Streely

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marlis calling and I’m calling from Cambridge, Wisconsin.

Hey Marlis, welcome.

Welcome to the show. How can we help?

I have a question about a word that my mother used to use.

Now, she was a widow with six children and she didn’t want us to look slovenly.

She wanted us to be nice and clean, not to embarrass her.

So she used to tell us to be sure and wash our hair so that it wouldn’t be streely.

She didn’t want her children to have streely hair.

Streely?

Streely.

I’ve never heard of that anywhere before except from my mother.

Interesting.

And, Marlis, how did she spell it?

I have no idea.

It was just verbal orders to the children.

No streely hair.

No streely hair.

Was she from Wisconsin as well?

No, no.

She was from northern Minnesota.

Northern Minnesota.

Any Irish heritage there?

Oh, yes.

Both her side and my father’s side.

Mostly Irish.

I ask, and it’s good to have the confirmation, because streel-y ultimately comes from an Irish word meaning unkempt.

Really?

Yeah, yeah.

So a streel is somebody who is unkempt.

Their personal appearance is in disrepair, so to speak.

And unkempt is another word she used frequently.

We were not to be unkempt.

Yeah, the older synonym for it, by the way, for a streel, the noun is slut, which has nothing to do with sexual proclivities.

It just has to be, used to mean, you’re just like you’re personally, physically.

Slovenly.

Slovenly, yeah.

Careless about your appearance or even dirty about your appearance.

And so this streel came to the United States,

And the adjective form isn’t quite as common as the noun form,

But it pops up here and there.

But almost always there’s an Anglo-Irish connection.

The roots are usually pretty apparent there that it was handed down through the generations

When somebody ultimately came from Ireland.

Well, it could have been also.

So my father’s parents were both born in Ireland.

Oh, interesting.

So it could have come into her, you know, language from my father.

So it’s sometimes spelled S-T-R-E-E-L.

It’s also sometimes spelled S-T-H-R-E-E-L.

And that more closely reflects what I believe the Irish pronunciation would be,

Which is a little more like stril, something like that.

So the voice T-H in there.

And before that, in the Gaelic, it comes from words that have to do with flapping or flailing or dragging.

And this refers to banners, for example, that might not be well attached.

Or imagine a ribbon that has come undone.

Or the hem of a skirt that is trailing in the dirt.

Or laces that aren’t completely fastened.

Well, I know, but we weren’t to have oily, like stringy hair.

And that’s what she meant.

I could see that.

So you have the stringy hair that’s not neat and cared for and maybe tied up or put in a bun or something.

Oh, that’s so interesting.

I had no idea.

I thought she made that up.

No.

So often these family words tend to have larger cultural implications.

We can kind of find the plug in the history that you connect to.

It’s like the puzzle piece under the couch.

We fetched that for you and we plugged you into the larger language puzzle.

Thank you.

I wondered about that.

Now you know, Maris.

Now you know.

Now I do.

Thank you so much.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

So a streel is a person, usually a woman of low character,

And then streely is someone of low character or just, you know,

Disreputable behavior or slovenly appearance.

Right.

Do you remember years ago on the show we had a woman who,

She lived in Newfoundland,

And she had a T-shirt company that had a name like Two Streels or something.

They were reclaiming the term.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I don’t remember that,

But I do know that this term has been recorded on Prince Edward Island, which isn’t far.

Yeah, there you go.

Yeah.

Yeah, they were selling T-shirts with words from Newfoundland English, like twacking.

Do you know twacking?

No, I don’t know twacking.

It means shopping.

Shopping, nice.

Yeah, I used to have a twacking T-shirt.

Twacking.

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