No Ideal

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Fawn. I’m from Danville, Kentucky.

Fawn, welcome.

Hi, Fawn. How are you doing?

Well, I was raised in Michigan and came to Kentucky when I was 18 and have lived here ever since for 30-some years.

And I had noticed there were several colloquialisms, I guess, and I just kind of wondered if you knew if that was just a local thing or if it was something that other people do.

But one thing that is very consistently done by even top-level management people or from the pulpit, I’ve heard it from the pulpit, they use, instead of saying, I have no idea, they’ll say, I have no ideal.

No ideal instead of no idea.

Yes, they use that consistently.

There’s another one they use, instead of saying frustrated, they use flusterated.

Kind of a contractual type of thing.

And if they’re going to carry something, they pack it. They don’t carry it from place to place. They pack it from here to there.

Or if they are going to help you out in some way, they’ll say, yeah, I’ll pack you.

I’ll pack you.

These all sound familiar to me, Martha, most of them anyway.

Sure, yeah.

Flustrated has got a couple hundred years of history, and it’s not exactly the same as frustrated.

What it tends to mean is kind of frustrated with a little bit of aggression, maybe with a little bit of anger or with a little bit of or even a lot of confusion.

So it’s not just about like you don’t know what to do. It’s like you don’t know what to do and you’re feeling unsteady.

Isn’t there an element of fluttering in there too?

I imagine.

I’m doing that as I’m talking about this. I’m like spinning my hands like a whirligig.

T-Rex.

Yeah.

My arms are too short.

But ideal is the one that I want to talk about the most.

Yeah.

Does that one bother you?

It consistently bothers me.

Do you, Fawn, do you ask them if they know what they just said? Do they know that they’re saying ideal, or do they think that they’re saying idea?

The two people that I have confronted with it, one was a high school student and a friend of my daughter’s, and he was absolutely convinced that that was the correct use of that word.

And the other person I talked to about it seemed a little offended and really didn’t want to talk about it, so I actually haven’t, you know, gone up to the wall with anybody.

Here’s what we know about ideal in Kentucky, and it’s not a lot of information.

It turns out that it’s not very well researched, but there’s anecdotal evidence that shows that Kentucky is a place where when you say, I have no ideal, that’s pretty much the ordinary way of saying it instead of I have no idea.

And it does, as you noted, because you did great fieldwork here, Fawn, it does extend across all spectrums.

So it has very little to do with education or socioeconomic status or religion or race or where you are.

But it’s like pretty, you know, there’s this pocket of people that do this and they’re all got that feature of the language.

Which means it’s not so much a mistake as it’s a dialect.

However, it doesn’t mean that people on the outside aren’t going to judge folks from Kentucky for saying I have no ideal with an L at the end instead of saying I know I have no idea.

Or ideal.

Ideal.

Ideal.

Yeah, it’s often ideal.

I have no ideal.

The Court of Appeals in Kentucky.

Yeah, let’s go down to the mill and mill some flour.

No, I’m sorry. Let’s have a mill.

So I shouldn’t necessarily say to somebody, you realize you’re using that word wrong, right?

Well, because they are surrounded by people who say that, which means it’s a feature of dialect, and in that particular part of the dialect, that’s what they do.

And there’s a good explanation for it.

L and R are what we call liquid sounds. They’re pretty much the only two liquid sounds we have in English, and they’re easy to confuse.

They happen in approximately the same places in the mouth.

And you’ve ever heard somebody say, I have no idea, where it sounds like you’re adding an R at the end?

The I have no idea is a little bit related to what’s happening when someone says, I have no idea.

I see.

Okay.

All right.

Well, I got to tell you, Fawn, it was a great call. If you find any more Kentucky-isms, pass them along. We’ll try to explain them.

All right?

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Fawn.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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