Over Yonder

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Debbie Heron from Burlington, Vermont.

Well, hiya, Debbie. How you doing? Welcome to the show.

Thanks. Good to be here.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was curious about the saying, way over yonder.

Like, there’s a barn way over yonder that’s on fire. Maybe you should get some water?

Yeah, that’s it.

Well, Debbie, what got you to wondering about this one?

Well, my parents moved to central Florida a couple years ago, and I grew up in South Florida, which is really not south.

No, no.

Florida is very southern.

And I was walking one day, and this water main had broken, and water was coming down into this lake, and I didn’t, you know, I wasn’t near home, and I didn’t know the numbers.

So I saw this woman, and I went over and I asked her, are you going home? Could you call the water department?

And she says, well, I live way over yonder, and I’m not going to be getting there too soon.

And I’m like, oh, my gosh.

I may have heard that before, but I was kind of surprised.

Wow.

So you were surprised that people use yonder in everyday speech, right?

Yeah.

I mean, I probably heard it when I was young by my great-grandmother, but I don’t remember.

Like right now, you know, I live up in New England, and they don’t say way over yonder up here.

Or maybe you remember it from Shakespeare, but soft what? Light through yonder window breaks.

Oh, yeah.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Yeah, but I’m not surprised that you don’t hear it up there.

I see it generally in the south, and it’s a fantastically archaic word, you know?

I mean, it’s almost poetic, isn’t it?

People in the rest of the country probably know it but don’t use it.

Right.

Yeah, maybe know it from songs or from Shakespeare, but it is this sort of marvelous linguistic fossil that goes all the way back to 1300 or so.

But it seems to have dropped out in other parts of the country, but I certainly heard it all the time growing up.

I wouldn’t say that it’s archaic now, though.

It’s just a regional feature.

Or dialectal, yeah.

Yeah, okay, good.

It’s not something you’re going to hear the NBC nightly newscasters say, right?

Over yonder in the Middle East today.

No, they’re not going to do that.

You know what it reminds me of, Debbie? The word reckon.

In the United States, reckon kind of has the same notions that yonder has.

When you hear reckon, you think of either rural speech or southern speech.

And yet, in the United Kingdom, reckon is an everyday word for many British English speakers.

So you might actually have somebody just say to you, yeah, I reckon that’s correct.

And they’re not from anywhere in particular.

It’s just a normal part of their speech.

Yeah, reckon that water means over yonder.

I reckon so.

Well, Debbie, are you going to adopt it into your vocabulary or just…

I think I will.

I’m going to have to use reckon, too.

All right.

Well, thanks for giving us a call, Debbie.

We’re glad to help out.

Well, thanks for listening, and we’ll see you over yonder sometime.

Okay.

All right.

Bye now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

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