“Please?” to Mean “Excuse Me?”

Susan, a librarian in Grant County, Kentucky, says her spouse, who is from the Cincinnati area, uses the expression Please? to mean “How’s that?” or “Come again?” or “Excuse me?” to get someone to repeat a statement. This dialectal feature is largely associated with Cincinnati and other areas heavily settled by German immigrants. It’s what linguists call a calque, or loan translation, from German, where the word Bitte, or “please,” is used in exactly the same way. This is part of a complete episode.

Leave a comment

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

More from this show

Boodle on Beaver Island

A resident of Michigan’s scenic Beaver Island shares the term, boodling, which the locals use to denote the social activity of leisurely wandering the island, often with cold fermented beverages. There have been various proposed etymologies...