“Please?” to Mean “Excuse Me?”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Susan Nimmersheim, and I’m calling from northern Kentucky. Right now I’m at work at the Grant County Public Library.

Wow, that’s a double whammy. Because, you know, we’re big fans of libraries and librarians, and that’s the Grant County. How can we not love that?

I’m a big fan of Grant. What can we do for you?

I was curious about the word please. I was brought up in Tennessee, Arkansas, southern Kentucky, and, you know, you’d say, please, may I have, or, you know, thank you, please, or whatever. And when I moved to northern Kentucky and met the love of my life, and first time he said, please, I thought, please what? He used it as a term like I would use, huh, or pardon me, or excuse me. And I guess it just seems to only be in Cincinnati. That’s the only place I’ve ever heard it. So I didn’t know whether you all had any grand ideas about that.

So you’re right across the river from Cincinnati then, huh?

Yes, right across. We live in Fort Mitchell. So, yes, and Cincinnati is, you know, it’s different because it’s German heritage. So I didn’t know whether it was that or where it came from.

Yeah, that is exactly right. Ohio is especially known for this. They use please as kind of a tag on a sentence where other people would say, excuse me, or come again, or how’s that, to get you to repeat what they didn’t understand. But it’s not only found in Ohio. There are reports of it in Wisconsin and other places, as you say, that have German heritage, because it is what’s known as a calc, C-A-L-Q-U-E, from German, because Germans will say bitte in the same way. And bitte directly translates into English as please.

An interesting thing about Ohio, especially in Cincinnati, has a long history of German heritage. As a matter of fact, at one point, and maybe even still be true, Ohio had more people who are misnamed as the Pennsylvania Dutch than Pennsylvania itself. And there are tons of people there who speak that kind of Deutsch in Ohio than in other states. So there’s this long history even now of the German influence on English, although, of course, it’s outpaced by Spanish. So, yeah, that’s exactly why it happens, and it’s a real kind of important reminder of that heritage of German and English.

Of course, the two world wars stopped a lot of the German speaking in this country, the two world wars against Germany. Otherwise, we might have a lot more people still speaking German, at least as a second or third language.

Well, you know, working in libraries, we always do research, and I used to work at the Kenton County Library, and Cincinnati had a German newspaper in German schools up until World War I.

Yeah, that was true for a lot of places. And as a matter of fact, Cincinnati, I believe, has a neighborhood called Over the Rhine, just kind of reflecting its German heritage.

There’s a joke that goes with this, by the way, with this habit of saying please to mean excuse me or come again. And it’s that this person goes to a restaurant and orders a hamburger, but the waiter doesn’t understand. And the waiter says, please. And the person ordering the sandwich says, oh, hamburger, please, thinking that they were being corrected and told to ask more politely.

Or maybe there they were ordering five-way chili, right?

Yeah, right? Have you ever had that?

No, I haven’t.

That’s not German.

No, no. It’s just a Cincinnati specialty, right? But you will find that not just in Ohio. You’ll find that in surrounding states or pretty much any place where there was and is this strong German heritage. It’s just how Ohio has kind of become known for it.

Yeah, that’s always interesting to find the history of words, I think.

That’s what we’re all about, Susan, and we’re really glad you called to talk about it.

Yeah, librarians are our people. And thank you for keeping the world in books.

No problem.

Thank you.

Our pleasure. Call again sometime, all right?

Thanks, Susan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.