Old as My Tongue

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Gail Bosworth in Montgomery, Alabama.

Gail from Montgomery, welcome to the show.

How are you doing, Gail? What can we help you with?

Well, I have a little bit of a convoluted story.

My mother’s eldest sister was supposed to be a boy, and she would have been named after my grandfather, Andrew.

Okay.

Well, because she was a girl, they did her the honor of naming her Wordna, which is Andrew spelled backwards.

No.

How’d she like that?

And this dear lady went through her life with the name of Word or Wordy.

Are you serious?

They didn’t just call her Andrea?

I love it.

How’d she like it?

Well, she was a very neat little old lady. She used to call me old woman, terrified me, wore corset, very strict.

But if you asked her how old she was, and she was the eldest female in the family, she would say, I’m as old as my tongue and a little bit older than my teeth.

So I wondered where that phrase came from.

And by that she meant what?

That her teeth came in when she was a baby.

They weren’t there when she was born, right?

Exactly.

That’s funny.

That one actually goes back to the famous satirist Jonathan Swift in the 1700s.

He included it in one of them.

Yeah, and Jonathan Swift, there’s been long periods in the Anglophone world where Jonathan Swift was a must-read in a variety of different coursework for a variety of different universities and colleges.

So there was plenty of opportunity for everyone to pick that up from Jonathan Swift and then to spread it further from there.

My goodness.

Yeah.

How about that?

Was she college-educated? Perhaps she read it herself.

She was not college-educated. Now her mother had gone to college.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

But it’s got a really strong life ever since the 1700s.

About 1738, I think it was published in, oh, what was it called?

Polite Conversation, I believe.

There’s like a collection of three essays or something.

Oh, I’m tickled that y’all know.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it’s popped up also famously in Gross’s Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue in 1811.

And this is kind of the first really well-known slang dictionary that every lexicographer will spend some time with just because it starts to lay the foundation for separating slang out from standard English.

But I tell you, after you read that dictionary or read parts of it, you’re going to want to wash yourself with lye soap.

It’s pretty filthy.

It’s about the low life, pretty much.

A lot of gutter rolling there.

Oh, my.

But, Gail, Aunt Wordy.

Aunt Wordy.

Aunt Wordy.

She was something.

Let’s hear it for Aunt Wordy, all right?

Yeah, bless her soul.

Gail, thanks for calling today.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

I appreciate the information.

Bye now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

We know you’ve got a ton of these kind of expressions floating around in your head.

Give us a call about a couple of them, 877-929-9673, or email us.

Tell us the whole story, words@waywordradio.org.