You're listening to away with words, the show about language, and how you use it.

I'm Grant Barrett.

And I'm Martha Barnett.

If I tell you a hand-dip snuff, you can look under its wing and you'll find a whole can.

That means what I'm saying is true, and if you don't believe it, you can check it out for yourself.

And I never knew that expression until I learned it recently from one of our listeners in Huntsville,

Alabama, where we were doing a live performance at the invitation of the wonderful public radio station

there, W-L-R-H. This listener brought up a version of that phrase during the Q&A,

and it turns out that this phrase is well established in African-American vernacular English.

In fact, jazz-great, Louis Armstrong once used it in a letter to his biographer, he wrote,

if I tell you that a hand-dip snuff, you just look under her wings and you'll find a whole

canful, meaning I don't waste words either.

I love it, and I love the layers in that expression, because it plugs into the expression

about hen's teeth, which they don't have. And so the question is, where is the hen putting the snuff?

Maybe she's sniffing it. Well, we learn a whole lot from our listeners every time

we're on the road. Martha and I carry notebooks or record messages on our phones so we can look

things up later. We'll talk about what we learned from high schoolers in Huntsville as well,

and you can find out where else we're going in the world on our events page at waywardradio.org

slash events, and you can contact us wherever you are in the world at waywardradio.org slash

contact. Hi, you have a way with words. Hi, my name is Noah from Charleston, South Carolina.

Hey Noah. Hi Noah, welcome to the show. I'm Colin Yolk today with a question about the word hangover.

Hangover. Is this something you're experiencing at the moment?

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