’t know, magazines and stuff that you can find online, you will find places where people compare a woman’s hair cut this way unfavorably to the rear of a horse.

That’s not very complimentary.

Well, there was a time when you simply didn’t wear bangs.

It was decades when bangs were completely out of fashion.

So once they started to come back into fashion, there was much humor about that, much jocular kind of riposte and that sort of thing, just the teasing, gentle stuff sometimes, but sometimes not.

Being compared to a horse’s ass isn’t good at any point.

Yeah, no, I think I’d pass on that one.

Pat, have you been here since the 80s?

Did you see bangs in the 80s, like in the Midwest and Texas and places like that?

No, I came in the early 90s.

Okay, so they were astonishing in their anti-grav cap capabilities.

They stuck out forward, and I’ve got my hand up here, like a garden rake.

And they were hard and crusty from the hairspray.

And this was bangs in the 80s and 90s, at least where I lived in the Midwest.

Well, we call them a bouff.

A bouff.

Just a bouff.

Not a full bouffant, just like the front part, right?

And the whole rest of the head could be lank and kind of greasy, but the bangs were perfect.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

But they look like they would hurt you.

Yes, exactly.

Right, right.

It’s like the prow on a ship or the cow catcher on the front of a locomotive, you know?

So did that time in with like head banging on the dance floor or anything?

Oh, completely different groups.

Completely different groups of people.

They never hung out.

Anyway.

Oh, Pat.

Pat, so did we do a bang up job?

Did we solve this for you?

I think so.

All right, good.

You don’t sound completely convinced, Pat.

But she’s confused now.

That’s our job.

She’s thinking about the rear end of a horse.

You got it right from the horse’s mouth.

There we go.

The right end, the correct end.

Better than the other end of the horse.

That’s right.

Pat, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

And that’s the least of the confusions between the two Englishes, right?

The least, yes.

If you’ve got something that confuses you about the way they talk across the pond, or heck, the way we talk here in the United States, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.