Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey brain Stuff, Lauren vog Obam Here. You know that song you hear every New Year's Eve, the one about not forgetting old acquaintances? Did you ever wonder about that phrase in the chorus? The one that's also in the title for Old Lang Sign. It's the most common song for most English speaking people to sing on New Year's Eve, and it may be one of the top two most sung songs in the English language, after only Happy Birthday.
But to be honest, I've never known exactly what it means or where it comes from, and I'm guessing a lot of other people don't either, or a lot of the other words in it, for that matter. In a survey from the UK in a third of respondents said that they were planning to sing it on New Year's but only three percent knew the lyrics. So what does it mean? A good sub question to this is what language is it? It turns out that Oddline Sign is an Old Scots language folk song that may have never
even been written down until the seventeen hundreds. Scott's isn't just a dialect of English, but a distinct, if related language which is why it's fair that revelers who don't speak any Scots have some trouble with the lyrics. Some phrases and even whole verses commonly printed for English speakers
are in Scots. The first written version may have been put down by Scottish printer James Watson in seventeen eleven, but the seventy eight version by Scottish poet Robert Burns is the one that's gotten the most attention over the years,
so the song is associated with him. A friend of his, the music publisher George Thompson, may have been the one who suggested the relatively modern melody that we're familiar with today instead of the more traditional folk melody that It was originally transcribed with odd lang sign literally means old long since. More conversationally, you might say it means something long long ago or times gone by. So when we sing this song, we're saying, in essence, we'll drink a
cup of kindness yet for times gone by. The song has been popularized by a number of musicians over the years, including Beethoven, who included an arrangement of it in his twelve Scottish Folk Songs from eighteen fourteen. The Scottish may have started incorporating it into New Year's celebrations soon after Robert Burns published it, and it's also sung at other Scottish events like weddings and Burns Night, the holiday that celebrates the poet on the day of his birth January.
They likely spread it throughout the British Isles and into the U s and Canada as they immigrated, but it perhaps became cemented with American New Year's Eve traditions when the Canadian big band music group Guy Lombardo and the Royal Canadians began playing it during their New Year's Eve concerts starting in Their show was broadcast on North American radio and later television all the way until nineteen, earning Lombardo the nickname Mr. New Year's Eve until his show
was supplanted by Dick Clark's New Year's Rock and Eve. But Lombardo and his band played odd Lang sign every year for decades, and it's since been reinforced by other pieces of popular culture, like the film When Harry Met Sally, and apparently in some parts of Japan, it's played in stores to signal that's almost closing time. Today's episode was written by someone on the house stuff Works editorial team, possibly Marshall brain Um and added to by me and
it was produced by Tyler Clang. For more on this and lots of other new topics, visit house to works dot com. Brain Stuff is a production of I Heart Radio. For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.