Like the boy when the calf ran over him, “I had nothing to say,” is an old saying describing someone who’s speechless, and goes back to the mid-19th century. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Nothing to Say”
I came across an expression the other day that really caught my fancy.
It has to do with describing when you’re speechless.
You’re so surprised that you’re speechless.
Okay.
And you say, I felt like the boy when the calf ran over him.
Have you heard this?
No, I haven’t.
That sounds terrible.
What happened?
I don’t know, but I thought that this must be like a one-off, but then I started looking for it, and it appears again and again in books.
How far back does it go?
At least to the mid-1800s.
It makes me think of little kids, you know, when something really surprising happens and they just sort of stand there dumbfounded, you know?
Yeah, yeah.
I mean, having something unexpected, I don’t know.
But if you Google this, you come across a lot of uses of, like the boy when the calf ran over him, I had nothing to say.
Like the boy when the calf.
Yeah.
I wonder if there’s a connection there, some story that we don’t know about.
That’s what I was wondering, or a joke or a song.
A famous book or a passage in the Bible or something.
If I could overthink this for a minute, I wonder if it’s about misjudging the baby animal.
Oh, that could be it.
Because it’s a baby animal, you’re like, oh, it’s just a baby cow.
It can’t hurt me.
And yet, it’s still two or three times the size of a boy, even though it is just an infant itself.
Maybe that’s it.
And then, you know, you get knocked over and there’s really nothing more to say.
No.
You’re done, and the calf is capering in the fields.
Yeah.
So I wonder if any of our listeners have heard their parents or grandparents use that term,
Or maybe you use it yourself.
Like the boy who was run over by the calf.
C-A-L-F, right?
Like the boy when the calf ran over him.
Like the boy when the calf ran over him.
C-A-L-F.
All right.
Let us know.
Email words@waywordradio.org.
