Root, Little Pig, or Die

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes, good morning. This is Barb Kehoe. I’m calling from St. Petersburg, Florida.

Originally from Louisville, Kentucky, so I’m a fellow Kentucky girl with you.

A fellow Louisvillian, too, and you pronounce it correctly. Louisville.

What about nine pronunciations for that city?

Yeah, but the correct one is when you kind of swallow it like you just did, right?

Barb, what’s up? What can we help you with?

I want to thank you guys so much. My husband is from Wisconsin, so you’ve already helped us take care of the tump battle.

Oh, nice.

And it is an actual, tump is an actual word, and a toboggan is both a hat and a sled.

Yes.

You bet.

Yeah, you are enlightened.

Which started many fights in our household.

Whoa.

You can’t ride a hat.

I’m calling to ask you about a phrase that my mom always used with us.

She got it from her mom and her grandmother, and the phrase was, root, little pig, or die.

Now, what context would you use that in?

What would she use that in?

You would use that as in in the afternoon I would come home from school and I would ask my mom, what are we going to have for dinner?

And she would say, I’ve been busy all day.

It’s going to be root, little pig, or die.

That means fend for yourself?

Exactly.

It means fend for yourself.

And when I told her about this, she said, oh, you’re going to make me sound like a really great mom on the radio is what I’m hearing.

But it does go back to her grandmother.

And, of course, now my kids say it.

And we’ve got other people who say it that we’ve passed it on to.

But that makes independent children.

That’s how I feel about it.

I do a version of it with my son.

I’m like, yeah, you can have any fruit in the house.

Have at it.

Yeah.

Basically, yes.

So root, little pig, or die?

That’s what she would say?

Well, the older version of this is root, hog, or die.

I’ve never heard the little pig version, but I’m 100% sure that they’re connected.

And it goes back at least as far as Davy Crockett in the 1830s.

The idea was that you didn’t have nicely fenced-in enclosures for your hogs.

You would just set them loose in the woods maybe, and they would have to find their own food.

You can fence in a small bit of woods and put the hogs in there, and they will clear out the underbrush in no time flat.

It’s a really great way to get the lower levels, every branch, every twig, every leaf, every sprout, all just completely cleaned up.

But, yeah, it’s really as simple as that.

You let the hogs go, and if they can’t feed themselves, then they just don’t make it.

Because you’re not going down to the feed store to get a 50-pound bag of feed for the hogs, right?

There’s only so many slops from the house to go around.

They’ve got to fend for themselves in the woods.

Yeah, I’m looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, which says that the idea is work hard or suffer the consequences, too.

Yeah, so not just for food, right?

Yeah, yeah. Root hog or die.

Was it Mojo Nixon, the kind of, what was it called, a hillbilly, rockabilly performer who used that as one of his slogans, root hog or die?

I don’t know.

I never heard it.

I have heard it in a, I heard it one time in a John Wayne movie as the root hog or die.

But it was, it seemed like it was more in not, you know, it was more in go find your own way.

Yeah.

Not necessarily a food type of thing.

That’s right.

Do whatever it takes to get by.

You need to do that because other people aren’t going to be there to make it happen for you.

So do you use this phrase yourself?

I do use it, and my girls use it.

One is away at college.

One is in middle school.

So they know exactly what it means.

And my older one who is away at school has used it on her roommates when they say, what are we having for dinner?

They have learned now exactly what it means.

It’s up to you.

Mm—

I like that.

Well, Barb, there you go.

Thanks so much for the call.

Thank you guys so much y’all have a wonderful day yeah you too take care bye-bye bye bye-bye

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