“Ix-nay on the ocolate-chay in the upboard-cay” is how you’d say “nix on the chocolate in the cupboard” in pig Latin. English speakers have a long history of inserting syllables or rearranging syllables in a word to keep outsiders from understanding. The pig in pig Latin may just refer to the idea of pig as an inferior, unclean animal. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “The Pig in Pig Latin”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hello, this is Benjamin from North County.
Hey, Benjamin. North County, San Diego?
That’s right.
Are you there on the coast?
Oh, right there on the beautiful coast with the beautiful waves.
Nice.
Well, what can we do for you?
I’ve been brainstorming on some things I’m sure you know about.
One is, where did pig Latin come from, like Ixnay on the ocult shea in the ubered kea?
Say that again.
Ixnay on the ocklet che in the ubbard che.
Nick’s on the chocolate in the cupboard?
We talked about the chocolate in the cupboard.
Got it.
Okay.
It’s pig Latin, and I don’t know where it came from, but my grandma, if she ever wanted to say anything that she didn’t want us to hear, she would say that.
Oh, okay.
That reminds me of my son likes to say that he’s fluent in two languages, English and pig Latin.
That’s hilarious.
My friend used to say I speak every language except Latin, and no matter what you would ask him, he’d say, that’s Latin to me.
We have a really long history of all these kind of nonsense languages where syllables are reversed or sounds are inserted or things are like repetitively changed in order to make something sound a little non-obvious.
And some of it goes back to people imitating sacred rituals and kind of doing a fake, say, mass or something like that and doing fake, the fake church Latin and that sort of thing.
Some of it obviously comes from school kids, but we have hundreds of years at least of people making these variety of pig latins.
And they’re not all the same as the one that you used.
Some of them have just adding a syllable or changing all the vowels to the same vowel, different things like that.
So pig in this sense meaning inferior or not the real thing.
Yeah, not human.
The other one that comes to my mind is where did the term doohickey come from?
Because people use that a lot if they don’t know what they’re talking about.
How do you use doohickey?
Well, it would be like if I didn’t know where we were going or what tool I was going to use, I’d say, yeah, the doohickey for the whatchamajig or whatchamacank.
That’s right.
And the thingamabob.
Yeah, the thingamabob, of course.
You got to have that.
Well, we have a whole bunch of those words, too.
Yeah, these replacement words, right?
They almost behave like pronouns in a way because they vaguely and indeterminately stand in for another specific noun.
Whatchamacallit.
Whatchamacallit’s a good one, right?
Right. Yeah, that’s just interesting.
And I really appreciate you guys.
It just makes it so fun to just kind of use your brain for a little different things besides what’s been going on in the political world.
Yeah, we’re happy to do that for you.
Nicely put.
What do we have?
I’m looking in the American Speech here, which is a journal about the American language.
And there’s a variety of things.
There’s a doohickey, doohiccus, dohinky, dohinkus, dohunky, dohunkus.
And these all go with thingam and thingamabob, and they all kind of refer to gadgets or widgets and that sort of thing.
There’s no, unfortunately, they’re all origin unknown.
They’re kind of these goofy, pass-along things that are really impossible to trace to their roots.
Yeah, silly words that are fun to say.
Dude, it’s been really nice to talk to you.
Thanks for calling us.
Oh, okay.
Take care.
Take care.
Bye.
All right.
Thank you.
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