Transcript of “Starnated Fool”
Hey there, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, my name is Rosalyn Maxwell.
I’m speaking to you from the great city of Montgomery, Alabama.
Well, okay, what’s on your mind today in terms of language, Rosalyn?
Okay, when I would do something that seemed to be very idiotic, my mother would say, you’re acting like a starnated fool.
And I was like, starnated fool? What is that?
Actually, she was saying starnate.
Well, she would pronounce it as starnatal, but I looked it up and it’s starnated fool.
Okay.
Well, I’m curious what kinds of situations you might have gotten yourself into where she said that, where she called you a starnatal fool or a starnated fool.
Okay.
Like when I was younger, if I wanted to wear something to church that wasn’t, that was inappropriate, she’d say, Ross, you’re acting like a starnated fool.
Go back in there and change.
I’d be like, okay, mom.
But I like it.
She said, I don’t care.
You go in there and change.
Starnated.
The correct spelling is S-T-A-R-N-A-T-E-D.
Starnated.
Boom.
Okay.
Yeah, that sounds right.
That’s right.
We’ve had a few questions about this before.
But you know what’s funny is I don’t find this in any of our reference books.
But I do find it in Kiese Lehman’s memoir, Heavy, where his grandmother used the phrase starnated fool.
He’s from Jackson, Mississippi, which is not that far.
And so he writes about being a black man in Jackson.
And in the book, he asks her, he says, do you mean stark naked?
No, not that.
No, not stark naked.
That was my thought as well.
You wouldn’t go to church stark naked.
No, that was my question.
Not literally stark naked.
No, thank you, Martha.
You wouldn’t go to church stark naked.
Not literally stark naked, but kind of the same way you call somebody.
Because they would turn you out of the church.
Not literally stark naked, but the idea you might call someone a bald-faced liar, meaning your foolishness is exposed for everyone to see.
Like metaphorically stark naked, you know?
But the question for me would be, where does starnated come from?
Is this a form of another word?
And why is it so rare?
And why does it seem to only be a part of Black English, you know?
You know, I guess because, you know, people in the South, when they would pronounce stuff and they were, I guess, because of their idioms, they would pronounce it rather raggedly.
And so it probably was mispronounced for many years.
My version of what you said is that the South has multiple dialects.
They pronounce things according to the rules of those dialects.
And there’s a lot of oral transmission of language, which means that it changes faster according to set rules.
And so it would be easy for an expression like stark naked to turn to star-nated in a short amount of time and sound like stark naked after not too long.
I’m not saying it is stark naked, but I think it’s very interesting that a perceptive writer like Hiese Lehmann in his memoir, that he should report that he thought it also might have been stark naked when his grandmother said it.
Because that was my thought as well.
But I’m not saying it is.
It’s just a guess.
But again, metaphorically, stark naked, not literally.
Nobody’s going to church stark naked, Ross Lips.
Every book that I find it in, sometimes spelled S-T-A-R-N-A-T-E-D, sometimes A-D-E-D, sometimes Starnater, that is A-D-E-R.
They’re by black authors, fiction.
Occasionally I’ll find social media posts.
And when it’s clear who the writer is, they’re almost always black American English speakers.
So it just seems to belong to one community.
Like bra rabbits.
I know.
I know.
They’re all modern.
They’re all like modern folks.
There’s just, yeah, it’s not historical.
It’s all fairly recent.
What about Aesop’s nables?
Not that old either.
Well, you know, what I like about this word is that even if you don’t know the meaning, you can kind of guess it.
I mean, it’s like a fool, but it is a really, really, really foolish fool.
You know, starnated.
I mean, to me, it almost sounds like tarnation.
Yeah.
Which is a euphemism for damnation.
I thought it might be a shortened form of consternated, but consternated means like astonished.
And I don’t know, it might be like a form of astonishing fool.
Like, it’s amazing how foolish you are.
It’s possible.
Well, Rosalyn, I got to say, you are amazing.
I love your energy and your liveliness.
I love yours, too.
And I am so elated.
Thank you so much.
It was completely our pleasure.
Will you call us again sometime and let us know what’s on your mind with language and so forth?
I would love it.
All right.
I would love it.
All right.
Will you take care of yourself?
Don’t be a starnaddle fool now.
No, no, no.
Rosalind, you take care of yourself now, all right?
Take care.
Bye.
Bye-bye.
Another idea, which didn’t occur to me until later, is that “starnated” is just another form of “tarnation,” which is a euphemism of “damnation.” Tarnation possibly has its roots in “eternal” and possibly “infernal” as well as “damnation.” So a “starnated fool” is basically a damned fool or an “eternally damned” or “infernally damned” fool.