Like It or Lump It

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, is this Martha?

Yes, who’s this?

Martha, this is Charles, and I’m in Charlottesville, Virginia.

Hi, Charles, welcome.

Hi, Charles, how are things in Charlottesville?

Hey, just great.

My question goes to a program recently,

Masterpiece Theater on PBS,

Called Downton Abbey.

Oh, yeah.

And it is a, is it a period?

Yeah, period piece, yeah.

Period piece, sure.

Having to do with the time in the first session, at least the first season,

Exactly between the sinking of the Titanic and the start of World War I.

Now, there are various phrases that are tossed about, some of which are alive very much today.

One of which I stumbled upon was, put that in your pipe and smoke it, delivered by Maggie Smith.

Oh, my. I love that image.

And someone said, if so-and-so doesn’t like it, he can lump it.

And I wondered if both of those phrases and others, not the least of which is,

One of the servants, O’Brien, is told by the lady of the house,

You’re sailing perilously close to the wind.

Whether all of those phrases, the last one I can kind of interpret, nautical phrase, of course,

But the first two, still common very much today, were they common then?

And is that something we want to discuss?

Sure. I love that expression, like it or lump it.

Yeah, and I don’t know where it comes from.

Well, there is an old sense of lump as a verb to mean to look sulky or disagreeable.

So like it or lump it, that goes back to at least a century earlier.

Yeah, yeah, 1830s or earlier.

Well, at least 100 years before the period that you’re talking about.

Yeah.

Okay.

About 100 years.

Yeah.

Okay, so it’s legit that that be in the…

Yeah, it’s a rare use of the verb lump, meaning to deal with something in a sulky or kind of grumbly way.

Yeah.

Okay.

Let them lump it if they don’t like it.

Yeah, there you go.

Lots of variations.

Yeah.

And I always love to put that in your pipe and smoke it, mainly because it makes me think of my Uncle Ernest,

Who has long since gone who smoked a pipe.

And so, you know, when you have a pipe smoker in your life,

That particular aroma of their tobacco is always associated with that person.

I just realized I miss pipe cleaners.

My dad smoked a pipe, and I used to do the coolest things with pipe cleaners and no more.

But put that in your pipe and smoke it is from just about the same period.

We have citations for that back to the 1820s,

Meaning that people used it exactly as we use it today,

Meaning whether you like it or not, take that and just deal with it in any way you can.

It’s very much related to like it or lump it.

Is that right?

I thought it would have gone back to the 60s or something.

No.

That kind of pipe.

No, it’s older than that.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, Dickens used the variation of an 1830s,

And pretty much it just keeps coming up again and again and again.

Writers love it.

I don’t know that people say it all together that much aloud,

But writers love that expression.

It’s a bit of color that they can use.

All right.

The final one, then, is sailing perilously close to the wind.

That’s a warning to the servant who has gotten a little out of hand and has said things maybe she shouldn’t have.

To the wind.

I could see if it was to the sun, maybe alluding that they were Icarus, right?

Icarus, right.

I don’t know that one.

That’s a big hunk for me.

Surely from the period, sailing was far more common and prevalent, right?

So I could see it coming from sailing.

Gee, if only we lived on the coast, Grant.

Oh, wait, we do.

There are lots of people.

Yeah.

Well, Charles, I guess we’ll have to put that in our pipe and smoke it.

All right.

Well, then.

But thank you.

You have a great show, and I listen to it regularly.

Thank you so much for calling, Charles.

Well, thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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