Dear Me Suz

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Nate Danforth. I’m calling from Tucson, Arizona.

Welcome to the show, Nate. What can we do for you?

Thank you. Yeah, I was recently back home in western Massachusetts and was reminded of quite a few things from my childhood.

And one of them was the saying my grandmother had.

She had come from Nova Scotia just before World War I, and she had some things that came with her.

And she would get exasperated sometimes and say, dear me, something would startle her, and that would be kind of her retort on that.

And I’ve never heard it since, so I didn’t know if there was something that was out there.

Dear me, sus.

Any idea how she spelled it?

I don’t.

No, but…

Okay, but definitely not suds.

Not suds.

Not S-U-D-S, but more like S-U-Z as in Zed.

Yes, exactly.

Yep, yep.

Okay, yeah, this is really interesting.

It’s not that common.

Anybody who uses this term probably recognizes that it’s very dated, if not obsolete at this point.

But there are about 200 years of history that we know about showing up first in the early 1800s, 1820s.

And all of the evidence points to it being a form of SIRS, S-I-R-S, as in Dear Me SIRS,

With an overlapping influence of transformations of Sakes to get variants like SIRS alive,

But also variants like “Law me says” or “O says alive” or “Law says” and all of these are just kind of a form of

Drawing attention to a situation kind of like you might say “man” or “boy.” There isn’t necessarily a man or a boy present

But you’re using that as a form of emphasis. The form that your grandmother used shows up very early, 1830s.

We can find it in the as-told narrative of Peter Wheeler.

He was a black man who left enslavement and helped move the cause of abolition with his life story.

It also shows up in a Mark Twain short story, the $30,000 request from 1905.

So there are at least two written places that it could have gained some traction and been picked up by others.

People in the 1800s definitely would have recognized it, but it just is not that common anymore.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, so Dear Me Says, S-U-Z, is probably a form of Dear Me Sirs, S-I-R-S.

Same way we’d say man or boy or lady.

It’s an interjection of surprise or delight.

So, Nate, you’ve helped to popularize it a little bit today.

Perhaps. Let’s see. Let’s see if it finds its way back into favor, right?

I like it.

Yeah, right. No, no, this is good. I’m going to research this.

Thanks for sharing your memories of your grandmother.

And give us a call again sometime, all right?

Well, indeed.

Thank you guys so much.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Nate.

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