Hand Running

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carrie Kisdall.

Hi, Carrie, where are you calling from?

From St. Louis, Missouri.

What’s on your mind, Carrie?

Well, I was curious about a word that we used in my family,

But that I didn’t hear, well, when I used it again,

Other people didn’t recognize it.

And it was hand running.

Hand running?

And it means like one after another,

Like the buttons in the shirt went hand running up the front of the shirt.

Oh, that’s interesting.

One right next to each other.

Mm—

Or like the tickets on a fence.

So it’s a series of things?

How else would you use it?

Can you say that you did something hand running?

Yes, or problems came at you hand running one after another.

And you heard this from whom?

Both my parents used it.

My mother was from Alabama, but I grew up in western Oklahoma.

But both of them used it.

And my sister knows it.

But I had used it around some friends in St. Louis, and they kidded me about, where did you get that phrase?

Yeah, it’s a weird one, and I have a hard time saying it.

I always want to take the hand out, you know, something like, Carrie’s had the same weird dream three nights running.

What’s the hand doing in there?

Well, we talked about it in my family, and we wondered if it was either running your hands along a picket fence or measuring horses.

Like, you know, you measure horses with hands.

One after another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Those aren’t bad guesses because it does mean consecutively or in a row.

And I have to say that as far as I know, the origins of this expression are a mystery.

You’re right that you see it a lot in the South and the South Midlands, parts of Arkansas, parts of Missouri, as a matter of fact.

They’ve documented this expression.

But as far as the origin, we’re just not sure.

Oh, so it really is a mystery.

Well, you will find that it dates back to the early 1800s in parts of the United Kingdom around Leeds and West Yorkshire and a few other places.

You can find it in some old glossaries that were collected about that time.

So we do know that it was a term from the British Isles before it was an American term.

Oh, it was.

Okay.

And the fact that the term appears in the South jibes really well with some of the historical migration patterns.

So there’s kind of a connecting path there.

Yeah, because one side of my family I know is from around Yorkshire and Durham.

Well, that would make a lot of sense then.

Well, this one remains a mystery, and I hope we find out more about it.

Very interesting.

All right. Well, thank you for calling, Carrie.

Thank you, Carrie.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Handrunning, how about that?

There’s no end to this stuff.

The language that kind of just lingers for a while and pops out,

And you’re like, wait a second, I’ve never heard that one before.

Yeah, and it was perfectly natural to her, but don’t you have a hard time saying it?

I do, because I kind of want to drop the D off there, handrunning.

There’s like a pause that’s forced in there between that D and the R sound.

Handrunning.

I wonder if people, when they pronounce it, if they just don’t leave the D off.

Well, we’ll have to do a little more digging on this and post to whatever we find on the website.

Sounds great.

And maybe they leave off the G, too.

Hand running.

Hand running.

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