Swan Song

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Judy Dunson in Indianapolis, Indiana.

Well, hello, Judy. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Well, I have a question on a phrase that we were using not too long ago.

It’s called swan song.

When somebody is getting ready to leave, or in our case, it was somebody who had finished their term on the board, and we were joking around asking him what his swan song was going to be.

And then a little later I was talking with someone about my pending retirement, and they were saying, what are you going to do for a swan song?

And I said, where did that term come from?

And none of us knew because we’d never heard a swan singing and didn’t know whether a swan does some sort of dying, mournful thing when it dies or whether it came from an opera or what.

So in other words, Judy, you got out of singing a song?

Well, they didn’t ask me to sing, and it was probably a good thing.

Oh, really?

Well, if you were going to sing for them, what would you sing?

Well, I don’t think it would have anything to do with retirement.

There’s no business like showbiz.

Yeah, I wouldn’t do the old great goose ain’t what she used to be or something like that.

There we go.

Very good.

Well, yeah, it goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks, at least.

As you suggested, they had this mistaken belief that there was a certain kind of swan that is silent most of its life.

It’s really kind of a beautiful story that it remains silent most of his life.

And then just before the moment of its death, it breaks that silence by singing this final song of unbelievable sweetness.

Sounds like something should be in an opera.

It probably was.

It was, yeah.

Definitely was.

You’re right that it’s this classic image that you find in Shakespeare and The Merchant of Venice and Chaucer and Aesop’s Fables.

I mean, it’s been around for a long, long, long time.

And we borrowed the expression from a German expression that means the same thing.

Well, that’s interesting because when I was speaking with one of my colleagues about it, he started saying, well, this came from this woman named and gave this German name and when she was singing and then she just dropped dead.

I said, you’ve got to be kidding me.

He said, yeah, I just made that up.

But he linked it to German.

Interesting.

Well, we would never do such a thing.

Never, ever.

Ever?

No.

Ever.

It was Schubert who had a collection of songs published after he died under the name Schwanegesang.

Right.

Like the unfinished?

I thought maybe it might have something to do with the opera of, you know, where the swan is dying.

You know, the dancers are swans.

Swan Lake.

Swan Lake, something like that.

Yeah, there’s definitely some correlation there.

Most of the dictionaries that I’ve checked suggest that we borrowed swan song from German, where it is something of, well, my German is terrible, but Schwanegesang, which is literally swan song.

And you can find it in German as far back as 1560.

I’m sure it’s much older than that.

And there’s definitely the correspondence between the English language tradition of opera and the German tradition of opera is so great that I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s where we get it from directly.

So, Judy, what are you going to do in retirement now besides call erudite radio shows?

Well, actually, I would love to just continue to call this show.

You’re one of my favorites.

Oh.

But I work for Church World Service, and I plan to continue to volunteer for Church World Service in my retirement.

So I’ve got some things mapped out, especially in emergency response and things like that.

Oh, cool.

Cool.

Well, that’s very much needed.

So my swan song will be very active.

Excellent.

Excellent.

I love that.

It’ll be more like Happy Feet than swan songing.

More like Happy Feet.

I like that.

Well, hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Okay, and thanks for the answer.

Thanks, Judy.

Take care.

Grant, speaking of retirement, remember when we asked that question about is there a better word than retirement?

You know, sometimes there’s a word that we talk about on the show that just hits a nerve, and this one did.

I mean, the emails just won’t stop coming.

We heard from all kinds of people who were suggesting, instead of the term retirement, rebooting, reframing, reformatting, rephasing, becoming an entrepreneur.

One of my favorites was from Gary in San Diego, who said that when he was a full-time employee of a company, he referred to that as captive employment.

And now he refers to his current state as free-range employment.

I like that, free-range.

So that’s what I’m going with for now.

But, boy, now if we could just come up with an alternative to senior citizen, we’d be all set.

Old people.

No.

Okay.

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