A Gazelle in the Garden

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Martha.

This is Martha, and there’s Grant.

Hey there, what’s up?

Okay, this is Phil Blackwell. I’m calling from Whitewater, Wisconsin, southeastern part of the state.

Hi, Phil.

Hi, Phil.

We were at dinner a couple of weeks ago with our 42-year-old son and his wife, their two small children, and our daughter-in-law’s parents who were visiting from Connecticut.

And during dinner, I saw that our son had some food on his chin.

And so in good Blackwell family fashion, I just said, hey, Pete, gazelle on the lawn.

So he wiped the food off.

And the mother of our daughter-in-law looked at me and said, what did you say?

I said, well, I just said gazelle on the lawn. It meant that Pete had food on his face.

And she said, where did that come from?

Well, that’s something that we learned in our Blackwell family generations ago, and it has always been kind of fun for us to sit there and use that as a way of giving notice to somebody that they had food on their chin or their upper lip.

But I’m interested to know, assuming that we did not make that up, where did that come from, and was that ever used seriously as if someone expected to look out the window and see a gazelle and thereby diverting the guest’s attention?

Or was it always kind of a humorous way of saying something that needed to be said, and it was kind of a non-offensive way of doing it?

Oh, I like this one. We’ve tackled this before, right?

Yeah.

A couple years ago.

Yeah, gazelle on the lawn.

So you’re going to love this, but I have some questions first.

You said that this is a part of the Blackwell family history. How far back?

Well, I remember when I was a little kid sitting at my grandparents’ house in Ohio, and this was sort of a normal pattern of speech.

They came from England. My dad was born in Manchester but came over as a kid.

Oh, so let me ask you one question about your grandfather.

Did he serve in the military? And if he did, where?

I don’t know. He was a police officer by the time he got to Cleveland, but I’m not aware of military service before then.

Here’s why. We know that this expression goes back at least 100 years to the Arabic-speaking countries, including countries that derive some of their language features from Arabic but don’t actually currently speak Arabic, for example, in India and Bangladesh and so forth.

And there’s an expression in Arabic, which you use to basically say it’s literally the same thing. There is a gazelle in the garden.

What you mean is that you have some kind of material or food or something in your beard.

And the garden is a word bustan or something like that. Bustan, that means both forest or small grove of trees.

And it can also mean beard by poetic license as well.

So if you’re talking about a gazelle in the garden, you mean you have something in your beard.

And so we find this as far back as 1906 in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, which would be Bangladesh, basically.

It’s super cool, right?

So that’s why I was wondering if he had served in the British military, perhaps was stationed somewhere in South Asia or somewhere in the Middle East.

You just never know. Maybe that’s where he picked it up.

Was it ever intended seriously to divert guests’ attention, or was it just a polite way of saying that you better plant off your upper lip?

Well, it’s polite and poetic.

You know, Arabic has a great deal of poetry built into it in the form of proverbs and sayings and colloquial expressions.

We do in English as well, but ours either become so embedded in the language that we forget that they’re idiomatic or proverbial or they’re joking, you know.

But in Arabic, they’re such a rich part of the language that I’ve had Arabic speakers tell me that they can’t actually do without them or else they feel that their language is barren.

And it’s like it’s soil with nothing growing on it unless they can use these poetic expressions.

And so I think that this is just one of those expressions that you use started as poetry or metaphorical way of talking so that you wouldn’t cause offense.

All humans do this. We speak indirectly about others in order not to cause offense.

And this is a great way of doing that.

Yeah, it sounds metaphorical to me, too.

I’m thinking about a phrase in Spanish for if you have something sort of in your nose or slightly hanging from it.

The phrase is pan en el horno, which is you have bread in the oven.

Or you have a bat in the cave.

I’ve heard that one, yeah.

Thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Give us another call sometime, all right?

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know something weird is going on in your family.

We only want to hear the language parts.

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