Eva from Honolulu asks about the family expression infra dig — heard by her as “in for a dig” — for something too undignified to do, such as asking dinner hosts for leftovers. The phrase is a clipped form of Latin infra dignitatum, “beneath one’s dignity,” with infra meaning “below.” Its modern-sounding dig has nothing to do with slang “dig” meaning “to understand” or “to appreciate”; it comes from the beginning of dignitatum. Such Latin abbreviations were once common among schoolboys in the U.K. studying classical texts. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Infra Dig Means Beneath One’s Dignity”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Eva from Honolulu.
Hi, Eva. Welcome to the program.
Hi, Eva.
Hi.
How can we help you today?
Well, I was coming back from Thanksgiving dinner with my brother, and we had been really quite disappointed because our host had said that they’d made two turkeys so there would be lots of extras, and we kind of waited for them to offer us a little bit of turkey to take home, and it didn’t come.
So on the way home we were talking, and we said, well, we would have asked, but it would have been, and both of us simultaneously said, in for a dig.
And we realized as we were talking that this was a word our mother used and that we never used it with anyone else, but somehow it popped out of both our mouths at the same time.
So I was wondering where that term comes from, if it’s from some part of the country, or if it’s a word that’s in common usage.
Nice. And Eva, what does it mean?
Lacking in dignity is how I would think of it as. I think that would be my general sense of it.
Excellent. Well, you’ve just about gone right back to the original Latin, which was infradignitatum, which means under one’s dignity, beneath one’s dignity.
Okay, that makes sense.
Yeah, it’s a shortening of that.
And infra is like infrared, is the wavelength that’s not visible. It’s below the spectrum that we can see.
So infradig was something that you heard among your family.
Yes, and I really don’t think anyone outside of my family, certainly not in Hawaii, I’ve never heard it.
It’s pretty rare being a Latin phrase originally, and you’re probably only going to hear it among people who are fairly literate.
Now that would have been my mom.
And what throws people when they first hear it, or even after they’ve heard it for a while, is that the dig sounds so contemporary.
It just immediately calls to mind the slang, do you dig it or can you dig it, right?
Oh, okay. Never thought of it that way.
Yeah, or dig. But it’s just a shortened form of dignitatum.
I think my mom may have studied Latin in high school.
There you go.
Yeah.
Among school boys in the U.K., there was a fad and a custom at one time for the longer Latin phrases that they had to learn when they were studying the various classical texts.
They would just shorten them.
And some of these abbreviations became very standard, and this is one of them.
Thank you so much. It’s been great. I appreciate it.
Thanks, Eva. Bye-bye.
Bye.
Take care. Bye-bye.
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