Good Night on the Big Drum

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sarah from Copham, Virginia.

I called you a same, I have a quandary.

I have an expression that I realize I’ve been using all my life.

And A, I have no idea what it means,

And B, I don’t have any idea of the origin of it.

Oh, wow, this is good. I like a puzzle, a mystery.

Well, there might be a puzzle, it might be very obvious.

It’s one of those things I haven’t really discussed with many people

Because the subject doesn’t actually come up.

But when I tuck my children in at night,

I say, good night, sleep tight, and see you on the big drum.

And it’s something that my parents have said to me.

I guess there was an interlude in my life when I didn’t say it at all,

Because I wasn’t, you know, when I’d left home,

And then when I had my children again, I picked it up again.

And I don’t know if anyone else says it.

Good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum?

See you on the big drum, yeah.

On the big drum.

And your parents said this to you.

This was growing up in England?

In England, yeah.

Yeah.

What part of England?

The South, Hampshire.

Okay.

That doesn’t help me at all.

I just thought I’d ask.

Well, I mean, obviously, I’ve been thinking about it lately,

Wondering what the connotations are.

We have a military background.

So whether it was, I don’t know, drumbeat or something.

I think my niece had this lovely idea of it,

Because my sister says it to her children, too.

And they had this idea.

She used to see it as like going to toy town at night

And sort of everyone meeting on the skin of the big drum at night in their dreams.

Oh, that’s nice.

It’s a nice idea.

Interesting.

That’s nice.

Sarah, I see online that there is a Sarah asking about this very phrase in a lot of places.

Is that you?

Really?

Yeah.

No.

It’s not?

Well, recently?

Well, I don’t know.

It’s on a ton of sites.

It looks like they all stole it from each other.

Did you ever submit this as a question to one site, and then all the other sites just ripped it off from them?

No, I haven’t.

I haven’t.

I’ve looked up the expression.

I haven’t actually submitted it.

That’s the only use I can find of it online is somebody asking about it.

I don’t find any, and this is in British and American and, frankly, tons of reference works and newspapers and online archives.

And across the entire span of every text that I have at my disposal, I found nobody using this except for you.

Okay, so it must be something weird about our family.

It’s not weird, no.

No, it’s weird.

No, it isn’t.

Family things are natural and normal.

They’re a byproduct of a close relationship,

And they’re part of the glue that holds you together.

Yeah, well, I was hoping you could tell me why.

That’s nice and said.

But what could a big drum be?

I don’t know.

I thought it was a military one, so maybe, you know,

The military tattoo, the military sort of…

I hope it’s not…

I wonder if it’s one of those things that comes from a particular regiment

That maybe your father or grandfather belonged to.

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

They were both in the same regiment.

My grandfather was in the cavalry, and his father was in…

My father was in the tanks, which is a derivative of the cavalry.

And they often have their own in-house slang and jargon

That this is transmitted from year to year, from generation to generation.

I wonder if it has something to do with that.

It might not have escaped that particular close-knit group

And found its way into the wider world where it would appear

In the reference works that we have at our disposal.

Because, Sarah, I got bupkis, nothing, zip.

But I think it’s this fantastic linguistic relic.

I feel like we’re archaeologists who just found a little shard of pottery that, you know, I mean, maybe we’ll find a connection someplace.

So from that shard, we can posit an entire family.

Yes.

Maybe a culture.

An entire regiment.

Yeah, maybe somebody out there, maybe one of the many, many people out there listening has heard this.

Could be.

We’ll stay in touch, Sarah.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

See you.

You know where.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So good night.

Sleep tight.

See you on the big drum.

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