If I Tell You A Hen Dips Snuff

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. If I tell you a hen-dip snuff, you can look under its wing and you’ll find a whole can. That means what I’m saying is true, and if you don’t believe it, you can check it out for yourself. And I never knew that expression until I learned it recently from one of our listeners in Huntsville, Alabama, where we were doing a live performance at the invitation of the wonderful public radio station there, WLRH. This listener brought up a version of that phrase during the Q&A, and it turns out that this phrase is well-established in African-American vernacular English. In fact, jazz great Louis Armstrong once used it in a letter to his biographer. He wrote, if I tell you that a hen dips snuff, you just look under her wings and you’ll find a whole can full, meaning I don’t waste words either. I love it, and I love the layers in that expression because it plugs into the expression about hen’s teeth, which they don’t have.

And so the question is, where is the hen putting the snuff?

I never thought about that.

Maybe she’s sniffing it.

I don’t know what she’s doing.

Well, we learn a whole lot from our listeners every time we’re on the road. Martha and I carry notebooks or record messages on our phones so we can look things up later. We’ll talk about what we learned from high schoolers in Huntsville as well.

And you can find out where else we’re going in the world on our events page at waywordradio.org/events.

And you can contact us wherever you are in the world at waywordradio.org/contact.