Hideous

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susie Forbes, and I’m calling from Norwich, Connecticut.

Hey, Susie, welcome.

Hey, how you doing? What’s up?

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Well, I have a question about some letters that my dad wrote to my mother, who was at that time his fiancée, during World War II.

Ooh, that sounds exciting.

It’s pretty interesting.

I’ve been transcribing these letters because my two cousins have letters from their fathers as well, and so the three brothers apparently sent all these letters to their wives and sweethearts.

And they haven’t come across this usage.

And so I’m calling you because this doesn’t make sense to me.

The five times it’s happened so far has been in March of 1944 through November of 1944.

And he uses the word hideous, which to me sounds awful, to be an adjective for terrific.

I don’t understand.

I could read you one or two of them.

It says, we’ll play together and really have a hideous time.

Interesting.

And we’ll have a big get-together and really make the night hideous, as we did during the Christmas holidays.

Wow.

Okay, this is interesting.

Yeah.

And so what are you taking away from this?

Are you just taking, do you think this is slang of the age, or he was using a word he didn’t understand?

No, I think this is something – I mean, he’s used it five times.

Yeah.

I don’t think it’s a word he didn’t understand.

His letters are very literate, and his writing is awful, but his usage and his spelling is very good.

And so I think this must have been the slang of the times, but none of my uncles have used it.

So he was stationed on Hawaii during this time, and I’m just wondering if this is something that was used in Hawaii.

I don’t know.

What it sounds amazingly like to me is a lot of really common usage that is about emphasis, about emphasizing something.

And so it’s not really, it’s lost its negative or positive value.

It just says more of the same.

It’s almost adverbial.

And it’s really interesting, too, that you use the word terrific, because terrific comes from a root that originally meant terrifying or causing terror.

And now we use it in this emphatic, positive way.

So really, I suspect it’s a perfect match for a pattern of other words which used to be negative and then were used to express kind of a force or extra emotion.

Kind of like when an actor does a really great job and they say, oh, he really killed that role.

Yeah.

Yeah, crushed it.

He was awfully good, right?

Yeah.

Or before he goes out, you say, knock him dead.

And none of these things really are actual literal negatives.

They’re all meant to be as positives.

True.

What were your parents’ names?

Nancy.

My mother’s name was Nancy, and my father’s name was Moe.

His name was Morris, and he always went by Moe.

Okay.

The other thing I’m wondering is if, you know how couples just develop their own language?

I mean, I’m wondering if this is the lingua franca from Planet Nancy and Moe.

That’s a good one.

I hesitate to say that because they had become engaged the two weeks before he left, and they had only been friends before that.

Wow.

Until they, as he says, we discovered each other.

No kidding.

Yeah.

I have to say there’s a larger thing at work here that I want to compliment you on, and that is transcribing these letters for the record.

Because in my work as a dictionary editor and somebody who specializes in slang, we’d love to go back to these handwritten letters to find the closest thing that we can get to the vernacular, the way the average person spoke rather than the way newspaper writers wrote or the way that book authors wrote.

It’s very important to have this stuff.

So if you were making that public in any way, that would be astounding.

The Civil War letters that people go through and transcribe are a delight to look in because of this language stuff.

So it’s possible that if we were to find a larger trove of letters written by military folk who were stationed in Hawaii during World War II, we might find that hideous was indeed a thing.

But it will take a larger body, a larger corpus of letters to figure that out.

Well, Susie, the other thing is that we might hear from listeners who have the same experience with the word hideous.

Sure, you never know.

That would be fantastic if there were others.

Yeah.

Well, let us know if you come across any other cool stuff in the letters in terms of language.

Oh, I will.

You’re my favorite go-to place for discovering whatever this means.

Thanks, Susie.

Outstanding.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, before my father died, he gave me a box of the love letters that he and my mother shared.

Oh, that’s nice.

And it includes diary entries from his desk diary the week that he realized that he was falling in love with my mom.

Oh, how nice is that?

And I have them in, you know, a fireproof safe.

And I’m sort of going through them, but I sort of don’t want to come to the end.

Right.

Do you know what I mean?

That’s too perfect a thing.

I know.

I know, but I want to at least scan them and share them with the rest of the family.

That’s to know this essential moment.

I know.

You know what that reminds me of?

My aunt last year gave me a card that my mother had sent to a relative when she was pregnant with me and my brother, talking about finding out that she was going to have twins.

Oh, gosh.

And it is like the first mention indirectly of me and my brother in my mother’s handwriting.

And it’s like an amazing document.

It’s astonishing.

I’m like, you know, it’s in the envelope with this stamp and the whole thing.

Yeah.

And it’s just a card you would buy in a store, but it’s in her hand.

It’s really nice.

It’s really nice.

This whole letters connection to language.

Yes.

But it’s not just the language.

It’s the emotion and the history.

Right.

The family elements, as we say.

Right.

Right.

And the handwriting.

Right.

That feels different.

Very, very evocative.

In cursive, right?

Yeah.

Very evocative.

Yeah.

We’d love to hear the language that you picked up from the letters that your family wrote.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.