Nancy in Dallas, Texas, shares a funny story about a preschooler’s misunderstanding of the expression in the meantime, meaning “in the interim.” The mean in meantime derives from a Latin medius, “in the middle,” the source also of such words as English meanwhile and the French word for “middle,” moyen. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “In the Meantime, Should We Be Worried?”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yes, this is Nancy Farrow from Dallas, Texas.
Hello, Nancy. Welcome to the show.
When I was teaching preschool, which was a very long time ago, one of my little students didn’t come to school, and her mother taught there also.
And I said, Marcia, what is wrong? Why isn’t Jill coming?
And she said, I don’t know. She’s afraid to come.
And I said, oh, gosh. So it went on for a couple of days, and then finally, Jill said that I kept saying there was going to be a mean time because we were getting ready for a big program.
And I would say, yeah, we’re going to do this and this.
But in the meantime, so Jill was afraid there was going to be a mean time.
A time to be mean?
She thought there was a time that everyone was going to be mean.
Exactly.
To avoid the mean time.
That makes perfect sense.
It’s perfectly logical, right?
If you didn’t know what in the meantime meant, that’s a great parsing of that phrase.
I know.
I wonder how she figured it out or who explained it to her.
I don’t know.
And I don’t know what Marcia said.
It was so long ago.
Her mom doesn’t live here anymore.
I did text Jill to tell her I was going to do this.
And she was pretty tickled because she has her own children now.
And she said they’re going to be excited to hear it.
And I guess what she didn’t understand was that mean in that sense means occupying a middle place.
It comes from a Latin word that has to do with the middle.
In fact, it’s related to words like middle, that kind of mean.
So mean is related to the French mohame, right?
Right.
Meaning middle.
Yeah, all those words.
Meantime, meanwhile.
Oh, poor little Jill.
I’m glad she figured it out.
Great. Well, Nancy, you’ve got to call us again sometime.
Maybe you’ll remember some other story like that.
All right. Thank you so much.
Take care of yourself.
All right. Bye-bye, Nancy.
Bye.
Bye.
Oh, we love those childhood misunderstandings.
And those stories from your past about language.
Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.
