Gradoo

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Reed calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Reed.

Hello, Reed. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

How can we help you?

Well, even though I’m calling from where we have a lot of snow right now, I grew up in the south. I grew up in Louisiana. I spent some time along the Gulf Coast parishes where I heard a word I haven’t heard anywhere else. The word is gradu.

Gradu.

Gradu.

And we can spell it phonetically, I might try, but I’m sure I’d get it wrong if I tried to spell it in Cajun French. If I understood the use of the word in context, it would be something you would rather scrape off your shoe.

Okay.

So you’d say, I have gradu on my shoe?

Well, no, you might say, what kind of gradu did you just step into?

-huh, okay.

Or unknown kind of schmutz.

Yeah, that sounds like a bunch of gradu to me.

Okay, there we go.

Okay, well, gee. Did you get this from English speakers or people who spoke Cajun French and English, or who was saying it?

By people who both spoke English and Cajun French.

Okay, that’s good. That’s a nice clue there. Well, I’ve got a, if you’ll pardon me saying it, I’ve got a half-assed theory about it if you’d like to hear it.

Okay, just don’t try to crawfish out of the deal, all right?

I will not do that.

The crawfish out of the deal?

I’ve never heard that.

It’s to scuttle sideways or something, right?

Kind of worm.

Oh.

Yeah.

Oh, I never heard of it.

The crawfish used to back out of the deal.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, sure, sure.

Yeah, they crawl back into their hole, right?

Oh, so crawfish is a verb?

I didn’t know that.

Cool.

Okay.

All right.

What do you have, Grant?

Well, here’s the theory. And the reason I asked about the Cajun French speakers is because I speculate that it is a corruption, and bear with me, of the French phrase gras d’eau, G-R-A-S-D apostrophe E-A-U. And basically, I found one source which suggests that it’s colloquially used, even though it’s not a literal meaning of the phrase, too much water, or basically fat, the fat of the water.

So it might be the water junk or the flotsam, that sort of thing. So there’s a lot of different ways and go. The reason I call this a half-cocked theory is that I don’t find anybody else who’s browsing this theory, and so little work has been done on the history of gradu. I’m really surprised not to find it in some of the standard works of American English. I just don’t see it there.

So that’s my theory. We find it as early as the 1970s. It’s probably older than that. It’s definitely more widespread at this point than just the French-speaking parts of Louisiana, but it’s not nationally known, and many people are going to go, huh?

When you use it, right?

You probably get that.

Yeah.

You know, puzzled looks, and what did you say?

I like your idea that it would be the flotsam. That’s a more general kind of a, you know, something you’d just assume do without kind of definition. But it requires that you accept this colloquial interpretation of G-R-A-S, which just generally means fat.

So sort of scum on the water.

Yeah, kind of the scum of the water. But again, who knows why it now is referred to something that you find on the street. But I do find mention of it in Paul Dixon’s book, Family Words. He says that he has widespread reports of this, and he describes it as miscellaneous dirt, junk, small pieces of grit, etc., or the sludge at the bottom of wash water, or what’s left after melting snow for drinking water.

So it really makes, I mean, that kind of reinforces the theory. Well, I’m a professional storyteller, and I’ve been fascinated with words all my life. And one of the things I really enjoyed about growing up in Louisiana and other parts of the South, I’m sure people are like this everywhere, but it really caught my attention down there how people are known to be creative with creating meanings using sort of taking tangents off of basic definition or basic use of a word.

Oh, yeah.

So if it was grado or gradu that would be slop water from washing dishes or whatever, and it got to be spread around a little more, just basically something undesirable, something you’d rather scrape off your shoe or you would rather not step in.

Good description.

All that would apply to my experience down there.

Yeah, that’s generally how the words change. And also we are great innovators, human beings. We tend to take whatever we have at our disposal and modify it so that it will work for a new task. And we do the same thing with language.

Well, Reid is probably a new word to a lot of people, so we appreciate your spreading around gradu.

Sounds good.

I think.

And I’ll do the same for you.

Okay.

Thank you for calling, Reid. This was good stuff.

A pleasure.

I love your show. Keep it up.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your hometown expressions. Give us a call 1-877-929-9673 or send that crazy word to words@waywordradio.org.