A Coon’s Age

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is James S. Brown from San Antonio, Texas.

James?

Yes.

James S. Brown.

Welcome to the show, James.

Yeah, the S stands for sensational, but that’s between me and a couple other people.

But anyway.

Nice.

All right.

Well.

Now everybody knows.

James Sensational Brown, what’s on your mind?

Well, of course, I’m from Texas, as you can tell from my slang.

We have a Texas slang around here.

And, you know, the type of language that we use, you know, we go different places in the country.

Nobody understands what we’re saying.

And, well, not, you know, generally speaking anyway.

And the other day I was talking with a friend of mine, and I’ve been using this term all my life.

I never know where it comes from.

For instance, one of my friends that I went to school with many, many moons ago, he asked me had I seen a certain person.

And I told him, you know, not what I’m thinking about, I told him, man, I hadn’t seen old John in Coon’s Ages.

I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of old John in Coon’s Ages.

And, of course, nobody knows what that means, including me.

But, you know, what that means, I guess, in English, I hadn’t seen the guy.

Right.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

So both those expressions mean you haven’t seen somebody in a long time, right?

Right, right.

Hide nor hair, you know, come on.

I don’t know what the hide nor hair is.

I guess it has something to do with a rabbit.

I don’t know.

Well, it has to do with any kind of animal, and actually it’s much, much older than Texas.

It goes back to the 1400s.

If you’re talking about hide or hair, it means the entire animal.

Everything you can see on the outside, including human beings, because we have hide and we have hair, so to speak.

Are you serious?

Yeah, it’s pretty much that simple.

14th century?

Yeah, 1400s.

Yeah.

So 15th century, yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Now, what about the other part?

Well, the other part apparently goes back to an old idea that raccoons live a long time.

It’s a reference to raccoons, although these days there’s such a sensitivity to that word that I wouldn’t use it.

Yeah, yeah.

But around here, you know, when you say stuff like that, people know what you’re saying.

You know, there’s no pun or any ill feelings intended because this is Texas.

We have found that Texans love to talk about the way they talk, James.

Yes. Yeah, I’ve been living there for 57 years so far.

And trust me, that’s not a whole lot I have not heard.

I thought it was kind of cool because I’ve been saying it all my life and I never I never knew what it was until you just told me.

How about that? Neither hide nor hair.

Neither hide nor. And that’s just normal language from around here.

-huh.

That is so cool.

But I really appreciate you guys doing the research and enlightening me on that.

At least I can tell my friends now what the heck we’re talking about.

Well, we can tell our friends that we just talked to James Sensational Brown.

I think that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, I am a musician.

If people ask me, are you the real James Brown, I tell them, yeah, I’m the real one.

The other guy was a fake.

Well, James, we are delighted that you called.

I hope you call again sometime.

Oh, thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

And thank you for doing the research, and we’ll be listening in on your radio station.

Okay.

Thanks a lot, James.

All right.

Take care now.

Take care.

Yeah, Coons Age is likely to get you in trouble if you’re the wrong person at saying to the wrong people.

Right.

But it is about 100 years old.

We do believe it comes from a raccoon, and it does have to do with the supposed age that these guys can go, right?

Mm—

I haven’t seen you in a Coons Age.

Yeah.

That’s a long time.

Yeah, you’ve got to be careful with that, right?

Yeah.

Real careful.

Real careful.

People are just likely to misunderstand your intentions.

Yeah.

We’d love to talk with you about your language questions, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send them to us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.