Transcript of “Tarnation, Gumption, and Brogans”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Lanessa from presently San Antonio, soon to be somewhere else.
How are you?
Okay.
Do you know where?
We’re transitioning. We are moving from San Antone to L.A.
It’s a big trip.
Oh, wow. Yeah, that’s a big trip.
Okay, so my mom, my grandmother, and grandfather were originally from Tennessee.
He was in the Army.
He would come back from work.
He would work on a refrigeration truck or mechanics and whatnot.
And he would, one time I heard my grandma say at that side door that led into her pristine kitchen, she said, Henry, what in the tarnation? You don’t have any gumption. Don’t come walking into my kitchen like that. Leave your brogans at the door.
I was a little kid, you know.
Well, that’s a lot of stuff.
Yeah, that’ll blow your hair back.
Right?
As a kid, I was like, Brogan’s. That’s just, I’m like, and I looked at his shoes, and they were just boots, you know, some sort of boots.
I didn’t even think they were military boots or anything like that, but they were definitely shop boots, and they weren’t allowed in the kitchen.
Right, right, her pristine kitchen.
Oh, and I’m not kidding. She kept that house so nice all the time.
Yeah, very house proud. I can imagine. And this was where?
This is in Tennessee, Nashville.
There’s three words in there that catch the ear, right? It’s tarnation, gumption, and brokens.
Let’s kind of break those down in reverse order.
So brokens, as you know, it’s a kind of work shoe or boot.
Interestingly, this is a word of Scots-Irish origin.
And it comes from a word that is in both Irish and Scots-Gaelic.
And it means a small brogue.
And a brogue is a leather outdoor shoe.
And it has perforated ornamentations.
These days, a brogue is a nice man’s shoe.
But it could also be a rough work shoe back in the day.
And interestingly enough, this is probably where we get the term brogue referring to an accent.
So some people might talk an Irish brogue or a Scots brogue.
Which makes a lot of sense because you think about those accents kind of being bedecked with ornamentation, right?
But sturdy, just like the shoe.
Oh, that’s cool.
Yeah.
Wow.
You guys really find things.
I thought it was alluding to a military shoe, but I seriously don’t remember which shoe it was.
And I’m like, well, who knows?
I love to go even deeper than just a military shoe or whatnot.
Brogan is especially more common in the American South, in the U.S. South.
And really in the beginning, it was a coarse, heavy leather work shoe, kind of tied with leather straps.
Often homemade, and the shoes were made the same size so that you could put either shoe on either foot.
There was no left and no right.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
That seems uncomfortable.
That would be handy.
Yeah.
Made on the same last, as they put it.
The last is the thing that you fashion the shoe on.
Now, gumption is also a Scots word, interestingly enough.
So we might have a connection here.
And it’s related to the word gormless.
Have you ever heard anyone called gormless to mean witless or stupid or dull?
No.
Because gorm or gorm means to understand.
And this is a 300-plus-year-old word.
So gumption means gomption, having a lot of gorm or a lot of gorm.
Oh, wow.
Yeah.
So that’s also a Scottish word.
Also Scottish.
Wow.
Yeah.
Right.
And then tarnation is, we’ll call them minstoth.
It’s a form of two words.
Damnation turned into darnation.
It’s probably where we get darn, you know, as a minstoth for damn.
But tarnal is a little different.
It comes from the word eternal.
So people would use tarnal and eternal for infinites.
Like there’s a line in Othello by Shakespeare about an eternal villain.
It doesn’t mean that he lasts forever.
It means that he’s very much a villain.
And so eternal plus darnation became tarnation.
So in tarnation.
So I was worried that I had pronounced it wrong.
Like I thought maybe it was a short for entire nation or something like this.
And, you know, tar.
No, but you will hear people then, because they don’t understand the root of it, they will say, what in the nation?
And that is a further extension of this expression.
Wow, that is really neat. Thank you for clarifying all of that.
Lanissa, thank you so much for sharing those memories, and good luck with your new house and keeping it as spotless as hers.
Thank you so much, you guys.
Great. Thanks for calling.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
Give us a call to talk about the words passed down in your family.
We’d love to hear about it.
