MerPeople and Their Mer Language

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. A mermaid is a fabulous sea creature with the body of a human and the tail of a fish. And the linguistic roots of this word go way, way back into antiquity. So mermaid shares a common ancestor with words like marine and maritime and even marinate and of course the Spanish word for ocean, mar. But what I didn’t know until recently is that mermaid is also a verb.

I learned that from a remarkable new documentary called Merpeople. And it’s about people who portray mermaids both as amateurs and professionals at tourist attractions. And you can find this on Netflix. It’s a fascinating look at this subculture. Half the time I watched it with my jaw on the floor, sometimes I watched it with my heart in my throat, because sometimes this free diving in costume is not without risk. But what’s fascinating to watch as a language person is how slang naturally arises in that subculture. For example, if you’re going to mermaid, you need to wear an ornate heavy tail made of latex or silicone or fabric, and after a session in the water, when you’re wriggling out of one, you detail. And putting on your tail is a lot of work. And if you’re not right next to the water, then you have to have help from another person getting the whole thing on and have them carry you to the water. And those people are called wranglers.

Now, some of these coinages are a bit self-conscious and a lot of them involve puns because merrs, as they call themselves, will sometimes greet each other with shallow rather than hello.

Oh, that’s terrible.

I know, it’s terrible.

And some of them take selfies with their phones.

But I’ve since found out that my friend Whitney belongs to a pod of merpeople here in San Diego. She’s part of the Ocean Beach pod.

And she confirmed that many mermaids do greet each other with shalom.

But when I first heard this in the documentary, I thought they were saying shalom. And I thought, well, I guess there could be Jewish mermaids because one of the striking things about the mermaid community is that it is incredibly diverse and welcoming.

Mers come in all shapes and sizes. They represent a variety of ethnicities, of body types, of physical abilities.

And anyway, the movie is this fascinating look at a subculture, if only to watch that new language bubbling up, as it were.

It’s called Mer People, and it’s by Oscar-winning director Cynthia Wade.

I don’t think there’s a pun intended there.

If you’ve got cool language in a community that you’re a part of, Martha and I really love to hear about it.

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