Are we there yet? HuhHuhHuh?
Dear Word Detective: My mother is fond of calling the nervousness one feels the night or day before a trip as being “journey proud.” She says it is a Virginia (especially Richmond) anachronism, but I cannot find its derivation anywhere. I would appreciate your help on this matter. — Clay Witt.
Good question. I hadn’t heard “journey proud” before, but it’s a great expression, and I certainly know the feeling. I remember as a kid being so wound up the day before we went on vacation that I couldn’t sleep. As a matter of fact, I don’t remember sleeping once we were on the road, either. I do remember sneaking over to the motel room window at 3 a.m. to watch the trucks roar by.
“Journey proud” is indeed considered archaic today, but it’s not all that ancient. As recently as 1972, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE) reported that the expression was said to be a common “Old South” locution still occasionally heard. But “journey proud” must have been more widespread in the US at one point, because the earliest citation for it in DARE, from 1891, is “I have heard New Englanders speak of a person as ‘journey-proud,’ meaning that one is so elated on the eve of a journey as to care nothing for food.” The phrase was also common in England during the same period (“In Cheshire, .. a village good-wife, describing her farm-labourer husband’s first visit to Manchester, declared that he was ‘that journey-proud that he couldn’t eat a bite o’ breakfast’,” 1908).
The “journey” in “journey proud” means simply “trip,” but the “proud” differs slightly from the normal meaning of the word, which the American Heritage Dictionary defines as “Feeling pleasurable satisfaction over an act, possession, quality, or relationship by which one measures one’s stature or self-worth.” The “proud” in “journey proud” is an older English dialect sense lacking the normal self-congratulatory aspects of “proud” and meaning simply “very pleased and excited” (“She will be proud to have her tooth stop aching,” 1895). There is, however, a secondary meaning of “journey proud,” which first appeared in the 1950s, which employs the modern “I’m wonderful” sense of “proud” and means “conceited because one has traveled.”
“Journey,” by the way, is an interesting word in itself, derived from the Old French “journee,” meaning “a day’s work or travel,” and ultimately from the Latin “diurnus,” meaning “of one day” or “daily.” A “journey” was thus originally the distance that could be traveled in one day, or, later, in a specified number of days (“a three day journey”). This original “by the day” sense of “journey” persists in the term “journeyman,” meaning a worker who has served an apprenticeship and works for hire by the day. The term thus has nothing to do with wandering from town to town looking for work.
My mother (born 1897 in middle Georgia) used that expression, “journey proud,” in the sense Clay Witt asked about: “I hardly slept last night, I was so journey proud”–meaning nervous about the upcoming trip. But my wife, born near Atlanta and much interested in local language, had never heard the expression until she married me. There is a lady in my home town in south Georgia, born in 1909 and now 100 years old and still mentally sharp, who says she never heard the expression until I asked her about it today, 09/25/2009. PS: Is “Clay Witt” a pseudonymn? It’s a great name for a clever fellow from the country, especially if he is from a clayey part of the country, like south Georgia.
No, Mr. Wilcox, Clay Witt is my name, and my family is from Virginia and Kentucky.
My mother said “journey proud” at any occasion of a tripShe also said “land o Goshen” and my yankee brother in law thought she was saying “atlantic ocean. She had many others as well. She was raised in N Florida by a mother from SC.
My 72-year-old cousin, from a small North Carolina town, used this phrase yesterday, which led me to this site.
I’m 62 and from the same town but had never heard the phrase before. Thanks for the education!
My mother, born and bred in MS, always used this expression when the family was headed on a road trip. I, too, use it to mean that I can’t sleep for being so excited over what the journey will bring.
My mother used “journey proud.” She grew up on a Kansas farm in the 20′s and 30′s. After introducing it, its become a favorite of some of my friends, here on Cape Cod.
My friend who loves to say, “journey proud,” coined a new phrase this morning. He said he couldn’t sleep last night because he was, “work proud.”
I am from Eastern NC and I have heard the expression “journey proud” all of my life. However, the meaning of the phase in this locality usually referred to someone who comes back excited from a trip who can’t stop talking about it.