Go Sit on a Tack!

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Tricia Dunn from Chesapeake, Virginia.

Hey, Tricia. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. I’m glad to be with you. I listen to you all the time.

Fantastic. How can we help you today?

Well, I have a very old question. It’s almost as old as I am. I will be 73 soon, and back in the very early 50s, 52, maybe 53 at the latest, my dad used to say something that I always wondered if it was something that he made up or if it’s indigenous to the Virginia area where I live, because he and my mom both were Virginia natives. He was the consummate Virginia gentleman. He never, I never ever heard him utter anything that wasn’t totally proper. But sometimes when he would get annoyed with my mother, he’d say to her, oh, Jackie, go sit on a tack. And I was so young and she never said anything back. They weren’t mad at one another or anything. She never said anything back. But after I had heard him say that maybe two or three times over about a year’s period of time, I was probably maybe five, five and a half at the time, I said to my mom, Mama, what is a tack? I mean, if he’d have said go sit on a nail, I would have known what that meant. But I wasn’t familiar with tacks. And she explained it to me. And so then I thought, okay. And I didn’t ask her anything else. But I always wondered if there was some basis for that, some old saying that had been around maybe in his family or in this area for a long time.

And she didn’t take offense at that, right?

Oh, no, not at all.

Okay.

Well, like I said, they got along fine. I mean, you know, it wasn’t a mean thing. It was just a, oh, you know, go sit on a tack.

Okay.

Yeah, we can talk about it. Did he say anything else along those lines? Did he ever say, go climb a tree?

He would tell my sister to go climb a tree all the time, and she did, and she probably still does to this day, and she’s 70 years old. But did he mean it as a way of saying, stop bugging me, get out of my hair?

More of a sense of frustrated type of a thing, but he wasn’t mad.

Right. Gotcha. I think there’s a difference in being mad and frustrated, but that’s what he said. There’s this whole batch of things that you say, and those are some of them, to get people to leave you alone. And go sit on a tack has been one of those since at least the 1880s.

Go sit on a tack.

Yeah, absolutely. And go fly a kite and go climb a tree. Go jump on a lake. Go soak your head. Go chase yourself. Go run in traffic. These are all things that people say when somebody’s annoying you. And you’re just basically saying, leave me alone. Stop bothering me. And that was your dad. Your dad’s ghosted on a tack is one of the politer ones. There are many offensive ones that we can’t say on the air, of course.

Oh, he’s a very polite person, extremely polite person. And he was born in 1921, so apparently what he was saying is one of those that comes probably back in his family from the 1800s.

It could be.

The late 1800s. He could have just learned it on the playground because it’s certainly something that kids would say. And there was this heyday for them in the early 1900s when a lot more of them were created. And you can find them in joke books and little tidbits shared in newspapers. There’s one joke that etymologist Barry Poppik discovered. What time is it when you sit on a tack? Springtime.

That’s great.

I love it. And then there was a little tidbit in a newspaper from 1890. Did the boss give you a new position? He offered me one, but I didn’t take it. What was it? He told me to go sit on a tack.

Well, I doubt that my dad’s boss ever did that to him. But, yeah, that’s so interesting because I thought this was going way out on a limb to call and ask them this. But it’s interesting to know that it probably really was a thing. And so you answered that very well, as usual.

Well, it’s been a delight to talk to you, Trish. I really appreciate your ringing us up. And you call us again sometime, all right?

Okay.

Love your show. I’ll keep tuned.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, I’m reminded of the phrase, go fry ice, which is nonsensical. We’ve talked about it before on the show, but it’s sort of that same idea.

Oh, yeah.

And I bet our listeners have a bunch more ways to tell people to bug off, to get out of your hair, to go be a pain in someone else’s neck. And if you’ve got one you want to share with the world, let us know, 877-929-9673.

Or send your ways to tell people to go sit on a tack to email words@waywordradio.org, or let’s start a whole big thread on Twitter @wayword.