Emily in Colchester, Vermont, asks about hark your racket, a phrase her mother heard from a coworker who called it a Vermont expression meaning “be quiet,” “pipe down,” or “stop complaining.” The exact form is hard to find in print, but Dictionary of American Regional English records the close variant hark your noise from the 1940s on, with citations from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine. In both versions, hark means “listen” and racket or noise points to the commotion someone is making. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Hark Your Racket” Means “Shush””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Emily calling from Colchester, Vermont.
Hey, Emily, how you doing?
Hey there, what’s up?
I’m doing well.
I’m calling with a question that my mom actually told our family about at a Sunday dinner.
She was at a meeting at work, and one of her co-workers was telling a story, something happened to her.
And in the story, she said, well, I told so-and-so, you know, hark your racket.
And everybody at the meeting said, what? You told her to what? Harp your racket? Hark your racket?
No, she’s like, no, no, no. Hark your racket. You know, like, hark the herald angels sing.
And nobody in the room had ever heard of it before.
And they asked where she got it. And she said, oh, you know, it’s a Vermont thing.
Okay, so hark your racket, it doesn’t have anything to do with tennis, though.
Apparently not. It just meant, you know, be quiet or, you know, pipe down or stop complaining. Close your pie hole.
I don’t have anything for that exact phrase. Obviously, hark means listen. In hark the heralds, it means listen to the heralds.
And racket is a word for noise that probably originally came from a word having to do with rattle or something like that. To make an annoying noise.
So it means listen to your noise. But I don’t find that exact phrase anywhere except there’s something close to it.
In our favorite lexicographical work, the Dictionary of American Regional English at daredictionary.com, and they have an entry for Hark Your Noise, dating from the 1940s.
And the citations are from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine. And so I think Maine is close enough to Vermont.
There’s only four citations here. I bet if we looked at length, we could probably find a lot more and find that it’s particular to that part of the country as well.
Interesting. So Hark Your Noise. And is the meaning the same?
Yeah, yeah. Like watch your noise level?
Yeah, basically it’s to be mindful of all the noise you’re making. Did you realize that you’re being loud, basically, is what the subtext is.
Interesting. Well, that’s fantastic.
So you said Michigan, Wisconsin, and Maine from the 40s.
Yeah, and there’s a couple from Maine here. But all of these are in the form hark your noise rather than hark your racket.
But I could see how you could easily replace the word noise with racket. So the citations appear from the 40s, and then they kind of fall off from there.
40s, 50s, 70s.
Yeah, they’re not that common. It’s not that well-known.
But, you know, with this kind of language, it is not uncommon for something to exist in abundance and just be barely recorded, even in the specialty dictionaries like this one.
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for taking the time to take my call and answer my question.
I will tell my mom that it’s not just this person, but some other folks in other parts of the country as well.
Yeah, tell it a harker racket and you want to talk to her.
Thank you for your call.
Thank you.
Bye-bye.
Bye, Emily.
Bye-bye.
Well, we want to hark your racket. Give us a call 877-929-9673 or send your joyful noise an email, if you can do that, to words@waywordradio.org.
