Cutting a Rusty

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Fawn from Danville, Kentucky.

Welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I was raised up north, and when I was a teenager, my brother married a girl from Selma, Alabama.

And, you know, she was cute as a bug but had a lot of colloquialisms.

And one of them that she used consistently was she would say, oh, we were going to town, we were cutting a rusty.

Or, you know, so-and-so was doing this, and they were cutting a rusty.

And I thought that was just a real, I mean, I kind of had the idea that they were going faster, they were really getting after it, but just never had heard that expression anywhere, really, but from her or from that area of Alabama.

And I just thought that was, I wondered where that came from.

Yeah, that’s fabulous. A rusty.

A rusty. So there’s a connected history here to some other words that you probably know.

Rusty as a noun in American English is pretty rare at this point, but it just means a prank or some wild behavior or something outrageous that you might do.

It could even just be something as simple as shouting out naughty words or pulling a trick on somebody.

So a rusty is just doing something that’s just not usually permitted or considered proper.

But where rusty comes from is the word resty with an E, R-E-S-T-Y.

And that word is related to restive.

If you have a restive sleep, R-E-S-T-I-V-E, it means you’re tossing and turning, you’re fidgeting.

It’s not a calm sleep at all.

Yeah, you’re not really getting rest.

You’re not really getting rest.

And what happened with the word restive, originally restive applied to horses.

It underwent what one of the dictionary calls a reversal, where originally it meant just standing stock still.

But if you’ve ever seen a horse stand still, their flanks and their muscles will do this quivering thing.

It looks like they’ve got pent-up energy they need to get out or maybe they want to shake off the flies.

It flipped and restive came to mean fidgety or active or just looking like you needed to get out and run.

And that later became applied to people.

It underwent this transformation when it became a noun to refer to an act of, let’s say, running or being aggressive or being really full of motion and life and vitality and pranks and so forth.

Interesting.

It’s a strange path, though, isn’t it?

Yes, very strange.

Well, there you go.

It goes back about 200 years, the noun form of rusty.

And originally comes out probably from horses and dealing with animals.

So is it used anywhere else in the states?

Yeah, it’s found throughout the south, mainly Tennessee, Kentucky.

Occasionally it will pop up in places north of the Ohio River, but usually it’s the southern states.

Yeah, so I’m not surprised the person from Alabama was saying it.

Yeah.

Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

Very interesting.

Cool.

Okay, thank you.

Thank you.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

This is a show where it’s not rare to find that a word has a 200-year history with twists and turns.

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