That Particular Noise the Class Makes When a Classmate Gets in Trouble

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Katie Turek and I’m calling in from Greenville, South Carolina.

Hey, Katie, welcome to the show.

I have been searching online and everywhere I can think of to find the meaning of a saying that I learned in a little one-room country schoolhouse in rural Montana when I was about eight years old. It’s a ver, something you would say to someone that it’s like, ooh, you saw something maybe that they didn’t want people to see. It was kind of a teasing comment. Ver.

And it occurred to me it might have something to do with Italians because there were some Italian immigrants who worked in coal mines in the small town nearby.

This is very similar to Spanish. I know a little Spanish. Is T-O, meaning to something. And Z-E-R in Spanish means C. So like there might be to see, like I see you or I saw you. So I thought maybe it was a colloquialism in Italian. Maybe that means shame or shamey shame.

Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy. Katie, I have been collecting data on this for a number of years. And so your data is very useful and interesting to me. Wow. And to Martha as well. You’re like the piece of the puzzle that slid under the couch that I’ve been looking for, you know? You’ve got the whole thing on the table and there’s a hole in the middle.

Yeah. So we had a call about this a number of years ago. And it was related to this, but it was a different version. And she was from Albuquerque. And the way she described it, it was a thing that you would say when someone at school was reprimanded by the teacher or are called into the office. And what the rest of the class would say was umbers. And it’s the kind of thing that in the rest of the country, some of the rest of the country, people would say oh or.

And we got so much email and so many voicemails in response to that. Dozens and dozens of people had versions of this. And some of them were spelled like umber, like the color. But others were spelled U-H-V-E-R, sometimes with a B, sometimes with a V, sometimes with an A or a U at the beginning. And a number of different people thought it might be related to Umbridge, and I don’t think it is. But most of the people who reported this came from the same part of the country. They had connections to Montana, just like you, but also the Dakotas, North and South Dakota, New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Wyoming, all from the same region of the country.

That’s interesting, right? To a linguist.

Yes. To a sociolinguist, that’s very interesting. Well, and especially because those places were populated, at least by Caucasians, you know, we all came from someplace else. As a linguist, I know that before that, there were Spanish speakers. One of the oldest dialects is Spanish-spoken in North America is still spoken in Colorado and New Mexico. And it’s this long Spanish-speaking tradition. And there’s a long tradition of not only these Spanish speakers moving around as families, but as workers, whether it was with cattle or moving for agricultural reasons or what have you, doing work in the mountains or work in the fields and so forth.

And I think it isn’t Italian. I think you’re right that it’s Spanish and it’s Aver because there’s a Spanish exclamation, Aver, that has lots of variations and lots of uses. But many of them have something to do with something like, let’s see, or you’re going to find out, or we’ll find out, or I’ll find out. And I think that’s what we’re looking at here. It’s a version of the kids all saying, you’re going to find out. Basically a way of saying you’re going to see what you’re going to get, what kind of trouble you’re going to get into.

Yeah. Martha, what do you think about this?

Yeah, that makes sense to me. I mean, Aver, to, you know, just see what’s happening. You know, let me see that. I see you. I saw you.

Yeah, Aver is so colloquial that even, I have only two books that specialize in interjections in Spanish, and both of them do just kind of a poor job of covering Aver, but I can find many, many uses of it in dialogues and fiction and in movie scripts where it seemed, they approach what we’re talking about here. Somebody says, that’s not going to happen. And somebody says, a ver, it will too. Meaning, you’ll see, it will.

Yeah. We have examples of English speakers taking words from other languages and modifying them in such a way that they no longer sound or feel like they come from another language. From Spanish, for example, from Mexican Spanish, people took the word chones, which is slang for underpants, and change it to choners or chonies. It’s not widely used, but some people will know. Or the French word voila. Some people have no idea that that’s French, and they spell it W-A-L-A. They don’t know that it’s French, and they just think it’s an weird English word, voila. And that’s what happens when a word becomes fully anglicized and fully naturalized in its new home.

Well, let me add one more thing. One more thing. That little town with the coal mine is called Roundup, Montana, where cattle were driven in. So we’re looking at Spanish herders, too.

There we go. Gold star to you today. I’m going to send you a trophy, in fact. That’s amazing what you’ve done. So I’m really pleased to take your call.

Oh, thank you so very much. Mystery solved.

Okay. Well, I don’t know about that, but how about this? It’s another book on the shelf towards the end of this mystery.

Okay. All right. All right. Be well. Take care of yourself.

Thank you. Bye-bye. Take care, Katie. Bye-bye.

Well, we want to be your suit. And tell us something we don’t know. Give us a call on the telephone. 877-929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada. Or spill your knowledge in email, words@waywordradio.org.