A listener in Omaha, Nebraska, says his mother always ends a phone conversation not with Goodbye, but mmm-bye. How common is that? This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Mmm-Bye”
Hi, you have A Way with Words.
Hello. My name is Chad Ecker, and I’m in Omaha, Nebraska.
Great.
I’m doing well.
Welcome to the show, Chad. How can we help?
Well, I had this question about a little language quirk that I kind of grew up with my mother saying, and I actually didn’t realize it was kind of out of the ordinary until I was older. Something she would do, and I think she got it from her mother as well, she would end every telephone conversation with Mbai, which I’ve never heard her say, like, in person. It was always just at the very tail end of the phone conversation. And I didn’t know if that was an idiosyncrasy of just my mother or if this was kind of a regional kind of thing. I don’t know. I was just kind of curious about it. And I wonder sometimes if I do it.
Yeah, I’m wondering if you do it, too.
Yeah.
So, yeah, I didn’t know. Because, I mean, in the Lincoln, Omaha area, we’re kind of known for our lack of specific kind of regional dialects because we’re telecommunication capital of the world. I don’t know if that’s still true. So I always find it kind of interesting, the little things that are kind of different. And that’s kind of one that’s always stuck with me.
Well, I know one other person that does it for sure, and that’s my father.
Oh, really?
Yeah, he’s in his 70s from Missouri, you know, St. Louis area mostly, although originally from southeast Missouri. He has some traits of various southern forms of speech, but he does it. He’s always done it as long as I know. It could be a serious conversation, say, with the bank, or it could be a conversation with, say, my son, his grandson, but he’ll close it with, mm-bye, mm-bye.
Right.
That’s something I’ve noticed. There’s no, like, tone to it. When my mother uses it, it could be a curt m-bye or a very pleasant m-bye. It has no reflection of any tone in her voice or anything.
Interesting.
It’s always the very last thing. It’s never m-bye, talk to you later. It’s just m-bye. M-bye.
There are phonetic things here, pretty simple. You basically have the elongation of the lips staying closed before you do the B sound. So because you’re voicing the m-ba, m-ba. So you’re just dragging out that. You can do it to any word that begins with it. You can do mm-basket. You could do mm-birch tree. Mm-baby. Mm-baby. And so it’s just holding that sound just a little longer before you release the lips to make that b.
But do either of you think that the mm has a meaning itself? Because I think it does.
Well, there are a number of amateur theories on the Internet where this is discussed, say, on the straight dope forums, for example, where people think that they’ve just dropped the good in goodbye or that they’ve just slurred some other syllable before that. But I don’t think that. I think it’s actually just the word bye alone with the initial sound being elongated.
Really? What do you think?
Well, it’s never like, it’s just, it seems like it’s just part of the bye. It’s never, she’s never responding to anything when she says, it’s never like, because I’ve also, I talked to my cousin who grew up in western Nebraska, and she uses K-by at the end. So I don’t know what that’s about. But for that, it seems more like she’s saying, okay, bye. But for my mother, it’s just part of the bye, and there’s no, I never sensed any other meaning in it, I guess.
That’s so interesting.
For me, the mm has a meaning. I guess I’ve just always assumed, it’s my own amateur theory, that the mmm is short for mm— which sort of acknowledges everything that you’ve just talked with the other person about. And you’re sort of agreeing to conclude the conversation, hang up, and you’re just saying mm-bye. But it’s mm-bye.
Oh, interesting.
But I have no evidence for that whatsoever. And I’ve only known one or two other people to do it, but it’s definitely noticeable when they do. My father does it as a reflexive conversational closing. And so it comes at a very particular moment in the conversation when we are doing the slow wind up to the end. Because most Americans don’t do abrupt closings in a conversation, particularly on the telephone. We do, okay, bye. I’ll talk to you then. All right, talk to you later. Love you. It’s nice to see you. Okay, bye. And there’s a bunch of these, one right after the other, different ways of saying goodbye, different ways of closing the conversation. So for him, it comes toward the end of that chain of closings, and it’s not any kind of consent or assent or anything like that.
Chad, we’re going to probably get a bunch of calls and emails about this to learn some more about M’Bai and who says it and where. I think there’s one mention of it on Urban Dictionary for what that’s worth, but I don’t know of any professional linguistic texts that have studied this particular closing. If we get more information about this from our listeners, we’ll talk about it on the show, all right?
All right. Well, thank you.
Thank you very much.
All right.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
We love talking about language and all of its weirdness.
Clearly.
The discussion of mmm-bye was a delight. A year ago, my South African friend asked me why Americans insist on saying “buh-bye” and “mmm-bye.” Before she asked, I had never consciously heard mmm-bye before. Now I seem to hear it all the time! Anyway, ever since she and I talked about mmm-bye last year, we simply end the calls between us with “mmm.”