Jesse in Gainesville, Florida, says that when he was growing up in Northern Minnesota, he often heard the expression “Oh, for…!”, as in “Oh, for cute!”, “Oh, for nice!”, or “Oh, for dumb!: This idiomatic construction usually expresses judgment, is largely confined to Minnesota, and may be a calque from German or a Scandinavian language. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Oh, For Nice!”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Yeah, hi, this is Jesse calling from Gainesville, Florida.
Hi, Jesse, welcome.
Thanks. I grew up in northern Minnesota, and up there, there was this phrase that I heard, and I haven’t heard it anywhere else. And it was constructed like they would say, oh, for, and then an adjective. So for example, they’d say, oh, for cute, or oh, for nice, or oh, for dumb.
Yeah.
And so I was just wondering, like I said, I haven’t heard it anywhere else, so I was curious where that came from, how widespread it is, and if there’s any other adjectives that are used in that construction.
Oh, I love it.
So it’s oh, O-H-O, for F-O-R, and then some adjective, usually expressing a judgment of some kind.
Right.
The ones I’ve heard are cute, nice, dumb, stupid, maybe gross.
Yeah.
Oh, for gross.
Yeah, those are all familiar to me. And it is very Minnesotan. Occasionally you’ll find people saying it in Utah and some other places. But it is widely known almost to the point of being what I call a chamber of commerce expression where people from Minnesota know that they say it. So they kind of say it because they say it. You know, it’s kind of a circular reinforcement of the habit and the thing that they’ve got that differentiates them from other people.
There’s a stress on the oh, right? It’s not oh for cute. It’s oh for cute, something like that.
Yeah, yeah, and I’ve only ever heard it with the oh at the beginning.
Right, right. Although we do have other constructions without the oh that use for followed by an adjective, where you might say for real or for good or for sure. So we have similar constructions that do other things. Those tend to be adverbial, whereas the oh for good is an emphatic or the oh for cute, where you’re expressing with an interjection your opinion on this matter.
And often it’s self-referential, right? It’s either a compliment of whatever you’re saying, or you’re talking a lot about yourself, at least in the uses I’ve seen.
No?
Well, the way I remember it, and this is when I was a little kid, so I might have a foggy memory, but I remember it being like, oh, you’d see a baby, you’d say, oh, if her cute.
Oh, gotcha.
And it almost seems like the for was taking place of maybe the word how, like, you know, oh, how cute.
Right.
It’s very similar to that. It’s idiomatic in Minnesota, so it seems normal. And it’s not idiomatic outside of Minnesota, more or less. It seems strange to us. And so idiomatic expressions have this quirk about them where when they’re not part of our natural sociolect or idiolect, then they’re just foreign and strange. But if you grew up with it, it probably seems normal.
One of the books that I read suggests that it’s largely a feminine usage. Does that ring any bells with you? Does it seem like something women are more likely to say than men?
Yes, definitely.
Oh, okay.
Yeah, because I hear my grandma, and I hear my cousin, and maybe my mom. But yeah, now that you say that, I don’t remember a lot of men saying that.
So there have been some suggestions that it comes from one of the languages that were spoken by the people who settled in Minnesota. So German or Scandinavian language. I have not been able to run that down and to prove that beyond a doubt, but it is a suggestion that it’s what’s called a calc, C-A-L-C-U-E, where this particular construction exists in another language, and then they simply mapped the English words to the syntax of the other language in order to get the oh for cute or the oh for adjective expression.
Another thing I can throw in here, which I haven’t seen published in any of my reference works, is that we have evidence of it at least back to the 1920s.
Okay.
Yeah, so it’s got a long history here. We’re talking nearly 100 years at least, and it’s probably older than that. So it’s nothing new.
And it’s still being used, I assume?
Yeah, yeah.
Oh, it’s widespread. It’s super common. You’ll find it in online discussions and social media posts and people just kind of unremarkably and unironically using it as an everyday expression.
I like it. I might adopt that. Oh, for nice. Oh, for fun. Oh, for fun. This has been fun. Thank you so much for calling.
Jesse, thanks, bud.
Thank you for answering my question. I appreciate it.
Bye-bye.
All right.
Bye-bye.
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