Why does 'shh' mean the same thing in so many languages, and what's 'broad' about daylight?

The worldwide history of shushing

0:00Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty. This week, we'll talk about why the SH sound means hush in so many different languages, and why we can describe daylight as broad. This next segment is by Karen Lundy. If you've ever held a fussy newborn baby, you've probably found yourself making a voiceless palatoalveolar sibilant. In other words, you whispered shh, and you probably thought nothing

0:34of it. After all, it's the sound we make to calm crying babies. It's also the thing we might hiss when someone talks during a movie or theater performance. For English speakers, shh simply means be quiet. But shh isn't just for English speakers. It turns out the sound, or some close variation, is spread across many languages, and it means roughly the same thing. Hush. A French speaker might say shhute, while a German speaker might say psst, adding a plosive P

1:09sound before the sibilant SH. A Spanish speaker might say shh, just like English speakers do, but also might use chiste. If you're up on your Latin, you might know that classical Latin doesn't even have an SH sound. So does that mean Roman parents were completely helpless when it came to shushing? Nope, they had ST, a clipped little sound with a similar vibe. So in many languages, the sound we use to shush babies or chatty people has a hissing quality. But

1:42why? Well, for starters, the shh sound is easy for humans to make. It's something called a voiceless fricative, which means our vocal cords don't vibrate when we make it. Try this. Put your fingers gently against your throat and say zzzz. Feel the vibrations? Now try it with a sustained shh. There are no vibrations. So we can make the sound softly and continuously. Imagine a parent

2:13pacing with a crying baby on their shoulder at 1am while murmuring a steady shh. And speaking of babies, another theory is that the repeated SH sounds create a kind of steady rhythmic sound that might be a little like what an infant might hear in the womb. But it's not likely we were ever consciously thinking, I'll bet this was what the world sounded like for the baby before she was born. And still another theory is that the sound mimics nature. Think of how you might try to imitate the

2:46sound of wind in the trees or rushing water. But in the end, these are all just plausible explanations, not true origin stories. When it comes to solving the riddle of why shh is such a common hushing sound across languages and cultures, the answer is pretty unsatisfying. We just don't know for sure. And because shh is more of a sound we make than a formal word, it's also not something we can easily trace to a specific etymological source. EtymOnline says the two-letter SH form is an interjection used

3:24to urge or request silence, dating back to 1847, and says that the word hush used in this sense dates back to around 1600. But that's looking at the written expressions rather than a sound used to convey meaning. And likely that hushing sound is a lot older. So linguists don't know exactly why the way we hush one another around the world often involves consonant sounds like shh, s, or st. But research on sound symbolism suggests humans do seem to make surprisingly consistent

4:01connections between certain sounds and certain kinds of meanings and experiences. We tend to connect sharp sounds like the ones made by the consonants k and t with spiky shapes, while m and b are often linked to softer, rounder ones. High-pitched vowel sounds remind us of small things, but lower-pitched vowels feel larger or heavier. These patterns don't mean sounds have universal meanings, but they do suggest that humans might not experience speech sounds as entirely arbitrary. So even though we don't have a firm

4:37understanding of why shh is such a widespread sound for requesting, or even demanding, silence, we at least know this. If you were in a movie theater anywhere in the world and someone was making far too much noise while rummaging around with their soft drink and popcorn, it's a safe bet that shh would not only get their attention, but would also get your meaning across. 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

5:09you a writing prompt and a metaphorical pen. Find her on igofirst.org.

The meaning of broad daylight

5:15A Grammar Pelusian named Mahala wrote, Hello! I absolutely love your podcast. Thanks so much for everything you do for the writing and language communities. Thank you. I have a topic suggestion. The origin of broad daylight. Stefan Pastis created a Pearls Before Swine comic using this idiom, and it made me curious about why we typically only use this term in relation to a crime. He robbed the place in

5:51broad daylight. And just after I googled the origin, I brought up a news page on my work computer. Lo and behold, a headline announced that a man shot a food truck owner, quote, in broad daylight, unquote. Well, thanks for the kind words and the great question. And seeing in broad daylight in a headline immediately after looking it up will definitely get your attention. So at first, broad daylight does sound a little strange if you think about it. We usually use broad to describe something wide, like broad shoulders, a broad grin, or maybe a broad range

6:24of choices. You can't measure the width of daylight. So what's broad about it? Well, in the phrase broad daylight, broad is using a slightly different meaning, open or full, that used to be more common and goes all the way back to Old English. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the phrase broad day, meaning the full light of day, goes all the way back to the late 1300s. This type of broad used to be paired with other words, too. Noah Webster used the example broad sunshine in his 1828

6:58dictionary, generally the same idea as broad daylight. And the Oxford English Dictionary has broad air as an older way to describe the open air. And you can find that full, plain, or unmistakable sense of broad in a few other places, too. Your great-great-grandmother might have said she was broad awake. That's an older version of wide awake. And if someone drops a broad hint, the hint is so plain that nobody could miss it. But as you noticed, people often use broad this way today when they're talking

7:32about crimes. As in, the thieves drove away with the ATM in broad daylight. Dictionaries definitely call out the crime connection, too. For example, the Cambridge Dictionary says a crime committed in broad daylight happens when it, quote, could have been seen and prevented, unquote. And Collins says the phrase expresses surprise that a crime was committed during the day. Nobody says, I bought groceries in broad daylight, because of course you did, unless you worked the night shift. But we usually think of

8:06crimes as happening under the cover of darkness when nobody can see you. So when someone gets robbed at noon, the everyone-can-see-you light is the shocking part. And using the phrase in broad daylight is how we emphasize that the robber didn't even try to hide. I do have to note that the expression isn't exclusively limited to crime, though. For example, you could also say that someone spotted a nocturnal animal like a bat in broad daylight, too. The important idea is almost always that it was

8:39unusual for the event to happen in daylight. So the broad in the phrase broad daylight literally means the light is full and open. And the implication of the phrase is usually that the act occurring in daylight is shocking or unexpected, which is exactly why it works so well in crime stories. Thanks for the question, Mahala, and thanks for your support as a Grammar Palusian.

A banjo playing family word

9:04Finally, I have a familect story from Paul. Hello, Grammar Girl. I'm Paul from Batavia, New York, and I have a familect to share. Years ago, when my now adult son and daughter were maybe three and five years old, respectively, we went to the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester for a special event. I think it was a teddy bear hospital or something. There were some wandering singers and musicians, including someone playing banjo. It was a fun day, but no matter where we turned, we kept hearing the banjo player, and he would

9:36get louder the closer he got. My daughter Rebecca was saying she didn't want Joe Band to follow us because it was giving her a headache. She kept telling me to ask Joe Band to stop, and Joe Band was too loud, and Joe Band was giving her a headache, and Joe Band was this, and Joe Band was that. Eventually, I asked her who was Joe Band. She said Joe Band was playing that music. I didn't make the connection until I realized she thought the guy playing the banjo was named Joe Band. So still 25 years later, if someone in the family has a

10:08really bad headache, we ask if it's a Joe Band headache. Thanks for your great podcast. I recommend it to all of my students. Bye. Thanks, Paul. I love that. You should have one of those people who draws caricatures at state fairs and places like that draw a picture of Joe Band for her sometime, or maybe it's just best left to the imagination. Thanks again. And remember, everyone, if you want to share your familect story, you can find the instructions in the show notes. Grammar Girl is a Quick and Dirty Tips

10:39podcast. Thanks to Nat Hoops, Morgan Christensen, Rebecca Sebastian, Maram El-Mageeb, Dan Fireup, and Holly Hutchings, and Stephen Schepansky, who still has a working VCR. And I'm Mignon Fogarty, better known as Grammar Girl. That's all. Thanks for listening, and don't forget to like and subscribe wherever you listen to the podcast.

11:04Thank you.