Not One Iota

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, great. Who’s this?

This is Jeff, calling from Columbus, Indiana.

Hello, Jeff. Welcome to the program.

Well, my dad used to use the phrase, well, he would say he would use the term one iota.

In other words, he would say something like, I went to the store and there was no bread.

I mean, none, not one iota.

And he used that a lot.

And, of course, I grew up hearing that since I was a little boy, so I always knew what he meant.

But as years go by, I question what that meant or if there was any connection to any true meaning to that other than just something he used.

All right.

Well, we can definitely help you with this one, Jeff.

Iota is the smallest letter in the Greek alphabet.

It looks kind of like a letter I, right?

Yeah, only it’s tiny.

It almost looks like an apostrophe or a comma or something.

Sometimes in some forms of certain Greek words, it looks so tiny, it just looks like a speck that you want to flick off the page.

And so even the ancient Greeks used the word iota or iota in ancient Greek to mean something that’s really, really tiny.

So not one iota is not one little tiny thing.

Even in the Gospel of Matthew, the fifth chapter, all that business about the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus uses the word to mean something tiny, tiny, tiny.

I see.

And this also reminds me of a jot, right?

Not a jot of something left, you know, not a jot of tobacco left in the bag, right?

Right.

Not one jot or tittle.

I mean, that’s from the fifth book of Matthew.

Right.

Very good.

And jot and iota have the same etymological root, right?

Yeah, they kind of look like each other, huh?

You know, there’s an interesting connection to what you just shared with me, which was that my dad was a minister.

There you go.

And was he classically trained?

Did he have a little bit of Greek or any other classical languages?

He was not classically trained.

I mean, he did attend a seminary, and how much of this was brought out in that, I have no idea.

But it is interesting that you connected that as you did, and in fact, he was a minister, so that’s interesting to me.

Yeah, well, as a preacher’s kid, I can tell you that a lot of the language there gets picked up

And is passed on around the family and to the congregation.

Like this one.

Yeah, that’s really very good to know.

I had no idea.

This has been part of our life, like I said, since I was a little boy.

And it’s really great to hear what the meaning of this word is.

Well, that just gives us a great deal of pleasure.

Thank you so much, Jeff.

That’s very cool.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Yeah.

The religious connection, the Bible connection,

Reminds me of that new book by David Crystal called Baguette.

And he talks in this book specifically about all of the different expressions and phrases

And even just kind of unusual words or characteristic words that we have in English

That we got from the different versions of the Bible.

Okay.

And this is one of those.

I’m putting that on my wish list right now.

Yeah, that’s David Crystal’s Bagat.

We’ll make a link to the Amazon page for that.

Tell us about what your parents used to say, 877-929-9673,

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.