A Indianapolis, Indiana, woman remembers that her Kentucky-born grandfather used to say that a lazy person wasn’t very work-brickle. The dialectal term work-brickle is a variant of work-brittle, which, in the late 19th century, described someone who was industrious. Over time, work-brittle also came to mean lazy, perhaps because of associating the word brittle with the idea of being delicate or fragile. The use of work-brittle in the positive sense of being energetic and eager to work is especially common in Indiana. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Work-Brittle”
Hello, you have A Way with Words.
Hi, this is Sylvia Bachner.
Hi, Sylvia, where are you calling from?
Indianapolis, Indiana.
Welcome to the program.
What can we do for you, Sylvia?
I have a question about some of the vocabulary my grandfather used.
When I was a child, he was from Kentucky in the Sadieville, Synthiana area.
One of the things he used to say about people who did not like to work was that they weren’t very work-brickle.
And I got the idea pretty quickly about what he meant, but I discovered later on when I asked him that you could not say the reverse.
You couldn’t say that somebody was work-brickle.
So I’m just interested in the word, where it comes from, why it’s only used in the negative, that kind of thing.
That’s so interesting because there is a certain amount of confusion about this word.
Well, the most common version is work brittle, B-R-I-T-T-L-E.
Oh.
Yeah, and it has been used positively for a very long time.
It probably comes from a dialectal word in England, but since at least the late 19th century, you could say that somebody was work brittle, meaning that they were what I described, somebody who was really industrious and eager to get to work and all of that.
What’s really interesting, though, is that after World War II, you see a lot more use of work brittle, meaning not so industrious, like actually lazy.
And so it’s this weird situation where work brittle can mean the opposite of itself.
Some people use it to say somebody who’s really industrious, and some people use it to describe somebody who’s super lazy.
It’s one of these odd situations where two different meanings coexist, sort of like the word peruse, you know, which can mean to look at something really, really carefully or to look at something just in a sort of cursory fashion.
So it’s kind of odd in that way.
And so that second leader misinterpretation came about because people didn’t quite understand what the expression meant.
Brittle.
They thought brittle meant, oh, like they’re too fragile to work, some kind of, they’re too much of a, I don’t know, delicate flower.
Yeah.
And I’m interested that you’re calling from Indianapolis, right?
Yes.
Right, because in the Dictionary of American Regional English, there’s a map of where people say work brittle in that first sense of being industrious, and the big concentration is in Indiana.
Oh, for heaven’s sake.
How about that?
Well, that is interesting.
Well, thank you so much for calling about this and sharing it with us.
Well, thank you so much for the information.
It’s fascinating.
Sure thing.
Bye-bye.
Bye-bye.
So that’s a really interesting expression.
I think I’ve only ever seen that in fiction at this point.
I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in the wild.
You sound like you’ve heard people say it.
I’ve heard it a couple of times, but then I’m from that part of the country.
Yeah, Kentucky, just south of there.
We know your family has words that seem to belong to you, and you’re not sure if anyone else says them.
We can tell you if that’s true or not.
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