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Hope (Help)

Blast from the past.

Dear Word Detective:  While this is not of earth-shaking importance, I hope you can “hope” me out of this quandary.  As I was growing up during the Great Depression in rural East Texas, my grandmother used the word “hope” to mean “help.”  She also used the word “help,” but maybe with a slightly different meaning.  Was this just ignorance on her part, a holdover from her Irish heritage or is there an etymological basis for this usage?  She wasn’t the only one who used “hope” in this sense; many aunts (pronounced “aints”) used the word in the same sense. —   Morgan, New Mexico.

Thanks for a great question.  It may not be earth-shaking, but it’s exactly the kind I like, namely one that leads me down an unfamiliar trail.  My initial suspicion was that this was simply a question of unusual pronunciation (on a par with “aints” for “aunts”) that had become standard in a region, but it turned out to be a more complicated and interesting story.

George Bernard Shaw is often quoted as saying that “England and America are two countries separated by a common language,” referring to the many differences between US and British vocabulary and usage.  But if  Shaw had spent a few months hitchhiking around the US (there’s a screenplay for you), he’d probably have concluded that America actually spoke at least fifty varieties of English all by itself.  American English is a patchwork of dialects, many of which can seem pretty mysterious to an outsider, and it’s not unusual to find a regional word or usage, unknown in (or long ago dropped from) the mainstream national vocabulary, alive and well outside our large cities.  Fortunately, there are scholars cataloging and preserving these regional quirks.  The most ambitious project in this field, the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), now stands at four large volumes and its dedicated staff is still out there collecting.

All of which is a roundabout way of saying that your grandmother was not ignorant or eccentric, and she was far from alone in her use of what sounded like “hope” to mean “help.”

Our modern English word “help,” both the noun and verb form, is very old, drawn from the Old English “helpan” (meaning “to help”), which in turn was derived from the Proto-Germanic root “kelb,” which also produced the equivalent of “help” in a number of other European languages.  The general sense of “help” has been “to aid, to assist,” with various related meanings added along the way, such as “to help” meaning “to serve food to,” which gave us our modern “helping” meaning “a portion of food.”

In modern usage, the verb “to help” follows the standard English conjugation form in number and tense (I help, she helps, they help, they helped, etc.), but it was not always so simple.  “Help” retained, in various English dialects, the old forms of irregular English verbs (as in “begin/ began/ begun” or “sleep/slept”) well into the 18th century, and the traces of this “irregularity” persist in some regional dialects, including in the American South (which, for linguistic purposes, includes Texas).  The specific archaic form of “help” that persists to this day in the region is “holpe,” “holp” or (tada!) “hope” used as various tenses of “help.”  This “hope” is indistinguishable in pronunciation from “hope” meaning “wish for.”  So your grandmother was actually saying “help,” but she was saying it in a very old way.

18 comments to Hope (Help)

  • Glen and Kathey

    Thank you for this information. My wife (Kathey) and I were discussing the “Hope” you with the table. And “Hope” I hope you are happy. —- This form of usage of this English USA used word. We heard it here in the south from the elders all the time. Thank you for this nice piece of information. I you need anything “Holler” we just live up the “Holler” and like to “Hope” people out .. Nice page Andm. — We have to stick together , I have many pages as well. Thank you –Glen Reynolds

  • I was searching this very word “hope” for help. My father and his mother used these words like the person above said his grandmother did…and guess what, we live in East Texas too!! My grandmothers g grandfather came from Ireland, to England, to America, early to mid 1800’s and my father still says other weird words like “plummer” for “plummer”. “Harse” for horse. I have been trying to figure out why myself and you have helped a lot.

  • I grew up in rural eastern NC and to this day my relatives in their 80’s and older use hope instead of helped as in ‘I hope my neighbor pick beans yesterday”.

  • Elisha Powell

    My Grandfather used hope to mean help. For example he would say “let hope you” meaning let me help you.

  • One set of my grandparents, my father all used this word hope for help. Their ancestry shows as Ireland to England to America. So I see I am not alone in wondering where it came from.

  • Ron Tucker

    My grandfather often said ‘Cain’t be hoped’ meaning that a situation was beyond ‘helping’ rather than beyond ‘hope’.

  • Lexa Jones

    I grew up in South Carolina. My grandfather would always say, “Come and hope me in the garden.” I thought this must be a part of his dialect he picked up along the way.!Rhanks for the post. I was searching for this topic.

  • Isn’t this Elizabethan English? I’m from Appalachia and my grandmother used this term a lot. As well as calling her household goods her house plunder.

  • Grandmother would say, I hoped him. Or went to hope. Come hope up me. Jesus come up me. In that type of sentence she loved mostly on Warren, Ar. Ruby Hassie Reddin. She married Smith. She was born 1919. So glad I found this. My dna is 96% Europen. My great grandmother was from old Prussia. I grew up in Northwest Ar.

  • Ruby Huddleston

    My father used the word hope for help. We live in middle Tennessee.

  • Ronald Hughes

    I miss hearing these words in phrases from my culture in South Carolina, “it hope my cold”, “it was a stobbing pain”, “I do declare”, “great crown in glory”, “I have aplenty, thank you”, and I miss the voices that spoke them.

  • Pat McCutchen

    I grew up in rural west Kentucky. Many of our older neighbors in our small farming community used “hope” for help. I often wondered where that came from. I still use a lot of those old sayings and some of those words even today. My college students always find it a source of entertainment when I do, especially those coming to us from urban areas and northern states. It is my way to preserve a bit of our culture.Thank you for this tidbit of information. Some of this language has been preserved in the rural parts of this area and I am thankful. Thank you again!

  • Anonymous

    My Grandmother Eunice Payne used “hope” for help, too, I thought bless her little heart, but then when I was in an English Literature class in college, I found out that “hope” is the Celtic word for “help”. My grandfather is a direct descendant of Irish immigrants. They originally settled in SC, but then moved to Alabama after the Civil War, so all of this makes sense. Thanks!

  • Anonymous

    I found this blog because I was puzzled by the Greek word elpis (pronounced helpis with the breathing mark over the e). I have not found any traceable correlation, but it sure seems like there is some traceable relationship between these two words based on what everyone is saying in this blog. Does this help or hope anyone?

  • Believe it or not, I used to have an older Webster dictionary that had the word hope, and it actually defined hope as “help”.
    I cant seem to find one dictionary online that shows thus.

    But if there is a local library that has some older versions of dictionaries, then maybe you can find it. Please keep me posted.

  • Dionne

    My grandmother and my father used holp or hope for “help” all my life. We are from North Alabama and our people are from TN/GA/NC – we are from the southern foothills of Appalachia, basically. Granny was born in 1905 and Daddy in 1928.
    We also say “steer” for a cooking pot. I always wondered about that one and assume it stems from differentiating the type cookware in which one would “stir” (which we also often pronounce as “steer”) versus a flat fry pan. My mom, age 87, still requests that we get out her “big steer” so she can make stew or chili or whatever she would need to make in a larger pot.

  • Margie Morris Thibert

    My grandmother in East Texas also used hoped for helped. Her family moved to Texas from Kentucky and their ancestors immigrated from England to North Carolina.

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