Extraordinary Meanings of Ordinary

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Mary, and I live in Fort Worth.

Hi, Mary, welcome.

It’s nice to be here.

I have two expressions that I need some help with, and they’re really, it’s ancient history since I’m almost 87, and these words or expressions were heard when I was growing up.

My mother would say, for instance, when a dog asked out, and we’d put him outside, and we’d watch him run around and run around as dogs do looking for the right spot, Mother would say, look, he’s on a still hunt, S-T-I-L-L hunt.

I’ve never heard that expression.

Mm—

And what did she mean by he’s on a still hunt?

Well, I don’t know. He was just looking around to find the right place to go. And so she would say, he’s on a still hunt. And I thought that was just something Mother said.

It’s a widespread expression. If you’ve ever done any hunting, you might know it. It’s a kind of hunting where you don’t know where your prey is, and you don’t sit still. You walk slowly and quietly, looking from side to side to look for the deer or the rabbits or whatever it is that you’re hunting. That’s a still hunt.

In politics, which is where I first encountered it, a still hunt is something a little different. It’s kind of almost a surreptitious campaign where your opponents don’t quite realize what you’re up to until it’s too late.

There are a lot of different kinds of still hunts. And so you sometimes find in the by-elections, say the years where there’s not a presidential election, it used to be common where a party would figure out if they could get candidates on the ticket in all the regional and local elections and get all their core supporters out without any advertising, they could take every office. Because people tend not to vote in elections where there are no presidents being decided. And those are called still hunt campaigns or still hunt elections.

So the still in this has to do with not chasing so much? You are calmly, slowly, quietly walking. Your dogs, if you bring hunting dogs, are not barking or baying. You’re not beating the brush to chase the animals forward. There’s no fox calls or anything like that, no trumpeting or anything like that. But you’re also not standing still. You’re not in a hide or a shelter or a deer stand. You are moving when you’re looking for your prey.

Well, that’s so interesting. I have another one for you. Would you like to try again?

Oh, yes, please. This is what Mother would say when describing people who she felt were simply not up to her standards. She would say, they’re so ordinary. And her tone let me know that she just didn’t approve of these people.

I’ve never heard anyone describe people that way.

That’s interesting because ordinary sounds like such a neutral term, but she was using it in a negative way, correct?

Right. It was very derogatory. It sort of looked down her nose, you know? That meaning of ordinary to refer to somebody as crass or rude or vulgar or low class has been around since the 1600s, but it’s never been terribly common. It does still exist in some varieties of American English, particularly in the South, where you use ordinary not to mean regular or common.

Well, you use it to mean common in the negative sense, which is like not of high class, not of good breeding, not of good taste. It reminds me of Downton Abbey, you know. You can just see Maggie Smith saying, they’re so ordinary.

And we’ve talked about this once on the show before, but I think it bears repeating, Mary. Ordinary became the word ornery and kept some of that negative meaning. And ornery is a corruption of ordinary. Sometimes pronounced ornery.

That’s the way I pronounce it, which sounds even more like ordinary. That’s another Southern expression. I was built in Memphis, and so perhaps that has something to do with it.

So that’s so interesting. You’ve helped me solve a mystery, and thank you so much.

It’s quite a pleasure, Mary. Thank you for calling.

Bye-bye, Mary. It was fun. Take care now. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

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