According to Hofmann: Believe you me
Bruce Springsteen once said — well, sang, actually — “you can’t start a fire without a spark” and then he talked and talked and talked.
Nothing against Springsteen, but you go to one of his four-hour-long concerts, three hours of it is just him talking.
“Wooohooo!,” a fan would gush out at a Springsteen concert. “Now Bruce is talking about growing up in a blue-collar town with this high school sweetheart! I thought he was going to save that one for the encore!”
Sorry to go on a little rant there, but the spark that set this week’s column ablaze is a single phrase that I’m sure all of you have heard in your lives but maybe weren’t obsessed with like I am: “believe you me.”
When we hear that phrase, we automatically know it’s one where the person saying the phrase is conveying they must be believed by the person to whom they’re directing the phrase. The meaning is buried deep in our brains like the instinct to procreate and hunt.
But when I recently heard that phrase, I had to pause and fight the urge to go cross-eyed while trying to figure out why it needs to be said that way instead of “believe me” or “you believe me” or, as I uttered while trying to talk my way out of a speeding ticket, “Your belief in me is my life’s passion, officer.”
I still received the speeding ticket.
Regardless, what would have been the first reaction when someone heard someone else say “believe you me?”
“Wait … am I believing you, are you believing me or am I believing that you believe yourself? This is the oddest way of getting out of a speeding ticket I’ve ever heard!”
Perhaps the phrase came out of the 1960s as I recall the opening lyrics to the Beatles’ song “I Am the Walrus”.
Then again, “I am he as you are he as you are me, and we are all together” may be less of a homage to “believe you me” than it was a side effect of hallucinogenic mushrooms.
As with all things of which I have little understanding, I decided to consult the internet, which informed me that I may have a severe fungal infection, but that’s what I get for making WebMD my computer’s home screen.
But what I really found was that such sentence structure stretches back to dates that have AC/DC attached to them … or maybe it’s BC/AD, but who’s counting?
I mean, who hasn’t had to read twice or thrice sentences that begin with something like, “Douth shalt not…”?
Nothing against the biblical times, but perhaps dyslexia was running rampant back in those days and phrases like “believe you me” literary and literally and liturgy became scripture.
However, in my research, “believe you me” seemed to not go back that far with one source stating that the phrase didn’t even appear until sometime after the 18th century. The source followed up by saying “believe you me,” so I had to take it for its word.
It makes me wonder – or wonder it makes me – when did the phrase really emerge into the cesspool of the English language.
With my limited knowledge of history and literature, my best bet for the phrase’s origin would be 1980, which was the year that “The Empire Strikes Back” was released.
I’m no “Star Wars” expert by any stretch of the imagination, but while I’m pretty sure “The Empire Strikes Back” didn’t have the phrase “believe you me” in it, the movie does hold a clue of inspiration in the character of Yoda.
Yes, the very old and very wise Yoda, for some reason, used sentence structure as stable as game of Jenga with phrases like “Help you, I can,” “Found someone, you have” and “Try not. Do… or do not”.
Imagine a child of the 80s being scolded by his parents over something he had likely done, but he has to sound convincing to them that he’s innocent.
Now, who’s more convincing than Grandpa Yoda?
“Do it, I didn’t,” the kid would say. “Believe you me. Shave the hamster, my sister did!”
Of course, who’s to say “believe you me” didn’t inspire the way Yoda was written to talk in “Star Wars?”
When it’s all said and done, I guess that’s the kind of magic language has — it’s influenced by a person’s background, location and style, and it’s something that is constantly evolving and growing in unexpected ways over great spans of time … or near the end of a Bruce Springsteen concert.
According to Hofmann is written by staff reporter Mark Hofmann of Rostraver Township. His books, “Good Mourning! A Guide to Biting the Big One … and Dying, Too” and “Stupid Brain,” are available on Amazon.com.