What 'kith and kin' and 'beck and call' have in common

Exploring fossil words

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and this week we'll talk about fossil words like kith, beck, and hue. And then I have some great listener follow-up stories about topics from some recent episodes. This next segment is by Karen Lundy. At a friend's birthday celebration recently, she told me she was delighted to be surrounded by kith and kin. And suddenly, I was thinking less

0:31about the charcuterie and more about that strange phrase. What does kith—that's K-I-T-H—what does it mean, anyway? And why do we never hear people talk about just kith by itself? Well, some old words get trapped in amber. Not literally, of course. We're talking about a sort of linguistic amber. When my friend said kith and kin, she was using what linguists often call a fossil word. Fossil words

1:01may be mostly extinct, but they survive as part of a phrase that's become fixed in our everyday language. Merriam-Webster defines them as an old word or word element preserved only by idiom. And just a little nerdy side note, some of these phrases are also what we call irreversible binomials. That means their word order sounds wrong if it's reversed. You never hear someone say kin and kith. It's always kith and kin. We talked about more of those in episode 864 back in 2022.

1:37So let's look at a few phrases that contain fossil words, starting with the example I just gave you. In the movie National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Clark Griswold gets sentimental about being surrounded by kith and kin. And in this context, he meant family. He was with his immediate family, cutting down their Christmas tree. But it turns out my friend used the phrase more correctly, at least where the fossil word was concerned. According to Merriam-Webster, kith means familiar

2:09friends, neighbors, or relatives. And kith goes back to Old English, and it used to have an even broader meaning. Originally, it also included a sense of knowledge and familiarity, especially related to a person's native land, along with the familiarity of relatives and neighbors. Edam Online dates the phrase kith and kin to the late 1300s, when it originally meant country and kinsfolk. And here's another fossil word. If friends needed your help, you might assure them,

2:43I'm at your beck and call. It means you're always ready to do what someone asks. But have you ever used beck alone in a sentence? Probably not. Originally, beck was a verb that meant to signal someone with a nod or gesture, which makes sense when you think of summoning someone to do your bidding. The noun followed sometime in the late 1300s. And a little side note, occasionally, you see someone write beck and call using the word beckon, b-e-c-k-o-n, instead of beck and. But

3:17that's an egg corn, a misunderstanding that seems to make sense. The correct idiom is three words, beck and call. And then there's hue and cry. You might hear a teacher say, the kids raised a hue and cry when recess was rained out. The idiom hue and cry is often used to describe an uproar. We tend to think of it as a bunch of people making a fuss. But originally, it would have been more about one wronged person shouting a rallying cry. Hue comes from the old French for clamor or public

3:53outcry. When this word first came into use in the 1200s, the kind of organized police force we have today didn't exist. In the English common law system, the task of fighting crime and seeking justice often fell to citizens. So if someone stole your coin purse, you might yell, stop, thief. And anyone who heard your hue and cry was expected to join the pursuit. Today, of course, you usually

4:23don't hear the word hue, h-u-e, except when it refers to color. It's the same spelling, but a completely different word with different origins. The word you might use when you look at something freshly painted and say, that's a beautiful hue. That comes from Old English rather than Old French. Now, if you've just given your home a deep cleaning, you might say everything's spick and span. You're describing your space as extremely clean, fresh, and tidy, at least until the kids or the grandkids arrive.

4:56But the phrase originally had more to do with something being new than being freshly cleaned. The older form, the first known use was from 1579, was spick and span new. The first word of the phrase, spick, S-P-I-C-K, is an obsolete word for spike. The second part was originally span new, with a hyphen, between span and new. It meant brand new. Edom Online puts this wonderfully concrete

5:26image behind it. Something, quote, new as a recently made spike and wood chip, unquote. So the phrase once reminded people of things like fresh materials and new construction. Imagine something not yet worn down by use with untarnished metal or clean-cut wood. Over time, the new part dropped away, but the idea of something fresh stayed. Spick and span came to mean something so clean and tidy that it looks new. And that's some fossil word magic. The idea of fresh

5:59building materials faded from everyday use, but they're still tucked into a phrase you might use after you've just deep-cleaned the kitchen. That segment was by Karen Lundy, a career writer and editor. She writes I'll Go First, a newsletter where she shares her story, then hands you a writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her on igofirst.org.

Listener follow-ups and games

6:29Before we get to the familect this week, I have some wonderful follow-ups from listeners about items from previous shows. First, multiple listeners wrote in to comment on Holly's phrase, huckle-buckle beanstalk, as something to say when you find something you're looking for. It turns out it's based on an old children's game. Joyce said she played the game in fifth grade in southern Connecticut, where four students would leave the room and they'd hide an eraser. And then the students would return, and when they found the eraser,

6:59they'd say huckle-buckle beanstalk, and go to the blackboard, and the first one at the blackboard would win. Priscilla said when she was young, her mom would play a similar game with art students while waiting for their parents to pick them up. In this case, the first person to yell huckle-buckle beanstalk won the game and the privilege of being the person to hide an item. And Daniel said huckle-buckle beanstalk is what you say when you find the thimble in the traditional game hide the thimble.

7:29In his version of the game, when you find the item, you look somewhere else before saying huckle-buckle beanstalk to keep the other players from guessing, because they have to keep looking until they find it. There are many variations, and sometimes the person who hid the item will call out hot or cold as the searchers get closer or farther from finding it. Wikipedia says the game predates Victorian parlor games and also goes by many other names, including huckleberry beanstalk,

8:01hot buttered beans, find the object, and find the key, and is played in many countries. As for where it got the name huckle-buckle beanstalk, nobody really knows, but that name is newer and more common in the United States than the name hot buttered beans. So one theory is that the beans part carried over from Europe and that it somehow became entwined with the idea of the Jack and the Beanstalk tale. Next, Daniel also sent a link to a funny college humor video that makes all the

8:34situations in Alanis Morissette's song ironic actually ironic. Like, it's like a no-smoking sign on your cigarette break at the R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company. I'll put a link to that in the show notes. And finally, Michelle wrote in with another follow-up about the word nimrod, which is turning out to have all kinds of interesting little tidbits associated with it. She said, quote, I loved your recent podcast episode mentioning the word nimrod. Like many, I grew up hearing the term in cartoons, but it caught my attention again when I was touring colleges. On the drive to Michigan Tech

9:12in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, we passed through Watersmeet, Michigan, which proudly displays a sign reading Home of the Nimrods. I ended up attending Michigan Tech, where I occasionally saw students wearing Nimrod t-shirts. While I initially assumed it was a small-town gimmick, I eventually learned that the mascot dates back to 1904. It actually refers to the biblical figure Nimrod, who was described as a mighty hunter, reflecting the area's heritage. I thought you might find this history interesting.

9:46You can find more information on the school's website at www.watersmeetschool.org, unquote. So their website says, in 1986, ESPN's Sports America show named the Nimrods the third-best high school sports nickname. So I had to go see what the first two were, right? And they were the Cairo, Georgia Syrup Makers and the Brush, Colorado Beet Diggers. Frankly, I think the Nimrods were robbed.

Family words and egg corns

10:17Thanks, Michelle. And this week, we have egg corns in our familect, too. This one is from Paul. Hello, Mignon. This is Paul from Joplin. You had asked for some more familect stories, so I thought I would briefly share three. These are all words that my son used when he was little, and we just found them funny, and they just stuck. The first two are egg corns. For the word lawnmower, he would say

10:47lawn motor, and instead of eyeballs, he said eye bulbs. And you have to admit that like most egg corns, they do make sense in a way, at least in a kid's mind. And the third one, I don't know if it's really an egg corn, but his word for umbrella was underbrella. You have to admit again that that makes sense because when you use it, you stand under it. Anyway, keep up the good work. Thanks. Bye.

11:19Thanks, Paul. That is so great. And those all strike me as egg corns, too, because they all make sense. What a clever child. And if anyone is wondering about egg corns, we talked all about them in episode 711 back in 2019, and you can still find that on your podcast feed. Grammar Girl is a quick and dirty tips podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Maram El-Mageeb, Stephen Japanski, Holly Hutchings, Dan Feyerabend, and Rebecca Sebastian, who's been to Africa twice. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening. And don't forget

11:53to like and subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.