Pear-Shaped

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alan in Indio.

Hi, Alan, how you doing?

Hi, Alan, welcome.

What’s up?

My question has to do with a word I have heard several times on Mythbusters. And when they are doing something and it goes wrong, they say everything went pear-shaped.

Mm—

Now, I have looked up pear-shaped, and the only reference Webster’s 10th Collegiate has is related to vocal production.

Oh, I thought you were going to say body type.

I think, you know, you eat a trifle or something, you get pear-shaped.

Right.

Then I went to an etymological online dictionary, and it said we don’t even know where pear came from.

The name of the fruit?

Yeah.

It’s an older word. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were probably a lot of theories about where it came from.

Right.

But pear-shaped is itself a really interesting term.

Did you look further into it? Did you get the connection to the Royal Air Force?

No, no.

Yeah, it’s funny about pear-shaped. It’s long since been borrowed into many other fields.

I’m not surprised it shows up with those knuckleheads on Mythbusters.

What, as opposed to the knuckleheads here?

It sounded very British to me, but I couldn’t figure out why.

Well, it pops up in the lexicon of the Royal Air Force basically during the Falkland Islands War. And it refers to aircraft that have crashed.

Because they go from being these sleek, long devices to being really big on one end when they hit the ground.

Oh.

Yeah, so they literally have one big end and another thin end, and they’re roughly the shape of a pear.

Wow.

So if something is pear-shaped, it has gone splat because of gravity.

I knew that it had gone awfully wrong, but I didn’t understand that connection.

So when you’re in a really boring presentation at work and somebody’s on a slide 100 of their slideshow and they use the word pear-shaped, you can just have a really nice moment and you’re like, he doesn’t even know.

-huh.

Okay.

But pear-shaped has got this great backstory.

What’s really interesting to me is it seems like a term that should have come up in the 1920s when aircraft became a thing.

I know they were really common.

But no, it wasn’t until the 80s that we really start to see it show up in print.

It could be older than that, but I’ll be darned if I can find anything earlier than that.

1980s.

Yeah.

Falkland War.

But that’s really fascinating because it seems like such a benign term, and it’s got this really grisly origin.

Yeah.

It’s sort of like Blockbuster. We think of that as being a great movie, but it’s also from the military, right?

Ammunition that can bust a block.

Yeah, a whole city block.

A city block, yeah.

Cool. Well, how do you do, Alan?

That’s wonderful.

Take care, Alan. Thank you so much for calling.

Bye-bye, Alan.

Thanks a lot, Grant and Martha.

Bye-bye.