See You in Church

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. This is Christine from Sebastian, Florida.

How can we help you?

Well, on shows, you guys have talked about family sayings that people’s families say, and we have a little quirky one in my family, and I thought it’d be kind of fun to share it with you and maybe see if you guys know where it might have come from, because nobody in my family seems to know where it first originated. So I don’t know if it’s something we made up.

Okay, let’s hear it.

Well, it’s, see you in church if the window’s open.

And how would you use this? When does this come up?

Basically, it’s kind of a goodbye. So if you were talking and you left without making some plans to see each other again, instead of, I’ll see you when I see you, it would be, see you in church if the window’s open.

So in my mind, there’s an image of one of the people in church in the pew praying or listening, and the other person just like leisurely walking on by, just like going to the pool hall or whatever.

Exactly.

So there’s a little joke about somebody not being a very good churchgoer, huh?

I like it. It’s funny. It’s automatically funny.

And so everybody says this in your family, that’s just a thing?

Yeah, and I remember it mostly my dad saying it when we were younger, but I don’t remember hearing it outside of our immediate family anywhere. So nobody knows where it really came from.

And you didn’t hear other people saying, see you in church?

No, not that I can remember.

Because that is a fairly widespread saying, see you in church, with the same kind of undertone and connotations to it that, like, not bloody likely. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge.

I’ll see you in church, meaning the bar.

But your version is an expanded version that I like. I like it a lot.

And actually haven’t seen anywhere else. So it is possible that your family invented it.

Who’s the cleverest one in your family?

Well, like I said, I think it came from my dad, and he was in the Navy for about 25 years, so we were kind of thinking maybe he heard it somewhere else that we just hadn’t heard it.

Yeah, there’s no telling what those Navy guys will pick up and bring home.

No, the Navy, the military.

Maybe a mom.

Well, yeah, the military is rich with two or three different levels of language, and the lower registers of language, the slang level, has got a ton of stuff in it like this, and usually stuff we can’t say on the air.

But that’s a good one. See you in church if the window’s open.

I love it.

Well, thank you.

Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you say when you say goodbye?

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