Nairn

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jane. I’m calling from a little town about 30 miles east of Tallahassee, Monticello, Florida.

Okay, well.

Jefferson County.

Welcome to the show.

Monticello, Florida. Welcome.

Thank you.

How can we help you?

Thank you. Well, I teach school. I did teach school over here for a number of years, and I heard many times in our community a word that I’ve never heard before.

I’m from Louisville, Kentucky.

I’ve lived in Corpus Christi and Athens, and I’ve never heard this term.

But if a person was asked, do you want any peaches, they might say, I don’t want nairn.

Or do you have any peaches, they would say, I don’t want nairn or ain’t not nairn.

You can figure out what the word means, obviously, but I didn’t know what the origin of that word was.

I wondered if it came from the word nary.

Thought maybe y’all could tell me.

Mm-nary.

And so how are you spelling nairn?

I have no earthly idea.

I’ve never seen it in print.

N-A-R-N, I suppose.

Nairn-a-one.

Nairn-a-one.

Is that it?

Are there any peaches left?

Nairn-a-one.

Actually, it’s a contraction of never-a-one.

Never-a-one.

Never-a-one.

And it goes back hundreds of years.

Double negatives were much more common in English early on.

In Old English, they’re really common.

Yeah, and they don’t make a positive. What they make is an extra negative.

Yes.

It’s even more negative.

Yeah, yeah. So we ain’t got nairn. We ain’t got never a one.

Wow, so extremely very clear. We don’t have any at all.

And so this is common in the American South, right?

Yeah, the South, the South Midlands. My grandmother, Winnie, used to say that.

She was a mountain woman who said, you know, nairn and fotched for fetch, past tense.

Fotched, yeah.

So Nair one, and it’s related to Nary, right?

As Jane suggested, right?

So Nair or Nairn or Nary.

And am I reading this correctly?

It also exists in some of the dialects in the UK, right?

Yes.

Okay.

Yes, it does.

So it has a long, long history.

It is really surprising if you look in some of the dictionaries of Southern American English,

How specific this is to the American South

And how rare it is to hear this outside of the American South, at least in this continent.

Yeah, and I usually see it spelled when it’s spelled N-A-I-R-N.

Nairn.

Does that make sense, Jane?

It makes a lot of sense.

You’ve set up a lot of things, and it doesn’t sound like it’s terribly unusual, although I had never heard it.

Maybe I’ve just not lived in the right part of the country or talked to the right people.

Well, and it could be becoming even more old-fashioned.

It’s possibly one of those terms on the way out.

I don’t know.

And I don’t know where I first heard it.

I certainly did so much reading of authors like Faulkner and Twain that I’ve no doubt read it as a boy.

So I don’t even know if my family in Missouri says it.

I don’t know.

So, Jane?

Well, thank you very much for all your information.

Our pleasure.

We’re glad to help.

Thanks for calling.

Good luck down there.

Goodbye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.