In deafening industrial workplaces, such as textile factories and sawmills, workers often develop their own elaborate system of sign language, communicating everything from how their weekend went or to straighten up because the boss is coming. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Sawmill Worker Secret Language”
You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.
And I’m Martha Barnette. My father grew up in poverty in the mountains of North Carolina.
And at age 13, he moved to a nearby town and begged for a job in a textile mill.
And this was before child labor laws. And so at age 13, he was working 10-hour days, five and a half days a week.
And what he would do was stand with these giant blades to cut towels as they came through the machinery. And over the next five years, standing there in that same spot, doing that same repetitive motion over and over and over again, he wore a hole into the solid oak floor.
And he used to tell me a lot of stories about that experience. He talked about how they were all called lint heads, the people in his town, because there was all this lint in the air that stuck to their hair and clothing.
And the other thing that he always told me was about how deafening it was inside that textile mill.
He would have nightmares on into his 80s and 90s about being in this deafening textile mill and not being able to get out.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about that lately and wishing that I could talk with him about that because I’ve been reading up on the language, the sign language, that people in loud industrial situations have to work out in order to communicate with each other.
You and I both read this article recently about sawmill. It was on Atlas Obscura, I believe.
Yeah, which is a wonderful site.
And linguists have studied this to some degree, and in some places they’ve found as many as 175 different signs that people are using in that kind of situation.
And for me it’s really fascinating because you sort of see a language being born, the idea that they’re not only telling each other with hand motions how many things to produce or how long an item should be before they cut it.
But they’re coming up with terms for like the word weak. It’s going to take a week or in a week.
They might use like a hand over the muscle as a pun to mean weak.
Oh, they’re joking that the guy’s muscle is weak.
Yeah.
And a lot of that language, which I’m sure you appreciate, is crafted in order to keep the bosses from knowing what they’re talking about.
Oh, interesting.
I was reading about mills in the UK where people used a tapping of the head, the top of the head, to mean that the big managers are coming in because these were the people who would be wearing top hats.
Oh, very good.
Yeah.
So it’s just kind of a fascinating little language that’s not heard, literally, not heard about very much.
Yeah, I read that article with a lot of fascination, and we will link to that in the show notes for this episode.
We’re really interested, too, in knowing more about what you do.
What is something that’s not quite language but feels like language?
Do you have signs that signal something in your family, perhaps?
In my family, we have this really dumb little thing we do, what we call kitten paws.
That’s cute.
You put your little hands up next to your chest, and you tuck your fingers down like a little kitten paws folded over.
And in our sign, it’s kind of the universal sign of, oh, isn’t that cute?
You look like a baby T-Rex.
Yeah.
Anyway, share it with us if you’ve got something.
Just this little kind of quasi-language, a sign, a signal, a special word.
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