Behind God’s Back

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Melanie Vinovich. I’m calling from San Francisco, California.

Oh, Melanie. How are you doing?

Hello. I’m doing well, thanks. How are you?

All right. Super duper. Welcome to the show.

We’re great. What’s going on?

Well, so my question is this. I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and there was a phrase that we always used to mean really far away. We would say it was behind God’s back. And when I moved to California, I sort of assumed this was a thing everyone said, and then one day I used it in front of some friends, and they had no idea what I was talking about. And so I thought it was an Indiana thing, so I reached out to some Indiana friends through Facebook, and no one else from Indiana had ever heard of this.

Really?

So now I’m kind of confused about this phrase. My brother says that my mom always used it because he knows it. But I don’t know if it’s just a family thing or, you know, where it comes from.

Let’s do a little diagnosis here for a second. I’m going to ask you some questions. Did your mother ever live or come from the Caribbean?

She did not, though she was a flight attendant.

Okay. Do you have a strong religious tradition in your family? Are you the kind of people who do Sunday school and go to church a couple times a week and do summer Bible camps and that sort of thing?

You know, we did a few of those when I was a kid, but it wasn’t really something we did a lot of, though my mom herself was quite religious.

Okay. That could have part of it. There’s this passage in the Bible. I’m not a big Bible scholar, and I just know this from my reading. But it’s from Isaiah 38, 17. For thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back. And there’s a suggestion in some of the literature that I’ve read that this particular line from the Bible is what influenced the parts of the English-speaking world where this expression behind God’s back to mean very far away or out of the sight of God is used.

So, for example, there’s a dictionary of Caribbean English, which I highly recommend because it’s so interesting. It’s called The Dictionary of the English Slash Creole of Trinidad and Tobago by Lisa Weiner. And she has a really nice entry on Behind God’s Back. And it pops up not only in those two islands, but it pops up in Jamaica. It pops up in all the other English-speaking islands as well. It’s used in an incredible number of sermon titles and book titles and journal article titles by religious scholars or people of the cloth who are writing about the things that we do, that we think are out of the sight of the God versus the fact that God is all-knowing and therefore there is nothing out of the sight of God. It’s kind of that contradiction of being human versus being, you know, understanding that your God can see you no matter what you’re doing.

So you would hear it more in the Caribbean than you would in this country? I mean, I, you know, I grew up in a religious tradition and I don’t remember hearing this.

Yeah. Well, in the Caribbean, it’s part of the idiomatic discourse. So it’s just something that anyone might say. Whereas in this country, if you find it, it’s probably a carefully chosen phrase in a particular position of prestige, like I was saying, like a book title or article title or sermon title, that sort of thing. Melanie, does that make sense?

Yeah, that is so fascinating. And it sort of makes sense because the people who I mentioned it to in San Francisco, one of them was particularly religious, and he had never heard of it before. So he was a lay person. So perhaps this is something that people maybe in the clergy or in some sort of leadership role may be more familiar with.

Well, I guess my question for you is, did they understand it even if they’d never heard it before?

Good question.

They kind of looked at me funny, like they had no idea what I was talking about. And to me, it was something that, you know, it meant far away.

Yeah. I just didn’t. It was kind of an interesting moment. But no, they really didn’t get what it meant.

Yeah, it seems pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think?

Does it?

I think so. If you’re not from a religious tradition at all, maybe not. But I do, I like the imagery that you are from such a backwater rustic place that even God can’t see it, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I still use it, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t offending people, particularly religious people. And so now that you’ve explained it to me, I realize that it’s actually not at all offensive. It’s from religious literature.

Yeah, probably. Most likely, yeah.

Great. Well, thank you all so much.

Sure, Melanie. We appreciate your calling.

Thanks, Melanie. Take care now.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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