Shut your piehole! means “Shut your mouth!” Dave in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, heard it during a tense exchange at a mechanic’s shop. Piehole appears to be a U.S. offshoot of the older cakehole, recorded from the 1940s and likely associated with British schoolboy slang. By the 1960s, cakehole had somehow become piehole in American English. Other slangy mouth terms include potato trap, bun trap, gingerbread trap, kissing trap, yap, and bazoo. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Shut Your “Cakehole” to “Piehole””
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Dave calling from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.
Hello, Dave. Welcome to the program.
Thank you.
What’s going on?
Well, I’ve got a goofy question for you.
Yeah, I was at my car mechanics a couple of weeks ago, waiting to pick up my car, and I heard a couple of the employees kind of getting into a bit of a discussion argument. They didn’t realize I was there. It was getting a little uncomfortable, and at one point one of them told the other to shut their pie hole. And I just about started laughing, but it was getting a little uncomfortable. I wasn’t sure how serious the discussion argument was becoming, so I kind of cleared my throat and made myself known, and they slowed down and I left. But it just seemed like such a funny, goofy expression, and I didn’t think much of it until a couple of weeks later I was at a friend’s house, and she used the expression, and I laughed and told her the whole story, and she said, oh, my parents used to use that all the time when we were kids.
So anyway, I thought I’d call in and see if you knew the origins of the expression.
So shut your pie hole, and this was said with a lot of energy and anger?
Actually, the energy and anger seemed to be building, and actually, in the interest of full disclosure, there was an adjective inserted into it.
But was there an element of humor about it?
Well, I couldn’t really tell. I mean, there seemed to be, certainly on my end of things, but I couldn’t tell from them.
I love it. It’s one of my favorites. Shut your pie hole. To me, it’s automatically funny. I don’t know why.
Yeah, yeah.
That’s great. That sounds like a great argument stopper, you know, where everybody sort of makes up. How could you be serious?
Right. How could you be serious after being told to shut your pie hole?
Yeah, exactly. And it’s your mouth. When you say shut your pie hole, you just mean your mouth.
Right.
Yeah, I assume.
Yeah. No, it is. It’s the mouth. And it goes hand in hand with a lot of slangy synonyms that we have for the mouth. If you look in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, you’ll come up with a bunch of them. And there’s some real gems there, and a lot of them have to do with food going into your mouth. And a lot of them have to do with traps, which is really interesting.
Like, there’s potato trap, tater trap, and tatty trap.
Yeah, I’ve seen bun trap.
Bun trap, gingerbread trap, and kissing trap, and fly trap, and rattle trap, and, of course, gin trap, and plain old trap. You know, shut your trap, right?
And others, mooie, bazoo, mug, puss, yap, all of these things are slang from the mouth. And bacon hole and cake hole.
Well, cake hole is the older form and is the earlier form of pie hole. Cake hole comes from about the 1940s. It probably came up in the slang of the British schoolboy, which is an abundant source of all slang in the world. And it’s recorded in the 1940s pretty quickly in American English. Shows up in the Opie’s in their collection of folklore for kids in the schoolyard in the 1950s.
Right, the couple called Opie.
Yeah, yeah, the Opie’s. Opie, I-E, Ina and Peter Opie. They do these well-known collections of the folklore of schoolchildren. And by the 1960s, it somehow had morphed in the United States from cake hole into pie hole. And pie hole is almost exclusively used in the United States now. It’s really crazy stuff because why do we need all these words for mouth?
I don’t know.
Maybe, and that’s why he asked you about humor. Maybe there’s some element there of needing to diffuse a difficult situation. And I really loved your story because it felt like there might have been some drama there that could have escalated into a fight. And by telling somebody to shut their pie hole, it still might be funny enough and bring a little bit of humor to just knock a few degrees off the temperature of that argument. Kind of diffuse things.
Yeah.
I also think that it implies that your mouth is better used for eating than arguing with me.
Yeah, yeah.
Right? Just go back to eating pie.
Yeah, exactly. Shoving stuff in. Cork that sound machine with food.
That’s great.
Cool. Dave, thanks so much for your call.
Well, thank you.
We promised to never shut our pie holes about words and language.
Sounds good. I appreciate it.
Take care.
Thanks so much, Dave. Bye-bye.
Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or go to your keyboard pie hole.
No, that doesn’t work.
Go to your keyboards and send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
