Run a Sandy

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Glory June. I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Welcome. What can we do for you, Glory June?

Well, this is a little convoluted question, but I’ve been thinking about it for years. I’ve had a lot of language questions, some of which have been answered on your show. I am the daughter of two people who met in the Navy in World War II. And I am a historian and also a performer. And one of the things I’ve been doing for the last several years is doing a program I call Songs My Mother Sang, A World War II Remembrance. And in it, I tell their story, their romance in the Navy. I sing songs of the period, and I read from their letters. Happily, several hundred of their letters, both on both sides, have survived.

Wow, that’s awesome. I tell you, it’s very emotional. And what I do have, and probably one of the most treasured of them, is the very first letter, apparently, that my dad ever wrote my mom.

Oh, man. And what had happened was my mother was one of 20 waves, the first 20 waves who were assigned to the big naval base at Norfolk, Virginia. You can imagine 20 women coming in. All those men, wow. So none of the waves lacked for dates. So my mother and another guy and my dad and another girl went out on a date, a double date. And my future mother and father looked at each other and thought it was good. So my dad wrote to my mom to straighten things out, sort of apologize for causing her breakup with the other guy, although it wasn’t a serious thing. And then to tell her that, you know, hey, how about me?

So in so doing, the paragraph this is in starts, maybe they, the eyes, did tell something, but it was much different than you spoke of. Gosh, hon, I am not the one to tell you what you should do. If I spoke the way I felt, it would seem as though I were trying to better my own ends. It would also look like I was running a Sandy or cheating on Bill. That’s the other guy. Running a Sandy. Now, from the context, it sounds as if that means going behind the other guy’s back or something like that. And I’ve done all sorts of research. I mean, besides just the Googling, I’ve looked through all kinds of places, and I never found it. And then one day, just in passing, I was somewhere, and there was an old British movie on, a World War II movie. And just in passing, I heard the phrase, running a Sandy. I said, aha! But I don’t even know what the movie was. It starred George Sanders, I can tell you that.

So running a Sandy meaning to do an end run around somebody or go behind their back? I guess so. Yeah. That sounds about right. That sounds really about right with what we can find out about this term from other sources. Because it has been written down and it is in a few dictionaries.

Really? And there is something to say about it. Yeah. I haven’t seen the right dictionary. It probably comes from poker, like a lot of other American slang.

Oh, that fits. It connects to the term to sandbag, which is in poker where you kind of like hold off raising your bet in the hope of making a larger bet later so that you can actually take a larger pot when you know that you have a strong hand. And so if you sandbag in poker, it’s considered kind of a crummy move by some people.

Devious. Devious, yeah. So you could sandbag. And certainly the first use that we find of this word in print from 1897 as a sandy, meaning to run a sandy, it calls it a bluff and it calls it a poker term. And so it’s a really strong connection. I’m not surprised that it would be in the vocabulary of a soldier. Not at all. Sailor, if you please. A sailor. There we go. Navy. Navy. Yeah, I’m not surprised at all.

Oh, that’s fantastic. So it’s got at least 100 years history, late 1800s. It is an American term. It’s not Canadian. It’s not British. I’m surprised that it popped up in a British film starring George Sanders, but there’s no telling how much American vocabulary made it across the pond during the war.

Of course, especially during the war, yeah. And it may have been, in fact, you wonder maybe it was an American character saying it, and that was just showing he was American by using an American phrase.

Exactly. It could have been, yeah. Glory June, I’m glad we were able to help you. I’m excited. We love to hear that. I’m excited to talk to you guys, too. Well, thank you very much for your call, Glory June. Really appreciate it. Thank you. This was great. All right. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

The two places I found that term are Green’s Dictionary of Slang and the Dictionary of American Regional English. One of the things that this show specializes in is that kind of fringe language, the border language that’s kind of outside the mainstream. And it’s interesting, though, we often find the strongest connections in history between generations, between groups of people in the fringes and not in the core of our language. And I think this is one of those really great examples.

It’s a terrific example. I’ve never heard the phrase. Yeah, it’s not new to me. I’m not a big poker player. Like in the heyday in the 2000s when everyone was playing poker, I played a little bit. But there’s so much amazing vocabulary that’s kind of snuck in that comes from cards, right? Are you playing with a full deck, for example? East in the hole, that sort of thing. Pass the buck. Pass the buck, yeah.

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