Kim from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, remembers her Alabama-born mother asking, Where are you proging today? The word progue, also spelled prog, is a bit of dialect meaning “to poke around” or “to ramble.” In the UK, this word, from a Germanic root meaning “to poke” or “to prod,” came to mean “forage for food.” In the American South and Chesapeake Bay area, it came to refer to poking around marshes and later extended to rambling in general. A North Carolina listener shared his definition: going out alone on the water to fish or hunt according to the season and doing whatever nature allows. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of ““Progue” Means “to Poke Around” or “to Ramble””
Hello, you have A Way with Words!
Hi, how are you?
I’m super duper.
How?
And who are you?
Okay, my name is Kim.
I’m from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
Hi Kim.
Welcome to the program.
What’s up?
Thank you.
Hi.
My mother was from the Deep South in what’s called the Black Belt Of Alabama.
Mhmm.
And she would always say, you’re proging or where are you proging today?
And to me it meant rambling.
And my niece says dilly dally.
And we were talking about this word and we’re wondering how to spell it and what it means.
Sure.
Yeah.
I’d love to hear you use it in a sentence or two.
How would you talk about it?
Thank you.
I like to go out a lot and just explore different areas, or even a kid in the house that’s always getting into something.
She’s saying you’re probing.
-huh.
Where are you probing today?
And how would you spell that?
I’m not sure.
So I would try maybe, and I have looked, tried to Google it, I couldn’t find anything.
I tried P r o g u e, or P R 0 A G.
But between her southern accent and my lack of seeing the word in print to know it, I couldn’t find anything.
Okay.
Yeah, well, one of those spellings is fairly common, p r o g u e, and the other one is p r o g, prog.
And it comes from a very old Germanic root that means to poke or prod or stab or probe, and in The UK came to mean to forage or scrounge or go looking for food or supplies.
Then immigrants to this country brought that food sense, and around the South, the American South and the Chesapeake Bay Area and Ocracoke Island off the coast of North Carolina, the word progue came to mean poking around in marshes or mud holes, you know, looking for whatever might turn up, and that sense got extended to just kind of poking around like you’re talking about, you know, going out to look for something.
So it has a very, very long history.
Okay.
And it’s PROG.
And my mom was probably the only person I heard say it.
Is that right?
Love that as a data point, that she used it where she was.
Yeah.
In Alabama, right?
In she was from Alabama.
She moved to Pittsburgh when she was around 19 or 20 years old.
And I’ve never heard anybody else say, you’re progen or you’re rambling.
So I think we were pretty much spot on with it.
We just didn’t know how to spell it.
Is fabulous.
Yeah.
And you will still hear the kind of hunting uses of it.
We heard from Horace in North Carolina who described it as, when you’re on a boat following the calendar seasons or the hunting seasons and just kind of chapping or fishing or hunting off by yourself, just doing whatever’s allowed and whatever’s available.
Okay.
That feels good.
I like that.
She was a pioneer in that.
Okay, very good.
All right.
Thank you so much.
Kim, take care.
Thank you.
Have a good day.
You too.
All right.
Bye bye.
Bye bye.
If you’re wondering about a word, Grant and I love to go proguing about for information.
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