You’re Going to Get a Potch!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Stacey calling from Market, Michigan.

Hello, Stacey. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Stacey.

Hi. Thank you. My family, my opa, my grandfather, Otto, had always used the word with us, the grandkids, and then my father used it as well when we were misbehaving and maybe we were in trouble and the word was punch. And we were told, you know, if you don’t get it together, you’re going to get a punch. You’re in trouble, you’re going to get a punch. That was normalized in my family, but when I would use that word with friends at school or elsewhere, no one else had ever heard of that word. And so I was kind of embarrassed and I’ve always sort of wondered where where it came from.

And a little bit of research that I’ve done, and I mean very little, is just finding a German word, because my grandfather was first generation and fluent in German, was to me in government overthrow. And I thought, well, I’m pretty sure Opa didn’t mean that. And I’ve always wondered what that means.

I was going to guess that Opa Otto was a German, because Opa Otto sounds very German to me.

Very German, very German.

He was fluent in German and also fluent in Swedish because he was an iron worker. And where he worked, they spoke Swedish. And so he picked that up as well. So he was a bit of a linguist in a way.

Okay.

So when he told you that you were going to get a putch, what were you anticipating getting? What did he tell you a putch was?

A putch usually meant a spanking. And for anyone listening, it was usually just a little spank. We didn’t get wooden spoons or anything like that. It just usually meant that you were going to get a little spanking.

Am I hearing a P there? That’s like P-U-T-C-H or P-O-T-C-H?

Well, I look, when I have researched it a little bit, I was spelling it P-U-T-S-C-H, just guessing that that was how it was spelled.

There we go. That makes sense.

P-U-T-S-C-H.

So he might give you a little putch on your tuchus.

Yeah.

A little slap on your behind.

Well, the German word potch, P-A-T-S-C-H, means a slap, and it’s probably onomatopoetic. So if he was talking about giving you a potch or a putch, it was a little slap. The reason that you saw those other words having to do with the government is that there is a related dialectal German word putch. P-U-T-S-C-H, that means a sudden blow or a smack. And it came to be used in German to refer to an attempt to overthrow a government or an armed insurrection.

And in fact, in the 1920s, there were several of these in Germany. And one of them was in 1923. Hitler and his followers unsuccessfully tried to overtake the German government in something that was called the Beer Hall Putsch. And English journalists ended up adopting this word putch to mean a violent overthrow of a government, which is really interesting because it has to do, you know, it goes back to this early, early sense of a slap or a blow.

And you also see this kind of thing when you’re talking about a coup d’etat. The French word coup has to do with striking. And in Spanish, the word for that kind of thing is golpe, a striking. And so a putsch is a strike against a government. And the related word potch in German means slap, and it’s been adopted into dialectal English as putsch, like you said, P-U-T-C-H or P-O-T-C-H. And so it’s a real range from a little bitty slap to overthrowing a government.

It certainly has a range, and I just assumed what the spelling might be without really thinking of alternative spellings. And just wondered if my opal was just making up a word or maybe if it was something from his own family.

Oh, no. He probably was warned when he was a kid that he was going to get a potch. And Martha, you said something about a potch in tuchus, which is a clue to more information that you can drop on us.

Right, that there’s a Yiddish connection here, that potch in that sense is a Yiddishism.

Yeah, so lots of our listeners will probably remember as kids hearing about pochki, pochkiing. Pochki is a verb meaning to fool around or to mess around, which also is related to that word. And being warned that they were going to poch and took us if they misbehaved. They get a smack on the bum. And that definitely aligns with how my opa used the word for sure. And frankly, my dad.

Yeah, it’s kind of more like a push that moves you along rather than something that stings, right?

That’s a good way to put it. It’s more playful than a vigorous belting.

Absolutely. We never had any sort of vigorous discipline other than, you know, getting the, you know, the evil eye or being told that, you know, our parents were disappointed in us, which was like the ultimate worst possible thing ever. So a punch was sort of a, you know, you kind of need to get the program here.

So, do-do-do.

Yeah, a demonstration of strength rather than of anger.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. Wow. I can’t wait to tell all my cousins about this.

Yeah, that it’s a heritage word. This is something that you’ve inherited from your family’s roots.

Absolutely. And the Yiddish connection, that’s so interesting.

Yes. Thank you so much for sharing these memories with us.

Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

All right. Take care now.

Be well.

Take care. Bye-bye.

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