Hand-Running

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jan Haller. I’m calling from Taos, New Mexico.

Well, welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

Well, I had found this term that my mother had used. My mother’s been writing some stories of her life, and she wrote a story about her in-laws coming to help her when my brother was born. And she used this term called hand running. She said over three consecutive weekends, they came hand-running to assist the ailing new mother. And I was really curious about this term because I had never heard her use it before. But here it was when she was writing these stories. And when I asked her what it meant, she said, well, right away she said, well, consecutive. And when I looked it up in the dictionary, that seemed to be true, but I was really curious about where this came from.

So you haven’t heard anybody else use it either?

No.

Yeah.

And what do you picture?

Well, the image that comes is almost like a fire brigade of people handing from one hand to another. That’s the image that comes to me.

Oh, that’s interesting. Interesting.

So hand running, H-A-N-D, probably a hyphen. Yeah. R-U-N-N-I-N-G. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah, this term has been around since at least the early 1800s, and it originated in England, actually.

Oh, that’s interesting because there’s some English blood in the family.

Oh, really? Really?

Yeah, it was a dialectal term used around Leeds and Yorkshire. And it’s interesting because it sort of follows the same migration patterns that people from that area followed in this country. So you hear this across the South and South Midlands, so I’m not surprised.

Yeah, by the 1850s, it was well ensconced in American English. And you’ll still hear it, actually. It comes up, of course, in fiction where somebody’s trying to get a flavor of a place and time, but people still use it like your mother. They still use it as an everyday expression.

I would say it’s really rare, though, now, right?

Yeah, I don’t hear it that often.

Well, I never heard it when my mother spoke. I mean, this is the first time just in this writing, so that interested me, too.

Yeah, so it means consecutively, like one thing after another, right? And I don’t know that we actually know the origin of it. I picture hands like measuring a horse. You know how you measure a horse with the length of your hands? I don’t know. I’ve seen a suggestion that maybe it has to do with poker and a running hand, but I don’t know about that.

Right, where you keep getting good cards one hand after another. I’ve seen an older theory that it comes from the textile mills. If you were a particular type of worker, your hands were continuously moving as the cloth was running past and you were doing things. So you just imagine this giant loom, probably steam-powered or at least diesel-powered or something, and the cloth is continuously running by and your hands are pushing this and pulling that and bumping this and nudging that and pulling a lever, punching a button. That’s your job, you know, 12 hours a day. So kind of a continuous motion.

Yeah.

But both of those theories are really speculative and it’s particularly problematic that either one of them could be true because the early uses aren’t associated with poker or with textiles.

Exactly. So when we find them in print, usually you’ll find some kind of hint or suggestion of their milieu. I’m just not seeing that here for this. It’s just kind of general everyday uses of the expression right from the get-go.

So does that help?

Yeah, it does. And I’m just interested that it’s from England. That’s where some of the origin came from. But I’ll let her know what I found out.

Jan, thanks for calling. Take care now.

All right, thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have stories to share about language, we’d love to hear them. 877-929-9673 is the number to call, or you can send them an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.