To Joner Like Jonah

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katie. I’m calling from the Northwoods of Wisconsin, and my word is jonard.

Jonard.

Jonard.

All right, tell us more about jonard.

It’s funny, I got into a conversation with the older of my two older sisters, who is 17 years my senior,

And she defines jonard differently than I do.

She defines it as abject humiliation using the example of being in the sixth grade, being on stage in front of the entire elementary school, and then having the elastic in your underwear burst and losing your underwear around your ankles.

Oh, that’s terrible.

Jonah, so they were Jonah because their britches fell down.

Well, that’s how she would define it.

I disagree.

By the time I was growing up, at least, Jonah became far more nuanced.

It definitely was a form of embarrassment, but it included a component of humiliation.

And I’m going to give you an example that I remember very, very well.

My grandmother, who lived with us, got into an argument with another member of our family, who was not me,

About whether or not Billy Graham and Mahalia Jackson had ever been on stage together.

So my grandmother was adamant that her position was the correct position and in the course of the conversation actually wound up calling the other family members stupid and an idiot and what did they know about anything.

Okay.

As you can well imagine, when it was over, it came to light, of course, that my grandmother, whatever position that was, turned out to be wrong.

And it was worth it.

Yeah, yeah.

And it was one of the few times that she ever admitted, however quietly, that she felt Jonard.

I love the way you said that, however quietly.

We all have somebody like your grandma in our lives.

They’re always right.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, I’ve heard people say, oh, it’s some sort of a morph of Jonard, which it can’t be.

Jonah’s like to be a jinx.

Oh, but you’ve got a preacher’s daughter here.

The preacher’s daughter is going to school you.

Okay, fill me in.

Well, yeah, both of those things are negative.

And it sounds like if your grandmother was arguing so forcefully about Billy Graham,

She was probably familiar with the story of Jonah, wouldn’t you think?

Well, yes, I’m sure she was.

But I don’t know how she would have morphed being a Jonah into being humiliated,

Unless she thought Jonah was humiliated by the whale.

I don’t know.

Well, I think there was an element of humiliation in there.

You remember that God commands Jonah to go to the city of Nineveh

And preach there and tell people to change their ways.

But he has other ideas, and Jonah gets on a ship and heads off in a different direction.

And this huge storm comes up and Jonah gets blamed for it.

And he tells the sailors, yeah, God’s mad at me.

But if you throw me overboard, the storm will stop.

And so they do.

And the seas calm down.

But then he’s swallowed by the whale or a big fish.

This story used to terrify me in Sunday school.

But he was swallowed by the whale and stayed there three days and three nights and ends up repenting.

And I suppose is humiliated in the process.

And then God makes the whale vomit him out, which would also be humiliating.

And so he ends up doing what he was supposed to do in the first place.

And you’re right that a Jonah or a Joner in English dialect is a jinx or somebody who brings bad luck or somebody who’s being a pest primarily.

But Katie, I wanted to talk about the transformation of this meaning here about this biblical character who had this trouble with God that he brought upon himself.

And so this idea of being a troublemaker is part of the history of to be Jonered or to Joner someone because it can be both transitive and intransitive.

But later we see variations, you know, starting in the 1860s where it’s about trouncing someone or making someone fail or rejecting someone.

I’ve even seen Jonah being used to talk about taking the sting out of a very rough text where somebody has written something excoriating, something really terrible about someone else, and then it’s edited to be much calmer.

And they’ve Jonahed the text, almost bolderized it.

Well, thank you very much.

That’s all very interesting.

And now I can tell my sister what I have discovered, that indeed it does have a connection to Jonah.

But it still is more than just abject humiliation.

You have to have done something.

It’s because the example that she gave, I just called it a terribly embarrassing accident.

But it wouldn’t make you feel Jonas.

You just want to go high and never.

Yeah.

That’s an interesting development.

Well, thank you very much, guys.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Kate.

Bye, Katie.

Bye-bye.

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