Mash the Brake

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mike Semrau, and I’m calling from Braver City, Michigan.

Welcome to the program, Mike. How can we help?

Well, before we arrived here a few years ago, we lived about 30 years in Atlanta, Georgia.

And you might guess we picked up or heard a lot of southern phrases.

And most you can find on Google are kind of quaint, and they don’t get in your vocabulary.

Like fixing to go somewhere.

But some of those in the general business routine did get my attention,

And that’s what I had called for.

I worked 15 years with a company headquartered in the South,

And for all those years I would experience the use of MASH,

As in entering the elevator and hearing someone say,

MASH 14, please.

I thought of mash as a rather harsh word.

You know what I mean?

Yeah, you think of it as being a violent or destructive action, right?

Yeah, a little rough, yeah, as opposed to something as simple as, I might have used the word push.

Or press.

Yeah, so mash is distinctly southern, right, Martha?

Yeah, it is.

It creeps upward, a little north, but when you get to Michigan, they definitely don’t say it in Michigan, or very few people do.

Yeah, and it’s not that it means something different.

It just means something additional in the South.

In fact, I remember when my dad was teaching me to drive, he was from North Carolina, and he said, mash the brake.

And so I hit it really hard, just not even thinking.

Instead, he just meant press.

Well, maybe he was scared.

That’s cute.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought about mashing the brake, but I’ve heard that one as well.

It does seem to happen mostly with buttons and pedals, though, right?

That’s what’s a mash.

There aren’t many other things that are mashed in this other way where most of the rest of the English-speaking world would say press or push.

Yeah, I’m not sure about mashing the potatoes.

They could have been whipped.

That’s true.

It could be, and if it was used that way as mashed, it didn’t catch on with me because I already had that in my vocabulary.

Mike, thank you so much for calling.

You’re very welcome. It was fun talking to you.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

You bet.

Bye-bye now.

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