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You're listening to Away With Words, the show about language and how we 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's 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, WLRH.

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 hen 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?

I never thought about that.

Maybe she's sniffing it.

I don't know what she's doing.

Well, we learn a whole lot from our listeners every time we're on the road.

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