Wash-Belly

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. Who’s this?

This is Ralston. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Well, welcome to the show, Ralston. Nice to meet you.

My question is, I’m a Jamaican by birth. I’m a naturalized citizen, but ever since I’ve been here, I’ve always had, you know, the last child. I’m the last child of my parents, and I’ve always heard them call me the baby boy.

So my question is really, in Jamaica, they call us washbelly. And I’ve always wanted to find out what the history, why do they call it washbelly, and where does baby boy come from? Why do they call the last child of any parent baby boy versus Jamaican versus American?

So in the United States, you are the baby boy, but in Jamaica, you would be the washbelly.

Yes, I’m the washbelly.

W-A-S-H-B-E-L-L-Y, washbelly?

Yes, perfect.

That’s a really interesting question. So how many kids are there in your family?

There’s seven. My mom has seven. So it’s one boy, Michael, and she’s got five girls, and I’m the last one. I’m the wash belly.

And, Ralston, can that be applied to either boys or girls, wash belly?

Yes. My understanding is it can be applied to either boy or girl. I’ve just always been curious about it. And the funny thing is I went to Jamaica a couple weeks ago and I forgot to ask Ma about it. I totally forgot to ask her.

You know, I came across this term for the first time, oh, I don’t know, six or seven years ago. I collected a citation for it. That is, I found it in a Jamaican newspaper and I made a little note on my website of this term washbelly. And then I didn’t think much of it. But it turns out that this term washbelly is in the Dictionary of Jamaican English written by Frederick Cassidy and Robert LePage. This is probably the single most comprehensive work on Jamaican English that there is.

Fred Cassidy also did another book called, let me get this right, Jamaica Talk as well, which is a little more narrative and less like a dictionary. But these two works together do a pretty good job of summarizing the way Jamaicans speak that’s different from the rest of the English-speaking world.

Washbelly’s in there. Unfortunately, what LePage and Cassidy say about wash belly is that it simply means a child whose belly needs to be washed, which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. Because when I went looking in newspapers and found a lot more uses of the term wash belly and personal blogs and that sort of thing, what I found was there’s another component to it.

Now, you’re the youngest child, and so I don’t mean to offend. But a lot of times when people call the youngest child the wash belly, they also mean that they’re lazy or that they’re spoiled and they don’t have to do anything because they’re the youngest and the rest of the family takes care of them and does their chores for them.

And washes their belly?

Well, I don’t know about that. But I found again and again in newspapers and books even, fiction written by Jamaican writers about their lives and their histories, that’s the way the wash belly is seen. It’s spoiled. It’s a mama’s boy or a daddy’s little girl.

I may agree with the spoiled part of it because they usually say to me as a kid, or to my mom, say, he’s going to bite your ears off. You know, because, you know, I always used to hear that, hey, you keep spoiling him, he’s going to bite your ears off. But I never thought of it as being lazy. So maybe spoiled. I probably could agree with that hearing.

But where does baby boy come from? Now, why does Americans call their child baby boy?

Oh, because I think it’s related to the way that babies are announced in newspapers. So if I have a child and I send the announcement to the newspaper, they will put as the headline, baby boy Barrett. Or if I have a little girl, they’ll say baby girl Barrett. I think it’s related to that. This is a very typical small town way of announcing the birth of your child in a newspaper. It’s almost universal. I think it’s got something to do with that.

And so it sounds like a term of affection. I don’t know, but they actually literally are the baby of the family, the baby boy of the family, which is their last child.

Yeah, I have a baby sister. There were five kids in my family. She’s 36, but she’s still my baby sister, so it does carry into adulthood.

There was just one more thing that you might be interested to know about washbelly. It’s not only heard in Jamaica. It’s been found in Belize, in the English that they speak there, in Guyana, in the English they speak there, and in the English-speaking part of Cameroon. So it looks like this term probably came from the United Kingdom at some point and settled in these parts of the world where there’s a secondary English that is now spoken, where the English was an add-on language brought in by the colonials.

Well, thank you so much for your answer. I appreciate it.

Our pleasure. Call us again sometime when you have another question, Ralston, all right?

I will. Actually, I’m going to check out that book by Jamaica Talk. I’m going to see if I could pick up some more from there.

Great. Thanks.

Take care.

Thank you, Martha. Have a good one.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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