Here we go, deep into the rabbit hole again, with a unique, and possibly unfamiliar phrase! So could or would my characters have said “A bit of pother”?

Have you ever heard someone say, “Don’t make a bit of pother about it”? Actually I hadn’t until working on the World Wright’s project. Prior to that I would have brushed it off as an error.

It’s a fancy way of telling someone not to fuss or cause a commotion. But what on earth is “pother”? Is it some magical creature from a fantasy novel? Not quite—but almost as goofy and fun.

The word pother means a fuss, a little uproar, or just plain excitement over something small. Picture someone bouncing around, talking fifty miles a minute, all over something silly, like one of my three-year-old granddaughters telling me how my very friendly dog just licked them. That’s pother in action. Merriam-Webster describes it as “a confused or fidgety flurry of activity,” or “agitated talk… usually over a trivial matter”

Now, where does the word come from? That’s the trickier part. No one really knows. Some linguists think it might come from Dutch, like the word peuteren (meaning “to poke around”), or from old English words like potter (“to prod around”), or pudder (“to make a fuss”) But those are educated guesses—nothing binding.

What we do know is that pother has been around since at least the late 1500s. It first showed up with the meaning of “disturbance” or “commotion,” just like we use it

Shakespeare gave it a moment in the spotlight. In King Lear, he wrote: “That keep this dreadful pother o’er our heads…” Sounds pretty dramatic, right?

So when someone says “a bit of pother”, they’re talking about a small fuss or bit of excited activity—nothing more than a mini-drama, maybe not even worth the energy. It’s the kind of phrase that sneaks into your ear and adds a wink of humor or a gentle nudge to calm down.

Next time you see someone overreacting to a tiny thing—like the dog barked or the light flickered—you can smile and say, “Hey, is that all a bit of pother?” And everyone’s day just got a little lighter.

Find more from ‘You Can’t Say that!’ here

References

Merriam-Webster. n.d. “Pother.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary. Accessed August 29, 2025. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/pother Merriam-Webster.

Wiktionary. n.d. “Pother.” Wiktionary. Accessed August 29, 2025. https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/pother Wiktionary.

Oxford University Press Blog. 2017. “Why bother?” OUPblog, March 2017. Accessed August 29, 2025https://blog.oup.com/2017/03/bother-word-origin/ OUPblog.