Makes No Never Mind

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tor Borkstrom from Vermont.

Tor?

Tor, T-O-R.

Okay.

Welcome. What’s going on?

Yeah, I listened to your show last week, and I was really intrigued with the vernacular from different areas of the country, you know?

And I was born in New Jersey, and when I was 13 years old, my family moved to rural Northeast Kingdom, Vermont.

And the first day, the next first day, my neighbor came by, and he said a phrase that to this day I have yet to understand.

And it’s, make no never mind to me.

And I looked at him, and I was like, what’s that mean?

And Tor, what was he talking about?

You have to understand, we were like 13-year-old kids.

And I went from suburbia to a farm with 40 cows.

Why?

And that was in the day when they had rectangular hay bales.

And they wanted to play in my barn.

And I was like, why?

And apparently they had built all these little tunnels, you know, by stacking the bales of hay a certain way.

Oh, sure, yeah.

So it’s like, well, do you want to, like, ride bikes?

It’s like, makes no never mind of me.

You’re saying that he didn’t care.

That’s really what I think it means, you know, one way or the other.

You know, makes no never mind of me.

But just to put those words together just really doesn’t make much sense to me.

It’s sprinkled throughout the United States, maybe a little more southern than anywhere else.

I’m kind of surprised to hear it in Vermont.

Yeah, I’m very surprised.

But never mind here is kind of behaving like a noun.

So think about it as a hyphenated compound, never hyphen mind like that.

And the best suggestion I’ve seen about the probable origin of this comes from a 1982 article by Jerry Cohen.

In the Journal of American Speech.

And he wrote about his theory that perhaps this is a speaker’s blending of some other similar phrases.

Like you might say, I don’t pay that no attention.

I don’t mind what he says.

I don’t care about that.

That don’t make me no difference.

That doesn’t make any difference to me.

All these different ways of expressing negation kind of combined where nevermind starts to stand as its own little thing,

Like as a response that you might say to something like,

Do you want to go through the maze with me?

Do you want to go through the hay maze with me?

Oh, I don’t care.

Do whatever you want.

Never mind me.

Just do your own thing.

So never mind starts to get its own identity as a noun rather than mind being a verb there.

That’s so interesting to me.

I mean, I heard it growing up in the South.

And when I think of that expression, my voice goes up an octave and I lose the R.

Oh, really?

That don’t make no never mind me.

I mean, and it said in…

Yeah. It’s said in a way that’s sort of making fun of oneself.

Oh, really? Okay.

Don’t make none of that mind to me.

It was interesting in this article by Jerry Cohen from 1982, he quizzed a bunch of students from around the country.

He was on a university campus and some of them reported they use it in anger, but many of them reported humorous uses.

But his was a small sample.

I just know that we’ve heard this from a wide variety of people around the country.

And it’s popped up here and there in movies and books.

And so some people have heard it who don’t actually use it, so that makes it seem maybe a little more current than it is.

It is still in use, though.

Well, great. Fantastic.

Tor, it’s good to speak with you.

Yes, this was so exciting.

Thank you, sir. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

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