In Mud Eels Are

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. Hi, my name’s Laurie, and I’m from the Boston area.

I want to ask something that my grandfather used to say. As my brothers and sister and I were growing up, my father’s father, he’d occasionally take us aside and say, did you know? In Medeals are in Clay Nanner, in Pine Tareds, in Oak Nunners. And he’d say, what are you saying, Grampy?

Oh, you’re going to have to repeat that again for us.

I will. I will. He’d say, you speak English, listen again. And he’d repeat, in mud eels or in plain none are in pine towers and oak none are. Which he had no idea what he was saying. It sounds like something played backwards.

I’ve heard that it can sound like Latin or just it does not sound like English. But he’d say, in mud eels, I get it? In mud eels are. It’s like eels are in mud.

Yes. In mud eels are. And then in clay none are. In clay none are. And then in pine tar is. In pine tar is. And in oak none is. In oak none is. That thing, it’s been passed on in our family. In fact, I taught it to my oldest grandchild who’s 13. He gets a big kick out of it.

And my question is, the way he’s talking, is that a thing? And his parents and all his siblings were born in England.

Oh, gotcha. Okay. North of England, a town called Blackburn. And he was the first one. Then they moved to the United States, to Newbury, and he was the first one to be born there.

This is a good clue because the great British folklorists, Iona and Peter Opie, who I’ve talked about on the show numerous times because I love their work. They have a book called the Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes, and other sources and other reference works have also talked about this. But they’ve kind of collected what is known about this expression that your grandfather used because it’s an established expression.

And it’s said so fast like that to make it sound like false Latin. It sounds mystical or magical or like something you might hear in church. And one of the things that they point out is through a complicated path of research works is that a version of this shows up in a medical manuscript from 500 years ago.

Is that right? 500 years ago? It’s very similar. And then we find versions of it again and again, popping up well into the 1800s when it becomes more common. And the other thing about this, and maybe you know this already, but there’s two more lines that sometimes go with this, where you follow it with goat, eat ivy, mare, eat oats.

That’s like the song from the 40s.

Yes. Yeah. Mare’s eat oats and goat’s eat oats. Some little lambs eat ivy. Wouldn’t you like to eat it? A kid’ll eat ivy too.

Yeah, exactly. And so that goes back 500 years. The original version in Henry VI’s time was, is thy parenti colant, is God eat ivy, mere eat odies, is thy cock like a rooster. I’m meaning rooster.

Yeah, so it’s funny. So it’s like this song, which became big in 1943, actually goes back to like the 1400s.

Wow. Crazy, right? I found even when I tell it people, even if I say it slow, in my deal, sir, they still, you’ve got to have it broken down even more than that.

There has been some work done by linguists using this particular expression that you relate here from your grandfather in transcription exercises where they get people to try to write it out phonetically just to see how people hear and how they can best describe what they’re hearing in text form. And people almost always write it differently from each other.

People can’t really hear it when it’s said at speed like that. It’s very hard to parse it and break it out into its separate words. And it’s partly because it’s all these one and two syllable words.

Isn’t it? Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Lori, I think it’s beautiful that you’ve passed that down to a whole other generation.

Yeah. I mean, it goes for my grandfather to my father, to us, to my children, to my grandchildren. So that’s five generations right there.

Oh, wow. I’ve experienced five generations, but not that it was but five centuries. How about that?

Right. How about that? Well, this has been a delightful. Lori, thank you for sharing your memories with us and sharing this one more time before we go. Let’s hear it really fast.

In Medillus, the Ring, Clay, Nanner, and Pine, Towers, and Oak, Nanners. That I’ll say. We’ll put it on the website for everyone to enjoy.

Oh, good. Thank you so much. It’s fabulous. Take care of yourself.

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