A listener in Huntsville, Alabama, says that in her native Scotland, the phrase send out for messages means to send someone to go shopping. The phrase stems from a time when the person going out to do the shopping or run other errands would also pick up the postal mail, sometimes at the local store. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Go Out for the Messages”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello.
Hi, who’s this?
My name is Liz Worthy, calling in from Huntsville, Alabama.
Oh, welcome to the show.
How can we help you, Liz?
Thank you.
I had a question, so I was listening to your show, and it made me think of something that I thought was a little odd in terms of language when I moved to the U.S. I’m originally from Scotland, and one of the things that happens when you’re living in Scotland is sometimes your grandmother will send you off to the store to buy some messages. And I didn’t really realize there was anything unusual about that until I moved to the U.S. And then I would say that and people would be completely confused about what I was talking about.
Oh, you would go to the store to buy some messages. Your grandma would send you for messages.
Okay.
Yes.
And when you were sent for messages, what did you come back with?
So normally when you were sent for messages, you would get a piece of paper with a grocery list, and you would hopefully come back with all the things that were on it and some sweeties for yourself.
Some sweeties for yourself.
Of course.
Yeah, and so you didn’t hear that when you moved to Alabama.
No, or Seattle or Wisconsin or any of the other places in the U.S. that I’ve lived. I’m not surprised that you didn’t encounter it in any of those places. It does exist. It shows up in several different dictionaries as being a very Scots thing. But it also, through the number of Scots who have traveled around the world and moved to different places, it now shows up as well in New Zealand and in some of the Caribbean dialects of English. And the Irish do it to a smaller degree.
And the path that it took for messages to mean things that you pick up when you’re running errands or groceries that you bring back is actually pretty straightforward. If you go back to the early days of messengers who would actually literally take a message, you know, some kind of communication, sometimes verbally, but sometimes on paper. And so the idea that they were delivering a piece of paper soon kind of got rounded up into the notion that they were just running general errands. So they might not only deliver a piece of paper, they might deliver a trinket or a token of respect or a literal package. And so before long you can find this in the printed record. It’s really interesting. You start to see I sent so-and-so out for messages and it might be that they went to take some things to somebody else, some things that weren’t even notes or words, or it might be that they went to get some things and to bring them back. So in Scotland, it’s its quite specific to groceries.
So were you able to tell in the Caribbean, is it also groceries or is it, you know, DIY supplies?
Well, it’s interesting. In Scotland and Ireland, for sure, it’s always plural. You wouldn’t go out for a message. You go out for messages. And it does usually tend to be the groceries, although I see some evidence in fiction, although fiction writers could have been taking some liberties, where messages sometimes are, they went to get a variety of dry goods, or maybe went to pick up a takeout order from a restaurant, that sort of thing.
But there was always the idea that it wasn’t just the one thing. There were a bunch of things that you were doing and you were going to come back after they were all done.
But in the Caribbean, it’s usually singular where it’s used at all. I’ve seen evidence in Jamaica and Trinidad. So you might say, I’m going to collect the message from the shop or the message was too heavy to lift. And in both cases, the message is some kind of thing that you might buy at the corner store or the grocery store or the pharmacy, the drugstore.
That’s cool. And we used to also say, you know, when you came back with those candies, you would often say that you had a little skin off the top of the messages, which was a little bit for yourself. So, you know, it’s funny, now that I live in the U.S., all of these Scottish things that were just taken for granted, I think about them more often.
Yeah.
I really appreciate it. That’s great.
Yeah, so that was a little skin off, S-K-I-N, or a skim, S-K-I-M?
A skin with an N.
Oh, like the skin off the top of a cream or something or a pudding.
Yeah, hot milk or something.
Well, thank you very much for answering my driving along the road question.
Liz, thank you so much for calling.
Well, thank you very much.
Take care now. Bye-bye.
Take care. Bye-bye.
Not sure I agree with the derivation suggested; surely as the goods are your groceries, it is likely that the connection is to the “mess” of “mess hall”, “mess of pottage”, etc., and is to do with the fact it’s foodstuffs? I’m sure that I was told the root was Old French “mes”, a “portion of food”. This sense does derive ultimately from the same Latin which gives us “message” and “messenger” in their communications meanings, but I think that the distinction happened earlier than you suggested in the programme.
Oh, and you *can* “run” or “go a message” (singular) to indicate a brief errand/ shopping trip, at least in NE Scotland where I come from, and probably elsewhere in Scotland too.