To Know From Something

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sarah calling from Missoula, Montana.

Hi, Sarah. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thank you.

Well, I’m calling to see about the expression don’t know from, when people use it really to mean that somebody doesn’t know about something. I don’t hear it said too much here in Montana, but I think I’ve heard it on movies. And I recall maybe like two people that I’ve heard say it in real life, and I think they were from the East Coast. So I’m just wondering where people say it and where that from comes from.

So can you give us an example or two?

Usually people, I think, use it to mean like you don’t know anything about this. So, you know, why do you let Jim work on your computer? He doesn’t know from hard drives. Or my friend Kathy says she has too many wrinkles, but she’s only 30 years old. She doesn’t know from wrinkles.

That’s a good one. You don’t know from wrinkles.

And so the movies you saw with people on the East Coast, would it happen to be places like New York and Boston?

Yeah, I think so. I think I’ve heard it in like a Woody Allen movie or something.

Of course, yes. There you go. That’s like the source for these kinds of expressions.

Yeah, not so much Montana.

Yeah.

No.

The thing is, it comes from Yiddish. It’s a calc, kind of a direct borrowing word for word from a Yiddish phrase, which literally means he doesn’t know anything about anything. Or he doesn’t know anything about nothing. He knows nothing about nothing with the double negative kind of reinforcing there.

And in Yiddish, there’s a few versions of it, but erves nish van gurnisht. I know that all my Yiddish speakers are going to correct me, and please do. I welcome that.

But generally, like a lot of these kinds of expressions, it’s kind of like you throw it on at the end of a sentence when you’re kind of scoffing at what someone else is saying, and it’s kind of a tag on the end of it. He doesn’t know anything. He doesn’t know from nothing.

And the fun there is from.

Yeah, yeah.

And so the from is a direct translation of the preposition from Yiddish. And what’s really interesting, you find this again and again when you learn other languages. Prepositions do not track very well from language to language, even when you’re comparing, say, romance languages or where they look alike. Like there may be Germanic languages. It just doesn’t always work.

And so this is a case of a mistranslation. But it sounds interesting. So because it kind of came, it’s catchy. It’s almost a catchphrase. It’s stuck, and nobody corrected that from to about.

Okay. He doesn’t know from nothing.

I was wondering.

Yeah.

One last thing I want to share with you, Sarah, the earliest version that I know of in print of you don’t know from nothing or he doesn’t know from nothing comes from a Rube Goldberg cartoon in 1931. And you’ve probably heard of Rube Goldberg devices, these strange constructions where you, say, drop a penny in the top and a boot kicks a bowling ball and magical things happen at the very end of a Sarah.

So it’s not that old in print, although I’m sure it was spoken for much longer before that in English.

Well, that’s a lot of good information. Thank you so much for helping out.

Yeah, sure. Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Sarah.

Bye, Sarah.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

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