Scat, Tom!

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Jerry Ryan from Oceanside, California.

Hello, Jerry. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

I’m glad to be on because you seem to have all the answers.

Oh, we have lots of books at our disposal.

Let me ask you, Jerry, you don’t sound like you’re originally from California, are you?

No.

You’re from the Greek?

Born in southern Illinois, lived in North Dakota, and finally made it to California.

Yeah, I think it’s mostly North Dakota, I hear.

You probably lived there for a while, right?

Yes, it’s a ya, you heard the ya.

Well, welcome to the program. How can we help you, Jerry?

Well, the other day I was at a plane, Mexican Domino with my little group,

And someone sneezed, and I said,

Scat, Tom, get your tail out of the gravy.

And they all looked at me and said, what did you say?

They thought you were a witch.

That’s what we always say when somebody sneezes at our house.

Scat, Tom, get your tail out of the gravy?

Yeah, scat, Tom, get your tail out of the gravy.

So I have no idea if it was just a family thing.

And, of course, being a child, you never ask where the thing came from.

And so I have no one to refer to.

So I thought I’d ask you guys.

Right, right.

And do you know, Jerry, this phrase is pretty darn widespread, although I’ve never heard it.

It’s very southern, though, right?

Yes, yes.

You take a look in the Dictionary of American Regional English, it is all over the place.

Oh, my goodness.

So it’s not just your family.

Yeah, and I bet you picked it up when you were in southern Illinois

Because there’s some of the southern language heritage there.

Yes, definitely, yes, because my family that grew up in California, my children,

We kind of talk a different language.

Well, you sound fine to me, but I’m from Missouri, so.

Okay, because I wash my clothes and she washes her clothes.

Okay.

I see, I see.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, put a little R in there, right?

So Dare has an entry under scat for this, right, Martha?

Yes, and it’s just marvelous.

There are all these different versions of it.

Scat, get your tail out of the butter.

It’s great, and it’s what you say to someone who’s just sneezed,

Possibly because there used to be an old belief that evil spirits would enter your body,

And that’s why you sneezed to get them out.

Oh, I see. Your body, it was expelling the demons?

Yes, yes, and you want to get rid of them.

And especially in the South, it wasn’t always cool to refer to the devil,

So you might refer to a cat, perhaps.

That’s one explanation we don’t know for sure.

But there are all kinds of examples of that.

But the other possible explanation was it just tried to explain the sneeze away.

You might sneeze when a cat was around if you had mild allergies or some kind of rhinitis, right?

So it just might be kind of a joking way to explain why you sneezed.

Yeah, that’s another possibility.

We really don’t know.

But it’s just…

So this is widespread in the South, still common enough to show up in fiction, right?

Because you can find a number of examples in Google Books and on Amazon.

Yeah.

Just kind of colorful and wonderful, just very American as well.

This is not the kind of thing that they say in the U.K.

I love it.

It’s just not me saying it.

No, no.

No, no, it’s all over the South.

I wish I could ask my Aunt Maiso, because that sounds like something she would say.

Right.

Well, you answered my question.

All right.

Well, we’re glad we could help.

Yeah, we aim to please.

Thanks for calling, Jerry.

You’re welcome.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I like it a lot better than Gesundheit.

Scat cat, get your tail out of the gravy

In a book by Donald Yates called The Bear Went Over the Mountain

He uses it

And there’s a version he’s got, they used to say skedaddle as well

Skedaddle

Not just scat cat, scat cat being the short version

Yeah, skedaddle

But get your tail out of the gravy

I’m just imagining a cat sitting there in the gravy boat keeping his rump warm

Having a grand old time

You know, cats seek the warm spot, right?

They do, they do

And they get fixated on one for a few weeks

And then they move to another one.

They move to the sunbeam or something.

You can’t do better than a warm bowl of gravy.

I’ll say.

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