Grab a Root and Growl

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Libby Davis from Coronado, California.

Hi, Libby. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Libby.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I have a group of lady friends that we meet regularly. Most of us are widows that live alone, and we’re used to coping with little emergencies that come up every day. I mean, your aging house is breaking down around you, or God help us, your aging body is breaking down. So every day you say, oh, what is the challenge today?

We were talking at lunch and saying how we were feeling very sad that one of our friends who had a medical emergency a couple of months ago hadn’t snapped back. She just crumbled and wasn’t leaving her home and joining us in activities we’d always done together. And I said, well, her get up and go is just gone. And Klessy said, she needs to grab a root and growl. And I said, wow, I’ve never heard that. I love it. Grab a root and growl. It’s not only got resiliency, it’s got tenacity. And I said, where did you get that? She said she heard it from her mother-in-law, who was from Hattiesburg, Mississippi. And she didn’t know anything about it. None of us had ever heard it before.

What do you know? What do we know? First, I want to say that her get up and go was gone is also a great turn of phrase. I love that. Yeah, get up and go, got up and went. Yeah, indeed. And I know the feeling. I do. Particularly when you’re coming out of a few days of not feeling well and you’re like, I just want to lie here like a lump.

So the grab a root and growl. We’re thinking probably R-O-O-T for root, right? Like the root of a plant or a tree or something like that. That’s what we’re figuring. Some kind of a root of a tree or something. It reminds me of Root Hog or Die, which is another one of these exhortations to figure it out, make do, find your guts, muscle on through, to heave ho, put your shoulder to it, whatever your exhortation is to get somebody to do the thing that they need to do.

Hang on. Hang on. Get in there. Do it. Fight. Be tough. It doesn’t have a deep history, but it’s 100 years old at least. I find it in some camping articles and stories about outdoor recreation and climbing in the mountains. There’s one particular use of a magazine, which I thought was funny. It’s where this Easterner is writing into this magazine about how hard time he had in the Rocky Mountains. And the editors in the magazine are like, yeah, well, that’s because you came out here with your East Coast ways and you didn’t come out here and grab a root and growl, which is to do the hard job of making it all work, which is kind of what we’re talking about, right?

I particularly like the growl. You not only hang on, you’re almost aggressive about it. There’s a couple places where people have speculated, and I think this is really solid, that what you need to think of when you say this phrase is a dog going after game. Let’s say maybe a terrier going after a rat, and the rat has dived into a hole, and the dog’s got to clear out the roots and dig down to where the rat is to get his prey, and he’s growling the whole time to make his intentions known. And if you just think about it that way, that’s the kind of tenacity we’re talking about, this fierce kind of almost instinctive desire to win and beat the enemy.

Well, there you go, Libby. I’ve seen one slight variation, which is not grab a root and growl. It’s grab, comma, root, comma, and growl. So all three main words are verbs, and they’re telling you to grab on, to root in, and then to growl to show that you’ve got the guts to do it.

Oh, I like that too. Yeah, and that aligns very well with root hog or die, I think.

I think so. So Libby, thank you for sharing that phrase with us.

Well, thank you for explaining a little bit of how it came about. Take care now.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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