Stuff We All Get

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Thank you. So do you. Yours is better, which is why I’m calling.

Okay.

Who is this?

Troublemaker already.

Is this Dan? Yes, I am. Sorry. This is Dan from Redwood City in California.

Hey, Dan. You have A Way with Words, too. I can already tell.

Welcome to the show. My father-in-law was born there in Redwood City.

Oh, cool.

What that’s worth, which is nothing.

I was in San Diego just weeks ago, which is where I found your show.

Oh, nice.

Wow, and I used to know a guy named Dan.

This is amazing.

All right, Dan, what kind of trouble do you want to get up to?

Because it sounds like we’re all in the mood.

Okay.

So back in the Cooking with Gas show, you, Grant, used the term swag.

And that is a term that I have wondered about for years.

I’ve been told really authoritatively, like, it stands for stuff we all get, which is a bacronym.

I don’t trust bacronym.

There we go.

Yeah, good.

Your instincts are solid.

To me, when I think swag, I think, like, piratical, like, swag and booty.

And it’s this sort of cool stolen term.

And I just want to know the origin.

Does swag have anything to do with this jolly swagman and the billabong?

Or what is the actual derivation of the term or entomology of the term?

I think people pick up the habit of making bacronyms in kindergarten and never shake it.

A bacronym, just so everyone knows, is when you take a word and you decide that each individual letter stands for another whole word to make a long phrase.

So you said that somebody told you authoritatively that swag means stuff we all get.

But that’s bunkum, hokum, yeah, nonsense.

It’s not true.

And a lot of people or something like secretly we are all gay is another one.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And there’s even a fake etymology floating around that claims that secretly we’re all gay goes back to like the 1930s.

And it was the code word.

Swag was the code word that would get you into the speakeasy so you could hang around with other gay folks.

Oh, my.

But that’s all bogus, fake, made up, not true.

Well, we do know about swag related to, let’s use the modern use for now, stuff you get at a con.

Let’s say you go to Comic-Con and you come back with, you know, Pokemon cards and action figures and a couple signatures and some hand-drawn illustrations from a famous comic book artist.

That’s swag.

You know, comes in a plastic bag or a big colorful bag.

Free stuff.

Free stuff.

You know, maybe you go to an IT conference and you come back with flashlights and miniature screwdrivers and USB sticks, right?

Some drive, yeah.

Dan, does this match your experience?

Oh, absolutely.

And the pharmaceutical conferences, you used to get just amazing stuff with those.

I bet.

But what’s cool is that this swag, and usually the reduplicated swag bag is used just because it’s fun to say, goes back to the 1700s when it referred to a thieves or a pirate’s plunderer booty.

The ill-gotten gains was the swag.

So we’ve got like a solid 300 years on this, actually predating nearly every acronym that exists in English.

Acronyms are a relatively modern phenomenon, basically 1900 and forward.

And there is a suggestion here, and I’m only suggesting it, that swag may be connected to an idea of something swaying from side to side.

And that thing that’s swaying from side to side is the booty, is the plunder in the bag.

Now, think of a hobo with a bendel stick and a bendel over their shoulder.

The bendel is the bag filled with stuff moving from side to side as they walk down the road.

Or think of a horse with bags of loot slung on either side of it and kind of…

Dun-da-dun-da-dun-da-dun, walking down the road.

There’s the suggestion that that’s where the swag kind of migrated from meaning sway or move from side to side to referring to the actual contents of the thing that is swaying.

So nothing to do with swagger?

It may actually be related to swagger.

When you have a high opinion of yourself, when you swagger, that is you kind of have this particular kind of like big man walk strutting.

You know, you are kind of moving from side to side.

That is, you march down the street with your bad self, right?

There’s a particular way of walking when you’re arrogant and full of yourself.

So it sounds like you were right, Dan.

I thought I was, but, you know, some people are just so very, very sure of themselves.

I know.

That’s why I wanted to call the experts and the guys who have, like, all those cool dictionaries.

Dan, thanks for listening.

Take care.

All right, thanks, Dan.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.