Slang Abbreviation “Nation”

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dalton Winslow. I’m calling from Meriden, New Hampshire.

Dalton Winslow from Meriden, New Hampshire.

Hi, Dalton. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

I teach at a boarding prep school, Kimball Union Academy, and I teach one section of junior English.

I was just recently teaching Huckleberry Finn, which is full of all kinds of interesting slang, and most of it is pretty understandable, but there was one expression that was used at least twice that was a little bit confusing to me.

And the word was nation, and I don’t know if it’s meant to be short for something like tarnation or some other mild swear, but it sounds something like that.

Dalton, how would it be used? Do you have a sentence from the book?

Yeah, so I’m looking at the Norton Critical Edition, and I’m on page 140 of that. And this is where the king and the duke have just come on the raft with Huck and Jim. And they’re trying to pass themselves off as royalty, sort of fallen from grace.

Embarrassed royalty, sure.

Right. So anyway, so the duke first, you know, does his spiel and, you know, tries to pretend that he’s a duke, and then the king is feeling sort of left out. So his comment is, look here, Bilgewater, I’m nation sorry for you, but you ain’t the only person that’s had troubles like that.

Nice. I’m nation sorry for you.

I’m hung up on Bilgewater.

I like that.

Look here, Bilgewater.

He claimed that he was the Duke of Bridgewater.

Okay, okay, okay.

It’s coming back to me now. These are two of the biggest rascals in fiction, these two guys.

The biggest rapscallions, yes. And then they fall easily into the Mississippi River habit of boasting and bragging and trying to one-up each other.

Right. And you eventually find out that Jim and Huck are kind of eye-rolling in the background, neither one believing but just going along so there’s not a fight, right?

Right, yeah.

There’s a second use. Jim uses it shortly after that when Huck is sort of giving him a skewed history lesson on what kings and dukes do. And he says, Huck says, take them all around. They’re a mighty ornery lot. It’s the way they’re raised. And Jim responds, but this one do smell so like the nation, Huck.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Both of these nations, you nailed it at the top. It is a, how should I put this? It’s a reduced form of a mild swear word. So all of them originating from damnation, which was euphemized into tarnation and a few other nations and shortened to nation as a way to still get across the idea that you are swearing.

However, it stopped being a swear. It just started being a form of emphasis. And we’ve talked about this on the show many times, how so many words kind of become removed from their original meaning. Their semantic value is bleached out or completely lost, and all they’re used is kind of almost an adverbial way to emphasize what follows after.

Sure. And so that’s exactly what nation is doing here. We find this goes back well in the mid-1700s at least, this nation used in exactly this way. And so it can be used to mean large or great or excellent or very or—

Oh, we’re back to the 1700s.

So in England or here?

Here, yeah.

No kidding.

Yep.

This is very much an Americanism. You will find occasionally popping up in British text, but you’ll always find at the root of that there’s some American connection to that author. Either they traveled in the U.S. or they were born in the U.S., that sort of thing.

But it’s a very American term.

Thanks, Dalton. Really appreciate this. Take me back to my childhood in one of my favorite books of all time.

It’s a great one.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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