Remember those children's classics, the Velveteen Rabbi and The Little Price? The Twitterverse is abound with these books with a letter missing. And it turns out there's some pimping going on in our hospitals, but it's not what you'd think. Grant and Martha clear up the plead vs pleaded debate, touch on the use of product, and trace the history of shambles. Plus, a word puzzle with nursery rhymes, a map of regional grammar, and plenty of crazy vocab, from popinjays to the tee na na!

FULL DETAILS

There's a Twitter meme going around for books with a letter missing from the title. You can find them through the hashtag #bookswithalettermissing. Can't wait to read that romp about the sand-covered South, A Confederacy of Dunes.

http://huff.to/q9I0Ra
 
We usually brandish a weapon, or some object we can wave about. But the definition of brandish can be stretched to include more figurative types of weapons or objects (e.g. seductive body parts).

What does shambles mean? If your house is in shambles, it's a mess, but before the 1920s, the word shambles referred to a butcher's bloody bench.

What is a popinjay? Literally a parrot, this term is often used in a military context to refer to a vain or conceited officer with a Napoleon complex. And a bandbox boy? That once commonly referred to an officer who gave excessive attention to his grooming and dress. It's a reference to "the box used to transport uniforms."

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game of Name That Nursery Rhyme. The catch is, the text has been run through the translation site Babelfish. What happens when Little Bo Peep and Humpty Dumpty go from English to Spanish to Chinese and back again?

What's the past tense of plead? Is it pleaded or pled? Within the legal profession, pleaded is preferred. But in our common vernacular, we tend to use the less traditional pled.

If something's right on the tee na na, it's just perfect. This phrase from New Orleans has popped up in myriad songs from the region. One interview with the musician Dr. John suggests that tee na na refers to the rear end, or tuchis. Martha speculates that tee na na may have to do with the phrase to a tee.

http://n.pr/cUbhzz

Lots of people have tweeted their own examples with the #bookswithalettermissing hashtag. Take, for example, that famous guide to Jewish sensuality, The Oy of Sex.

http://bit.ly/nqdFWk
http://bit.ly/qneRsF

What's the origin of the phrase God willing and the creek don't rise? It has to do with travel; back when wagons rode on low gravel roads, you couldn't pass if the creek level was high.

Regional grammar can be just as rich and diverse as regional vocabulary. The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project has picked up on all the variations in American English usage and plotted them on a Google Map. Turns out that double modals and the positive anymore are popping up all over the country.

http://bit.ly/ocY6dk

Did your hairstylist recommend you use product? Is your company moving product this quarter? The term product is in vogue, mainly for the purpose of simplification.
 
Why do department stores label their infants' section Baby instead of Babies,' a la Men's or Women's? For one, the Baby department includes more than just clothes; they've got strollers and cribs and pacifiers. Also, the baby of the family has a unique singular identity, unlike the rest of the kids.

Where do we get the expression more than you can shake a stick at? It probably just derives from counting. Imagine herdsmen bringing in their cattle or sheep at the end of the day, pointing with a stick in order to do a headcount.

Another #bookswithalettermissing joke: Have you read the book about how 99 cent stores are changing the way we shop in America? It's called The Little Price.

Pimping med students is a common practice in hospitals. But not that kind of pimping; the term pimp, likely from the German pumpfrage, meaning "pump question," refers to the method of tough quizzing that doctors put their young residents through. It generally straddles the border between rigorous initiation and plain bullying.

http://bit.ly/orBACV
http://bit.ly/rdyrMs
http://nyti.ms/7evgWi

You know that book missing a letter about the young Southern woman finding peace in a storm? It's called One With the Wind.

...

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University http://www.nu.edu/, which invites you to change your future today. More at nu.edu.

We’re also grateful for support from the University of San Diego http://www.sandiego.edu. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
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Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

What did you call the cliques in your high school? Were you a member of the nerds, the jocks, or maybe the "grits" or the "heshers"? Also, what's the meaning of the phrase "rolling in the deep"? Why do we say something's returned "like a bad penny"? And is it proper to refer to our recent economic problems "the Great Recession"? Plus, favorite letters of the alphabet, taking umbrage, fudgies vs. flatlanders, and washrag vs. washcloth.

FULL DETAILS

Now that the Encyclopedia Britannica is going to an online-only format, one of many things we'll miss is the accidental poetry on the books' spines http://www.roughtype.com/archives/2012/03/spinelessness_1.php. In the age of endless digital information, volumes like Accounting-Architecture and Birds-Chess point to the tomes that contain everything you'd need to know and nothing more.

The saying a bad penny always turns up has been turning up in English since the 15th century, when counterfeit pennies would often surface in circulation. As pennies have lost their luster, the phrase has lived on; see the line "Don, my bad penny," http://jonhammsome.tumblr.com/post/20867218191/don-my-bad-penny from this season of Mad Men.

What does rolling in the deep mean, as sung by Adele? In her Rolling Stone  http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/adele-opens-up-about-her-inspirations-looks-and-stage-fright-20120210 interview from February, she traces it to British slang for close friends that have each other's backs.

To take umbrage means to take offense or be annoyed at something. It comes from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow," as in umbrella. So to take umbrage is to sense something shady, or suspect that one has been slighted.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game about words and phrases that involve furniture or parts of a house. For example, if you want to see your lover but you only have two hours, that's a tight window of opportunity. And if you invest in, say, smartphones for pets--only to see your savings go down the drain--we'd say you'll be taking a bath.

In high school, were you a jock or a nerd? How about a grit, or perhaps a Hessian? Grits, hashers, metalheads, greasers--the dudes with roughed-up denim jackets, metal boots, and cigarettes in their shirt pockets--are an essential part of the student body, but there doesn't seem to be a consensus about their name. What did you call that crowd?

Should The Great Recession be talked and written about as a proper noun? Recessions tend to be vague in their scale and timelines, so it's problematic to mention them as proper nouns. Perhaps the similarities in sound between Great Recession and Great Depression have encouraged this usage http://www.salon.com/2009/12/17/great_recession/ by government officials and members of the press.

In a previous show http://www.waywordradio.org/go-all-city/, we came upon a word mystery with a 1947 menu from Jackson, Mississippi that mentions tang. The mystery has been solved! It wasn't the drink, and it wasn't the fish; it was Cudahy Tang http://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=336&dat=19560627&id=60EvAAAAIBAJ&sjid=eEgDAAAAIBAJ&pg=1903,5357698, one of over a hundred knockoff brands of SPAM, a canned meat product.

Which is correct: washrag or washcloth? Whether you use one or the other isn't likely so much about regional dialects as class differences.

Due to their fondness for treats, tourists in some parts of Michigan are known as fudgies or conelickers. In Vermont and Colorado, they're called flatlanders. And Californians refer to the Arizona beachcombers and Zonies. What do you call tourists in your area?

Vaccines take their name from vaccinia, the virus that caused cowpox. It was the original ingredient used to vaccinate people against smallpox. Stefan Riedel, a pathologist at the Baylor University Medical Center, offers a detailed history of the centuries-long fight against smallpox here http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/.

A collection of Virginia folkspeak from 1912 includes this zinger about a proud person: He doesn't know where his behind hangs. And here's a choice insult: I'd rather have your room than your company!

Do you have a favorite letter? The sound or typeface varieties of a letter can really catch us. For more about the visual and emotional properties of various letters, check out Simon Garfield's book about fonts, Just My Type. http://www.simongarfield.com/pages/books/just_my_type.htm Grant also recommends One-Letter Words by Craig Conley, a surprisingly lengthy dictionary of words made up of just one letter. http://www.oneletterwords.com/dictionary/

...

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University http://www.nu.edu/, which invites you to change your future today. More at nu.edu.

We’re also grateful for support from the University of San Diego http://www.sandiego.edu. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

What colorful language do you use to when you're angry and tempted to use a four-letter word? There's a difference between cursing and cussing: It takes a slow mind to curse, but an active, vibrant mind to cuss. Also, what it means to be stove up, the phrases the horse you rode in on, and it's all chicken but the gravy, plus a couple of handy synonyms for armpit. And when, if ever, can you trust Wikipedia? 

FULL DETAILS

The hadal zone, named for the Greek god Hades, refers to the deepest depths of the ocean floor. James Cameron's deep sea dive http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/mar/26/james-cameron-historic-solo-drive recently made it down there. 

There's a difference between cursing and cussing: It takes a slow mind to curse, but an active and vibrant mind to cuss—especially when the cusswords sound like alapaloop palip palam or trance nance nenimimuality. What colorful language do you use to diffuse anger?

What's an oxter? It's another term for the underarm, primarily used in Northern England, Scotland, and Ireland http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-oxt1.htm. A bit nicer than armpit, isn't it? Oxter can also serve as a verb, as in, "We oxtered him out of the club." Need another synonym for that body part that also happens to rhyme with "gorilla"? Try axilla.

A pipe dream is "an unobtainable hope" or "an unrealistic fantasy."  The term originates from the idea of opium pipes, and the strange dreams one might incur while high on opium. Back in the 1890s when the term first showed up, opium pipes were a bit more common. 

Here are a few good skeuomorphs, or outdated aesthetic elements: We still refer to the ticking of a clock, even though we're surrounded by digital timekeeping devices, and the kids are working hard for those washboard abs http://www.saturdayeveningpost.com/wp-content/uploads/satevepost/Washboard-Abs.jpg when they don't even know what a washboard is!

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called Aye Aye, Captain about phrases with that long "I" vowel sound. For example, a colorless synonym for a fib would be a white lie, and another name for a mafioso might be a wise guy. 

What does it mean to be stove up? This phrase for sore or stiff has nothing to do with a stovetop; stove is actually the past tense of stave. To stave in a wooden boat is to smash a hole in its side, and thus, to be stove up is to be "incapacitated or damaged." These words are related to the noun stave, the term for one of those flat pieces of wood in a barrel. Similarly, to stave off hunger is to metaphorically beat it back, as if with a stick.

Common wisdom says that if you learn a second language by the age of ten, native speakers won't recognize that it's not your first. Even so, things like idioms or prepositions can often trip up even the most skilled second-language speakers, if their second language is English. 

A dish-to-pass supper, common in Indiana, is the same as a pot-luck supper or a covered-dish supper, but the term nosh-you-want drew a red flag when Grant went to visit the Wikipedia page for potluck http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Potluck. It hadn't appeared in any other form of print, so luckily, the crisis has been averted, because Grant personally edited out this specious term.

The song "Old Dan Tucker" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-GHbDFrwlU has a long history in the United States, going back to the minstrel shows of the 1840s. Martha highly recommends the documentary Ethnic Notions http://newsreel.org/video/ETHNIC-NOTIONS about our country's complicated history with racially-charged imagery in theater and song, and the evolution of racial consciousness in America.

Is it a good thing to be a voracious reader? We think so. Just take Shakespeare's notion of the replenished intellect in Love's Labour's Lost http://goo.gl/qzmw7

The idiom and the horse you rode in on, usually preceded by a far more unfriendly phrase, tends to be directed at someone who's full of himself and unwelcome to boot. It first pops up in the 1950s, and it's written on the spine of a book in Donald Regan's official portrait http://www.nytimes.com/1998/06/28/magazine/on-language-of-high-moments-and-the-horse-you-rode-in-on.html?pagewanted=all&src=pm. 

Sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia http://scienceblogs.com/retrospectacle/2008/01/mystery_solved_the_cause_of_ic.php, also known as brain freeze, is a variety of nerve pain that results from something cold touching the roof of the mouth. But some people who suffer from migraines actually find ice cream confuses the nerve in a way that eases the pain—how convenient!

How do you pronounce the word won? Does it rhyme with sun or Juan? Some people, depending on their regional dialect, may hypercorrect their vowels and pronounce certain words in an unusual way. 

What is a buster? As TLC sang http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Av7m_Pgt1S8, "A scrub is a guy who thinks he's fly, also known as a buster." That is, a buster is that guy on the fringe who's always putting on airs. The word may come from the old term gangbusters, which originally applied to police officers or others who took part in breaking up criminal gangs.

If something's all chicken but the gravy, then it's all good. This colloquialism pops up in an exchange from a 1969 Congressional record. 

The past, the present, and the future walked into a bar. It was tense. 

...

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University http://www.nu.edu/, which invites you to change your future today. More at nu.edu.

We’re also grateful for support from the University of San Diego http://www.sandiego.edu. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone: 

United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673

London +44 20 7193 2113

Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Site: http://waywordradio.org/

Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/

Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/

Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/

Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/

Skype: skype://waywordradio 

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

What time is it if it's "the crack of chicken"? And when exactly is the "shank of the evening"? How do you pronounce the word spelled H-O-V-E-R? Did Warren G. Harding really coin the word normalcy? Also, a name game, sports nicknames, flounder vs. founder, Laundromats vs. washaterias, Black Dutch, nosebaggers, medical slang terms, and a look back at the joys of the early internet.

FULL DETAILS

When a car rolls slowly through a stop sign, it's often called a California stop or a California roll http://www.waywordradio.org/mute-point/. But the Midwest has its own monikers for this sneaky move, including the farmer stop, the Chicago stop, and "no cop, no stop."

How early do you have to wake up to see what one listener calls the crack of chicken? It seems to be a twist on the term crack of dawn. Other terms for this early-morning time are o'dark thirty and the scratch of dawn.

Did President Warren G. Harding coin the term normalcy in his famous Return to Normalcy speech http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wXETeWS6ub8? Turns out the word normalcy was already in use before President Harding made it famous, but it's now become largely obsolete, while its synonym, normality, is generally the preferred term. Harding is also credited with--or blamed for--bringing the term hospitalization into the common vernacular.

In his book, Presidential Voices: Speaking Styles from George Washington to George W. Bush http://books.google.com/books?id=Dh0wM9DNjbAC&pg=PA124&dq=allan+metcalf+presidential+voices+belittle&hl=en&sa=X&ei=x0-LT6CRHumI2gW8obHpAg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=presidents%20as%20neologists&f=false, Allan Metcalf points out that U.S. presidents have contributed or popularized quite a few neologisms to the English language.

In Texas, the California stop is also known as an Okie yield sign, an Okie crash sign, and a taxpayer stop.

What does it mean to be gorked or crimped? These slang terms for high on drugs or crumpled in on oneself are used by hospital and Emergency Medical Services workers in a darkly comedic sense, often help cope with the stress of such traumatic work and to build solidarity among co-workers.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game of aptronyms for people whose names fit certain locations or conditions. For example, a guy hanging onto a wall might be named Art. Or what do you call a woman between two buildings? Ally!

The racial descriptor Black Dutch http://www.genealogymagazine.com/blackdutch.html is one used by members of a certain ethnic group, like Cherokee Indian or African-American, that feel their identity will be viewed as more acceptable by those they're around if they use a different adjective. Black Irish and Black German are also used.

What's the difference between flounder and founder? To flounder is "to struggle or thrash about," while to founder is "to sink or to fail." Surprisingly,  the verb flounder shares no etymological root with the fish, though the image of a flounder flapping helplessly about on the shore may have influenced our sense of the word.

Skeuomorphs are aesthetic elements of design that no longer correlate with their original function. Computer software is full of skeuomorphs; for example, the save button that we're all used to is a picture of a floppy disc. But then, who uses floppy discs any more?

With Linsanity and Tebowing sweeping the country, we're thinking about other great sports nicknames. Unfortunately, it seems that with unique names taking up a greater percentage of children born, there's no longer as much practical demand for nicknames. Still, the Babe, Magic, and The Refrigerator http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/11/sports/great-sports-nicknames-like-magic-are-disappearing.html?pagewanted=all live on in legend.

The increasingly musty expression "like a broken record" has caused some confusion among digital natives who've heard of broken records only in terms of sports!

Ben Zimmer published a brilliant collection of internet memes from the past twenty years in a the journal American Speech. Memes like facepalming http://static.divbyzero.nl/facepalm/doublefacepalm.jpg and the O, rly? owl http://i1.kym-cdn.com/entries/icons/original/000/000/015/orly.jpg have allowed us to communicate otherwise unwritable sentiments via the internet.

How do you pronounce the word hover? In England, it rhymes more with clobber than lover. If you want to learn how to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in lots of different languages, head on over to Omniglot. http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hovercraft.htm

It's the shank of the evening! But when is that, exactly? This phrase is typically suggests that the night is far from over, shank being an old word for something straight, or the tail end of something. But as the Dictionary of American Regional English notes, in the South, evening is considered "the time between late afternoon and dusk."

If you're on vacation, watch out for nosebaggers! This mid-19th century slang term refers to tourists who go to resort areas for the day but bring their own provisions and don't contribute to the local economy. A modern nosebagger might be the type of person who cracks open a soda can at the movies.

Do you wash your clothes at a Laundromat or a washateria? http://pics3.city-data.com/businesses/p/1/2/8/1/4151281.JPG A chain of Laundromats in Texas that dated from 1930 to 1950 had the name Washateria, and it took hold as a general term, especially in Texas.

A couple more variations of the California stop: the jackrabbit and the California slide.

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University http://www.nu.edu/, which invites you to change your future today. More at nu.edu.

We’re also grateful for support from the University of San Diego http://www.sandiego.edu. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Have you been dining on a budget lately? Martha recommends the necessity mess, potato bargain, and other tasty regional foods that won't break the bank. Plus, what's a doomaflatchie? And what do you have to do before you rest on your laurels? Grant and Martha share idioms, proverbs, and paraprosdokians, those sayings that take a sudden, unexpected turn. Plus cryptic crosswords, graffiti slang, and new ways to read your favorite magazines.

FULL DETAILS

Dining on a budget? Just whip up some necessity mess or a potato bargain. That's a pork, onion, and potato stew popular in Eastern Massachusetts. Or how about some Georgia ice cream? It's a North Florida term for grits. Martha shares a generous serving of fun food names from the Dictionary of American Regional English.

http://dare.wisc.edu/

http://bit.ly/oDZcJQ

If you've accomplished something, go ahead and rest on your laurels. Martha traces this idiom back to Ancient Greece, where victors were crowned with a wreath of bay leaves from the bay laurel tree. In the 16th Century, to retire on one's laurels referred to "resting after an accomplishment." Like many inherited idioms, it's often said today with a tongue in one's cheek.

The old Brooklyn Dodger Roy Campanella really knew how to set the soup outside! A baseball fan recalls this overheard phrase from a game in the 60s between the Cardinals and the Dodgers, when Campy smacked one over the fence. Grant estimates that this usage of soup comes from the old slang term for nitrous oxide, a component in souping up cars. Over time, soup came to refer to any enhanced display of muscle or strength.

What would you bring to a pitch-in? An Indiana transplant shares this newly acquired term for a potluck dinner. Martha points out that the Dictionary of American Regional English has a map showing the distribution of the term, and it's limited almost exclusively to Indiana.

If something's a peach out of reach, it's something lovely that you want but just can't have. A listener shares this and other idioms from the American South.

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game of cryptic crossword clues called Double Definition. For example, if the clue is "trim a tree," the answer is "spruce." Or try this one: "crazy flying mammals." Did you come up with "bats"?

What does it mean to grok the data? A listener from the medical device business wonders about the techie word grok, which first popped up in Robert Heinlein's 1961 novel Stranger in a Strange Land.

http://bit.ly/qSPABU

To grok data means to understand all the information you're looking at. Grant also mentions Jeff Prucher's Brave New Words, a dictionary of science fiction terms that have made their way into the English language.

http://wywd.us/ng2QdG

New York seems to have a doguero on every street corner. Grant shares this Spanglish term for "a hot dog vendor."

What's it called when saying becomes sayin'? It's not a trick question; it's simply called an abbreviation. Grant and Martha settle an English major's confusion about the possibility of a trickier term. With words like o'er, a shortening of over, the apostrophe can also be called an apologetic apostrophe, but it's still just an abbreviation.

The old Yiddish word bupkis, referring to something of little or no value, has of late been split up for dramatic effect. As in, that's worth all of a bup and a kis!
 
What's a doomaflatchie? A listener shares this alternate for doohickie, thingamajig, doodad, or any other one of those whatchamacalits.

You can listen to the Tim McGraw song about his doomaflatchie here.
 
http://tinyurl.com/3aq4hp6

If I agreed with you, we'd both be wrong. Listeners share some of their favorite paraprosdokians. It's not the first time Martha and Grant discussed paraprosdokians.

http://www.waywordradio.org/sugar-for-a-dime/

As ubiquitous as social media and blogs have become, people are still reading long form journalism! Grant shares some great ways Twitter has enabled the spread of long essays from sources like The Atlantic and Wired. In addition, services like Readability and Instapaper have streamlined the distribution of articles to our myriad devices.

http://bit.ly/aeqNxp

http://bit.ly/aAVXT4

http://bit.ly/dADCNG

It takes some work for a writer to go all city--a graffiti writer, that is. An art supplies dealer from Dallas shares some vocabulary from the world of street art. For example, the old act of photographing trains from benches gave birth to the term benching, and the act of tagging or doing graffiti is also known as bombing. Grant discusses the related term going all city.

http://bit.ly/cutX0r

http://abcn.ws/qIRs0R

http://tinyurl.com/3wfeq6r

Everyone knows about Tang as that orange kick in a glass, but could it also be an entree? A listener from Plano, Texas, found an elderly relative's plan for family meals from 1947, which lists tang with molasses as a main course. If you've heard of tang the food, shoot us a message.

If a meeting gets pushed back, does it get postponed to a later time or rescheduled for a sooner one? Grant explains that push back is generally understood to mean "reschedule for a later date," but Martha recounts a scenario where the opposite definition caused a debacle with deadlines. As always, when in doubt, seek clarification.

Knowledge is knowing tomato is a fruit. Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad. Thank you to our listeners for this and other modern proverbs.

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

What would you wear to an ABC party? Hint: the letters stand for "Anything But Clothes." Any guesses what you'd wear to a tight-and-bright party? Martha gives a taste of the college party terminology from a slang collection compiled by Penn State student Emily Grier.

http://bit.ly/qpxAB0

Are you left hanging by the invitation Do you want to come with?  A Milwaukee native is proud of this regionalism, which means "Do you want to come along?" Grant explains that it may derive from the German verb mitkommen, a single word that literally means to "come with."

If what you're going to say isn't more beautiful than silence, don't say it. Martha shares this proverb, translated from the original Arabic.

If you suffer from restless nights of tossing and turning, you may have a case of the mollycobwobbles. A listener shares this hand-me-down term from her grandmother. Grant explains she may well have combined two English terms dating about 150 years back: mulligrubs and collywobbles. The aptly named affliction usually consisted of the jitters, the shakes, or even the yips.

http://bit.ly/p4RNrX

That little basket that your strawberries and blueberries come in? It's called a punnet. Just so you know.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska addles our brains with a puzzle called Odd Couples. See if you can figure out these strange celebrity pairings who share last names. "Anyone? Bueller, Bueller, Bueller" and "Bueller is Bueller is Bueller," for example, forms the odd couple of Ben and Gertrude Stein. And who else could hit home runs in the bedroom like Babe and Dr. Ruth?

Looking for something that curls your hair, cleans your teeth, and makes childbirth a pleasure? A listener's mother used that saying in reference to every miracle potion from WD-40 to vinegar. Grant explains that the first known version of this in print dates back to 1919 in Mrs. Lucretia Graves' Exits from the Pearly Gates, where the advertisements for opium-type substances had less cheek and more sincerity. Grant notes that Google Books has a wealth of examples of old ads that took the saying and used even more elaborate versions to promote everything from tequila to hypnosis.

http://bit.ly/p41EsZ

Is boughten a past tense form of to buy? Grant gives his blessing to its use in informal conversation, but when it comes to formal writing, the word you want is bought.

What are the college kids up to these days? Apparently, they're busy at darties, or "day parties." Martha shares this collegiate portmanteau from Emily Grier's list.

Can sentences end with a preposition? Yes! Grant assures a listener that all experts, including the most conservative of linguists and lexicographers, agree that a preposition as the last word in a sentence is something up with which we shall put.

http://bit.ly/dWii20

Tell your Mom the sterling silver stud above your lip isn't "that dumb thing." It's called a Monroe piercing, in honor of Marilyn's famed beauty mark.

Though the Spanish language, among others, has its quirks and foreignisms, the English language really can't be touched when it comes to complicated and irregular spelling. Thus, spelling bees are primarily an English-language phenomenon. Grant mentions a few "where are they now?" stories about past Scripps Bee winners. The common thread? If these kids had the discipline to compete in such a high-pressure event, they tend to carry those traits beyond the spelling arena and into their successes later in life.

http://abcn.ws/mlEtro

http://ti.me/oz9OjK

If something is mathematical, is it cool? According to a mother of two middle-schoolers, that's exactly what it's come to mean among the younger set. Then again, irony is also pretty hip. But could her kids be using a piece of ironic slang with confused sincerity? Ahh! Meta-irony! So cool!

http://bit.ly/n1V8Ff

If someone's balloon has lost its string, it means "they've come unmoored". Something unusual or odd has come about in their character. Patrice Evans used the illustration in his description of Tracy Morgan in an article for Grantland (no relation to our show's co-host).

http://es.pn/jyvuej

He thinks he's a wit, and he's half right. Though some might attribute the quote to Shakespeare, it's nowhere to be found in the concordances. Grant explains how many of these witticisms have been tumbled about by old newspaper columnists, humorists, and vaudeville performers. Though their origins are muddled, they're still a joy to hear and say.

So, can a sentence begin with the word so? Which ones? So is oftentimes used in place of therefore to conclude an explanation, but more people are using it as a general sentence-starter, in the same vein as well. Grant notes that while seemingly misused language may be grating to the ear, it's more productive not to peeve about it, but instead to record it and add it to the rest of the data we collect about our language. Ultimately, we learn about each other by doing so.

http://bit.ly/o2rtSQ

Martha shares a British article that begins, "Boffins have discovered a strange new type of spongy mushroom." But what, you may ask, is a boffin? The word boffin denotes an intellectual with a specific expertise and general lack of social aptitude. Grant adds anorak to the list of terms for nerds with minimal aptitude for cocktail-party conversations. Here's to you, boffins and anoraks!

http://bit.ly/iyly1W

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
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Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

If someone offered you a croaker with an old man's face, would you accept? You should! Croaker is a slang term for "hundred dollar bill." And did you ever wonder why we turn UP the A.C. to bring the temperature down? Grant and Martha ponder that question. Plus, the tricky debate over me vs. I, the byzantine story behind the word byzantine, whether paper toweling is a real noun, and a couple of name games. Also, Grant recommends some dictionaries and teaching guides for the new school year.

FULL DETAILS

Ever know somebody whose name makes you do a double-take, like a family physician named Dr. Hurt? An Albany, N.Y. listener shares a game of more positive aptronyms. For example, what do you name your daughter if you want her to be a lawyer? How about "Sue"?

Do you use paper towels or paper towelling? While a listener insists her husband's wrong for his use of paper towelling, Grant explains how certain nouns take a gerund ending. For example, clothes derive from clothing, and the side of a house adorns siding. In the same way, why not tear a paper towel off a roll of paper towelling?

A veteran broadcaster recalls a brilliant example of sesquipedalian language. Fifty years ago, he stubbed his foot on the beach and a group of college boys told him to go to his parents and get an anatomical juxtaposition of the orbicular ors muscles in the state of contraction on the unilateral calcification of the carbuncular metatarsal. Go get, in other words, "a kiss on the foot."

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a Grant and Martha version of The Odd Man Out Game, wherein one term doesn't belong in the list of four. Take Martha, Irving, Denzel, and Booker. Which one doesn't fit? It's Irving, because "Washington" is his first name, not his last.

Does turning up the A.C. make a room cooler or warmer? A listener grapples with multiple meanings of the word "up." Martha suggests saying, "Turn up the air conditioning," not "turn up the air conditioner," just as you say "turn up the heat," not "turn up" the heater. Grant observes that the English language is imperfect, and we often have to clarify our statements to make sure people understand us.

When it comes to proper grammar, "Where you at?" ain't where it's at. A mother is concerned that her child will pick up such malapropisms as "Where you at?" and "My mother and me went to the store." Grant argues that the redundant "at" has become such a part of our colloquial speech that it isn't to be chided in informal usage. However, for those formative years of language learning, Grant recommends the book Learner English by Michael Swan.

http://wywd.us/learningles

What do you name your baby if you want her to become a bank teller? "Penny." And if it's a boy? Try "Bill."

If someone offered you a croaker with an old man's face, would you take it? Here's a hint: the face belongs to Benjamin Franklin. A Louisiana native shares this rare term for " a hundred dollar bill." Grant suspects that it may derive from the French verb croquer, meaning, "to be crisp." It's mostly used in informal settings, such as horse tracks and neighbor-to-neighbor transactions. What terms do you use for the Benjamins? Here's a whole stash.

http://wywd.us/croakersnmore

If you're looking for dictionary recommendations, you've tuned to the right program! For comprehensive, desk-dwelling dictionaries, Grant likes the Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, 6th Edition, a two-volume set, and the brand-new American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, 5th edition, which contains original etymologies, illustrations, and plenty of guides and charts. The latter publication took nearly ten years to complete, and its authority is worth the investment.

http://tinyurl.com/3c9dkfb

http://tinyurl.com/yvs5cb

When a minister asked, "Who gives this woman to be married?" the father regrettably answered, "Her mother and me." Well, he regretted it after his daughters ribbed him about his improper grammar--specifically, his disregard for the implied verb. As in, "My wife and I do give this young woman to be married." Grant and Martha confirm that the implied verb is indeed what seals the deal. Alas, the "me vs. I" squabbles continue!

http://bit.ly/9IC2uZ

A physician heard a broadcaster use the term byzantine to describe the current health care system, and wonders about the origin of this adjective. Martha notes that the Byzantine Empire, which began in the 4th Century A.D., was notable for its convoluted system of government officials and titled nobility. Additionally, Byzantine art is known for its intricacies and elaborate details. Thus, the word has come to refer to anything exceptionally complicated or intricate.

What do you name your future ophthalmologist? "Iris"!

If a married couple moves because one spouse is relocated for work, is it correct to say the other spouse following them? A listener wonders about the implications of the term "follow," and how that dynamic works in today's day and age. Married couples often view themselves as a team of two equals, and sometimes words like "follow" can connote unintended ideas of subservience. Grant and Martha point out that, as relationship dynamics change, so does our language.

If you'd like your son to become a statistician, Martha suggests naming him . . . wait for it  . . . "Norm"!

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Does the thought of going without your cellphone fill you with separation anxiety? Grant and Martha coin some monikers for this modern-day phobia. Also, what's the best way to win at the game of Rock, Paper, Scissors? Where might you fry eggs in a spider, and where would you refer to a Band-Aid as a plaster? Could sending your child to a language immersion school help the whole family learn a new language? Where'd we get the expression When in Rome, do as the Romans do? Also, Yiddish proverbs and slang from the streets to Capitol Hill.

FULL DETAILS

How would you feel if someone took away your smartphone? Nomophobia, the suggested moniker for that anxiety produced by the separation between one and their phone, has been circulating on the internet for a few years after being cooked up by a market research firm. Is there a better term for that awful feeling?

What exactly is gobbledygook, and where does the word come from? Texas Congressman Maury Maverick coined the word http://www.worldwidewords.org/weirdwords/ww-gob1.htm in 1944 to describe the frustrating jargon used by policymakers in Washington, which reminded him of the sound of turkeys gobbling away. Incidentally, his grandfather Samuel August Maverick, also inspired a term that became popular during the 2008 U.S. elections. http://www.waywordradio.org/maverick-and-gobbledygook-minicast/

What's the best way to win at Rock, Paper, Scissors? Grant delves into the game's various monikers http://teachinghistory.org/history-content/ask-a-historian/23932, its roots going back centuries in Europe and Asia, and the role it plays among children learning about fairness. Studies have even been done to figure the most advantageous moves in competition http://www.worldrps.com/: statistically, scissors is your best bet http://www.worldrps.com/advanced.html.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called Words of the Year, based on phrases containing each month's three letter abbreviation. So, an ancient demonym would be TroJAN, for January, and a Derby Day cocktail would be a Mint JULep, for July.

What does it mean to redd up the home? This phrase is most common in Pennsylvania, and reflects the presence of early Scots-Irish settlers there. The expression means to "pick up" or "tidy up."

What's the difference between a plaster and a Band-Aid? One's a term used in England for "adhesive bandage," and the other is an American brand name that's almost completely generalized. The use of plaster for this type of bandage in Britain is allusion to the traditional use of sticky pastes to ensure the bandage stayed in place.

The Yiddish Project https://twitter.com/#!/YiddishProject on Twitter translates Yiddish proverbs into English, such as, "Ask advice from everyone but act with your own mind." It's not far from Martha's favorite advice from her North Carolina-born father: "Milk all the cows you can and then churn your own butter."

Should route be pronounced to rhyme with root or stout? There's no evidence to suggest that it can't, or shouldn't, rhyme with stout -- although anyone who's traveled Route 66 might beg to differ.

A collection of Bethlehem, Pa., slang from The Chatauquan http://books.google.com/books?id=qsVZAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA561&dq=chautauqua+%22coffee+soup%22&hl=en&sa=X&ei=CoFmT5ieBoaRsAKziuW2Dw&ved=0CEUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=chautauqua%20%22coffee%20soup%22&f=false, published in 1888, contains such gems as first, meant to be used interchangeably with just, as in "She is first eight years old," and coffee soup, bread with coffee poured over it.

We've received plenty of feedback about language immersion schools, and many who've attended say that not only did they learn both English and another language fluently by 3rd or 4th grade, but often the whole family picked up some of the new language, too.

Where does the phrase jonesing for come from? Heroin addicts first introduced the phrase in the early 1960s, but like many bits of slang, it soon left its original subculture and entered the mainstream vernacular.
 
The Southern idiom don't that tear the rag off the bush? http://www.word-detective.com/2010/03/04/rag-off-the-bush-to-take-the/ has been used when scandalous relationships are revealed, but it's also applicable to anything surprising. It's similar to "Don't that beat all?" and "Doesn't that take the cake?" Its etymology is uncertain, although it may have to do with old-fashioned shooting contests, in which someone would drape a rag on a bush as a target, and the winner would be the one who knocked it off.

Chiasumus http://www.waywordradio.org/pickles-and-ice-cream/, also known as antimetabole, is a somewhat symmetrical expression like John F. Kennedy’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you–ask what you can do for your country,” or "Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you." The great philosopher Alfred E. Newman once bequeathed to us a bit of wisdom with a somewhat similar structure: We are living in a world today where lemonade is made from artificial flavors and furniture polish is made from real lemons.

When in Rome, do as the Romans do. But wait, what did the Romans do, anyway, and where does that phrase come from? It pops up at least as early as St. Augustine's writings in the late 4th century, when he moved from Rome to Milan and inquired of a bishop as to whether he should keep his old routines.

Why are skillets also called spiders http://www.journalofantiques.com/hearthjan01.htm ? Centuries ago, the three-legged, long-handled pans used for frying actually resembled spiders, and the name stuck.

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

What do you call it when you roll through a stop sign without ever coming to a complete stop? A California stop, a Michigan stop -- or something else? And if someone calls you a voracious reader, would you be flattered or insulted? Also, Puddin Tame, the outmoded design elements called skeuomorphs, a clever Spanish proverb, moot vs. mute point, and the meaning of the military slang term "go hermantile."

FULL DETAILS

Why do we make a hand crank motion when asking someone to roll down their window? After all, in most cars these days, that's done with the press of a button. An outmoded gesture like this is similar to a skeuomorph, http://skeuomorphseverywhere.com/post/3242801306/velcro-tap-shoes-with-buckles a design element that still used even though it no longer has a function. For example, iPhones still use images of old handsets or tape recorders to indicate phone and voicemail functions.

What's your name? I'm Puddin Tame, ask me again and I'll tell you the same! This and other rhymes, such as "What's your number? Cucumber!" derive from French, English, and American children's folklore that dates to at least as early as the 17th century. Iona and Peter Opie have collected a bundle of these children's sayings. http://books.google.com/books?id=sdWwHbOf4oAC&pg=PA157&lpg=PA157&dq=iona+and+peter+opie+puddin+tane&source=bl&ots=HnFvI-mc4S&sig=6Yr0FO-iplK86ghakn5RXMK-b5s&hl=en&sa=X&ei=vaZbT-rGMMX20gGw69znDA&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q&f=false

What's it called when someone rolls through a stop sign without coming to a complete stop? People across the country have coined terms like California stop, New York stop, and Michigan stop as a way of expressing pride in their local delinquencies.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VVlTTqIgdY

Like the famous murmuration of starlings, http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/ a dole of doves is another beautiful collective noun from the aviary world. http://palomaraudubon.org/collective.html

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game of geographic and astrological portmanteaus. For example, if you're looking for something with a spongy-pointed marker in Pittsburgh, how about a Felt Tip Pennsylvania? Or if someone born in June is in putting on makeup, chances are they'd wear Geminishadow.

A Vermont kindergarten teacher discusses unusual vocabulary with his class. He's trying to revive apricity, which means the warmth of the sun in the winter. This term comes from the Latin meaning "to bask in the sun." This caller hopes people will warm to the idea.

If someone calls you a voracious reader, would you be flattered or insulted? And is it better to be a voracious reader of nonfiction rather than novels? The word voracious, which shares a root with devour and carnivore, might connote a lack of discernment when it comes to eating, but if one reads voraciously, it's typically a point of pride. What other gustatory tropes are there in the ways we talk about reading and eating?

El pez se muere por la boca is a wise and vivid Spanish proverb. It means "the fish dies by its mouth."

In the Navy and the Marines, if someone goes hermantile, they're engaging in crazy behavior. This slang expression is of uncertain origin. It goes back to World War I but has stayed almost exclusively within the military's lexicon and writings related to the Navy or the Marines.

Asafetida, the plant used in asafidity bags http://www.waywordradio.org/spelling-bee-words/ meant to ward off disease, is also a common ingredient in Indian cooking http://www.seriouseats.com/2010/06/spice-hunting-asafoetida-hing.html, and it's said to counterbalance heavy spices and relieve stomach cramps.

Why can't you tear the tag off a mattress? And why do old books say that the right of translation into foreign languages including the Scandinavian is reserved? These bits of jargon, not necessarily intended for the consumer, have seeped into our language because of nuanced copyright laws and the like.
 
How do you pronounce moot point? Does it sound like mute, or rhyme with toot? The correct answer is the latter.

Here's another fun skeuomorph: Martha's father bought an exercise bike for the den, but the pedals have reflectors on them.

Why do we speak to babies in high pitched voices? Often our eyes grow wide, we give big smiles, and we talk in exaggerated, singsongy voices because these are the things that infants respond to. Chances are this parental cooing has gone on since time immemorial.

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Do you ever wonder why the almost-human characters that appear in video games can seem downright creepy? That disturbing sensation is called "the uncanny valley." Speaking of creepy, do you know someone with a morbid fear of clowns? There's a term for that, too. Why do politicians suspend a campaign instead of just ending it? How is it that the sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo actually makes sense? Plus, onomatopoeia for the digital age, a magic word quiz, and the kippie bags and vaporwakes you'll find in the airport security line.

FULL DETAILS

What is it about lifelike robots and the humanoid characters in movies like The Polar Express that feels so disturbing? Robotics scientist Masahiro Mori dubbed this phenomenon the uncanny valley. It's evident with movies like The Polar Express. There are lots of interesting articles explaining this creepy sensation in Slate http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/gaming/2004/06/the_undead_zone.html, Wired, http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2011-07/19/uncanny-valley-tested, and on the NPR blog. http://www.npr.org/blogs/13.7/2012/01/20/145504032/story-telling-and-the-uncanny-valley

When selling a house, the last thing you want is to take a bath--or, for that matter, a haircut. The first of these refers to getting cleaned out of money. The second is an allusion to the idea of being left with just two bits, or 25 cents.

Be careful with that lazy man's load! http://www.fromoldbooks.org/Grose-VulgarTongue/l/lazy-mans-load.html That's the oversize armful you carry when you're transporting things and take too much to avoid making another trip.

Why do politicians say they're going to suspend a campaign? Aren't they really just ending it? Under Federal Election Commission funding regulations, politicians can continue to collect money for paying off campaign fees well after an election, so long as their campaign is just suspended. William Safire's Political Dictionary http://books.google.com/books/about/Safire_s_political_dictionary.html?id=c4UoX6-Sv1AC remains the best reference for such political terminology.

Would you prefer a low, six-figure salary or a low six-figure salary? With the comma, there are two independent modifiers for the salary; it's six figures and by the speaker's standards, it's low. Without the comma, it's simply less than $500,000.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a magical puzzle, the answers to which contain the word magic. For example, a motel sign in the '70s might have included the enticement Magic Fingers, and Gabriel Garcia Marquez was a proponent of the literary genre Magic Realism.

How do you spell the exclamation that rhymes with the word "woe"? Is it woah or whoa? http://separatedbyacommonlanguage.blogspot.com/2009/04/whoa-and-woah.html The correct spelling in the United States is whoa, but when words are primarily translated orally, spelling often varies.

If you're as happy as if someone were throwing pork at you, you're pretty darn happy. And if something is higher than a cat's back, it's pretty darn high.

Post-9/11, we've heard a lot of new jargon pertaining to travel and security. An example is vaporwake, that term for the airborne trail we leave consisting of our natural scent, perfumes, and the odor of any drugs or weapons we may be carrying. Another example of Transportation Safety Administration terminology: puffer machine, the device that's used to read your vaporwake by blowing a puff of air on you.

Why don't nouns have gender in English they way they do in Spanish, French, or German? http://www.quora.com/Why-dont-nouns-in-English-have-gender Before the Middle English period, nouns in English were either masculine, feminine, or neuter. Over time, however, we've moved away from the semantically arbitrary practice of assigning genders to objects that have none. In other words, the linguistic notion of grammatical gender is completely different from biological and social notion of natural gender.
 
Kippie bags, named after the former TSA head Kip Hawley, are those quart-sized bags we put toiletries in when going through airport security.

Grant has collected some modern onomatopoeia for the technological age. Try untz, for the beat in dance music, or wub, for the common dubstep sound. Pew pew! works for lasers, and beep, for a computer's beep, is a modern classic.

Can you describe a price as cheap or expensive, or are those words properly applied to the item for sale, rather than the price? Across all registers of language, both variants are appropriate.

Absenteeism is a problem in the workplace, but so is presenteeism. That's when people who should stay home to nurse a cold or flu insist on coming in to work, risking a turn for the worse or infecting everyone around them.

When it comes to words like reckon, is it true that Southerners preserve the Queen's English? For the most part, reckon has its own meanings between the continents, and the more common English spoken in the South is actually of the Scotch or Irish varieties.

What do you call a fear of clowns? Coulrophobia, from the ancient Greek term for "one who walks on stilts." Perhaps coulrophobia is a creepy cousin of the uncanny valley. This article from Scientific American offers further explanation. http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/anthropology-in-practice/2011/10/31/cant-sleepclown-will-eat-me-why-are-we-afraid-of-clowns/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2nK_qmvJ7A

How many buffaloes can you fit in a sentence? Eight? How about 40? The sentence Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo is a staple of introductory linguistics classes, because it's a great illustration of polysemy, in which one word can have several different meanings. In this case, example, buffalo can be a noun, a verb, an adjective, and a proper noun. It makes more sense to think of it this way: "Buffalo-origin bison that other Buffalo bison intimidate, themselves bully Buffalo bison."

....

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today. Learn more at nu.edu. http://nu.edu

We're also grateful for support from The University of San Diego. Since 1949, USD has been on a mission not only to prepare students for the world, but also to change it. Learn more about the college and five schools of this nationally ranked, independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu. http://sandiego.edu

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

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Let's put the moose on the table: You have questions, and Grant and Martha have answers. For example, why would someone have an albatross around his neck? And what's so cool about bees' knees, anyway? Plus, jockey boxes, bailiwicks, and cute names for loved ones, from snookums to bubula. If a bartender ever serves you a mat shot, don't try to beast it. You'll regret it in the morning.

FULL DETAILS   

What pet names do you have for your loved ones? In The Joys of Yiddish, Leo Rosten shares the name his Mother used to call him--Bubala, a term of endearment grandmothers might use in addressing children. We have all kinds of substitutes for the names of those we care about: sweetie, honey buns, snookums, etc. Martha opts for the Portuguese fofinha, meaning "fat, cuddly baby."

http://wywd.us/yiddishjoy

What's so cool about bees' knees, anyway? The bee's knees, a phrase meaning "cool" or "great," dates back to the flapper era of the 1920s. It relates to an old definition of the word "cute," referring to something "small and nicely formed." The knees of a bee are just that, after all.

http://wywd.us/bees-knees

A bartender wonders about the origin of the term jockey box. In his world, a jockey box is a "metal container for ice." However, in some parts of the western U.S., jockey box means "the glove compartment of a car," and much earlier, the term referred to boxes attached to the side of chuck wagon for holding feed or water.

The caller also shares another bit of bartending slang, the so-called mat shot or Matt Dillon. It's a glass of whatever liquor collects on the rubber mat behind the bar, which some enterprising patrons order as a prank or a test of a strong stomach.

The hosts discuss an email from a listener in Romania. His problem is that he learned English in the Southern U.S., but after going back home to where a British English is taught, people are having a hard time understanding his accent. Where we learn a language plays a big role in how we speak it.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called Centricity, emphasis on the "city." For example, "Mickey ate all the fruit, leaving Minneapolis." And as George H.W. Bush said to George W. Bush, "You can be president Tucson."

Has your boss ever used the expression Let's put the moose on the table? This management buzzphrase, meaning "let's address the problem everyone's been avoiding," is relatively new, showing up in print around the early 1990s. The phrase pops up in books by former Eli Lilly CEO Randall Tobias and management guru Jim Clemmer. In Clemmer's book Moose on the Table, he tells a possible origin tale about a baby moose that crawled under a buffet table, only to be avoided by the patrons as it stank up the banquet hall.

http://wywd.us/moosetable

What does it mean to have an albatross around your neck? A political pundit, referring to a current candidate, mentioned "an alcatraz around his neck." The proper version, with an albatross, originates from Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, wherein a sailor shoots an albatross, bringing down a curse on the boat, and his shipmates force him to wear an albatross around his neck as a symbol of shame. Grant notes that the name albatross likely derives from the Portuguese or Spanish alcatraz, meaning "pelican" or "sea bird." So perhaps an alcatraz around the neck isn't so far off after all.

http://wywd.us/albatrossneck

http://wywd.us/ancientrime

If something's "the bee's knees," you can bet that it's also beast. A sixth grade teacher wonders about the term beast being thrown around by her students. This synonym for "cool" or "good" is also used as a verb, as in I beasted that exam, or "I did extremely well." The slang term "beast" is common slang in sports, as in, "That player is a beast on the field." Former Cal running back Marshawn Lynch is notably famous for his signature playing style, beast mode.

http://wywd.us/beasted

A few weeks ago, a listener was looking for a term to describe the copy of The Emperor's New Clothes that he'd read many times as a child. In this picture book, the naughty bits were always cleverly covered up. Thinking he wanted a synonym for "fig leaf," Martha had offered the word antipudic, from the Latin pudor meaning "shame." Many listeners responded, suggesting that the word he really wanted was bowdlerize, meaning "to remove improper or offensive material." This eponym comes from Thomas Bowdler, whose sister ghost-edited The Family Shakespeare in 1818 containing censored versions of Shakespeare's plays.

http://wywd.us/antipudic

http://wywd.us/bowdlerandsis

If you go to a department store, you'll see the Men's department, the Women's department, and the Children's department. So why do so many stores have a department that's called simply Baby? Grant attributes the non-possessive nomenclature of stores like Baby Gap to tradition in the retail industry.

A listener from San Diego, California, named Lois has been called Louise, Lori, Lauren, Louisa, and Rosa, to name a few. And of course, the Scott/Todd mix-up phenomenon continues. Do people ever mess up your name?

http://wywd.us/scotttodd
 
What does it mean to vet a political candidate? The word vet comes from veterinarian, specifically the ones who would examine a horse before a race to make sure it was healthy and eligible. Similarly, one might vet a candidate to make sure they're up to snuff. The novelist John le Carre popularized the term in his political stories.

http://wywd.us/lecarre

A listener from Wisconsin adds to the discussion on wind pudding and air sauce, explaining that where he's from, wind pudding is old loggerspeak for baked beans.

http://wywd.us/windpudding

How do you pronounce biopic? The proper way to mention the genre of biographical motion picture has always been "BUY-oh-pick," as opposed to the mirror of myopic. It's not unusual to mispronounce a word if the spelling does not clearly indicate how to say it. For example, Grant notes a common error people make in pronouncing misled to rhyme with "chiseled."

If something's not in your bailiwick, it's not in your jurisdiction or area of control. But what exactly is a "bailiwick"? Martha explains that the two words which make up the term--bailiff and wick-- have specific meanings in Middle English. A bailiff, in the time of kings, was "a public minister of a district," and a wick was simply a "town" or "village." For example, Gatwick literally referred to a "goat village." And Greenwich literally meant "green village" or "village on the green."

Is that funny hehe, or funny haha? The way we laugh indicates whether we're laughing at someone or if we're simply enjoying the humor they've brought.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what's a busman's holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word "unicycle." Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite oxymorons, and the origin of "put that in your pipe and smoke it"! If the Google Books Corpus doesn't sound like fun, think again. And by the way, shouldn't more than one company be allowed to sell Monopoly?

FULL DETAILS
 
You know those words whose meanings never seem to stick in your mind, no matter how many times you flip back to the dictionary? Martha wrestles with the term atavistic, meaning "the tendency to revert to ancestral characteristics." She now remembers it by the Latin root it shares with the Spanish word for "grandfather," abuelo. Grant, in turn, shares his revelation that upwards of actually means "more than," not "up to."

A unicycle enthusiast wonders if his unicycle can be properly called a bike. To avoid the four-syllable mouthful, the unicycle community (yes, there is one) sometimes calls it a uni, but for the general public, the term "bike" works. Martha reveals that she once spent a summer teaching herself to ride a unicycle, and doesn't mind calling it a bike. Grant notes the general rule that once a word has left its etymological root, it can be used for whatever we need it for.

http://www.unicyclist.com/forums/showthread.php?t=88860

Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" may not have had the same ring if she'd referred to being "under my bumbershoot." Nonetheless, bumbershoot, bumberell, brolly and bumbersol, among others, are all playful alternatives to umbrella that even Mary Poppins would appreciate. Grant explains that bumbershoot, itself an American slang term, derives from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow," and chute, as in "parachute."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjXKk3AbgH8&feature=related

http://www.worldwidewords.org/qa/qa-bum2.htm

Twitter's 140-character format has made way for a whole new brand of comedy writing. See Judah Friedlander: "More than one company should be allowed to sell Monopoly," or Stephen Colbert: "It doesn't always pay to get up early. If you're a worm, you just get eaten by that early bird. So sleep in, worms."

http://twitter.com/#!/JUDAHWORLDCHAMP

http://twitter.com/#!/stephenathome

In the mood for a word puzzle? Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has an app for that. This week's quiz features solutions starting with the letters app. Someone afraid to take care of the bug problem in their apartment doesn't want to "app-roach" them!

Is it worth using proper pronunciation if it makes you sound ignorant or misinformed? Contrary to the common understanding, the word forte is actually pronounced "fort." Grant describes forte as a skunked word; it's a losing situation no matter how you use it. For the sake of clarity and conversational flow, it's best instead to say that something is a "strength," a "strong suit," or is "in one's wheelhouse."

Do you ever spend your off-time doing something work related? This is known as a busman's holiday or a postman's holiday, as in the British understanding of holiday as a vacation or time off work. Research for a dictionary entry on postman's holiday led Grant to an old French ragtime song called "Le Facteur en Balade," or "The Postman on a Walk". In the proper sense, a postman's holiday might consist of a leisurely walk along the same route whereon he delivers the mail. Let's just hope it doesn't involve getting chased by dogs.

http://bit.ly/jruSKk

Some listeners are madly in love with oxymorons, and they continue to share their favorites. One listener has a great T-shirt that reads "An oxymoron a day keeps reality away." Another says his favorite oxymoron is "Dodge Ram."

A listener from Richmond, Virginia, remembers an old game called buckeye that consists of metaphorically pulling someone's leg, then calling Buckeye! and tugging one's own lower eyelid. Martha suggests that it may be related to a 19th-century use of buckeye that refers to "something or someone inferior," like a country bumpkin or a rube. Thus, calling "Buckeye!" may be  equivalent to calling someone a sucker for getting tricked, or punk'd. Still, any explanation for the eyelid exposure is still pending.

Grant is pleased as punch about BYU Professor Mark Davies' new Google Books Corpus, which contains entries for every word ever in the entire Google Books database. In addition to parts of speech and definitions, the site provides contextual examples for each word. For example, the database has revealed that the word suitcase is often preceded by the adjective battered. Writers, teachers, English learners and language enthusiasts will love prospecting in this lexical goldmine.

http://googlebooks.byu.edu/
 
Home again, home again, jiggity-jig! A listener wonders about the origin of this phrase her Mother often used. Grant and Martha trace it back to another mother: Mother Goose. The full line goes, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggity-jig." It does not, contrary to a highly visited Google result, originate from the movie Blade Runner (though it's a cute scene nonetheless).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpK6GcViC88

Listeners have been sharing some of their personal Scrabble rules, including new uses for the blank tile. For example, one variation allows for the tile to be removed and reused, so if Grant were to play the blank tile as an "E" and Martha has an "E" in her tray, she can swap the tiles and then use the blank for her own play. Just be sure to use it, because nobody likes someone who bogarts the blank tile!

Downton Abbey, a program featured on Masterpiece Theater, provided a handful of colorful expressions that date surprisingly far back. Like it or lump it, meaning "deal with it," is found at least as early as 1830 and takes from the old verb lump meaning "to look sulky or disagreeable." Put that in your pipe and smoke it, a contemporary favorite meaning "Take that!" actually shows up around 1820. As for the phrase you're sailing perilously close to the wind, meaning "be careful not to overstep"--well, we haven't caught wind of the origin of that one.

Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women's suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women's rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage.

What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in language because we're constantly speaking and writing about them. The term "orange" became what it is in English after the fruit made it to the French town Orange.

Martha shares a quip that's all too true: "I don't find it hard to meet expenses. They're everywhere!"

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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What's the best way to help your child learn to speak a foreign language? One option is an immersion school, where teachers avoid speaking English. Also, did you ever play padiddle while riding in a car? It's a game that's supposed to help courting couples get closer. Plus, what your signature says about you, what to call that last hors d'oeuvre on a plate, sitting on your tuchus, alphabet riddles, old camp songs, soup to nuts, and the weather-related phrase Who let the hawk out?

FULL DETAILS

What does your signature say about you? http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2012/01/signing-off-the-slow-death-of-the-signature-in-a-pin-code-world/251934/ In today's world of PIN-codes and electronic communication, maybe not so much.

What's a tasteful way to refer to one's rear end? Tushie and tush come from the Yiddish word tuchus. The Yiddish word tuchus, also spelled tochis and tochas, is venerated by some, but regarded by others, including The New York Times http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2010/06/words-that-the-new-york-times-will-not-print/57884/, as "insufficiently elegant."

Grant has a handful of alphabet riddles for the young ones. What did the alphabet's love note say? U R A Q T!

Ever play padiddle in the car? You know, that game where you slap the ceiling when someone's rear light is out? Padiddle, also known as perdiddle and padoodle, go back to the 1940s, and were traditionally kissing games. There's even more about such games, including slug bug, in an earlier episode. http://www.waywordradio.org/road-trip/

Next time you're in Texas, be on the lookout for instances to drop this colloquialism: He didn't have enough hair on his chest to make a wig for a grape!

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called Word Scouts. In order to earn your badge, you'll have to know the architectural term Bauhaus, and the flower that's also a past tense verb.

The phrases Who let the hawk out? and The hawk is flying tonight, both mean "there's a chilly wind blowing." This saying is almost exclusive to the African-American community, and is associated with that Windy City, Chicago.

What's the difference between a lawyer and an attorney? None, really. In the past, though, the word attorney could also refer more generally to a person you "turned to" to represent you, regardless of whether that person had legal training.

How would you fare in a quiz of idiom meanings? If you're looking to bone up on these colloquial expressions, the American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms http://www.amazon.com/American-Heritage-Dictionary-Idioms/dp/039572774X is a good place to start.

What do you call the last appetizer on a plate--the one everyone's too embarrassed to reach for? That last piece has been variously known as the manners bit or manners piece, a reference to the fact that it's considered polite to not empty a plate, assuring the hosts that they provided sufficient fare. In Spanish, the last remaining morsel that everyone's too bashful to take is called la verguenza, or "the embarrassment."

What was your favorite camp song? If it sounds like nonsensical scat singing, it may date back to a radio character named Buddy Bear who sang in scat on the Buddy Bear show in 1946.

How does the alphabet get to work? Why, the L, of course!

Among some African-Americans, the term "Hannah" means "the sun." This sense is memorialized in the lyrics of "Go Down Old Hannah," a work song from the 1930s. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Sv3Qt_ZCsu4 One writer said of this haunting melody: "About 3 o'clock on a long summer day, the sun forgets to move and stops, so then the men sing this song." The great folklorist Alan Lomax http://www.loc.gov/folklife/lomax/ also made recordings of prison workers singing this song.

Twitter is a great way to discover new words. Just search with #newword, and you'll find gems like holus-bolus http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/holus-bolus, meaning the whole thing (e.g. he ate the whole turkey, or he ate the turkey holus-bolus).

If something is described as soup to nuts, it's "the whole thing" or it "runs the gamut." The phrase refers to an old-fashioned way of dining, beginning with soup and ending with nuts for dessert. The ancient Romans used an analogous expression in Latin: ab ovo usque ad malum, literally, "from the egg to the apple."

Martha reads a poem by former U.S. Poet Laureate Kay Ryan called "The Long Up." http://archives.newyorker.com/default.aspx?iid=46998&startpage=page0000031

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Survey time! Do you call that kind of cap a beanie, a toboggan, or a stocking hat, or something else? What about rubber-soled athletic shoes? Do you call them sneakers or tennis shoes? Also, great Scrabble words, feeling owly, Jumpin' Jehoshaphat!, finjans and zarfs, catching plagiarism with mountweazels, and the art of long sentences. It's a larrupin' good episode!

FULL DETAILS

What do you call a knitted cap? A beanie? A toboggan? A stocking hat? Grant's Great Knitted Hat Survey (http://waywordradio.org/great-knitted-hat-survey.html) traces the different terms for this cold weather accessory used across the country.

How do you refer to athletic shoes? Are they sneakers or tennis shoes? When canvas shoes with soft rubber soles came into use, they were so quiet compared to wood-soled shoes that one could literally sneak about. Outside the Northeast, however, tennis shoe is the much more common term.

The biblical king Jehoshaphat is the inspiration for the exclamation Jumpin' Jehosaphat. This alliterative idiom probably arose in the 19th century, but was popularized by the cartoon character Yosemite Sam.

Looking for some good Scrabble words? Try zarf, a type of cup holder of Arabic origin, or finjan, the small cup that's held by the zarf.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski shows off his acting skills with a word puzzle based on sounds.

Tight games often end up at a rubber match, or tiebreaker. Used for a variety of sports and card games, rubber match has been in use since the late 16th century, and seem to have originated in the game of lawn bowling. The term may allude to the idea of erasing one's opponent.

Do dictionaries deal with copyright infringement or plagiarism when definitions match up between volumes? Since many modern dictionaries derive from the same few tomes, it's common to see definitions that match. But lexicographers have been known to plant mountweazels, (http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2005/08/29/050829ta_talk_alford) or fake words, to catch serial plagiarizers. One famous mountweazel is the word jungftak (http://www.waywordradio.org/picklebacks-and-mountweazels/) the spurious definition of which is "A Persian bird, the male of which had only one wing, on the right side, and the female only one wing, on the left side; instead of the missing wings, the male had a hook of bone, and the female an eyelet of bone, and it was by uniting hook and eye that they were enable[d] to fly,—each, when alone, had to remain on the ground."

If someone directs you to drive three C's, they're advising you "drive as far as you can see, then do it two more times."

If something's larrupin' good, it's spankin' good or thumpin' good, and comes from the word larrup, a verb meaning "to beat or thrash."

Martha shares a couple of choice idioms: dry as a contribution box, and plump as a partridge.

Pico Iyer's piece in the Los Angeles Times (http://articles.latimes.com/2012/jan/08/entertainment/la-ca-pico-iyer-20120108) is a testament to the value of long sentences in our age of tweets and abbrevs.

Oh no you di-int! The linguistic term for what happens when someone pronounces didn't as di-int, or Martin as Mar-in without the "t" sound, (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kF4H5vZ-Km4&feature=related) is called glottalization. Instead of making a "t" sound with the tongue behind the teeth, a different sound is made farther back in the mouth. John Rickford (http://www.johnrickford.com/Home/tabid/1101/Default.aspx), professor of linguistics at Stanford University, does a thorough job tracing this phenomenon in his book African-American English: Structure, History, and Use. (http://www.johnrickford.com/Writings/Books/tabid/1128/Default.aspx)

When putting together a jigsaw puzzle, do you call it making a puzzle or doing a puzzle? Listeners shared lots of different opinions on the A Way with Words Facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/waywordradio

The Dictionary of American Regional English traces you'uns, a plural form of you, to the Midlands and the Ohio River Valley. But the phrase goes back a while; even Chaucer used it.

If someone's feeling owly, they're in a grumpy mood and ought to pull up their socks and cut it out. The phrase is chiefly used in the Midwest and Canada, and can be found in some dictionaries from Novia Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Some people think owls look grumpy or creepy (http://bit.ly/y31Ja5), although others think they're adorable (http://www.kpbs.org/news/2010/mar/25/san-marcos-famous-barn-owl/). Then there are those who prefer moist owlets (http://bit.ly/x7XVcD)

Martha reads a favorite love poem by e.e. cummings. (http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/179622)

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2012, Wayword LLC.

Why do spelling bees include such bizarre, obsolete words like cymotrichous? And why is New York called the Big Apple? Also, the stinky folk medicine tradition called an asifidity bag. Worn around the neck like an amulet, these smelly bags supposedly keep away cold and flu. Also, the surprising number of common English phrases that come directly from the King James Bible. Plus, three sheets to the wind, the term white elephant, in like Flynn, Australian slang, and what to call foam sleeve for an ice-cold can of beer or soda.

FULL DETAILS

What's the common thread that connects the phrases pour out your heart, from time to time, fell flat on his face, the skin of my teeth, and the root of the matter? They all come from, or were popularized by, the King James Bible, published in 1611. The Manifold Greatness (http://www.manifoldgreatness.org/) exhibit is now traveling to libraries and schools nationwide, demonstrating, among other things, this translation's profound impact on the English language.

A wedding photographer says she happens to run into lots of people who are three sheets to the wind, and wonders why that term came to mean "falling-down drunk." It's from nautical terminology. On a seagoing vessel, the term sheets refers to "the lines or ropes that hold the sails in place." If one, two, or even three sheets get loose and start flapping in the wind, the boat will swerve and wobble as much as someone who's overimbibed.

In Australia, if someone's socky, they're "lacking in spirit or self confidence." If someone's toey, they're "nervous," "aroused," or "frisky."

The words respiration and inspiration have the same Latin root, spirare, which means "to breathe." The word "conspire" has the same Latin etymological root. But what does conspiring have to do with breathing? The source of this term is notion that people who conspire are thinking in harmony, so close that they even breathe together.

The so-called Wicked Bible is a 1631 version of the King James, printed by Robert Barker and Matin Lucas. This particular Bible is so called because the printers somehow managed to leave out the word not in the commandment against adultery. They were, indeed, punished. Behold the offending page here. (http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/30/arts/design/manifold-greatness-and-king-james-bible-at-folger-review.html?pagewanted=all)

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game of Curtailments, in which the last letter of one word is removed to make another. For example: When the family gathers around the ________, it's clear that home is where the _______ is.

What do you call a gift that turns into more of a hassle, like a gift card for a store not in your area, or one with a pressing expiration date? A New York caller suggests the term gaft. Another possibility is white elephant, a term derived from the story of a king in ancient Siam, who punished unruly subjects with the gift of a rare white elephant. The recipient couldn't possibly refuse the present, but the elephant's upkeep became extremely costly.

What's an asafidity bag? Variously spelled asfidity, asfedity, asafetida, asphidity, and assafedity, it's a folk medicine tradition involves putting the stinky resin of the asafetida or asafoetida plant in a small bag worn around the neck to ward off disease. Then again, if this practice really does help you avoid colds and flu, it's probably because nobody, contagious or otherwise, wants come near you.

You can hear Granny Clampett mentions asafidity bags twice in the first two minutes of this episode of The Beverly Hillbillies(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7S2RJqBbRpkof). There's also a lengthy online discussion about this old folk tradition here.

http://en.allexperts.com/q/General-History-674/f/old-medicinal-practices-southern.htm

In an earlier episode (http://www.waywordradio.org/your-sweet-bippy/), Martha and Grant discussed what to call a person who doesn't eat fish. A listener calls with another suggestion: pescatrarian, from the Latin word that means "fish."

Why do spelling bees in the United States use so many bizarre, obsolete, ginormous, and Brobdinagian words? Webster's New International Dictionary, 3rd Edition, published in 1961, is still the standard for spelling bees, and thus contains some dated language. However, most unabridged dictionaries won't get rid of words even as they slip out of use.

Recent winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee included cymotrichous, stromuhr, Laodicean, guerdon, serrefine, and Uhrsprache. How many do you know? The whole list is here. (http://www.spellingbee.com/champions-and-their-winning-words)

Do you pronounce the words cot and caught differently? How about the words don and dawn, or pin and pen? The fact that some people pronounce at least some of these pairs identically is attributable to what's called a vowel merger. 

Why is New York City called the Big Apple? In the 1920s, a writer named John Fitzgerald used it in a column about the horse racing scene, because racetrack workers in New Orleans would say that if a horse was successful down South, they'd send it to race in the Big Apple, namely at New York's Belmont Park. For just about everything you'd ever want to know about this term, visit the site of etymological researcher Barry Popik. (http://www.barrypopik.com/)

A caller says her relative always used an interjection that sounds like "sigh" for the equivalent of "Are you paying attention?" The hosts suspect it's related to "s'I," a contraction of "says I." This expression open appears in Mark Twain's work, among other places.

Many teachers aren't crazy about cornergami. That's what you've committed if you've ever been without a stapler and folded over the corners of a paper to keep them attached.

The phrase in like Flynn describes someone who's thoroughly successful, often with the ladies. Many suspect it's a reference to the dashing actor Errol Flynn and his sensational trial on sex-related charges. That highly publicized trial may have popularized the expression, but it was already in use before that. It could perhaps be a case of simple rhyming, along the lines of such phrases as What do you know, Joe? and Out like Stout.

The foam sleeve you put around a can of ice-cold beer or soda sometimes goes by a name that sounds like the word "cozy." But how do you spell it? As with words that are primarily spoken, not written, it's hard to find a single definitive spelling. In fact, the word for this sleeve is spelled at least a dozen different ways.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

What do pigs have to do with piggyback rides? Martha and Grant have the answer. They also get a lesson from a listener in the fine art of speaking gibberish. And what's the correct way to pronounce the name of the nut spelled p-e-c-a-n? Pee-KAHN or PEE-can?  The French have the Academie Francaise, but what authority do we have for the English language? Also, what you should do when someone yells, "Hold 'er Newt! She's headed for the barn!"

FULL DETAILS

Martha and Grant share some favorite unusual words. Omphaloskepsis is a fancy term for "navel-gazing," from the Greek omphalos, meaning "navel." The other is mumbleteenth, a handy substitute when a number is too embarrassing to mention, as in, "Socrates the omphaloskeptic questioned himself for the mumbleteenth time."   

Double-talk, or doublespeak, is a form of gibberish that involves adding "ib" or other syllables to existing words. This sort of wordplay may have originated among criminals using double-talk to communicate on the sly. 

You say pee-KAHN, I say PEE-can. Just how do you pronounce the name of the nut called a pecan? Actually, there are several correct pronunciations.

Window-shopping became popular pastime along New York's 5th Avenue back in the days when stores closed at 5 p.m. Passersby would stroll past, gazing at the window displays without intending to purchase anything. The French term for "window shopping," lecher les vitrines, literally translates as "window-licking."

The word plangent, which means "loud" and sometimes has a melancholy ring to it, is an apt descriptor for movie soundtracks.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski revives a classic game of word reversals called Get Back. What palindromic advice would you give to someone who ought to stay away from baked goods? How about shun buns? If, on the other hand, you've highlighted the pastries, then you've stressed desserts.

The word silly didn't always have its modern meaning. In the 1400s, silly meant happy or blessed. Eventually, silly came to mean weak or in need of protection. Other seemingly simple words have shifted meanings as the English language developed: the term girl used to denote either a boy or a girl, and the word nice once meant ignorant.

Is there an English language authority like the Royal Academy in Spain or the Academie Francaise? Dictionaries often have usage panels made up of expert linguists, but English is widely agreed to be a constantly shifting language. Even in France and Spain, the common vernacular often doesn't follow that of the authorities.

How do double rainbows form? Scientists at UCSD have explained that extra-large droplets, known as burgeroids because of their burger-like shape, have the effect of creating a double rainbow. Burgeroids, all the way!

http://news.sciencemag.org/sciencenow/2011/12/science-shot-burgeroids-cause-do.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQSNhk5ICTI

The word bummer originates from the German bummler, meaning "loafer," as in a lazy person. In English, the word bum had a similar meaning, and by the late 1960s, phrases like bum deal or bum wrap lent themselves to the elongated bummer, referring to something that's disheartening or disappointing.

Many in the South know a pallet to be a stack of blankets or a makeshift bed. The classic blues song "Make Me a Pallet on Your Floor" gives a perfect illustration.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=39RBm4tH9cA

The I vs. me grammatical rule isn't hard to remember. Just leave the other person out of the sentence. You wouldn't say me am going to a movie or Dad took I to a movie.

What's the difference between empathic and empathetic? Empathic is actually an older word, meaning that one has empathy for another, but the two are near-perfect synonyms, and thus interchangeable.

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/12/rat-empathy/

Do you suffer from FOMO? That's an acronym fueled by Facebook and Twitter and other social networking sites. It stands for "fear of missing out."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/apr/17/hephzibah-anderson-fomo-new-acronym

http://wordspy.com/words/FOMO.asp

What does a piggyback ride have to do with pigs? Not much. In the 16th century, the word was pickaback, meaning to pitch or throw on one's back. It's changed spellings dozens of times over the past few centuries, but perhaps the word piggy has contributed to its popularity among children.

You know how it is when you encounter a word and then suddenly you start noticing it everywhere? One that's seemed to pop up is cray, or cray-cray, a slang variant of crazy.

http://www.doubletongued.org/index.php/dictionary/cray_cray/

Hold 'er Newt! This primarily Southern idiom means either "Hold on tight!" or "Giddy-up!" It apparently derives from the idea of a high-spirited horse. Variants of this expression include Hold 'er Newt! She's headed for the rhubarb and Hold 'er Newt! She's headed for the barn! Eric Partridge's 1922 Dictionary of Catch Phrases indicates that the name Newt was once jocularly used to mean an idiot.

Some classic advice for writers from Anton Chekhov: "Don't tell me the moon is shining, show me the glint of light on broken glass."

http://writershandbook.wordpress.com/2008/03/27/a-glint-of-light-on-broken-glass/

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
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Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SHOW SUMMARY

If your friend says she's coming to town "Sunday week," exactly when should you expect to see her? And what do you call those typographical symbols that cartoonists use in place of profanity? Martha and Grant have the answer. Plus grass widows, the linguistic phenomenon called creaky voice, the difference between insure and ensure, the roots of the term jingoism and what it means if someone warns You don't believe fat meat is greasy. Also, is it okay to make a noun out of a verb?

FULL DETAILS

Researchers have found that stress is a leading cause of plewds--you know, those drops of sweat popping off the foreheads of nervous cartoon characters. That's one of several cartooning terms coined by Mort Walker, creator of the Beetle Bailey comic strip. Martha and Grant discuss this and other coinages from The Lexicon of Comicana.

http://www.mortwalker.com/books7.html

If someone's coming to town Sunday week, when exactly should you expect them? This Scots-Irish term means "a week after the coming day mentioned."

What are those symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? They're called grawlixes--good to know for the next time you play "Comic Strip Trope or Pokemon?"

Is it okay to make a verb out of a noun? Yes! It's estimated that twenty percent of English verbs started as nouns. Just think of the head-to-toe mnemonic: you can head off a problem, face a situation, nose around, shoulder responsibility, elbow your way into something, stomach a problem, foot the bill, or toe the line.

http://madshakespeare.com/2010/08/sunday-funnies-verbing-weirds-language/

http://moreintelligentlife.com/content/ideas/anthony-gardner/youve-been-verbed

Squeans are the little starbursts or circles surrounding a cartoon character's head to signify intoxication or dizziness.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called Categories. The challenge is to find the common thread that unites seemingly unrelated things. For example, Mary-Kate and Ashley, Jack Sparrow's crew, and Cherubim all fall into which category? The answer: Twins, Pirates, and Angels are all baseball teams!

What's a grass widow? In the 1500s,this term applied to a woman with loose sexual morals. Over time, it came to mean a woman who's been separated from her husband, or a divorcee.

If someone's jingoistic, they're extremely patriotic, often belligerently so. The term comes from a British song written in 1870 that uses the phrase By jingo! to conjure up enthusiasm for a British naval action.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnCNJD3-e7g

The curved lines that follow the moving limbs of cartoon characters? Those are called blurgits or swalloops.

The admonition You don't believe fat meat is greasy means "Just go ahead and try me" or "Don't push your luck." This idiom is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The idea is apparently that if you don't believe fat meat is greasy, you're someone who misses the obvious.
 
What's the difference between the words insure and ensure? To ensure means to make certain. Insure means to protect someone or something from risk, and should be used exclusively in a financial sense.

For some time now, linguists have been studying a style of speaking known as creaky voice. In the United States, it's heard particularly heard among young, white  women in urban areas. New research about this phenomenon, also known as vocal fry, has been making the rounds on the internet.

http://www.waywordradio.org/chicken-scratches-and-creaky-voice/

http://healthland.time.com/2011/12/15/get-your-creak-on-is-vocal-fry-a-female-fad/

Voila (not spelled wallah or vwala) is a good example of a borrowed word. Though French for "there it is," Americans often use it as a simple utterance, akin to presto or ta-da.

http://itre.cis.upenn.edu/~myl/languagelog/archives/005052.html

Lock the bad guys up in the hoosegow! This slang term for a jail comes from the Spanish juzgado, meaning "tribunal." It's an etymological relative of the English words judge and judicial.

Did you know roly-polies, or pill bugs, aren't even bugs? They're isopods, meaning they have equal feet, and they're technically crustaceans.
 
Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing them out.

Solrads are those lines radiating from the sun or a lightbulb in a comic strip, while dites are the diagonal lines on a smooth mirror.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SHOW SUMMARY

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's . . . "witches' knickers"? Well, what do YOU call those stray plastic bags littering the landscape? Also, what it means to do something "like a boss," how to hyphenate correctly, and why we say we have a "crush" on someone. What do you call when you meet someone for the first time, and they ask if you know so-and-so, just because you share an area code? Also, similes from the 1800s, a rule on hyphens, and the truth about what happens when you turn a bull loose in a china shop.

FULL DETAILS

What do you call those plastic shopping bags that litter the street? Some know them as witches' britches or witches' knickers. Others prefer urban tumbleweeds. In American Beauty, Ricky Fitts famously called one the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen. Either way, despite the effort to introduce reusable bags, the plastic variety continues to build up. Lori Robinson of Santa Barbara has even gone so far as to collect them from Tanzanian villages and distribute the more sustainable variety.

http://animprobablelife.com/2011/11/26/lori-robinson-bag-project-africa/

http://africainside.org/favorite-charities/one-wordplastics/

A clumsy person may be known as a bull in a china shop or a bull in a china closet. The former came into use first, in the early 1800s, but a bull in china closet is all the more evocative.  Plus, according to the MythBusters, a bull in a china shop is surprisingly nimble.

http://dsc.discovery.com/fansites/mythbusters/db/animals/bull-china-shop-cause-dish-carnage.html

When did the expression to have a crush on someone come into use? The television series Downton Abbey has dropped this and other fun bits of language, but no need to worry about its historical accuracy- crush has been around since the early 1880s. To mash on someone or crash on someone are idioms in the same vein, and may derive from the idea of an emotional collision between two prospective flames.

As they say in Wasika, Minnesota, "If I don't see you in the future, I'll see you in the pasture."

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a new game entitled The Secrets of Nym. In AA, d.e.n.i.a.l. is said to stand for don't even notice I am lying, which is a backronym. An acoustic guitar could be considered a retronym. And an editor named Daily is an example of an aptronym.

When someone finds out where you're from, do they ask if you know so-and-so? The cynics out there may refer to this as the six degrees of stupid, but even urban dwellers can admit that the answer is yes more often than the odds would suggest. How do you respond in those cases, and is there a term for those questions?

The Spanish equivalent of our bull in a china shop analogy translates to "like an elephant in a pottery store."

Where does the meme like a boss come from? The original boss may be the rapper Slim Thug, whose 2005 track "Like A Boss", from the album Already Platinum (which never went platinum), lists the myriad tasks he performs like a boss (e.g. "When I floss/ like a boss"). In 2009, Andy Samberg of SNL and The Lonely Island made a video entitled "Like A Boss" featuring Seth Rogen, which describes further boss-like activities (e.g. "promote synergy/ like a boss").

A book of similes from the 1800s contains such gems as it's easy as peeling a hardboiled egg and it's as hard to shave as an egg.

Does evidence-based have a hyphen? Why, yes it does, because evidence-based often functions as an adjective. While style guides indicate that we're continuing to drop hyphens, evidence-based is an important one to keep intact, even when used after the verb (e.g. the research is evidence-based).
 
Here's another great simile: large as life and twice as natural. As in, did you really see Elvis? Yep, he was large as life and twice as natural.

It's been a puzzler tracking the origin of the saying good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum. Perhaps it's an innocent mixup that takes from the Robert Burns poem "Tam o' Shanter", which reads, good night, sleep tight, I'll see you on the Brigadoon.

http://www.waywordradio.org/kit-caboodle/

http://www.robertburns.org.uk/Assets/Poems_Songs/tamoshanter.htm
 
You'd better behave, or I'll knock you from an amazing grace to a floating opportunity! This African-American saying, used as a motherly warning, first popped up in the 1930 play Mule Bone by Langston Hughes.

Infra dig, short for the Latin phrase infra dignitatum, means beneath one's dignity, or uncouth. Abbreviated Latin phrases like infra dig have become standard after old English schoolboys used to shorten them while studying classical texts.

Here are some easy similes: easy as winking, or easy as breathing. If you prefer a tough one, try as difficult to grasp as a shadow.

We all know the idiom slow as molasses, but slow as Moses does just as well. After all, he spent 40 years trekking to the Promised Land, and even described himself as slow of speech and of tongue.

The 19th Century French writer Adolphe de Lamartine said that written language is like a mirror, which it is necessary to have in order that man know himself and be sure that he exists.

In their song "The Old Apartment," The Barenaked Ladies sang, "crooked landing/ crooked landlord/ narrow laneway filled with crooks. This is an example of a polyseme, or one word that has multiple meanings. Similar to this is the syllepsis, wherein one word is applied to other words in different senses (e.g. Alanis Morissette: "you held your breath and the door for me").

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ggJS0p-QQc

http://rhetoric.byu.edu/figures/S/syllepsis.htm
 
Here's one that's sure to lull a restless child into sleep: night night chicken butt ham head yoo hoo!

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

How about some wind pudding with a dollop of air sauce? What's in a tavern sandwich? Do pregnant women really crave pickles and ice cream? Grant and Martha dig in to colorful language from the world of food. Plus, ever think of publishing a novel? Be warned: The snarky literary agent from SlushPile Hell shows no mercy when it comes to rejections. Also, piggy banks, children vs. kids, hand vs. foot dexterity, and a bi-coastal quiz. Plus, those flipped sentences known as antimetabole, such as "It's not the men in your life that counts, it's the life in your men."

FULL DETAILS

Ever thought about getting that novel published? Apparently, others have too, and some of their queries are less than persuasive for the admittedly grumpy literary agent who writes the blog SlushPile Hell. He posts some of the more colorful queries from his inbox, along with his own pithy responses. Take this one: "Have you ever wondered what it's like to be pulled up a waterfall or to be flushed down a toilet?" To which the agent responds, "Hey! Have you been reading my mind?" Ouch.

http://bit.ly/9z3rBp

Is it wrong to refer to children as kids? One discerning mother, when asked about her kids, always replied, "I don't raise goats, but my children are fine." Grant explains that as early as the 1600s, the word kids had popped up to refer to bratty or unruly children. But by the 1800s, it was normal even among upper-class households to call their young ones kids without any negative connotations.

A vegetarian from Vermillion, South Dakota, wonders about the origin of a popular loose meat sandwich called a tavern. It's like a sloppy joe, and also goes by the monikers Maid-Rite and Tastee. Martha notes a diner in Sioux City, Iowa, called Ye Olde Tavern, that claims to have created the sandwich. Still, with food origins, plenty of people lay claim to the inventions of everything, from hamburgers to breakfast cereal.

http://bit.ly/fik8P2

http://bit.ly/jtCwOA

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a bi-coastal quiz about two-word phrases connecting the letters NY and CA. For example, the man in black is JohnNY CAsh. Keep your eyes wide open for the clues!

A Canadian listener's boyfriend has a special talent. He can remove his socks, roll them up, and throw them across the room into the laundry basket--all with his toes. She says he has toe dexterity, but wonders if the word dexterous can apply to feet as well as hands? Martha notes that great soccer players like Argentina's Lionel Messi are simply called dexterous, although nimble and agile are also appropriate adjectives.

Noctivagant people are those who wander the night, and vespertilian folks have bat-like qualities. Add these to "shirtless" as poignant ways to describe a vampire.

When the going gets tough, the tough get going. This and other phrases of wisdom are known as antimetabole, from the Greek for "turning about in the opposite direction." Certain forms of these statements also go by the name chiasmus, from the Greek letter chi, meaning "X." They're often effective for making a point in a speech, like John F. Kennedy's famous "Ask not what your country can do for you--ask what you can do for your country." No matter the context, these flipped-sentence proverbs are great for making a point clear. Mardy Grothe has a whole book about chiasmus called Never Let a Fool Kiss You or a Kiss Fool You.

http://bit.ly/lJz5qp

The grumpy agent who writes the blog SlushPile Hell received a submission stating, "I have attached a copy of a letter I recently sent to Oprah about my book. She ends her show in September 2011, which leaves little time to select an agent." The agent responds, "Finally! An author who understands the importance of Oprah and has a no-fail plan for getting on her show." As if.

What's for dinner? How about wind pudding, air sauce, and a side of balloon trimmings? This colorful euphemism for "nothing" dates as far back as the American Civil War, when troops would come into the mess tent, see a wild squirrel boiling in a pot, and opt for wind pudding and air sauce instead.

The calls and e-mails keep coming in about Scotts being called Todds and Todds being called Scotts. One listener left a voicemail about a christening where the priest called the baby by its oddly common misnomer. Another listener by the name of Stefanie complains that she keeps getting called Jennifer. Perhaps it has to do with rhythm, and the patterns we develop out of sounds and syllables.

There's been a lot of talk about the place of handwriting in the digital age. Grant has some great books to recommend on the subject: Reading Early American Handwriting by Kip Sperry, and Handwriting in America: A Cultural History by Tamara Thornton. A long time ago, part of the reason for teaching longhand cursive was to have students practice transcribing documents with indoctrinating political messages. The character of handwriting, from the flourishes to the way a letter sits on the line, brought with it an array of cultural implications.

http://bit.ly/mwKGPn

http://bit.ly/lDrvCS

Why do we have piggy banks instead of any other kind of farm animal banks? In Scotland and Northern England, a kind of earthen material called pigg was used in the Middle Ages for making pots. The name stuck, and today we fill our piggs, or piggy banks, with coins.

Why do pregnant women enjoy pickles and ice cream? Or do they? Linguists from the American Dialect Society have been discussing this recently. They found that the expression pickles and ice cream once referred simply to the conjoining of two unrelated things, sort of the opposite of peas and carrots. Not until the middle of the 20th century did it pertain to cravings, simply because pregnant women go through different nutritional patterns than they would when eating for one.

Can the word training be pluralized, as in "How many trainings did you have last week"? Martha and Grant disagree about whether training can be a count noun.

A Minnesotan who relocated to Wisconsin gets called a Mud Duck, and wants to know why. Much in the way Wisconsinites get referred to as Cheese Heads, it's really a harmless bit of nomenclature from a cross-state rivalry. In hunting, the term duck has also been known to mean a mixed kind of species. Unfortunately, Mud Duck has popped up in odd corners with negative racial connotations. Still, the vast majority of people using Mud Duck mean it simply as a friendly jest.

Martha shares another barb from the SlushPile Hell agent.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
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Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SHOW SUMMARY

Yo! Who you callin' a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie, anyway? Also, what do vintage school buses and hack writers have in common? Grant and Martha trace the origins of famous quotes, and a listener offers a clever new way to say "not my problem." All that, plus winklehawks, motherwit, oxymorons, word mash-ups, and a quiz about palindromes.

FULL DETAILS

Is that a winklehawk in your pants? A listener shares this word for those L-shaped rips in your trousers, from an old Dutch term for "a carpenter's L-shaped tool." And Grant has a new favorite term, motherwit, meaning "the natural ability to cope with everyday life." You could say a mark of wisdom is showing some motherwit in the face of life's winklehawks.

Ever heard a school bus called a school hack? Grant and Martha explain the etymology of hack, beginning with hackney horses in England, then referring to the drivers of the horse-drawn carriages, then the carriages themselves, and finally the automobiles that replaced them. A museum in Richmond, Indiana, has a vintage yellow school hack, once used in the 19th and early 20th centuries to bring rural children to their schoolhouse. Incidentally, the contemporary term hack, meaning a tired old journalist, comes directly from the original term for the tired old horse.

http://bit.ly/mfS08T

O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! A listener senses something awfully good about oxymorons, from the Greek for "pointedly foolish". Grant shares this favorite example from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, while Martha picks a modern classic: airline food. What are your favorites?

In the U.K., they don't count their seconds as one-Mississippi, two-Mississippi, because, well, they have no Mississippi. Instead, they say one-elephant, two-elephant. Lynne Murphy, author of the blog Separated by a Common Language, points out this difference between English speakers on opposite sides of the pond.

http://bit.ly/pZxYG

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game called Welded Palindromes, with two-word phrases spelled the same forwards and backwards. What do you call your first appearance on TV? A tube debut. What kind of beer does a king drink? Why, a regal lager, of course.

A listener wonders about the origin of the phrase your father's mustache, akin to the phrase go jump in a lake, or your mamma wears combat boots. Grant explains that it may sound more familiar as your fadda's mustache, circa 1930s, Brooklyn. The borough's own jazz musician Woody Herman had a hit song in 1945 called Your Father's Mustache, but those in the know pronounced it "FAH-dah."

http://bit.ly/lCbNwL

A listener named Meagan from Wisconsin uses the term flustrated, combining flustered and frustrated--one of many mashed together words she deems Meaganisms. Though Grant applauds her innovation and creativity, Martha points out that flustrate actually does pop up in English texts as far back as the 18th Century. Though dictionaries with entries for flustrate note that it's usually a jocular term, a conversation could always use more Meaganisms.

Grant gives Martha a little Greek test with the word leucomelanous. Leuco, meaning "white," and melano, meaning "black," together refer to someone with a fair complexion and dark hair, like Snow White or Veronica from the Archie comics.

How do you say "not my problem"? A listener shares his go-to: Not my pig, not my farm. It means the same thing as I don't have a horse in that race, or I don't have a dog in that fight. Douglas Adams, in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, created the SEP Field, or the Somebody Else's Problem field. Though examples are boundless, there doesn't seem to be a standard or definite origin.

http://douglasadams.com/

A cowboy loves a ranch that's pecorous, meaning abundant with cattle. Just something worth knowing.

There's an old joke running around that goes as follows, "Lost: Bald, one-eyed ginger Tom, crippled in both back legs, recently castrated, answers to the name of 'Lucky.'" Nigel Rees of The Quote Unquote Newsletter has been tracking down this oft-quoted joke, and so far he's found it as far back as 1969. On another front, Fred Shapiro of the Yale Book of Quotations has made progress in tracing the origins of famous quotes, often to people other than those who made them famous. And the folks at quoteinvestigator.com are doing their share in researching the history of those quips and aphorisms that do so much to frame our essays and speeches.

http://bit.ly/dgveSD

http://bit.ly/lz1qRp

http://bit.ly/8nWlvi

A violin maker wonders about the origin of a practice in his trade known as purfling, where a black and white line is inlaid into a tiny channel along the edge of the instrument. Martha traces the word back to the Latin filum, meaning "line" or "thread." Purfling is also a practice in guitar-making, furniture-making, and embroidery, and it shares an etymological root with profile. A fun fact: purfling is also just "profiling" said with a mouth full of marshmallows.

When someone admiringly called a woman "outspoken," Dorothy Parker is said to have cynically replied, "Outspoken by whom?" Well, according to quoteinvestigator.com, the line pre-dates Parker's quip.

Why do we call our biceps guns? The slang lexicographer Jonathon Green suggests that the metaphor first pops up in baseball around the 1920s, when players referred to their throwing arms as guns. Believe it or not, the early baseball pitchers actually threw the ball intending for the batter to hit it. It wasn't until later that a strong arm, or gun, was needed to throw a pitch too fast to hit.

A listener shares a Russian saying that translates I am going there where the Tsar goes on foot, meaning "I am going to the bathroom." It's the equivalent of we all put our pants on one leg at a time, or we're all just human.

Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a "rube" or "loser," to the 1920s, when Italian immigrants brought over a similar-sounding Milanese term for "ham." Jabronie is also commonly used in professional wrestling, referring to those guys set up to lose to the superstars.

A decade is ten years. A century is a hundred. But what do you call a period of five years? It's a lustrum, borrowed whole from Latin. So you might say a decade is two lustra.

--

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SUMMARY

Why do some puns strike us as clever, while others are plain old groaners? Martha and Grant puzzle over this question. Also, the difference between baggage and luggage, a royal word quiz, the "egg" in egg on, what to call someone who doesn't eat fish or seafood, Hawaiian riddles, and why we say "You bet your sweet bippy!"

FULL DETAILS

When President Barack Obama had the Oval Office redecorated in soft browns and beige, The New York Times headline read: “The Audacity of Taupe.” The hosts discuss how puns work, and what makes them clever. Martha recommends John Pollack's new book, The Pun Also Rises: How the Humble Pun Revolutionized Language, Changed History, and Made Wordplay More than Some Antics.

http://www.thepunalsorises.com/

What do you call someone who doesn’t eat fish? A caller wants to know, but not because of dietary requirements. He's a string bass player who plays in an ensemble that’s tired of being asked to perform Schubert’s famous composition, the Trout Quintet.

http://www.classicalnotes.net/classics/trout.html

Martha and Grant tells him he has several options. Among them: non-pescatarian, anti-marinovore, anichthyophagist--and, of course, non-seafood eater.

What’s the difference between baggage and luggage? After all, it’s not as if anyone confesses to having emotional luggage. The hosts conclude that usually the word “luggage” specifies the container, while “baggage” is more likely to refer to that which is lugged inside the container.

Martha shares a quotation from Joseph Addison, no fan of puns: “If we must lash one another, let it be with the manly strokes of wit and satire: for I am of the old philosopher’s opinion, that, if I must suffer from one or the other, I would rather it should be from the paw of a lion than from the hoof of an ass.”

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a royal quiz in honor of the wedding of Kate Middleton and Prince William. He celebrates the wedding of the King and Queen with clues to answers that contain the letters "K" and "Q" next to each other. The answer to "The band that recorded 'Take Five,'" for example, is the "Dave BrubecK Quartet."

Where'd we get a word like skyscraper? Martha explains the image literally refers to scraping the sky, but first applied to the topmost sail on a ship, and later to tall horses, and high fly balls in baseball. There are similar ideas in other languages, as in the Spanish word "rascacielos" and French "gratte-ciel." In German, the word is picturesque as well. It's “Wolkenkratzer,” which literally means "cloud-scratcher."

Grant shares some fill-in-the-blank puzzles from a listener. For example, "There's one w______ on a u________" and "There are 5 d________ in a z_________ c__________."

A listener remembers her mother used to say, "Your Monday is longer than your Tuesday." This phrase offered a subtle way to notify someone that her slip was showing. Other expressions convey that warning as well, including "Monday comes before Sunday" and "Saturday is longer than Sunday." Also, if someone whispers "Mrs. White is out of jail," it's time to check to see if your slip is showing. Ditto if you're told you have "a Ph.D.," but you've never earned that degree. In this case "Ph.D" stands for "Petticoat Hanging Down."

Martha's been reading the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English again, and stumbled across a synonym for "fried chicken." It's preacher meat.

http://www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary/

"The Die is Cast" is the title of an episode of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. A listener and his wife disagree about what kind of "die" is meant here. It's not a reference to metallurgy -- it's a quotation attributed to Julius Caesar. When he crossed the Rubicon to lead a campaign against his enemies, he supposedly declared, "Alea jacta est." The word "alea," which refers to one piece of a set of dice, is an ancestor of the modern English word "aleatory," which means "by chance."

What happens when a clock gets hungry? It goes back four seconds. Martha talks about how puns weren't always considered "bad." Cicero praised them as the wittiest kind of saying, and Shakespeare made plenty of them, for both serious and comic effect. In the early 18th century, though, things changed. Pamphlets with titles like "God's Revenge Against Punning" began appearing, and the great lexicographer Samuel Johnson denounced them as "the last refuge of the witless."

Martha and Grant discuss why some puns work and others don't. Martha recommends John Pollack's observation in The Pun Also Rises describing how "for a split second, puns manage to hold open the elevator doors of language and meaning as the brain toggles furiously between competing semantic destinations, before finally deciding which is the best answer, or deciding to live with both."

Where'd we get the expression You bet your sweet bippy!? It's from Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In, a zany television show from the late 1960s. The word "bippy," by the way, means "butt." The phrase "You bet your sweet bippy" is a linguistic descendant of earlier versions that go back to at least the 1880s, when phrases like "You bet your sweet life" were commonly used.

http://www.museum.tv/eotvsection.php?entrycode=rowanandmar

The show also popularized such phrases as "Sock it to me!" and "Look that up in your Funk & Wagnalls."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8iGvzmOoh3Y

Why is Cairo, Ill., pronounced "KAY-roh"? Why do Midwesterners pronounce Versailles as "Ver-SALES" and the New Madrid Fault as "New MAD-rid"? Grant explains that these names are far removed from their earlier incarnations and function as a sort of shibboleth among the locals.

Martha springs another pun on Grant: Knock-knock. Who's there? Tarzan. Tarzan who? “Tarzan Stripes Forever.”

Why do we speak of trying to egg on a person, meaning to urge them to do something? Martha explains that the "egg" in this case has nothing to do with chickens. This kind of "egg" is derives from an old root that means to "urge on with a sharp object." It's a linguistic relative of the word "edge."

Grant wraps up with some Hawaiian riddles from the book Riddling Tales From Around the World, by Marjorie Dundas, including this one:

My twin was with me from the day I crawled
With me till the day I die
i cannot escape him
yet when storms come, he deserts me

http://books.google.com/books?id=qnWz6zrE8RUC&pg=PA66&lpg=PA66&dq=%22My+twin+with+me+from+the+day+I+crawled%22&source=bl&ots=dTLR_OAxIm&sig=vvHKYEeCGLgl2SqLqqqpcOn8d_A&hl=en&ei=drrZTcbZEoeusAP9wtWFDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CBYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=%22My%20twin%20with%20me%20from%20the%20day%20I%20crawled%22&f=false

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SHOW SUMMARY

What's YOUR choice for the Word of the Year for 2011? What word or phrase best sums up the ideas, events, and themes that speakers of English have been talking about? Grant shares some of his picks. And speaking of picks, why do football commentators seem to love the term pick-six? Also, great quotations from writers, the meaning of such Britishisms as cheeky and naff, the intentionally misspelled and mispronounced word defulgaty and a discussion of whether the term ladies is offensive. And does the insect called an earwig really crawl into people's ears at night?

FULL DETAILS

Writers always seem to come up with brilliant quotes about writing, and why shouldn't they? Douglas Adams has noted, "I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by." And Gloria Steinem once quipped: "I do not like to write. I like to have written."
 
What's the difference between hand grenades and pomegranates? Not much when you think about their shape and the fact that they're both packed tightly with small things, which is why both share a linguistic root with the word granular.

http://www.altalang.com/beyond-words/2009/07/13/pomegranates-and-hand-grenades/

Grant offers examples from his latest Words of the Year list, including Crankshaft (the code name for the Osama Bin Laden), and basketbrawl, referring to the fight that broke out between the Georgetown Hoyas and the Chinese National Team.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ClAM3zXx-I
 
Football, like most sports, brings its own set of idioms and jargon that ride the line between cleverness and cliche. The adjective multiple describes a player, an offense or defense, or even a whole team that has multiple threats or talents. And a pick six, one of the more exciting plays in football, is when a player makes an interception and scores a touchdown. For a more erudite take on the language of sports, David Foster Wallace's "Roger Federer as Religious Experience" never fails.

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/10/writing-the-beautiful-game.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/sports/playmagazine/20federer.html?pagewanted=all

Writers will appreciate this quotation from Burton Roscoe: "What no wife of a writer can understand is that a writer is working when he's staring out of a window."

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a quiz called Take-Offs. For each clue, remove the first letter of a word to get the second (or third) word in the puzzle. For example, in the first chapter of Moby Dick, Ishmael had to screw up his courage and join the crew. Or, I've been in the barber chair for an hour, my hair looks great, but it's time to come up for air. Be sure to check out John's new NPR show, Ask Me Another.

http://twitter.com/#!/NPRAskMeAnother
http://www.facebook.com/pages/NPRs-Ask-Me-Another/263283727044159

What is an earwig? Those skinny brown insects with pinchers coming out their backsides have a reputation in folklore for crawling through people's ears and laying eggs in their skull. But really, earwigs are just simple insects that take their name from the Old English term wicga, meaning "insect." The males do have one interesting anatomical feature, though.

http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg17223183.200-lucky-earwigs-are-doubly-endowed.html

A professional auctioneer shares some techniques for creating his mesmerizing, melodious patter. He explains that auctioneers are known as colonels, because colonels in the civil war were assigned with auctioning off captured property. And he warns to beware of so-called chandelier bidding. His final tip: Remember, at an auction, it's cheaper to kiss somebody than to wave at them!
 
The 2011 Words of the Year list wouldn't be complete without occupy, as in the Occupy protests that sprang up in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. And Zuccotti Lung? It's an illness that made its rounds among the camped-out protesters.

Have you ever been faced with a defugalty? This ironic misspelling and mispronunciation of difficulty popped up in a Dashiell Hammett novel, The Glass Key, in 1931. It's often said with a tongue in the cheek, but, as in the case of the Hammett novel, it refers to the mispronunciations of the uncouth or uneducated.

http://www.languagehat.com/archives/000630.php

Is the term ladies an offensive way to refer to a group of women? As a recent discussion on Ask Metafilter revealed, many interpret it as outdated, condescending, or patronizing. The hosts conclude it all depends on context.

http://ask.metafilter.com/200453/Why-are-some-women-offended-by-the-term-ladies

What does cheeky mean? How about the words twee and naff? A British ex-pat says she finds it hard to convey the nuances of these adjectives to her American friends.

What's Lady Macbeth talking about when she urges Macbeth to "screw your courage to the sticking point"? This image of mustering up bravery most likely has to do with tightening the strings of a crossbow.

If your iPhone's Siri thinks that two meetings in one day is not bad, does that make her an optimist? And by the way, since when did cellphones start making value judgments?

Nobody likes a humblebrag. That's when someone complains about, say, having to choose among their dozen college acceptance letters. Harris Wittles, a writer on television's Parks and Recreation, runs the Twitter handle @Humblebrag, where he retweets those ironic complaints akin to Arianna Huffington's tweet: "About to take off from Milan to Istanbul and none of my three blackberries are working."

https://twitter.com/#!/Humblebrag

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

Give Now for the $25,000 Fundraising Challenge



Dear friends and listeners,

As we near the end of our biggest year yet, we must raise $25,000 to cover the remainder of this season. We need your help to reach that amount before December 30th.

Reaching that goal will mean covering fixed costs: Broadcast studio rental. A sound engineer and board operator. Website hosting. Podcast hosting. The toll-free phone line. Episode distribution through the Public Radio Satellite System — an expense that will increase 50% in 2012.

What you may not know is that when you donate to your local station — as you should — none of that money goes to A Way with Words . We’re independent of any radio station and independent of NPR. We receive no funds from them at all.

This means, in part, that A Way with Words can carry out its educational mission without excessive bureaucracy and overhead costs. It also means we can make it available to everyone, completely free of charge.

But it also means that to do well, we require support from our listeners. We need your donations, whether you listen online or on the air.

Show us that we can count on you. Make a tax-deductible donation of $100 or more today. If that’s too much, please donate what you can.

If you’ve given to A Way with Words before, thank you! But can we ask you to double your donation this time? Will you go the extra mile to support quality radio that respects your intelligence?

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Best wishes, and happy holidays,

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Wayword, Inc., is a small non-profit 501(c)3 corporation. It receives no funding from NPR, PRI, PBS, the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, or any public radio station or broadcast network. Support amazing radio today!

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SHOW SUMMARY

If you've ever eaten Flavor-Crisp Chicken, it was probably served with JoJo potatoes. And speaking of fried chicken, ever wonder why colonel isn't pronounced "KOH-loh-nell"? Grant and Martha have the answers to those nagging little questions, like the difference between a turnpike and a highway, and the rules on me versus I. Who's behind those eponyms in anatomy, and why are doctors phasing them out? Plus, a newsy limerick challenge, dog breed mashups, pallets, a little Spanglish, and a list of -ologies to fill a whole course catalog!

FULL DETAILS

What's your favorite -ology? Perhaps alethiology, the study of truth, from the Greek alethia? Theologians might concern themselves with naology, the study of holy buildings.

http://phrontistery.info/sciences.html

What are JoJo potatoes? Starting in the 1960s, fried potato wedges came to be known as JoJos, especially in the Northern states. JoJos were often served in restaurants that also made Flavor-Crisp Chicken, which requires a special type of deep fat fryer. JoJos are simply unpeeled potato wedges thrown in the fryer, but the name may derive from the idea of "junk," because the potato scraps were considered worthless until restaurateurs realized they could be marketed and sold.

http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/jo_jo_potatoes_jojo_potatoes/

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=563558

We'll keep this short: Perissology is the superfluity of words.

Why is colonel pronounced like "kernel"? The original form comes from Italy, where a colonello was in charge of a column of soldiers. As it moved from Italian to French, it took on an r sound, but the English translators reverted to the more etymologically correct Italian spelling. That's why it looks one way but sounds another.

What do you get when you mix a Shelty and a Cocker? A Shocker! Or how about a Dachshund and a Border Collie? That'd make it a Dashboard. We don't want to know what you'd call a cross between a Pit Bull and Shih Tzu.

Hope you've been checking the headlines, because our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a new set of current event limericks. What's been "occupied?" How long did the Kardashian marriage last? And who made ambiguous the definition of the word "winning"?

A thick blanket or stack of blankets is also called a pallet. The Dictionary of American Regional English says this term is most common in the South Midlands--such states as Tennessee, Kentucky, and Missouri. In the New American Standard Translation of the Bible (John 5:8) Jesus says to a man who's been incapacitated for nearly 40 years, "pick up your pallet and walk." The term actually comes from French, where a pallet was a thick, woven mat of hay to lie on.

The usage of the word me vs. I will always be a point of debate. Grant and Martha contend that language works in the service of culture, and thus, there will always be informal settings where the words me and I are slung around interchangeably. Then again, there will also be classrooms, job interviews and the like, where my colleague and I completed the project is the better choice than me and my colleague completed the project.

Aesthetes might go for kalology, or "the study of beauty."

What's the difference between a turnpike and a highway? In the 1700s, privately funded roads were constructed in the Northeast to connect commercial centers, but tolls were charged in order to pay for the wood planks that covered the road; this was well before gravel or pavement came about. A turnpike itself is the bar on a turnstile, much like you'd see in a subway station or an amusement park; one pays the toll, then moves through the turnpike. On the other hand, freeways were the dirt roads that didn't require a toll.

Anatomy is full of eponyms--that is, names inspired by the name of a person. In this case, there are the fallopian tubes, the Achilles heel, and the eustachian tubes. But there's a movement in anatomy to replace eponyms with more scientific, descriptive names. Thus, fallopian tubes are now uterine tubes, and eustachian tubes are auditory tubes.

The Spanglish term frajo, meaning "cigarette," evolved over a couple of generations of Mexican-American language. Primarily thanks to Pachucos, sometimes known as Zoot Suiters, the term developed from the verb fajar, meaning "to wrap up or roll."

A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, and a beautiful video of a murmuration of starlings flying about has been described by Martha as "nature's ornithological lava lamp."

http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/11/starling-flock/

If you're looking for a clever way to straddle the glass-half-empty line, try using litotes, or understated slights turned positive. For example, the guy you met for a blind date was really not unattractive.

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/glossary-term/Litotes

If you're into fungus among us, you might enjoy uredinology, the study of rust molds.

Why do we refer to people of questionable sanity as nuts, nutty, or nut-cases? In the early 1600s, a nut was considered something "pleasing" or "delightful." Its meaning then transferred to someone who liked something pleasing, and then someone obsessed with that thing to the point of eccentricity or weirdness.
 
Zymology? That's the study of joining or fastening.

Support for "A Way with Words" comes from the Fifth Edition of The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. 10 Years in the Making with 10,000 New Words and Senses.

http://ahdictionary.com.

Support for "A Way with Words" also comes from National University, which invites you to change your future today.

http://www.nu.edu/

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SHOW SUMMARY

Is it cool for parents to use their children's slang? What's wrong with the term "illegal alien"? Grant and Martha discuss possible alternatives. The catchphrase Who's Yehudi refers to the mysterious character who holds up strapless dresses, turns the light on in the fridge, and does lots of other things we can't see. But why Yehudi? Also, terms from the dictionary of anatomy, an idiom puzzle, putzing around, out of pocket, long in the tooth, and the ancient roots of the folksy expression even a blind pig can find an acorn. And what do you call the slobber marks a dog leaves on the windshield?

FULL DETAILS

Does your vocabulary mark you as old or outdated? Certain words really indicate generational gaps, like chronological shibboleths. For example, are thongs "sandals" or "panties"? And what do women carry around--a pocketbook, a purse, or a bag? Your answer likely depends on when you were born.

At what point is it inappropriate for parents to use the slang of their offspring? Can you call your son dude, or give your kids a beatdown in Scrabble? Living with children makes for a slang-filled home, so it becomes part of your regular speech. So long as your children aren't mortified, the hosts say, go for it.

Who is Yehudi, and what exactly does he do? In the 1930s on Bob Hope's radio show, there was a musical guest named Yehudi Menuhin. His name proved so catchy, along with sidekick Jerry Colonna's joking phrase, "Who's Yehudi?" that it entered the common vernacular, coming to refer to anyone, or anything, mysterious. Yehudi is, for example, the little man that turns on the light inside the refrigerator. He holds up strapless dresses. The Navy even had a secret project named Project Yehudi.

Charles Hodgson's Carnal Knowledge: A Naval Gazer's Dictionary of Anatomy is chock-full of great terms. It's best to keep the lipstick within the vermillion border, or that line where the lips meet the skin. And be careful when applying around the wick, or the corner of the mouth.

http://www.amazon.com/Carnal-Knowledge-Dictionary-Anatomy-Etymology/dp/B004E3XEJ8

Our Quizmaster John Chaneski has a puzzle based on clues with everything but the but. For example, when likening someone to a house, we say the lights are on, but nobody's home. Or regarding a noisy political contest, it's all over but the shouting.

If someone's being a bit lazy, or just moseying aimlessly, we say they're putzing around. But the word put derives from the Yiddish for "penis." Plenty of Yiddish words have made their way into the common vernacular, especially in the Northeast. But before you open your mouth, it's important to be mindful of context and whom you're speaking to.

A physician wants to know: Is it politically correct to use the phrase illegal alien? The Society of Professional Journalists have decided, collectively, to use illegal immigrant. But even words like illegal or undocumented can often be inaccurate. If, for example, doctors are talking about a patient, they want to recognize the patient as an individual person, not a statistic.

http://www.mediabistro.com/fishbowlla/society-of-professional-journalists-votes-to-end-use-of-term-illegal-alien_b40464

Speaking of those generational divides, did you know that Post-It notes haven't always been around? Martha shares a listener's funny email about that.
 
If you're having a tough time finding something, remember that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while. This encouraging idiom actually comes from Ancient Rome, where the concept of a blind animal turning something up lent itself to the Latin saying that a blind dove sometimes finds a pea. An 18th-century Friedrich Schiller play employed the blind-pig-and-acorn version, and the play's translation into English and French brought it into modern speech.

What event in life introduced you to a whole new vocabulary? Going away to college, having a child, renovating a home, or even getting diagnosed with a medical condition  often exposes us to huge bundles of new words. If you're renovating a house for example, suddenly a whole slew of new words muscles its way into your vocabulary, such as backsplash, shoe moulding, quarter-sawn oak, sconce, grout, and bullnose.

What does out of pocket mean? The answer actually splits down racial lines. Among many African-Americans, if someone's out of pocket, they're out of line or unruly. For most Caucasian speakers, out of pocket is primarily used in business settings, meaning that someone is either unavailable or out of the office, or they're paying for something with personal money, rather than charging it to a company.

What do you call those slobber marks that dogs leave on the inside of car windows? Some of our favorites are woofmarks, dog schmear, and snot kisses.

Is your name a conversation piece? A listener by the name of H. Christian Blood shares his story growing up with a colorful name. And for those of you with a comment to make, Christian Blood would remind you that he's heard plenty of it over the years, so unless it's really something sharp and original, it's best not to waste your breath. And yes, his name is for real.

http://www.scu.edu/cas/classics/faculty/blood.cfm?p=4834

What crawled over your liver? This Pennsylvania Dutch idiom means "What's the matter with you?"

If someone's getting long in the tooth, it means they're getting old, or too old for their behavior. The metaphor of long teeth comes from horses. If you look at a horse's teeth and the extent to which their gums have receded, you can tell pretty accurately how old they are. It's the same source as that old advice Don't look a gift horse in the mouth, which means "if someone gives you a gift, don't inspect it too closely."

--

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Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Ever eaten golden catheads for breakfast? Yum! A listener shares this Southern term for big, fluffy biscuits. Also, how did people greet each other before "hello" became a standard greeting of choice? What does it mean if someone's fair to middling? How do you pronounce the word bury? Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Should we use try to or try and? And if Sam and them are coming, who exactly is "them"? Plus, Grant and Martha share some classic riddles, and Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game of animal name mash-ups.

FULL DETAILS

What happens when you throw a yellow rock into a purple stream? It splashes. (Ba-dump-bum.) Grant and Martha share this and other favorite riddles, some with deceptively obvious answers.

Why do we pronounce bury like berry and not jury? The word originates in the Old English term byrgan, and the pronunciation apparently evolved differently in different parts of England. Grant explains why many terms go mispronounced if we read things without hearing them out loud.

What do you say when you answer the telephone? On the NPR science blog, "Krulwich Wonders," Robert Krulwich notes that hello did not become a standard greeting until the mid-19th Century, when the Edison Company recommended the word as a proper phone greeting. Before that, English speakers used a variety of phrases depending on the circumstance, from hail to how are you? One thing's certain: If we'd followed Alexander Graham Bell's recommendation, we'd all be greeting each other with "Ahoy!"

http://n.pr/gscLCA

A riddle, a riddle, I suppose, a thousand eyes and never a nose. Nothing shakes up the dinner table conversation like a good potato riddle!

Greg Pliska, musical director for the Broadway show War Horse and our very own Quiz Guy, has a puzzle about Animal Hybrid Phrases combining two common expressions involving animals. For example, what do you get when stuffed animal stocks go down? A Teddy Bear Market.

Here's a link to Greg's musical bio on the Lincoln Center website:

http://bit.ly/gt9h84

Ever had golden catheads for breakfast? A native of Tennessee wonders about the origin of this term meaning "biscuit"--specifically, ones that are light, fluffy, and about the size of, well, a cat's head. Martha explains how the names of many foods derive from their resemblance to other things--a head of cabbage, for example.

A listener has spent the last 30 years looking for the origin of the playful phrase "you're the berries." This affectionate expression first appears in literature in the 1908 book Sorrows of a Showgirl, then made its way into popular slang by the 1920s. However, it seems to disappear during the next decade, and it remains only as a relic heard in the vernacular of those who lived during the era.

http://bit.ly/gyF9TV

Should we use try and or try to? Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage says it's grammatically permissible to try and go to the store, or to ask someone to try and speak up. However, a fan of formality ought to stick with try to. Still, Grant warns against trying to force logic on the English language by creating rules that don't exist.

http://bit.ly/cQrxPx

http://bit.ly/eydxnN

Whoever makes it tells it not. Whoever takes it knows it not. Whoever knows it wants it not. What is it? Martha shares this old riddle.

The question of how children acquire language has long intrigued parents and scholars.  MIT cognitive scientist Deb Roy recently found a novel way to study what he calls "word birth."  He wired his home with cameras and microphones, and recorded his infant son's every utterance as he grew into toddlerhood. He then combined the 90,000 hours of video and 140,000 hours of audio into some astonishing montages. Dr. Roy shared his findings at a TED conference.

http://bit.ly/eaKVBS

More visuals and audio from the study in this article from Fast Company:

http://bit.ly/hOOf3Z

If you're fair to middling, you're doing just fine. A native of the Tennessee mountains wonders about the origin of this phrase her good-humored grandfather used. As it turns out, fair to middling was one of the many gradations a farmer would hear in the 19th Century when they'd bring in their crop--usually cotton-- to be priced and purchased.

Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Well, take this sentence: "Whether or not you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina." Would that sound right without the or not? Now, the or not is technically redundant, but depending on the case, it's best to pick the wording that won’t distract the reader or listener.

http://bit.ly/91hA3J

Only the grass dies when elephants fight. This Liberian proverb is a reminder that it's the powerless who suffer when governments or factions fight.

If Sam and them are going to be here after while, can the "and them" mean just one additional person? In some parts of the country, it could be Sam's wife, or Sam's entire softball team. A listener from Texas shares this charming colloquialism.

What goes 99, clump? If you woke up at night and scratched your head, what time would it be? Grant has the answers to those riddles.

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

"Well, butter my buns and call me a biscuit!" Martha and Grant talk about great catch phrases from old-time radio comedies. Also, why do we speak of a meteoric rise? Don't meteors plummet? What do you keep in a Fibber McGee drawer? Plus, myriad vs. myriad of, enamored of vs. enamored with, autocorrected text messages. And Martha shares a trick for eliminating those annoying verbal fillers like "um" and you know" from one's speech.

FULL DETAILS

They say it's easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for an autocorrected text message to be, well, correct. Listeners like Arnold share their funny Autocorrected text messages. And by Arnold, we of course mean Brooke.

http://n.pr/fz6qI4

Well, shut my mouth and call me Shirley! Butter my buns and call me a biscuit! A listener shares several of these humorous imperatives. Grant explains that the roots of these phrases probably go back to the 1940s. Phil Harris, the bandleader on Jack Benny's radio comedy, was known for using such colorful catchphrases. An early version was Cut off my legs and call me Shorty!

http://bit.ly/exqCLY

Martha shares a childhood misunderstanding sent in by a listener. Seems her three-year-old daughter confused the phrase "exposed to the elements" with "exposed to the elephants."
 
What do you call an expert speller? A "Words With Friends" enthusiast wants to know. Martha tells her that a great speller is called an orthographer or orthographist, from the Latin roots ortho- meaning "straight" or "correct", and -graph meaning "to write". A bad speller, on the other hand, is a cacographer, or as it's known among them, a kakagrifar.

What is the term for that big inflatable play area you see at the park, or in your neighbor's yard? Is it a bouncy house? A jump? Grant asks listeners what they call this modern pumped-up playpen.

Our multi-talented Quiz Guy Greg Pliska, served as musical composer for the television documentary Flying Monsters 3-D.

http://www.flyingmonsters3dmovie.com/

That experience inspired him to create a puzzle using phrases that have the same letter appearing three times in a row. For example, where will you find trumpets and trombones? In the braSS Section.

What do you keep in your Fibber McGee drawer? That's what some people call a catchall container for household items. Grant traces the term for the drawer back to the old Fibber McGee and Molly radio comedy. Whenever Fibber had to fetch something from the closet, that meant a green light for the sound effects guy to let anything and everything come tumbling out. Classic Fibber!

http://bit.ly/igh3Hs

Why do we say someone whose career on the ascent is enjoying a meteoric rise? Don't meteors plummet? For that matter, a caller asks, why do we call "Heads up!" when a ball is coming towards us? Shouldn't it be "Heads down"? The hosts explain that "meteoric" in "meteoric rise" refers to the speedy, brightly streaking nature of a meteor. As for "Heads up," well, no language is perfect.

Grant shares a word he's been encountering at conferences: discussant. A discussant is someone who, after a series of papers are presented, takes the microphone to summarize the information given and offer opinions on the matter.

Should you use enamored of or enamored with? Grant explains that while North Americans use both, enamored of is the more common of the two. In Great Britain, it's enamored of, a construction similar to those in several Romance languages. Enamored by, on the other hand, should never be used. But then, love is always worth expressing, no matter the preposition.

A listener reports that when her cat starts whining, she tells it to shut its kibble-hole. If only cats understood wordplay--or English.

Ben Schott's language blog Schott's Vocab on the New York Times website held a contest for modern age greeting cards called Get Web Soon. Among the favorites: "Heartfelt condolences on the loss of your data" and "Congratulations on your relationship update".

http://nyti.ms/e0YbYe

A listener from Tennessee has a saying that doesn't quite land with his friends: "Is it any count?" Martha confirms that the phrase is most definitely Southern. It originates in the word "account," and the question of whether something "adds up."

What does hoot mean? You might describe someone as a real hoot. But is the hoot in the phrase not give a hoot a different kind of hoot? Grant explains that in the positive case, hoot is a shortening of hootenanny, a informal party with folksy music. In the negative sense, however, to hoot at somebody means to disapprove of something.

Is it really possible to change your style of speaking so that you stop using the verbal fillers "um" and "you know"? Yes, you can. Martha relates her experience with dialect-coach-to-the-stars Sam Chwat. He was adamant that by catching ourselves every time we use that conversational crutch, we can consciously train ourselves to avoid it.

http://n.pr/eoFauX

Should you use myriad or myriad of? Actually, either is fine. Here's what David Foster Wallace had to say about the question in his commentary for the Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus: "[A]ny reader who's bugged by a myriad of is both persnickety and wrong--and you can usually rebut sniffy teachers, copyeditors, et. al. by directing them to Coleridge's 'Myriad myriads of lives teemed forth.'"

http://bit.ly/bSX35G

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Nothing brightens up an email like an emoticon. But is it appropriate to include a smiley face in an email to your boss? Also, what do time management experts mean when they say you should start each day by "eating the frog"? Plus, the story behind the phrase "the whole kit and caboodle," and some book recommendations for language lovers. If you see the trash can as half-full, are you an optimist or a pessimist? A puzzle involving breakfast cereals, the difference between adept and deft, and the origin of the political term solon. And what in the world is a hoorah's nest?

FULL DETAILS

Is it appropriate to use emoticons in business emails? After all, you wouldn't write a smiley face in a printed letter, right? Martha and Grant discuss the point at which you start using those little symbols in correspondence. Call it "The Rubicon on the Emoticon." Judith Newman has more observations about emoticons in business correspondence in this New York Times piece.

http://nyti.ms/pKguDN
 
Why are non-commissioned Naval officers called petty officers? After all, there's nothing petty about them. The term comes from the French petit, meaning "under, less than, or ranking below in a hierarchy." Petty comes up in myriad instances of formal language, such as petty theft, which is a lesser charge than grand larceny.

To summarize something, we often use the phrase all told. But should it be all tolled? The correct phrase, all told, comes from an old use of the word tell meaning "to count," as in a bank teller. All told is an example of an absolute construction--a phrase that, in other words, can't be broken down and must be treated as a single entity.

What do parents say when they tuck their children in at night? How about good night, sleep tight, and see you on the big drum? Have you heard that one, which may have to do with an old regiment in the British Army?

How do you manage your time? Perhaps by eating the frog, which means "to do the most distasteful task first." This is also known as carrying guts to a bear.

http://bit.ly/stoi5n

From Puzzle Guy John Chaneski comes a great game for the breakfast table in the tradition of such cereal names as Cheerios and Wheaties. What kind of cereal does a hedge fund manager eat? Portfolios! And what do Liberal Arts majors pour in their bowls? Humanities!

What is the difference between adept and deft? It's similar to that between mastery and artistry. Adept often describes a person, as in, "Messi is adept at dribbling a soccer ball." Deft, on the other hand, is usually applied to the product of an act, such as "deft brush strokes."

There are some words we just love to mispronounce, like spatula as spatular, which rhymes with "bachelor."

If someone plans to make hay of something, they're going to take advantage of it. It comes from the idiom make hay while the sun shines, based on the fact that moving hay can be a real pain when it's dark and damp.

Martha has a follow-up to an earlier call about why hairstylists advise clients to use product on their hair. At least in the food business, product often refers to the item before it's ready for consumption. For example, coffee grounds might be called product, but once it has been brewed, it becomes coffee.

If you see the trash can as half full, does that make you an optimist or a pessimist? Since it's half full of garbage, as opposed to daisies or puppies, it's questionable. On the other hand, in the tweeted words of Jill Morris: "Some people look at the glass as half empty. I look at the glass as a weapon. You can never be too safe around pessimists."

http://twitter.com/#!/JillMorris/statuses/128573375114256385

If we're talking about the whole lot of something, we call it the whole kit and kaboodle. But what's a kaboodle? In Dutch, a "kit en boedel" refer to a house and everything in it. For the sake of the English idiom, we just slapped the "k" in front.
 
The holiday gift season is coming up, and Grant and Martha have some book recommendations. For the family, Grant has two great children's books: The Three Pigs by David Wiesner, a meta-narrative based on the classic title characters, and Elephant Wish, a touching cross-generational story by Lou Berger, the head writer of Sesame Street. Martha recommends The Word Project: Odd and Obscure Words beautifully illustrated by Polly M. Law. Stop by your local bookseller and pick up a copy for your sweetheart, a.k.a. your pigsney!

http://amzn.to/w4TN3f
http://amzn.to/rxTZYw
http://amzn.to/ty9q6F

If something's messy, it looks like a hoorah's nest. But what's a hoorah? It beats us. All we know is, it leaves its nest in a real state of confusion, and does it well enough to inspire a popular idiom.

The Twitter hashtag #Bookswithalettermissing has proved to be a popular one. We discussed some great examples in an earlier episode.

http://www.waywordradio.org/missing-letter/

But why not take a letter off the author as well? As in, Animal Far by George Owell, the story about an animal that ran away, prompting a nonchalant farmer to say, "Oh, well." (The joke's doubly funny if you know that the name "George" comes from the Greek for "farmer.")

There's some confusion about the uses of at and by, particularly among those for whom English is a second language. Prepositions often cause trouble, because they don't translate perfectly. Nonetheless, it's important to know that in standard English, if someone is staying home, they're staying at home, not by home.

Here's a testy T-shirt slogan: "Polyamory is wrong! It's either multiamory or polyphilia. But mixing Greek and Latin roots? Wrong!"

http://www.patheos.com/blogs/unreasonablefaith/2010/03/polyamory-is-wrong/

Solon often pops up in headlines as a label for legislators. It is actually an eponym, referring to Solon, an esteemed lawgiver from ancient Athens who lay much of the groundwork for the original democracy. Nowadays, however, the term solon is commonly used ironically, since our legislators don't display the noble disinterest that Solon did a few millennia ago.

The great Leonard Bernstein once said, "a writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people." What are your favorite quotes on writing?

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Why do auctioneers talk so fast?  Martha and Grant discuss the rapid-fire speech of auctioneers, and how it gets you to bid higher. Also, why so many books have ridiculously long titles, where you'd have sonker for dessert, and an appreciation of that children's classic, "The Phantom Tollbooth." Plus, different from vs. different than, the origin of suss out, words that apparently entered English in 1937, and the many names for those little gray bugs that roll up into a ball.

FULL DETAILS

What do you call those little gray bugs that roll up into a ball? They go by lots of names: roly poly bugs, potato bugs, sow bugs, chiggypigs, dillo seeds, basketball bugs, bowling-ball bugs, and wood lice, to name a few.

If you're wondering why we capitalize the letter "I" when we don't capitalize the first letters of other pronouns, the answer's simple. It's easier to read. Martha recommends a book offering a detailed history of every letter of the alphabet. It's Language Visible: Unraveling the Mystery of the Alphabet from A to Z, by David Sacks.

http://www.alphabet-history.com/work1.htm

Why do auctioneers talk so fast? The hosts say it's partly to put you into a trance, partly to increase the sense of urgency, and partly to sell off lots of items in a short amount of time. More details in an article in Slate magazine. You can learn some of the basics of auctioneering from videos on YouTube.

http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/explainer/2010/11/why_do_auctioneers_talk_like_that.html

http://www.aristocratservices.com/The_Auctioneers_Chant.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GCr96VtvS80

Over on wordorigins.org, etymologist Dave Wilton is going through the Oxford English Dictionary year by year to find the earliest citations for various words, which offer an unusual linguistic glimpse into that particular year. The year 1937, for example, is the first in which we see the terms four-by-four, cliffhanger, and iffy.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/1739/

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "Double Dog Dare."

Why are book titles so incredibly long these days? A caller complains about book title inflation, usually consisting of a shorter title, followed by a colon and a longer subtitle that seems to sound important and ends with the words "and What To Do About It." Grant explains that such extra-long book titles are one form of search optimization by publishers and marketing departments. The more searchable keywords in the title, the more copies sold.

Which is correct: different from or different than. Martha explains that the grammatically correct choice is almost always different from.

Martha plays another round of the Books With A Letter Missing game.

http://www.waywordradio.org/missing-letter/

A caller in Hamburg, Germany wants to know where we got the term laundry list. Grant explains that it derives from a time when people of a certain class sent their laundry out to be cleaned. It's usually associated with a collection of things that are routine or involve drudgery or something negative. Funny how no one ever offers a laundry list of compliments.

More words that entered the language around 1937: spam, telecast, and oops.

http://www.wordorigins.org/index.php/more/1739/

The Phantom Tollbooth, the beloved children's book by Norman Juster and illustrated by Jules Feiffer, turns 50 this year. There are two new 50th anniversary editions of the book. As Adam Gopnik notes in a New Yorker magazine article, the book is the closest thing American literature has to Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/10/17/111017fa_fact_gopnik#ixzz1bCiS90OL

Martha shares her favorite passage from the book, a description of various kinds of silence.

http://books.google.com/books?id=T_0EtTjFHRIC&pg=PA152&dq=phantom+tollbooth+silence++or,+most+beautiful+of+all.+the+moment+utter+the+door+closes+and+you're+all+alone+in+the+whole+house?&hl=en&ei=NeCuTsa_GumYiQKliPGLCw&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CC0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=phantom%20tollbooth%20silence%20%20or%2C%20most%20beautiful%20of%20all.%20&f=false

Care for another helping of sonker? That's another name for deep-dish cobbler.
 
http://homepage.mac.com/ezzellk/Recipes/Pies/North_Carolina_Sonker-1550.html

There's a Sonker Festival each year in Surry County, North Carolina, one of the few places where you'll hear this regional term.

http://www.verysurry.com/blog/sonker-festival-2011/

More words that entered the lexicon around 1937: Yiddish bupkes, meaning "nothing," and "zaftig" meaning "plump," "soft," or "juicy."

What does the term suss out mean? It's often heard in police and journalistic jargon, and means to "take a forensic approach to finding out an answer." It probably derives from the verb "suspect."

Quisquillious describes something that's trashy or worthless. It derives from the Latin for "rubbish."

In the movie Avatar, the characters battle over a rare and valuable mineral called unobtanium. A mechanical engineer says he had a hard time getting into the movie because in his world, the word unobtanium means something different.

Martha quotes Steve Martin's aphorism about language: "Some people have a way with words. Some people not have way."

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
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Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Ever drop a reference that just makes you sound, well, of a certain age? Grant and Martha discuss language that's often lost on a younger or older generation. Why is the entree the main course? Shouldn't it come first? And why is the letter k silent in knot and knight? Plus, the right way to say the, a remedy for the superstition of splitting the pole, names for the toes straight from Mother Goose, the difference between finished and done, and a special word quiz for all you zombie fans!

FULL DETAILS

Ever drop a reference that just makes you sound old? Are you using outdated slang? Changes in pop culture and lax speech are always marking the generational gap, from the sitcom characters we love to the way we say something's cool.

The "Doogie Howser" scene in the movie 50/50 is a perfect example.

http://www.metacafe.com/watch/mv-dtg3j/doogie_howser/

What's the difference between done and finished? If you've completed something, are you done? Or are you finished? Grant and Martha contend that there's no historical evidence to suggest a difference between the two, although finished is slightly more formal.

Why are main courses called entrees in the US? Why isn't the entree the first course of a meal? In 19th Century Britain, the entree came after a course of soup or fish, but before the main portion of the meal, such as a boar's head. Over time, the main course converged into one course, but the name entree stuck.

If it's ten of five, what time is it? Is it the same as ten till five? Why, yes it is! Ten of five, or ten till five, are both appropriate ways to say 4:50.
 
Grant and Martha share some more terms that make a person sound old-fashioned these days. Ever get a blank stare when you mention the icebox?

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a zombiefied puzzle called Dead Reckoning. What's the problem with putting zombies in the legislature? A deadlocked government!

How do you pronounce garage? Does it rhyme with "barrage," or do you say it like the British so it rhymes with "carriage"? The variations abound, and they all work, so long as we know what you're talking about.

There's a rule for the pronunciation of the word the. If it's followed by a word whose first letter is a vowel, sticklers say it should be pronounced like "thee," as in, thee end. If followed by a consonant, it rhymes with "duh," as in the dog. That's thuh long and thuh short of it.

Some outdated words wind up coming back in cheeky and ironic ways. For example, kids these days likely know groovy from Austin Powers, not from the flower children.

It's a common superstition: do not split a pole. That is, if two people are walking down the street, they shouldn't each walk around a different side of a lamppost, telephone pole, or mailbox. But if they do, there's a remedy: just say bread and butter! There's an old Merrie Melodies cartoon of panthers doing that (at minute 5:42).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uow_6qbssCc

And of course, there's a Facebook page devoted to keeping poles whole.

http://on.fb.me/pkMcmy

There's a story going around about a 19th Century priest named Giuseppe Mezzofanti who claimed to speak forty to fifty languages. Hyperpolyglots, or those who speak six or more languages fluently, offer some key insights into learnings language. Michael Erard chronicles all this in his linguistic cliffhanger, Babel No More: The Search for Extraordinary Language Learners.

http://bit.ly/lz1FOk

Is there a term for the way words feel when they're spoken that has nothing to do with their meaning? The word suitcase feels nice to say, unlike rural. Cellar door certainly has a different quality than moist ointment. Mouthfeel is an oft-noted concept. But in his book Alphabet Juice, Roy Blount Jr. says of his favorite term to enunciate: polyurethane foam. His reason? "It's just so sayable."

http://www.waywordradio.org/a-conversation-with-roy-blount-jr/

Depending on what generation you're from, "Get your rubbers!" could mean put on your galoshes. Or it could mean something else!

Did we ever pronounce the "k" sound in the words knot or know? The now-silent k underwent apheresis, from Greek meaning "to take off." In olden days, the word knight also had an initial-k sound, and a "kin-not" was the thing you tie. But nowadays, as Blount would say, the k in knot is silent, "like the p in swimming."

At one time, a boner was a mistake. And now, it's--you know. Beware of that outdated usage, grownups!

Do our toes have names? Mother Goose and Scandinavian nursery rhymes gave us variants of Tom Pumpkin, Long Larkin, Betty Pringle, Johnny Jingle, and Little Dick. Sounds cooler than big toe, no?

http://bit.ly/o3JieG

What dessert would you serve a baseball player? Why, a bundt cake, of course!

--

A Way with Words is funded by its listeners: http://waywordradio.org/donate

Get your language question answered on the air! Call or write with your questions at any time:

Email: words@waywordradio.org

Phone:
United States and Canada toll-free (877) WAY-WORD/(877) 929-9673
London +44 20 7193 2113
Mexico City +52 55 8421 9771

Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
Site: http://waywordradio.org/
Podcast: http://waywordradio.org/podcast/
Forums: http://waywordradio.org/discussion/
Newsletter: http://waywordradio.org/newsletter/
Twitter: http://twitter.com/wayword/
Skype: skype://waywordradio

Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

We all know that the color pink is for boys and the color blue is for girls--at least, that's how it was 100 years ago. Grant and Martha share the surprising history behind the colors we associate with gender. Plus, we go rollin' in our hooptie, play a game of guess-that-Google-search, and get some tips on how to avoid getting swindled by our real estate agent! Also, new terms for failed software upgrades, some sugar-coated snark from across the pond, and a new way to show sarcasm in a text message. Yeah. Sure.

FULL DETAILS

Hate it when a software upgrade is worse than the previous version? We call that a flupgrade, or a new-coke. As in, Skype really new-coked it with version 5.3.0. Come on, Skype!

What is a hooptie? Though it started in the 1960s as a term for a sweet new car, it became the common moniker for a beater, or a jalopy. Maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot said it best: "My hooptie rollin', tailpipe draggin'/ heat don't work, and my girl keeps nagging.'" 

http://bit.ly/1WCYn

If a lady is no better than she ought to be, her sexual morals may be in question. The saying, recently popularized by the BBC program Downton Abbey, is what's known as a charientism, or a bit of sugar-coated snark. By the way, if you'd like to hear more about such thinly veiled insults, check out this episode.

http://www.waywordradio.org/bless-your-heart/
 
If someone's in a swivet, they're flustered or in distress. You might be in a swivel, for example, if you're late for a meeting or you've shown up to the SAT without a No. 2 pencil.

Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game based on Google searches, or at least what Google thinks you're searching. For example, what do Elmo, pink, and plant all have in common? Google suggests them, in that order, after you've entered the words "tickle me."

Did the movie Avatar make you imagine creating an entirely new language, like Na'vi?  Conlang.org and the Language Creation Society have plenty of information on how to go about it and what others, including J.R.R. Tolkein have tried. Mark Rosenfelder's book, The Language Construction Kit, is a great resource for getting started.

http://tinyurl.com/yabd9br

http://bit.ly/7qxTuV

http://amzn.to/qES5lw

What does it mean to call for tender? This British phrase for soliciting a job is rarely seen in the United States, though tender, from the Latin for "to stretch or hold forth," is used in North America in two different senses: to tender, as in to offer, as well as the noun tender for something that's been issued, such as a dollar bill, hence legal tender.

What do you call an upgrade gone wrong? Perhaps the 'Puter Principle could be the software equivalent of the Peter Principle, which in business means that every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.

If something's right on, it suits you to a tee. But why a tee? Tee, or the letter T, is short for tittle, or something really tiny. So if something's exactly perfect, it's right on point, with no room to spare. Or, simply, it suits you to a tee.

Why is pink a girl color and blue a boy color? Actually, in the 19th Century, pink used to be associated with boys, since it was a stronger, more decided color. Blue, on the other hand, was regarded as a girls' color, because it was considered dainty. It wasn't until the 1940s that marketers started to switch it around. Jeanne Maglaty has a great article about this in Smithsonian Magazine, called "When did Girls Start Wearing Pink?"

http://bit.ly/eDOeYg

To slake your thirst is to quench your thirst. But some people have been switching it to slate your thirst or other variants. It's a classic case of an eggcorn, or one of those words that people mishear, and then start pronouncing incorrectly; for example, when misheard, acorn can become eggcorn.

http://bit.ly/HG4m

What does it mean to gazump someone? This phrase, specifically meaning "to swindle a customer in a real estate deal," came about in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s before disappearing and then popping up again in England in the 1970s. Whether or not the term is in vogue, the practice seems to be a mainstay.

How do you indicate sarcasm in a text message or an email? If winky emoticons aren't your thing, try left-leaning italics, as recommended by sartalics.com.

http://bit.ly/reQ86l

The Arabic idiom in the apricot season translates to "in your dreams," presumably because the growing season for this fruit is so brief. Incidentally, the etymological root of "apricot," which means "to ripen early," is shared with the word precocious.

The Egyptian Arabic saying, ate the camel and all it carried, is the equivalent of "to eat someone out of house and home."

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

If you say to someone the Spanish equivalent of you're giving me green hairs (me sacas canas verdes), it means that person is making you angry. In Japan, the phrase that literally translates as "one red dot" refers metaphorically to "the lone woman in a group of men." Martha and Grant discuss colorful idioms around the world, plus: making money hand over fist, taking wooden nickels, names for the end of a loaf of bread, and where a sneeze may evoke the response, Scat, Tom! Get your tail out of the gravy!

FULL DETAILS

If you say to someone the Spanish equivalent of you're giving me green hairs (me sacas canas verdes), it means that person is making you angry. In Japan, the phrase that literally translates as "one red dot" refers metaphorically to "the lone woman in a group of men." Martha and Grant discuss these and other idioms collected online in Alan Kennedy's Color/Language Project.

http://www.starchamber.com/colors/color-idioms.html

Is it proper to speak of servicing a customer, or does that sound too suggestive? Is it okay to use the word utilize instead of use? Is it pretentious to use the term formulate instead of simply form?

What do you call the end piece of a loaf of bread? Names for that last slice include heel, bread butt, kissing crust, bunce, skirk, krunka, truna, tumpee, canust, the nose, and in Spanish, codo, which means "elbow."

In Spanish and French, if you have the equivalent of "a white night," it means you didn't get much sleep. In Sweden, if you have a "white week," it means you didn't drink a drop of alcohol.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a puzzle about portmanteau words called "Say Can You See."

Why do we say someone is making money hand over fist? Does it have to do with two competitors putting one hand over the other on a baseball bat to determine who's up first? Or does it have to do with pulling a rope?

More great color idioms, this time from Serbo-Croatian: In that language, a phrase that translates as I can't see a white cat means "I'm very tired," and to stare like a calf at a colorful door means to "look upon something with surprise and wonder."

A Dallas man says his father, who served in Vietnam, signed letters back home to the family with the phrase Don't take any wooden nickels. The hosts explain that this expression means  "don't let anyone swindle you."

In Mandarin Chinese, if you're big red and big purple, it means you're "famous and popular."

Scat, Tom! Get your tail out of the gravy! In some parts of the country, especially the South, people say this after someone sneezes. But what does a cat warming its tail in the gravy boat have to do with sneezing?

Some foreign idioms involving color have been adopted whole into English. A case in point: French bete noire. Literally, it means "black beast," and it's used figuratively now in English to mean anything particularly disliked or avoided.

Grant recommends two blogs about writing well and copyediting: Merrill Perlman writes The Language Corner blog for the Columbia Journalism Review.

http://www.cjr.org/language_corner/

And Philip B. Corbett of the New York Times reports on actual grammatical and usage mistakes in that newspaper in his blog, After Deadline.

http://topics.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/after-deadline/

An Indianapolis listener has a copy of a wedding poem that refers to the thrice-happy pair. Is a thrice-happy pair three times as happy as anyone else? Martha explains that the idea goes all the way back to Roman poetry. Here's an example from a translation of Horace's Ode 1.13.

http://bit.ly/g4QwP0

Does the expression petered out have to do with the Apostle Peter denying he knew Jesus? Au contraire. Petered out may derive from the French peter, meaning to "pass gas." Another theory is that the expression originated in mining and the use of saltpeter in explosives.

A fan of the TV series "West Wing" was puzzled by a character's use of the term pulchritude. It's a pretty ugly term for a word that means "beauty." Check out what some other commenters are saying about the word.

http://thepioneerwoman.com/homeschooling/2010/10/pulchritude/

Is it grammatically correct for a high school football team to call itself the Vanguards? A Wisconsin listener argues that Vanguard is already a plural noun.

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

More and more college students are getting pregnant--with burrito babies. Grant talks about new terms for "a full stomach" and other examples of campus slang. Also, is it safe to play on the macadam? Also, overegging the pudding, what it means to be gobsmacked, the difference between who and whom, apostrophe placement, how to pronounce coup de grace, and the embarrassing results when a smartphone mistakenly autocorrects text messages.

FULL DETAILS

Remember the classic children's story "Where the Wild Thongs Are"? (We didn't think so.) That's just one of the autocorrect horror stories that can happen when smartphones mistakenly correct a text message. Martha and Grant discuss several more.

http://damnyouautocorrect.com/

If someone is gobsmacked, they're totally surprised. The term may come from the same Gaelic root that gave us the Everlasting Gobstopper.

http://taoism.about.com/b/2008/12/29/everlasting-gobstopper.htm

Should the sign on the boys' bathroom at a school read Boy's Room or Boys' Room? The hosts clarify where to put the apostrophe.

"A fifth-year senior"? That term is so 2007. These days, college students just refer to that extra year of school as taking a victory lap. Grant shares this and other examples of campus slang collected by University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill professor Connie Eble.

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game of demonyms. What do you call someone from a certain place? If you're from Cambridge, for example, you're a Cantabrigian.

If someone has overegged the pudding, they've overstated the case. This may explain why a lawyer from Lawrence, Kansas, found the phrase in a judicial opinion.

A motivational Chinese idiom translates as "ride the cow, look for the horse."

Are the names Aaron and Erin pronounced the same? A bicoastal listener insists they should sound different. A longer discussion about Erin vs. Aaron is on the Straight Dope message board.

http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/archive/index.php/t-133780.html

The word sic, meaning "thus" in Latin, is placed in the text when an author knowingly quotes a misspelled word or otherwise incorrect statement.

A native of Southern Pennsylvania has always used the term macadam in place of asphalt. Martha traces the word from an old gravel road to the modern day tarmac.

A Japanese idiom, referring to someone who takes credit for another's work, translates as "doing sumo in someone else's underwear."

If you say, "The worm has turned," it means you've lost patience. Grant and Martha explain that this expression goes back to the old proverb "Tread on a worm and it will turn."

More and more college students are getting pregnant with burrito babies. Grant explains that that this slang term simply means that someone's stomach is full from a hefty meal.

What is the proper use of the French term coup de grace? Grant and Martha explain how the term has been twisted, both in pronunciation and meaning.

How can you tell the difference between who and whom? A listener shares a chant learned in grade school to remember the proper usage.

Grant shares a bit of military humor related to cumshaw, the art of procuring what you need in ingenious ways: "There is only one thief in the army. Everyone else is just trying to get their stuff back."

You know the feeling when something hurts so good? A massage therapist looks for a term that describes this mix of pleasure and anguish. Sensanguish? Hedonalgia, maybe?

Grant shares Tom Swifties sent in by listeners: "Aw, shucks, I dropped the toothpaste," Tom said crestfallenly, and "I've located the experts," Tom said profoundly.

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Is typing two spaces after a period "totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong?" Martha and Grant disagree. Also, is the language of the movie "True Grit" historically accurate? Also, shut your pie-hole, Southern grammar, Oh my Lady Gaga, and a little town called Podunk.

FULL DETAILS

How many spaces go after a period?  Your schoolteacher may have taught you to use two, but others strongly disagree.

 http://www.slate.com/id/2281146/

Shut your piehole! means "Shut your mouth!" Need more slang terms for the mouth? For starters, there's potato trap, tater trap, tatty trap, bun trap, gingerbread trap, kissing trap, fly trap, rattle trap, baconhole, and cakehole.

Where is Podunk?  Grant explains that a columnist in the 1800s used the name for his series called "Life in the Small Town of Podunk," referring to a generic backwoods American town.

A listener shares a phrase he learned in Peru that translates as "more lost than a hard-boiled egg in ceviche." It describes someone who's lost or clueless.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game worthy of the Saturday puzzle called "Cryptic Crosswords".

Is the formal language in "True Grit" (2010) historically accurate?  The hosts discuss why the Coen brothers would do away with contractions to set a tone for the movie.

A transplant from Zimbabwe finds the word irregardless annoying and ungrammatical. Grant explains that regardless of its status, "irregardless" is needlessly redundant.

The phrase oh, my goodness may be a dated way to express surprise or disbelief.  A listener asks for a contemporary replacement.

Multiple modals, as in the phrase "I thought y'all may would have some more of them," have their own logic and are well understood by many in the American South.

The Database of Multiple Modals compiled by Paul Reed and Michael Montgomery is here.

http://casdemo.cas.sc.edu/modals_d/

If you call someone a card, it means they're funny or quick-witted.  Grant and Martha discuss the metaphors inspired by the language of playing cards.

What do you serve to a lawyer coming to dinner?  A listener shares her riddle for the "What Would You Serve" game?

Have you been asked to trip the light fantastic?  This phrase, meaning "dance the night away", dates back to a poem by John Milton from 1640.

Martha shares the German slang term niveaulimbo, meaning "a limbo of standards".

 Why is the word pound abbreviated lb.?  A listener from Tijuana, Mex., learns that the answer relates to his native Spanish as well as the Latin term for "weighing."

Martha reads a love sonnet by the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda. Here's the text of the original Spanish, with an English translation by Mark Eisner.

http://www.redpoppy.net/poem37.php

And here's a lovely audio rendering of the poem in Spanish.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJhxNhy3BVA

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

This week on "A Way with Words": If you've "seen the elephant," it means you've been in combat. But why an elephant? Also, Martha and Grant discuss some funny idioms in Spanish, including one that translates as "your bowtie is whistling." And what names do you call YOUR grandparents?

FULL DETAILS

If you're in Bangladesh, the expression that translates as "oiling your mustache in anticipation of the jackfruit tree bearing fruit" makes perfect sense. In English, it means "don't count your chickens."

A discussion thread on Reddit with this and many other examples has Martha and Grant talking about odd idioms in other languages.

http://bit.ly/ifBbAQ

A Marine stationed in California says that growing up in North Carolina, he understood the expression fixin' to mean "to be about to."

Some office workers say their word processor's spellchecker always flags the words overnighted and overnighting. Are those words acceptable in a business environment?

"You really love peeled potatoes." That's a translation of a Venezuelan idiom describing someone who's lazy. Grant and Martha share other idioms from South America.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle called "Blank My Blank."

A woman in Burlington, Vt., says her mother used to use the expression Land o' Goshen! to express surprise or amazement. Where is Goshen?

A Yankee transplant to the South says that restaurant servers are confused when he tells them, "I'm all set." Is he all set to continue his meal, or all set to leave?

A woman in Eau Claire, Wis., remembers a ditty she learned from her mother about "thirty purple birds," but with a distinctive pronunciation that sounds more like "Toidy poipel blackbirds / Sittin' on a coibstone / Choipin' and boipin' / And eatin' doity oithworms."

Here's the Red Hot Chili Peppers version:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fw8YywYatA

Martha offers excellent writing advice from the former editor of People magazine, Landon Y. Jones. His whole article is here:

http://bit.ly/gVRekI

A former Texan wonders if only Texans use the terms Mamaw and Papaw instead of Grandma and Grandpa.

Martha shares some Argentine idioms, including one that translates as "What a handrail!" for "What a bad smell!"

A West Point graduate says he and fellow members of the military use the expression He has seen the elephant to mean "He's seen combat." Grant explains that this expression originated outside the military.

Do you flesh out a plan or flush out a plan?

Another Argentine idiom goes arrugaste como frenada de gusano. It means "You were scared," but literally, it's "You wrinkled like a stopping worm."

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Shadowdabbled. Moon-blanched. Augusttremulous. William Faulkner often used odd adjectives like these. But why? Grant and Martha discuss the poetic effects of compressed language. Also, African-American proverbs, classic children's books, pore vs. pour, and the double meaning of the word sanction.

FULL DETAILS

Amid the stacks of new titles at the library, Grant picks out The Wind in the Willows to read with his son. The hosts discuss the appeal of classic children's books.

A bi-coastal listener wonders about the terms West Coast and Eastern Seaboard. Why don't we say Californians live on the Western Seaboard?

Does an avid reader pore or pour over a book?

There is always a person greater or lesser than yourself. Grant shares this and other African-American proverbs.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski borrows a classic game from Joseph Shipley called Twin Ends.

 The expression that smarts, meaning "that hurts," dates back over a thousand years.

Does sanction mean "a penalty" or "an approval"?  Well, both. Martha explains the nature of contranyms, also known as Janus words. Here's an article about them in the periodical Verbatim.

www.verbatimmag.com/27_2.pdf

Listeners share their suggestions for the game What Would You Serve?  Hosting a golfer for dinner? Tea and greens should be lovely!

William Faulkner used adjectives like shadowdabbled, Augusttremulous, and others that can only be described as, well, Faulknerian. Grant and Martha trade theories about why the great writer chose them.

The University of Virginia has an online audio archive of Faulkner's during his tenure as that school's Writer-in-Residence.

http://faulkner.lib.virginia.edu/

Here's a 1956 interview with Faulkner about the art of writing. It ran in The Paris Review.

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/4954/the-art-of-fiction-no-12-william-faulkner

In a previous episode, we wondered how U-turn might translate in different languages. One listener explains that in Hebrew, drivers make a horseshoe or a hoof-turn.

The Century Dictionary contains a list of amended spellings from the late 1800s that only creates more of the confusion it set out to alleviate.

  Which is correct: We appreciate your asking or We appreciate you're asking?

A new transplant to Dallas wants to assimilate into the Texan way of speaking without offending the locals or forcing any new vocabulary.

Ever hear a broadcast where the announcer enunciates a little too precisely?  Grant and Martha discuss the effect of softening syllables, such as "prolly" for "probably," and "wanna" for "want to."

--

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Hot traffic talk! A caller is looking for a word for the point at which you have to reach in order to make it through a stoplight before it turns red.

--

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SUMMARY

What do the words marathon, paisley, and bikini have in common? They're all words that derive from the names of places. Martha and Grant talk toponyms. Also, what's the difference between a nerd and a geek? Why do some Marines greet each other with the word "Yambo"? And what do you call the crust that forms at the corners of your eyes after a night's sleep?

FULL DETAILS

What do the words marathon, paisley, and bikini have in common? They're all words that derive from the names of places. Martha and Grant talk about these and other toponyms.

What's the difference between a nerd and a geek? An Ohio professor of popular culture wants to talk about it.  Here's the Metafilter thread mentioned in that discussion.

http://bit.ly/Nl38h

Here's a Venn Diagram about nerds, geeks, dorks, and dweebs.

http://bit.ly/aJxb9E

In the Pacific Northwest, the term spendy means "expensive."

Grant has an update on the jocular pronunciation of "skedooly" for the word schedule. The original discussion about it is here:

http://waywordradio.org/chester-drawers/

Puzzle Guy John Chaneski presents a quiz called "Repeat after Me." It's a quiz that's neither so-so nor too-too.

A Marine at Camp Pendleton says that while in Iraq, he and his buddies heard the greeting "Yambo!" from Ugandan troops there. Now they use it with each other, and he wonders about its literal meaning. Martha explains that it's a common Kiswahili term.

In the novel Jane Eyre, characters sometimes speak whole sentences in French. A high school English teacher says her students wonder if there's a term for inserting whole sentences from another language into fiction. Grant talks about the use of foreignisms and loanwords.

Martha has a crazy crossword clue sent by a listener: "Camel's Nemesis." Twelve letters. Got it?

Residents of Maine are called "Mainers," people in Texas are "Texans," those in Wisconsin are "Wisconsinites," and people in Phoenix are . . . Phoenicians"? Grant and Martha explain that there are consistent rules for the naming the locals. The book they reference is Paul Dickson's Labels for Locals.

http://bit.ly/eXeAWx

Martha and Grant offer gift recommendations for language lovers:

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages, by Guy Deutscher

http://bit.ly/bSjZON

OK: The Improbable Story of America's Greatest Word, by Allan Metcalf

http://bit.ly/igLJn8

Lost in Lexicon: An Adventure in Words and Numbers

http://www.lostinlexicon.com/

Dreaming in Chinese: Mandarin Lessons in Life, Love, and Language

http://www.deborahfallows.com/

What do you call the crust that forms in the corners of your eyes when you sleep? Sleepydust, sleepysand, eyejam, slam, eye boogers, eye potatoes, sleep sugar, eye crusties, sleepyjacks. An Indiana man wonders if anyone else uses his family's term for it, cat butter.

Is the proper phrase toe the line or tow the line?

Grant talks about how that great American export, the word OK, was part of the first conversation on the surface of the moon.

You upgrade your software, and instead of working better, it's worse. Is there a word for that phenomenon? Downgrade? Oopsgrade? How about Newcoked?

Poutrage is a new term for "acting outraged when you're really not.
 It's sort of like accismus, "the pretended refusal of something actually very much desired."

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.very much desired."

A question from a listener on the “A Way with Words” Facebook page has Martha musing about the entomological and etymological connections between the word pupil and the pupal stage of an insect’s life.

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

We have collective nouns for animals, like "a gaggle of geese," "a pride of lions," and "an exaltation of larks." So why not collective nouns for plants? How about a "greasing of palms," or a "pursing of tulips"? Also, the difference between further and farther, the proper use of crescendo, how Shakespeare sounded in his day, and why a child's runny nose is sometimes referred to as lamb's legs.

FULL DETAILS

We have collective nouns for animals, like "a gaggle of geese," "a pride of lions," and "an exaltation of larks." So why not collective nouns for plants? How about a "greasing of palms," or a "pursing of tulips"? Martha shares some others collected on the site of food writer Gary Allen.

http://bit.ly/bKG1yC

Reverend William Archibald Spooner was known for transposing sounds, like raising a glass "to our queer old dean" instead of "to our dear old queen." A caller shares some favorite Spoonerisms.

Boil up some pigs' neck bones, add some liver sausage and buckwheat, mold it in a loaf, then slice, fry, and serve with syrup. Some folks call that scrapple, but a Milwaukee woman's family calls it pannas.

A listener asks: "Does the phrase "snap, crackle, and pop" need a cereal comma?"

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle about anagrams.

What did Shakespeare's plays sound like in his day? An acting teacher with an interest in dialects wants to know how researchers reconstruct Elizabethan speech.

A Pennsylvania college student remembers playing a game called "Whisper Down the Lane." She's surprised to learn that her fellow students call the same game "Telephone."

What's the difference between further and farther?

Martha shares more funny collective plant names, including a "mommy of poppies."

Pity the poor typeface designer, always seeing anachronisms in movies and TV. Imagine how painful it must be watching a World War II movie, only to see a document printed in Snell Roundhand Bold, a font invented in 1972.

Here's typeface expert Mark Simonson's analysis of the lettering on "Mad Men."

http://bit.ly/3L4a99

More about the life of font designers in the new book, Just My Type, by Simon Garfield:

http://bit.ly/as5o5a

Some speakers of American English use the word whenever to refer to a single event, as in "whenever Abraham Lincoln" died. This locution is a vestige of Scots-Irish speech.

A professional musician maintains that many people use the word crescendo incorrectly.

A father of two small children says his Indiana family referred to a child's runny nose as a "lamb's legs," as in "We need to wipe the lamb's legs off."

--

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What's the one word that comes to mind when you hear the name J. D. Salinger? "Masterpiece"? "Recluse"? How about the "F-word"? 

An Indianapolis listener came across an article about Salinger's use of that word, and that got him wondering about the linguistic terms for inserting at least one extra syllable into a word to make it more emphatic.

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Ready for some crazy crossword clues? The hosts discuss some clever ones, like "Hula hoop?" (3 letters). Also, is the correct term jury-rigged or jerry-rigged? Why are Marines called Gyrenes? When someone points out the obvious, do you say "Duh!" or do you say "No DUH!"? And what, pray tell, is in a cannibal sandwich?

FULL DETAILS

Grant shares some diabolically clever crossword clues. Have at 'em: Hula hoop? (3 letters). A city in Czechoslovakia? (Four letters). Want to try more? Check out these clues here and here.

http://www.crosswordese.com/ccotm.html

http://barelybad.com/xwdcuteclues2002.htm 

Hankering for a cannibal sandwich? An Appleton, Wis., woman has fond memories of raw ground round steak on top of rye bread, topped with salt, pepper, and onion. She wonders if it's a regional dish.

When someone points out the blindingly obvious, a listener might respond with Duh! There are other options, too, including No duh!, Doy!, and Der! Grant creates an online survey to find out which terms people tend to use.

If you're not yet old enough to understand homophones, you can wind up with some funny misunderstandings. Martha shares a listener's story about avoiding cotton candy as a child, fearing that it was literally made of cotton.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz based on descriptions of characters in novels.

Something that's repaired in a makeshift, haphazard fashion, is said to be jury-rigged. Martha discusses the expression's likely nautical origin and Grant tells how a different term, jerry-built, led to the variation jerry-rigged.

Crazy crossword clues, Round 2: "Letters from your parents"? (3 letters) and "Sound elicited by an electric can opener" (5 letters).

An officer from Camp Pendleton is curious about Gyrene, a slang term for "Marine." Grant says it may derive from the Greek word for "tadpole."

Martha relates a story from a listener in Valdosta, Ga., about her four-year-old's misunderstanding of a homophone.

Need to type something in Linear B or Mayan? Want to make Japanese emoticons? Now you can. Grant explains why the release of Unicode 6 has many word lovers doing the happy dance.

When speakers of foreign languages try to adapt their own idioms into English, the results can be poetic, if not downright puzzling. A Dallas listener shares some favorite examples from his Italian-born wife, including "I can put my hand to the fire," and "The watermelon isn't always red on the inside."

Crazy crossword clues, Round 3: Cover of the Bible? (2 words). Source of relief? (7 letters).

When did the word slick become a positive word meaning "cool" or "excellent"?

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

English is full of unusual terms, both old (eleemosynary, favonian) and new (flyway, catio). Also, the Swahili term that means "sleep like a log," the multiple meanings of the word joint, what it means to play gooseberry, cowpies and horse biscuits, and how to punctuate the expression "Guess what."

FULL DETAILS

Thinking about a flyaway, or will you spend the weekend gazing out at the catio? Grant explains these new terms.

Is subscribing just for magazines and podcasts, or can you subscribe to an idea? A husband and wife disagree over whether the latter is grammatically correct.

The Swahili phrase nililala fofofo means "to sleep really well." Literally, though, it translates as "to sleep like a log." Are the English and Swahili idioms related?

In French, tenir la chandelle means "to act as a chaperone," though literally it's "to hold the candle." Another expression that means "to chaperone" is the antiquated English phrase "to play gooseberry."

License-plate bingo, anyone? Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a radio version.

"Who is 'she'? The cat's mother?" A Davis, Ca., man remembers his mother's indignant use of this expression, and he's curious about the origin.

Should you pronounce the word coyote with two syllables or three?

A Northern California caller that discovers that in Britain, an invitation to share a joint doesn't mean what it does back home.

Eleemosynary is the title of a play by Lee Blessing. The play celebrates this and other unusual words, including sortilege, charivari, ungulate, favonian, and logodaedaly. Martha saw a production at San Diego's Moxie Theater, and takes the opportunity to discuss those words, plus the fizzy roots of moxie.

Guess what! Or would that be Guess what? A Honolulu listener asks about the right way to punctuate this interjection. Should you use an exclamation mark or a question mark? How about an interrobang or a pronequark?

A Texas listener says his family often describes a great meal as larrupin'. What does that mean, exactly?

Grant talks about FOIA ("pronounced FOY-uh"), a bit of journalists' jargon.

Cowpies, horse biscuits, buffalo chips, horse dumplings -- why do so many names for animal droppings have to do with food? A caller wonders this, and whether the term cowpie would be an anachronism in a Civil War novel.

--

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SUMMARY

In this week's episode, "It was bright cold day in April and the clocks were striking thirteen." Martha and Grant discuss their favorite first lines from novels. Also this week, Palmer Housing, beanplating, meeting cute, bad billboard grammar, and what it means when someone says you look like a tree full of owls. And which is correct: another thing coming or another think coming?

FULL DETAILS

Some novels grab you from the get-go. "I am an invisible man." "Call me Ishmael." "The cold passed reluctantly from the earth, and the retiring fogs revealed an army stretched out on the hills, resting." Martha and Grant discuss some of their favorite first lines.

You're falling asleep, then suddenly snap awake. There's a term for that: hypnagogic startle or hypnic jerk.

A North Carolina listener reports seeing a billboard that read, "Be Stronger Connected to Your Son." Bad grammar or good advertising?

When is your golden birthday? It's when your age and the date match, such as turning 23 years old on the 23rd day of the month.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski presents a puzzle involving inverted M's and W's called "Turn the Worm."

Among many African-Americans, the term Palmer Housing means, "walking with an unusual gait." A screenwriter connects some dots in his own family's history when he asks about the origin.

In the film industry, the expression meet cute refers to "an overly precious first encounter between the romantic leads."

A man named Kris wants to name his son Qhristopher. Have a problem with that?

Grant shares some favorite bad first lines from novels.

The hosts tackle a longstanding mystery about the word shoshabong.

A favorite quotation from George Eliot: "Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact."

Is the correct phrase another think coming or another thing coming?

Grant reveals the surprising origin of the term lunatic fringe.

The term like a tree full of owls describes someone's appearance. What does it mean, exactly? And why owls?

Need a great synonym for "overthinking"? Try beanplating.

--

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SUMMARY

Some of the world's most famous writers had to support themselves with day jobs. Martha and Grant discuss well-known authors who toiled away at other trades. Also this week, Eskimo kisses, the frozen Puerto Rican treat called a limber, how the word fail ended up as a noun, the phrase I'm efforting that, and where you would throw a houlihan. And what's a chester drawers?

FULL DETAILS

Some of the world's greatest writers had to do their work while holding down a day job. William Faulkner and Anthony Trollope toiled as postal clerks. Zora Neal Hurston trained as an anthropologist. Vladimir Nabokov was a lepidopterist who curated a butterfly exhibit at Harvard. Literary historian Jack Lynch tells the stories of these and others in his new book, Don't Quit Your Day Job: What the Famous Did That Wasn't.

http://bit.ly/aT4oXe

An Indianapolis newspaperman complains about his colleagues' use of the phrase I'm efforting that.

A woman in Racine, Wis., says her father and his fellow bus drivers always pronounced the word schedule as "skeh-DOO-lee." Is that an accepted pronunciation?

Todd Purdum's recent Vanity Fair article on the presidency contains intriguing beltway slang, including gaggle and full lid.

http://bit.ly/cXgmIj

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game called "Word Search."

 A woman of Puerto Rican descent wonders about limber, the name of the savory frozen treat popular in her homeland. Was it really named in honor of aviator Charles Lindbergh?

A man in Huntington Beach, Ca., ponders his teenager's frequent use of the words fail and epic fail. Grant explains what this has to do with linguistic bleaching, and discusses some funny fails on failblog.org.

http://failblog.org/

Martha has an example of a linguistic false friend: In Latvian, the word vista means "chicken."

On a recent episode of "Mad Men," a character said "keep me in the loop." Was that phrase really around in the 1960s?

Everyone knows old proverbs, but what about modern ones? Here's an aphorism attributed to William Gibson: "The future is already here. It's just not evenly distributed." The hosts discuss some others.

After a San Diego man used the term Eskimo kiss with his preschooler, they both wondered about its origin.

An Indiana woman is puzzled about a phrase in the old western song, "I Ride An Old Paint": "I'm goin' to Montana to throw the houlihan." What's a houlihan? You'll find one version of the lyrics here.

http://to.pbs.org/bmHyw2

Here are different interpretations of this cowboy classic by Johnny Cash and Woody Guthrie.

http://bit.ly/9h03hD

http://bit.ly/9cEqws

On an earlier show, Martha mentioned the popular detergent in the Middle East called Barf. Martha shares email from listeners who say that although the word spelled the same as English "barf," the Farsi pronunciation is somewhat different.

http://www.waywordradio.org/a-gazelle-on-the-lawn/

Ever hear anyone refer to a wooden dresser as a chester drawers? A woman who grew up in St. Louis only recently learned that not everyone uses this term.

Martha reports that, during her recent attempt at learning to surf, she picked up lots of surfing lingo in between wipeouts. Here's a handy glossary of such terms, including tombstoning and pearling, both of which she did quite a bit.

http://bit.ly/da7hqe

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

Remember misunderstanding certain words as a child? Maybe you figured "cat burglars" only stole cats, or assumed guerrilla fighters must be angry apes. Martha and Grant discuss childhood misunderstandings about language. Also this week, Yankee dimes, culch piles, hanging crepe, educational rubrics, and whether the language you speak influences the way you think.

FULL DETAILS

There's a point when children understand just enough of their native language to be confused by homophones and metaphors. What misunderstandings do you remember? Maybe you thought cat burglars stole only cats, or that you might be swept out to sea by the undertoad? The hosts discuss childhood misunderstandings about language.

Some business owners give their establishments names like "Ye Olde Coffee Shoppe." What most people don't realize is that the letter Y in this case is a vestige of a letter we no longer use, and has a "th" sound. More about this letter here.

http://bbc.in/9Vy8Ba

A woman from upstate New York says her stepfather used to keep small dishes in various rooms to collect small odds and ends like paper clips and rubber bands. He called them culch piles. Martha has the story on this term.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle based on the candy called "Mentos." It's called Mento Stimulation. Example: What kind of minty candy would be appropriate for musicians?

A North Carolina man says he was surprised as a child when he did a chore for his grandmother, and the Yankee dime she promised him turned out to be a peck on the cheek.

A Texas caller says her child's middle-school teacher insists that students should never begin a sentence with a preposition. The hosts are shocked, shocked.

Martha describes a funny linguistic misunderstanding she had while trying to read Harry Potter in Spanish.

Predictive text on cellphones can result in some amusing accidental substitutions. The word for that: textonym.

Does the language you speak shape how you think? The hosts discuss an essay on that topic adapted from the new book "Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages," by Guy Deutscher.

http://nyti.ms/chDUjO

Reading Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird, an Indiana listener is stopped short by the sentence "She carried a tray of charlotte." Who or what is charlotte?

Someone who paints a negative or pessimistic picture is said to be hanging crepe. Martha has the origin.

The word rubric derives from a Latin word for "red." Originally, it referred to red letters used as section headings in religious texts and the like. Rubric has since become a term used in modern educational jargon, as in grading rubric.

What's the connection?

--

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Copyright 2011, Wayword LLC.

SUMMARY

How much humor and personality can you pack into a 140-character update? A lot, it turns out. Martha and Grant talk about funny Twitter feeds. Also this week, the origins of skosh and can't hold a candle, why dragonflies are sometimes called snake doctors, whether the word pre-plan is redundant, and how technology is affecting the experience of reading.

FULL DETAILS

Martha and Grant share some of their latest guilty-pleasure reading from Twitter feeds that show just how much meaning can be compressed into 140 characters. Cases in point: @veryshortstory and @GRAMMARHULK.

http://twitter.com/veryshortstory

http://twitter.com/GRAMMARHULK

He can't hold a candle to someone means that he can't possibly compare to the other person. The hosts explain where this phrase comes from.

A zoo tour guide wants a specific word to describe how elephants procure hydration.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski presents a puzzle called "This, That, and the Other."

A Facebook newbie asks if it's okay to misspell words on purpose when communicating via social media.

The mother of eight-year-old twins wonders why one of her girls habitually adds Dun-dun-DUN! to sentences in everyday conversation. The hosts suspect it's related to the audio element known as a "sting" in television and movie parlance, like this one in the famous "Dramatic Prairie Dog" video clip.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHjFxJVeCQs&NR=1

The term skosh means "a small amount," and derives from a Japanese word that means the same thing.

Remember when the expression "reading a book" meant, well, actually reading a book? Martha and Grant discuss a Los Angeles Times series about how electronic devices are changing the way we read.

http://lat.ms/auLP0c

The distinctive shape of the dragonfly has inspired lots of different nicknames for this insect, including snake doctor, devil's darning needle, skeeter hawk, spindle, snake eyes, and ear sewer, the last of which rhymes with "mower."

What's the correct term for the male lover of a married woman? The hosts share suggestions from listeners, including paramour and Sancho.

A firefighter is annoyed by his boss's use of the term pre-plan.

Martha shares the term hit and giggle, a bit of sports slang term she picked up while working as an announcer at this year's Mercury Insurance Open tennis tournament.

--

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SUMMARY

Anagrams, rebuses, cryptograms, Jumble -- Martha and Grant swap stories about the games that first made them realize that playing with words and letters can be fun. Also this week, what's a jitney supper and where do you eat graveyard stew? The hosts explain the origin of the term “hang fire” and why Alaskans sound like they're from the Midwest, and take on a debate about whether an egregious falsehood is a bald-faced lie or a bold-faced lie.

FULL DETAILS

What games first made you realize that words and letters make great playthings? Martha describes puzzling, as a child, over the odd combination of letters, F-U-N-E-X, until she finally figured out the joke. Grant talks about discovering anagrams as a youngster, and how word puzzles in the newspaper became a daily ritual.

An office worker in Indianapolis is mystified when a British colleague sends an email telling her to "hang fire." The hosts explain the expression has to do with faulty firearms.
 
"Call up to 24 hours in advance to make a reservation." Do those instructions mean you can call until 24 hours before the deadline, or that you should call within 24 hours of it. When a San Diego listener assumed it was the former, she had an unpleasant surprise.

Did you know the POTUS (President of the United States) has a BOTUS? Grant explains what a BOTUS is.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska's game this week is "Name Dropping."  The answer for each set of clues will be a word that has a common first name hidden somewhere in it; when that name's removed, the remaining letters spell a new word. For example, the first clue is "one of the seven deadly sins," the second is "the grain consumed by one-fifth of the world's inhabitants." Subtract the latter from the former, and you get a woman's name.

A Charlottesville, Virginia, caller says that when she was a child and recovering from an illness, her mother fed her a kind of milk toast she called graveyard stew. Is that strange name unique to her family?

During the health care debate in Congress, there was lots of talk about an up-or-down vote. A Montana listener finds this expression annoying.  What's wrong with plain old "vote"?

In youth slang, "totes" is short for "totally." Grant talks about new, lengthened version of this slang shortening.

A Carlsbad, California, couple has a running debate over whether an egregious whopper is correctly called a bold-faced lie or a bald-faced lie.

The Library of Congress is archiving the entire content of Twitter. Grant explains why that's a gold mine for language researchers like David Bamman at Tufts University. You can see some of the results Bamman's compiled at Lexicalist.com.

http://www.lexicalist.com/

What do you eat at a jitney supper? Jitney?

Why do people from Alaska sound like they're from the Midwest?

A caller who grew up in Arkansas says his mother used a colorful expression instead of "mind your own business," which was “tend to your own rat-killing.” Grant talks about that and a similar phrase, go on with your rat-killing, meaning "Finish what you were saying."

--

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SUMMARY

News reports that the makers of Scrabble were changing the rules to allow proper names left some purists fuming. The rumors were false, but they got Grant thinking about idiosyncratic adaptations of the game's rules. Also this week, the origins of the terms picket lines and hooch, why actors go up on their lines, terms for diarrhea of the mouth, and what we mean when we say there's an 800-lb. gorilla in the room.

FULL DETAILS

Some families have their own idiosyncratic rules for Scrabble. Grant talks about the rules in his house.

What do we mean when we say there's an 800-lb. gorilla in the room?

An Indianapolis listener says her family often refers to strong liquor as hooch, and wonders where that term comes from. The hosts trace the term's path from an Indian village in Alaska.

Grant follows up on his chickpea vs. garbanzo poll, and shares an email on the subject from the U.S. Dry Bean Council.

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska reprises his game called Initiarithmetic. The object is to guess a set of items associated with certain numbers, as in "There are 12 m__________ in the y___________." Here's another: "76 t___________ in the b__________ p____________." If you missed the first Initiarithmetic game, it's here:

http://www.waywordradio.org/like-a-duck-on-a-june-bug/

An SAT prep teacher in Santa Cruz, California, hears lots of teen slang in his work, and is struck by a new use of the term legit.

What's a synonym for diarrhea of the mouth? A caller swears she heard the word on an earlier episode, but can't recall it. The hosts try to help. Tumidity? Multiloquence? Logorrhea?

Several decades ago, the expression tickety-boo was commonly used to mean "all in order," "correct," or "just dandy." Although it's rarely heard, a caller who once lived in Florida says her boss there often used it. Does it derive from Hindi? By the way, if you just can't get enough of this expression, check out Danny Kaye singing "Everything is Tickety-boo."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzVCahrtaWI

Grant quizzes Martha about some odd terms: three sisters garden, weak-hand draw, and strimmer.

In the theater, actors who forget their lines are said to go up or to go up on their lines. But why go up?

A listener from Bethel, Maine, calls with a riddle she heard at summer camp: The maker doesn't want it, the buyer doesn't use it, and the user never sees it. What is it? She proceeds to stump the hosts with a puzzle: What adjective requires five letters to form the superlative?

A Fort Worth listener wonders about a claim she saw in a 1930s magazine. The article said that traditionally, a picket line was an area between the front lines of two opposing armies where soldiers might safely venture out to pick berries without fear of being attacked. Might that be connected to the modern sense of picket line meaning a group of striking workers or protesters?

--

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SUMMARY

When it comes to language, who's the decider? Grant explains how grammar rules develop. Also, what's tarantula juice, and what's the difference between a muffin top and a smiley? The hosts discuss these and other terms from Jonathon Green's new Dictionary of Slang. Why do we call a waste of taxpayer money a boondoggle? What does it mean to be cotton to someone? And what's happening if we have a touch of the seconds? Plus, funny movie mistakes, a quiz in limerick form, regional terms for lanyards, and a new spin on the musical joke brown chicken, brown cow.

FULL DETAILS

Can you guess what a smiley is? Or how about tarantula juice? You could, of course, happen upon someone with a muffin top drinking inferior whisky, or you could look these terms up in Jonathon Green's new Historical Dictionary of Slang. Green spent decades assembling this three-volume collection of slang from the United States, Great Britain, and every other nook and cranny of the English-speaking world. Grant explains what has linguists so excited about its publication.

http://bit.ly/ienVE3

If you preface a statement with "I'm not trying to be racist, but," does that then make it okay? And is there a term for such disclaimer?

It's always fun to catch moviemakers' blunders. Say you're watching an epic about ancient Rome and spot a toga-clad extra who forgot to remove his wristwatch. That's an anachronism. But what do you call something that's geographically incorrect. Take, for example, an exterior shot of what's supposed to be Dunder Mifflin's Scranton office, but includes a fleeting glimpse of a palm tree? That's called an anatopism (accent on the second syllable), from the Greek topos, meaning "place."

For an excellent timewaster along these lines, Grant recommends moviemistakes.com. (Yo, "The Nativity Story"! Everyone knows maize wasn't grown in Nazareth during the time of Christ. Anatopic FAIL!)

http://bit.ly/39Ji

Understandings aren't just for epistemologists and marriage counselors. In the 18th Century, the slang term understandings was a jocular name for "boots" or "shoes." Later, the word also came to be a joking term for "legs."

Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a set of Topical Limericks from the world of media and entertainment.

A listener from Dallas wonders about the origin of I'm not cotton to, meaning "I'm not in favor of" or "I don't get along with." Though it sounds like a classic Southern phrase, Martha traces it all the way back to England, where the verb to cotton had to do with textile work. Saying I'm not cotton with or I don't cotton to means that you don't get along with something.

What do you call those convenient props in illustrations and movies that cover up the proverbial naughty bits? A listener remembers an old illustrated copy of The Emperor's New Clothes that made clever use of twigs and berries for covering, well, the twigs and berries. Martha opens the kimono on the rare term antipudic, from the Latin pudor meaning "shame." It's the source also of the English words impudent and pudenda.

Alfred Hitchcock specifically referred to his own use of antipudic devices regarding the shower scene in Psycho. And of course, nobody makes better use of antipudic devices than Austin Powers, International Man of Mystery.

http://bit.ly/Zikak

Listeners emailed us in response to a call on the sonorous bow-chicka-wow-wow cliche, and we're glad they did. We learned that country star Trace Adkins has a song called "brown chicken, brown cow" that uses puppets to demonstrate just what it means to take a roll in the hay. We're sure it'd have Statler and Waldorf whipping out their opera binoculars.

http://waywordradio.org/a-murphy-a-melvin-and-a-wedgie/

http://bit.ly/fNoots

Who is Boo-Boo the Fool? A listener wonders if this African-American character has any relation the Puerto Rican fool, Juan Bobo. Martha draws a connection to the Spanish term bobo, meaning "fool," and its Latin root balbus, meaning "stammerer". Grant notes that the name Bobo has been extremely common for clowns since at least the 1940s, and the bobo/clown/jester character is prevalent in most all cultural folklores, be they African, South American, or Anglo-European.

When it comes to language, a listener from Dallas wants to know, as a fellow Texan might put it, "Who's the decider"? Grant explains that nobody makes the rules about language--and everybody does. For those seeking professional guidance, a whole community of lexicographers, dictionaries, and style guides offers rules and provenance on vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. However, on a daily basis all the users of a language implicitly write the rules by choosing words and syntax that have semantic clarity for the people they're trying to communicate with. You could go to a reference book, or you could say something to your neighbor, then judge by their reaction whether or not you made sense.

Your mother gave you life, and you gave her . . . a boondoggle? Or is it a lanyard? Or maybe a gimp? Grant assures a listener there are several terms for that long key fob you made at summer camp out of plastic yarn. Boondoggle seems to have originated among Boy Scouts in the Rochester, N.Y., area in the 1930s, and was later picked up by those in politics to mean "a wasteful debacle." Grant also shares a French term for these summer-camp crafts, scoubidou, pronounced just like the cartoon dog, but apparently no relation.

Nobody writes more movingly about lanyards than poet Billy Collins.

http://bit.ly/YqF7g

If you get an email called Life in the 1500s, hit "delete"! Grant explains that the etymology provided is not entirely accurate. That's what this show is for. Also, if you're getting an email that says Free Money, Click Here, you shouldn't trust that either. That's what jobs are for.

Snopes.com has a good debunking of these linguistic urban legends.

http://bit.ly/fJQD

A college senior has invented a word to describe that anxiety we feel when there's unfinished work looming over us. He calls it desgundes. As in, that twenty-year-old in the library making a three-foot boondoggle must likely be dealing with some inner desgundes.

An Indianapolis listener says his father used to often speak of "leaving this veil of tears." His son wonders about the origin of that phrase. Grant and Martha explain the term is actually vale, a synonym for valley. In some translations, Psalm 84 refers to traveling through a vale of tears.

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