Swinging in Sync

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Heather calling from Tallahassee.

Hi, Heather.

And I have a question about a phrase that befuddled my son.

Befuddled. Okay, let’s hear it.

How old is your son?

My son is seven years old.

Okay.

And we were at the playground swinging,

And we got to the point where our swings were going in tandem.

And I looked over to him, and I said,

Hey, get out of my bathtub.

And he looked at me with an expression of just complete confusion,

And I realized that I grew up with it being completely normal to say,

Get out of my bathtub whenever we were swinging and our swings were going at the same speed.

But apparently that’s just not the case anymore,

And it made me wonder if there was any type of history to this particular phrase

Or whether I just heard it somewhere or made it up or where it came from.

Wow.

Do you know that one, Martha?

No, I never used that.

We never used that either.

No.

We can dig around on this, but this is, I don’t know.

I would just say, hey, we’re swinging together.

Yeah, we kind of liked it.

Get out of my bed.

And you grew up in Florida?

No, I grew up in Louisiana.

Okay.

Were you, as a kid, worried that if you were in sync, the swing set would tilt or fall over?

No, it never occurred to us.

And we probably would have been, it probably would have added some excitement to swinging.

But no, I don’t think it had anything to do with that.

Huh.

Was it like jinx?

Like the first person who noticed it was a little bit better than the other one?

Well, you definitely, you know, the person who said get out of my bathtub would, I guess by saying that,

You were saying that you were swinging at that speed first and the other person jumped in.

Okay.

And so you were, I guess you were establishing some type of hierarchy there.

Heather, we got basically nothing to add to this.

We don’t know where it came from.

We don’t know how far it goes.

We don’t know if there’s a geographic component.

It’s a beautiful stumper.

I love it.

But I have two really dumb theories that I thought of that I want to share with you.

Bring them on.

Do you want to hear them?

Okay.

Do you know when you go to the playground and the swings are heavily used beneath the playground is kind of this pit of sand and it roughly has the shape or pit of dirt roughly has the shape of a bathtub?

That’s one of my theories.

But the other theory is that if you’re swinging full out and you’re going almost horizontal, your body is horizontal and you’re kind of in the pose that you would be in were you taking a bath with your feet on one end and your head on the other.

And if you’re on one of the soft swings, like a rubber swing, then the actual shape of the swing itself is kind of like the shape of a rounded bathtub.

Two dumb, useless theories that you should probably ignore.

But I just want to, there they are for what they’re worth.

So anything goes, apparently, in terms of the theory.

Well, I’m not going to stop saying it.

I love to swing at the playground.

And whenever anybody is swinging at the same cadence as me,

Then I’m just going to tell them to get out of my bathtub.

I got to tell you, Heather, when adults just drop all of their pose

And all their pretension and swing full out like they were still a kid,

It’s the best thing ever.

I remember those days just going flying.

Yeah, not carrying at all.

The elastic joints just kind of solving everything for you.

No broken bones.

Well, Heather, thanks for calling.

I’m betting that we’re going to get lots of calls about other people who use this,

And they might have their own dumb theories about where it comes from and why people say it.

But thank you for calling.

Bring it on. I’m excited.

And keep using it.

Well, thank you so much for having me.

All right. Take care now. Bye-bye.

Take care, Heather. Bye-bye.

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