Who Is She From Home?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. My name is Dan Anderson. I’m calling from Ravenna, Nebraska.

Ooh, Ravenna, Nebraska. That is a lovely name.

It is.

That sounds like something from a fantasy novel.

Well, I’ve been to Ravenna, Italy, but not Nebraska.

Yes, it’s an Italian name, and all the streets in the city are pretty much Italian as well.

Oh, my goodness.

That’s super cool. What’s on your mind? What’s your language question?

Well, when I was growing up, my mother would always use this phrase, who was she from home?

And she would use that phrase when she was talking usually to her other women friends about some acquaintance that they all knew.

And that phrase was at a high level kind of asking what the woman’s maiden name was.

And, you know, whether, but it was always a lot more complicated than that.

You could never just give an answer and say that she was a McLaughlin or a Crist or some other family name.

It always involved, you know, a whole history of the woman’s family and her siblings and where she was from and all those things.

And so I was wondering just how common that was.

I didn’t know if my mom had just made it up or if it was something that was commonplace.

Well, Dan, I have a question for you.

Did she have any Polish heritage at all?

The town where she grew up was Polish, German, Bohemian.

And where was it?

It was Loop City.

It was about 30 miles from Ravenna, right in the middle of Nebraska.

Yeah, the reason I ask is because that same construction is a standard feature of Polish,

And you’ll hear that construction translated into English as, who is she from home, in communities that have a heavy Polish influence.

You see that a lot in Wisconsin.

And Michigan.

And Michigan.

Yes.

Yeah.

Yeah, in Polish it’s like, zzodom.

They would frequently refer to Loop City as the Polish capital of America.

There we go.

Yeah, the Polish is like Zdomu, which is related to domestic and words like that in English.

I’m interested that it meant a lot more than just her name, though.

Yeah, you knew that when that question came out, you could pull out a pad of paper and you were going to get her entire history.

You were going to find out how everyone in the room knew her and where she went to school and what her family did, where their farm was located.

Wow.

Everything, everything.

And everybody was just quiet when the answers came because you knew that it was going to be a history lesson.

Oh, that is lovely.

Dan, thank you for sharing that with us.

Yes, you’re welcome.

Thank you, Dan, for your call.

Really appreciate it.

All right, bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

We should point out that from home is what we call a calc in linguistics.

C-A-L-Q-U-E.

Yes, C-A-L-Q-U-E.

It’s when you take a phrase from, a word or a phrase from another language and translate it literally into your own.

Like, for example, our term blue blood comes from Spanish sangre azul.

Interesting.

Blue blood.

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