Goat’s Mouth and Happy Sack

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it’s time for Slang This, the puzzle where you guess the meaning of some strange slang terms.

Today’s contestant is Carolyn Baum from Collierville, Tennessee. Carolyn, welcome.

Hi, I’m glad to be here.

We’re delighted to have you. Say hi to Grant.

Hi, Grant.

Hello, Carolyn. Where is Collierville?

It’s near Memphis.

Near Memphis, all right. So are you a big blues fan?

I’m a big southern fan of just about anything from the south.

Oh, great. Well, Carolyn, do you have a favorite slang term, southern or otherwise?

Actually, I do. It’s one my husband makes fun of. It’s called nabs. Have you ever heard of it?

Nabs?

No, I think I know that one. N as in Nabisco?

That’s exactly, actually, I think that’s where it came from. It’s those little snack packets of about six crackers, the bright orange ones with peanut butter inside.

Right. And my husband thought it was really funny. One of the first road trips we went on many years ago, and I said, I’m going to run inside and get a Coke and some nabs. And he wanted to know what the heck nabs were.

I don’t know that one, Karen. That’s brand new to me. It’s not a brand name, right? That’s just something we call this. It’s a nickname for it.

What I had always heard was that it was a shortening of sort of a nickname for Nabisco.

Okay. They used to make a brand of the crackers. I don’t know if that’s true.

Okay. Well, Carolyn, that’s great. Let’s move on to our game.

Okay. Grant will give you a slang term, and then he’s going to give you three sentences that suggest what that term might mean. Now, only one of those will be real, and the other two are fake. So, Carolyn, your task will be to figure out which one of those three sentences illustrates how this particular slang term is actually used.

Okay. Now, chances are that you will not have heard the word before, so the trick will be to puzzle out its meaning.

Okay. All right, and I’ll be here to help you if you get stuck.

Good. All right. All right, here we go. Carolyn, we’ve got two words today, and the first expression is happy sack. That’s two words, H-A-P-P-Y-S-A-C-K, happy sack.

And the first clue, hacky sack used to be the game of choice for the dippy-doppy set on college campuses. Now it’s happy sack, which is like a sack race, only you walk on your hands with your head in a bag.

The second clue. The captain has asked me to remind all passengers that in the event of personal digestive turbulence, you are invited to use one of our complimentary happy sacks located in the seat pocket in front of you.

Okay. And the third clue. At Christmas, we play happy sack. Everybody chips in 20 bucks. We convert it to one $100 bill and two $50 bills and a bunch of Washingtons. All the money goes in a bag, and then everybody takes turns drawing out bills until the 50s and the 100 come out. The rest gets divided equally. It saves having to deal with a wallet full of gift cards for stores you never visit.

There are your three clues, Carolyn. Is a happy sack a game where you walk on your hands with a bag on your head? Is it an air sickness bag, or is it a Christmas gift-giving game?

Well, I think the middle one is an unhappy sack. And I haven’t seen me walking on my hands. I don’t know about that. I’ll go with the third one, I’m guessing, though.

You’re guessing that it’s something like Rob Your Neighbor or Pirate Christmas, like one of those games, right?

I think that would definitely be happy, especially if you got the 50.

That’s right, yeah. What if you just got a handful of ones, though?

Well, it’s better than the unhappy sack.

That’s right. I’m with her on that. I mean, I would have guessed that Happy Sack was a town in New Jersey.

No, unfortunately, it’s B. A happy sack is an air sickness bag. These airlines, they’re just full of terms where things don’t sound like they’re supposed to, you know, jargon.

Well, they don’t tell the customers that, do they? I mean, this is, or the past few years, this is in-house, huh?

No, no, this is in-house thing.

Yeah, yeah, that’s not something they share. Anyway, there we go. Here’s your second word. Actually, this is also two words. Your second expression is goat’s mouth, G-O-A-T apostrophe S, M-O-U-T-H, goat’s mouth.

And the first clue. When Rebecca’s illicit lover died in a suspicious fire, everyone in Kingston said of her jealous husband, I’m a goat mouth, or he has a goat’s mouth. In other words, he had a way of putting doom on somebody.

The second one. When O’Malley testified against his fellow officers, he found the words goat’s mouth spray-painted across his car. It meant that they knew that he’d broken the blue wall of silence.

And then the third clue. The goat’s mouth formation happens a few weeks each year when cold air rushes down from Nunavut and meets moist air from the Gulf of Mexico. Weather across the Midwest goes crazy.

So there are your three clues, Carolyn. Is goat’s mouth the ability to put a curse on someone? Is it a name for a narc, squealer, or traitor? Or is it a weird Midwestern weather formation?

Boy, I am clueless. Martha, what are your thoughts?

I was kind of guessing maybe the first one, just because you think devil and goats and all that kind of tied up together.

-huh, -huh, and bad mouth, too, I think, coming from an old African tradition, if I’m not mistaken. But, you know, I did like Grant’s meteorologist voice. What do you think?

It was pretty spiffy.

Oh, well, was it? I can do better than that. But you know what, Carolyn? I would go with your first instinct. I think that’s always best.

Well, going on a guess, I would say the first one.

Yes, yes, indeed it is the first one. Ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, it’s a Jamaican expression, although I think it’s used in Barbados as well. And that’s why I did that little bit of my really bad imitation of a Jamaican Creole.

Geneva Smitherman has written about this expression as well as G. Llewellyn Watson. And in his book, Jamaican Sayings, he says, a person is said to have goat’s mouth when he or she wishes another person evil, and the wishes are fulfilled. It also applies to one who has the foresight to discern impending danger and forewarn those concerned. It was just a really nice, colorful expression, which is why I chose it.

Wow. Thank you so much, Carolyn. You’re a superstar.

I enjoyed it.

Yeah, that was not bad. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I apologize.

All right. Thank you for letting me play.

Well, Carolyn, thank you so much. And hey, for playing our game today, we’re going to send you a book. It’s Erin McKean’s wonderful book, Weird and Wonderful Words. You’re going to love it.

Great. I love it.

All right. We’ll talk to you later. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. If you’ve got a question about animal husbandry, give Martha a call. The number is 1-877-929-9673.

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