Getting Down in Louisiana

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Keith D’Arce, calling from San Diego.

Hiya, Keith. Got a question for us today?

I do. I do.

I’m hoping you can help me with a phrase that I grew up saying in South Louisiana.

In the Cajun area, whenever you hop in a car and drive to a place,

Once you arrive at that place, it’s not unusual for the driver to turn to everyone else in the car and say something like,

Am I the only one who’s going to get down, or are we all getting down together, or something like that.

I just sort of thought it was a normal way of describing the act of getting out of a vehicle until I got into college at LSU.

Made friends with people from New Orleans who just laughed hysterically at me every time I would use the phrase.

So I’ve always wondered, you know, what it’s rooted in.

If it’s a phrase that people say in, you know, rural areas of, you know, in the rest of the country,

Or if it’s something unique to, you know, southern Louisiana or, you know, the Cajun area.

Maybe it’s, you know, an English translation of a French phrase from 100 years ago.

So you’re saying the vehicle arrives, the driver or somebody say, I’m going to get down now, and they mean they’re getting out of the vehicle, right?

Exactly.

They don’t mean that there’s gunfire and they need to hide.

Right.

Or that Casey and the Sunshine Band have showed up.

Exactly, exactly.

No, we’re not going to jump out and start dancing.

Right, okay.

Well, you have a very good instinct about the possibility of it having to do with French,

Because in French you do basically descend from a vehicle.

Descendre.

Right, right.

The verb is, and you have something similar in Spanish.

You bajar, you go down from the vehicle.

And it appears that in that part of the country it’s one of those calques,

What we call a calque, C-A-L-Q-U-E,

Where it’s a direct translation from the French.

Do you also invite somebody to have a coffee rather than have coffee?

Absolutely, absolutely.

And in New Orleans, actually, people in New Orleans are sort of famous for saying that they’re going to make groceries.

Right.

We talked about that before.

Sure, that’s a great one.

Tons of this.

And French isn’t completely gone down there.

It still exists enough, at least among the older set, that it can still have some influence on the English language, right?

Absolutely.

The funny thing is that we do see get down in various parts of the country from time to time.

And I think that in that sense of getting down from a vehicle, people will say something like, get down and stay a while.

I also wondered if it was connected maybe to days when people traveled on horses and buggies where you actually had to step far down to get back.

Sure, sure.

Yeah, it’s a nice little vestige.

Unless you’re climbing out of a monster truck, you’re not really getting down these days, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

So you do see that scattered in pockets around the country.

It’s really interesting.

But definitely I think there’s a French connection there in Cajun country.

Heroin?

Oh, no, I’m kidding.

The big easy, yeah.

Well, it’s great to finally get a conclusive explanation

And know that I’m not alone, that I can safely travel around the country

And not feel like I’m the only one saying these sorts of things.

Keith, thank you so much for your call.

This was a great question.

We always love talking about dialects in the United States.

So we sometimes think that Americans all speak alike, but we don’t.

We do not.

There’s too many of us.

Not at all.

Thanks for the answer.

I really appreciate it.

Okay.

Thanks, Pete.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a question about something they say down home, we’d like to hear it.

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