Towheaded and Towhead

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karen speaking from South Lake, Texas.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Yes, my word is toeheads.

When I was growing up, my grandmother used to call my brothers and I, we were all light-haired and light-eyed toeheads.

And then when I heard my first kid, I hadn’t heard that term in a long time, and then my mother said it again to me.

So I asked her, you know, where did you get that word?

And she said, well, my grandmother called you three kids toeheads.

So I’ve always wondered, you know, where it came from, and I’ve asked people, you know, I’ve lived all over the country, and I’ve always asked people if they’d ever heard of that word.

And I haven’t gotten a positive response.

Wait, you’re saying lots of other people haven’t heard this term?

Not in some of the places I’ve lived.

Right now I live in South Lake, Texas.

And no one around here has heard of it.

In Florida, no one had heard of that word.

I am surprised.

Color me surprised because I thought it was more common than that.

Okay.

Yeah, me too.

Not sure why.

You’re not picturing like a toe, like T-O-E, right?

Like a toe head?

No.

Okay.

I mean, my mom, again, told me it had to do with light hair.

That’s right.

That we all had blonde hair and blue eyes.

But, you know, her family was Irish, English, and Scottish.

So I was thinking it came from my grandmother somehow.

-huh.

Yeah, it’s a fairly common term.

Toe is an old word, T-O-W.

Toe is an old term for flax, you know, the fibers from flax that look pretty much like that.

Same color and texture.

A blonde whiteness, right?

Yeah, yeah, blonde, blonde, blonde.

And as you said, white, are your eyebrows kind of white?

Yes.

They used to fill them in for pictures.

Well, that’s very interesting because, yes, toe is a term for the filaments from flax.

And so toe-headed has been around for a very long time.

Sometimes toe-headed also means tousled, you know, like you wake up and you have bedhead and your hair is all messed up.

That can be toe-headed, too.

But usually it refers to somebody with exactly the kind of fine, very bright, white, blonde hair that you have.

The literary synonym is flaxen-haired.

So did that come over from England or was that something that was, you know, started in America?

Well, toe meaning flax, that’s back as old as English itself almost.

Yeah, it’s a very old term.

And then calling people toe-headed is at least 200 years in American English and probably older than that in the U.K. Varieties of English.

Okay, and you’re saying that it is commonly used, and maybe I just talked to people who haven’t really used that term before.

Yeah.

I haven’t heard it commonly used.

Yeah, I think, Karen, I think that you’ll find that you’ll get a lot of, if you keep asking, you’ll get more people that know it.

Maybe my understanding of the frequency of it is a little misplaced because I work in language, and so it just seems common to me.

It’s something I encounter all the time.

Yeah.

Right, and again, it’s not like I ask everybody all the time.

It’s just when it comes to conversation.

Here comes Karen with her question again.

Right.

She’s got the T-shirt on.

I appreciate this.

Sure, we’re glad to help, Karen.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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