Wanna Whistle?

For those of us who have been around small children, either recently or in the past, it is amusing to watch them learning (or trying to learn) to whistle. Whistling isn't quite as valuable a habit as saving pennies, paper routes, babysitting or studying a foreign language, but everybody tries it at one time or another. I thought about this the other day and realized how very little I knew about whistling.

My first research attempt included a quick visit to Amazon, to see how many books I could find with the word "whistle" in it. Believe it or don't, there are 731 hits on Amazon that have the word or derivatives of it in book titles. After reaching ten or fifteen of them, I started filtering out all the books titled "Whistling in the Dark." If that's not inspiring, Google discloses 24,800,000 hits for the word "whistle," with the obvious caveat that anything remotely resembling whistle will appear on Google.

Without pursuing semantic distinctions between whistle the verb and whistle the noun, the origins that I detected from the American Heritage Dictionary and "Dictionary.com," indicated that the word originates from Old English and Middle English, "hwistlen," a word that meant "to whisper." And if you think that this is a word that doesn't represent much significance to your current twenty-first century life, I would submit that we have many, many expressions that refer to whistles.

For instance, in 1940 America we talked about "whistling Dixie." The "clean as a whistle" expression goes back to 1878 and we have had "railroad whistle stops" since 1934. At present, we are still likely to blow the whistle on someone, whistle for something such as service, whistle in the dark to keep up your courage, wet your whistle when you are dry. Someone may be slick as a whistle, you may whistle while you work and if you're in a "King and I" mood, you may want to whistle a happy tune (all of this thanks to wannalearn.com)

My Amazon journey provided at least two books that offer the training necessary to whistle with diligence and expertise or make a variety of mouth sounds, one of which is whistling. But something that was more intriguing was the number of entities that were serendipitously granted the capacity to whistle. These included thorns, bagpipes, pigs, ducks, stallions, wings, women, chamber-maids, shrimp, legs, mothers, clams, whirligigs, shadows, skulls, snakes, skeletons, teakettles, ghosts, cats, orangutans and arrows. Thankfully, I didn't review all 700+ entries but I suspect that we would be surprised at how many critters and objects have been known to whistle.

Many world cultures use whistling as the prevalent form of communication, instead of or in addition to spoken words. According to crystalinks.com, whistling of this variety is used in such locales as the Canary Islands, Turkey, France, Mexico, South America, Asia and New Guinea. They go on to say that in one Greek village, the entire population is taught to whistle their speech, often at close range. I found it interesting that in Africa and various Mexican communities, whistled language is used only by men.

When I ponder the entire whistling habit as I've known it, only men have been prolific whistlers, with the occasional woman who has educated herself to produce an ear-splitting, attention-getting whistle. Per Answers.com, "Whistling appears to be a male-dominated activity, perhaps deriving from ancient sexual attraction." At no time can I remember that learning how to whistle would enhance my femininity, thus verifying this from my experience.

Answers.com goes on to say that substantial folklore is associated with whistling. According to British folklore, anyone whistling in a theatre dressing-room has to go outside, turn around three times and cannot come back into the room until invited. Whistling after dark is unlucky, ostensibly because it summons evil spirits or draws attention to oneself. The folklore reinforces that this is a male skill, labeling a woman as unfeminine.

Nothing to fear here. Among all the items on my "to do" list, none of them is whistling. I sometimes wonder if we women have different mouth apparatus that prohibits us from gut-wrenching whistles or if it's just our gender training that makes it unnecessary, unattractive or unfeminine. No matter. I will continue to respect those who do and be fascinated by an international habit with its individual refinements and history. Besides, many of us look positively silly while trying to whistle.