A Way with Words

A clever pun can make the difference between a so-so phrase and a memorable one. The phrase "the last straw" refers to an old fable about too many items in a load, but it takes on a whole new meaning in a public-awareness campaign about the environment. Also, why do we use the term "mob scene" to refer to an unruly crowd? This term originated in the world of theater. Finally: the Basque language spoken in the westernmost Pyrenees has long posed a linguistic mystery. Its origins are unclear and it's unlike any other language in the region. But Basque is enjoying something of a revival in a surprising place . . . Idaho. Plus, sun dog, ob-gyn, mob scene, George, Double George, Geezum Pete, and somersault vs. winter pepper.

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Carrie from Waupaca, Wisconsin, confesses she was stumped when that her son Aidan asked,"Mom, can you do a winter pepper?"

An ad campaign featuring the phrase The Last Straw urging people not to use plastic straws has Allie in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, wondering about double meanings in advertising. Research shows that such punning can be effective.

On Twitter, @laureneoneal wonders why the term ob-gyn is pronounced by sounding out all the letters, as if it's an initialism.

Eleven-year-old Ben calls from Rapids City to ask about the term sun dog, the meterological phenomenon in which a bright spot appears to the left or right of the sun. No one knows the origin of this term. Synonyms include mock sun, weather gall, and parhelion, from Greek words meaning beside the sun.

Some 50 years ago, says Susan from Burbank, California, she and a friend made up a game involving prefixes and suffixes, which led to such nonsense words as epidormithry and postpreparize.

Ever notice how many comic-book villains have names ending in the letter O? For starters, there's Magneto, Sinestro, and Bizarro. Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle features new villains with names that are common words ending in -o. For example, who's the villain who takes large islands and breaks them up into chains of smaller islands?

Barbara in Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California, wonders about the term mob scene, means an unruly, dense crowd. The term arose in the world of theater, where it denotes a point in a performance with lots of people onstage. The word mob is a shortening of Latin mobile vulgus, which means fickle crowd.

The phrase throw in the towel, meaning to give up, originated in the world of boxing. An earlier phrase from the same sport that carried the same metaphorical meaning is chuck in the sponge.

Andrew in Omaha, Nebraska, recalls his grandfather's use of the word George to mean exceptionally good, and Double George to mean really great. Other masculine names, including Jake, Tom, and Jerry have meant something similar. In the 1950s, the name George was used among casino workers for a high roller, as in Here comes George.

The German word for longjohns, Liebestoter, literally means love killer.

Rick calls from Rouses Point, New York, to ask about the etymology of the phrase hang for a sheep as for a lamb, meaning go for broke or go all out. The answer has involves the old tradition of capital punishment for theft. Given the risk of such dire consequences, one might as well steal the item that's more valuable. There's a similar Scots proverb that goes as well be hanged for a wedder as for a lamb, a wedder being a male castrated sheep. The word wedder is linguistically related to bellwether, a large, castrated sheep wearing a bell and therefore indicative of where the herd is going.

Our conversation about being criticized for using yes ma'am and no sir, prompted a letter from an Austin, Texas, listener who had a similar experience when she moved from Mississippi to Ohio.

The state of Idaho has a large community of Basque speakers. Their native tongue is what's known as a language isolate, meaning one that is not historically connected to those around it.

The name George derives from the Greek word for farmer, a combination of words that literally mean earth worker.

Ellen in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, wonders about the origin of the exclamation Geezum Pete! It's a minced oath -- that is a way of avoiding saying Jesus Christ! There are dozens of similar euphemized exclamations, including gee willikins, jiminy, Jehosaphat, Judas Priest, Jeekers, Jiminy Cricket, Jiminy Crickets, Gee willikers, Gee Christmas, Jiminy Christmas, and Jerusalem.

Michael in Papillion, Nebraska, asks: Why do we refer to that adjustable vent that regulates air flow in a home as a register?

This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

A stereotype is a preconceived notion about a person or group. Originally, though, the word stereotype referring to a printing device used to produce lots of identical copies. If you suspect there's a connection, you're right! Also, the link between tiny mythical creatures called trolls and modern-day mischief-makers, plus the stories behind the color names we give to horses. Finally, wise advice about fending off despair: learn something new. Also, grinslies, personal summers, cowboy slang, smell vs. odor, orient vs. orientate, trolls and trolling, and just for fun, some agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds.

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Scarecrow and pickpocket are compound words that name things and people by describing what they do. Such nouns were especially popular centuries ago, when quake-breech meant a coward, a saddle-goose was a fool, a scrape-gut was a violinist, and tanglelegs meant strong alcohol. The linguistic term for such terms is a mouthful: agentive and instrumental exocentric verb-noun compounds. Linguist Brianne Hughes, who has studied them extensively, calls them cutthroat compounds, the word cutthroat being another case in point. She's collected more than 1200 cutthroat compounds at her website, Encyclopedia Briannica.

Todd, a firefighter in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, wonders about the difference between the words smell and odor. Also, which verb is the better choice: orient or orientate?

While reading Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Sidney from Indianapolis, Indiana, stumbled across the use of the term stereotyped notice to denote a printed announcement of a meeting. It's an example of this word's earliest sense; stereotype originally referred to a type of metal printing block used to produce multiple copies. The French word for this kind of block is cliche, a word that may be imitative of the clicking sound made by such a device as it prints. Borrowed into English, cliche now refers to a word or phrase that is trite or hackneyed -- in other words, something repeated multiple times.

Matt in San Antonio, Texas, poses this question: Which language has the most words? For that matter, how would you even begin to count them?

Crossword-puzzle constructors often employ words with a vowel-consonant-consonant-vowel pattern, or VCCV. That's the cruciverbal inspiration Quiz Guy John Chaneski's VCCV puzzle. For example, if the clue is teen woe, what's the four-letter answer begins and ends with a vowel?

On our Facebook group, listeners share their terms for menopausal hot flashes, including
a short private vacation in the tropics, temperature tantrum, short private trip to the Sahara, and my inner child is playing with matches.

The name of that horse with a light gold coat, the palomino, derives from Spanish for young dove, because these animals share similar coloring. In the same way, a sorrel horse has the same color as a certain kind of sorrel plant. The names for the colors of horses come from three main traditions: English from the United Kingdom, Spanish, and French. Western Words, a book of cowboy slang collected by Ramon Adams, contains many more examples, including albino, bald-faced, bayo, bayo coyote, blaze, blood bay, buckskin, calico, chestnut, chin spot, claybank, cremello, flea bitten, grulla, moros, overo, paint, palomilla, piebald, pinto, race, roan, sabino, skewbald, snip, sock, star, star strip, stew ball, stocking, tobiano, trigeuno, and zebra dun.

Linguist Brianne Hughes has compiled more than 1200 cutthroat compounds, including smell-feast meaning a freeloader, and smellfungus, a chronic complainer. For a lively primer about such compounds, check out her video.

The gallywampus is a large, wobbly insect that looks like an overgrown mosquito. These long-legged creatures and others like them go by lots of funny-sounding names, including gallinipper, gabber napper, and granny-nipper.

A thought-provoking tweet from @Elloryn in Atlanta, Georgia, suggests replacing the words I'm sorry with Thank you. Instead of saying Sorry I was late, try saying Thank you for waiting for me. It's a subtle change, but it powerfully shifts the focus from the offender's feelings to those of the offended.

Ann from Fort Worth, Texas, says her elderly aunt was talking disparagingly about two people who, in her words, wet around the same stump. This expression isn't all that common, but it does appear in Sarah Bird's 1999 novel Virgin of the Rodeo. Another version, to smell around the same stump, is likewise rare, but also suggests that the two are thick as thieves or at least have much in common. The word stump figures in several colloquial English expressions where the stump is a metaphorical point of contention or a problem that needs to be solved. Two ways of getting around the same stump means two ways to solve a problem. There's also the phrase to go around the same stump, and to whip or beat the devil around the same stump, which means to avoid one's responsibilities.

A proverb on a bench in San Diego's Balboa Park reads: The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The next best time is now.

T. H. White's The Once and Future King offers excellent advice about how to fight off despair: learn something.

Harry from Falls Church, Virginia, wonders about the many meanings and uses of the words troll and trolling.

Listeners continue to chime in after our conversation about terms for a quick cleanup, such as Navy shower or G.I. shower, or washing your possible. @TruBlu tweeted still more examples.

Jesse in Gainesville, Florida, says that when he was growing up in Northern Minnesota, he often heard the expression Oh for …!, as in Oh for cute!, Oh, for nice!, or Oh for dumb! This idiomatic construction usually expresses judgment, is largely confined to Minnesota, and may be a calque from German or a Scandinavian language.

Amy from Ishpeming, Michigan, says her family's idiolect includes the word grinslies, which they use to denote the sediment in the bottom of your coffee cup. The word orts is a term for leftovers, and a dialectal term for the last little bit left from a meal is scrunchings. The last little bit of a drink in a glass or bottle is sometimes called a heel-tap.
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This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Sometimes it's a challenge to give a book a chance: How many pages should you read before deciding it's not worth your time? There's a new formula to help with that decision -- and it's all based on your age. And: Have you ever noticed someone mouthing your words as YOU speak? That conversational behavior can be disconcerting, but there may be good reasons behind it. Finally, a punk rock band debates the pronunciation of a word that means "tribute": is it HOM-age, OM-age, or something else entirely? Plus, chevrolegs, Pat and Charlie, on fleek, hornswoggle, 20-couple, coinkydink, and the correct way to say Nevada.

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Saying I'll get a ride with Pat and Charlie or I'm going to go with Pat and Charlie you're saying I'll walk there, Pat and Charlie being a jocular term for one's legs. Other colloquial ways to describe traveling on foot include getting there by shank's leg, chevrolegs, going with Tom and Jerry, or saying I'll use my pegs or I'll use my ponies.

The punk band Sacred Cash Cow in Carolina Beach, North Carolina is planning a tribute to another local band that's breaking up, so they call to ask: How do you pronounce the word homage? If you're paying homage to something, you stress the first syllable. If you're referring to an homage, you stress the second the syllable.

There's a story in the African-American folktale tradition about two tired mules named Pat and Charlie.

Judy from Indianapolis, Indiana, remembers her Great-aunt Fanny using the expression take a jaybird, meaning take a sponge bath, and explained it as when you wash under your wings and your tail feathers, maybe polish off your beak. Great-aunt Fanny may have been thinking of the term naked as a jaybird. There are many other terms for these quick cleanups, including Dutch bath, wipe-off, G.I. bath, Marine shower, and Georgia bath. We've talked before about another euphemized expression about bathing that involves washing one's possibles.

In the American South, you might indicate you're going to walk instead of drive with the expression I'm going to take my foot in hand and walk. A variation is I'm going to take my foot in my hand. Either way, you'll be walking there.

For this week's puzzle, our Quiz Guy John Chaneski invents some new sports by changing the first letter of a familiar pastime, then changing the rules. For example, in what new favorite sport are you allowed to punish an error by shocking the shortstop or center fielder with 50,000 volts?

Stephanie, a social worker in Tallahassee, Florida, talks with people all day long, and she's noticed that sometimes when she's talking to a client, that person starts silently mouthing Stephanie's words. This may be a form of echolalia, the repetition of someone else's vocalizations, or palialia, a language disorder involving the involuntary repetition of words, phrases, or syllables. It might also simply be a matter of mirroring the other person as the result of intense focus, or anticipating what they're going to say and how and when to respond.

To use mother's colt or to use granny's colt is another expression for going somewhere on foot.

Scott in Billings, Montana, wonders about the word hornswoggle, meaning to swindle, bamboozle, deceive, or trick. This verb found its way into American English during the 1820's, when there was a fad among newspaper editors and writers for inventing words as funny as they were pretentious-sounding. Among these were words like goshbustified, skedaddle, absquatulate, snollygoster, and discombobulate. A similar thing happened in the 16th century when learned people briefly used what came to be known as inkhorn terms.

Brannon, a high-schooler in Dallas, Texas, wonders about the meaning of slang term on fleek, meaning perfect or just right. Peaches Monroe popularized this expression in a Vine where she bragged about having eyebrows on fleek later explained that the word she was using was actually flick, as in on point.

Sometimes it's a challenge to give a book a chance: How many pages should you read before deciding it's not worth your time? We've talked before about this question, but now there's a new formula to help with that decision. It depends on your age.

How do you pronounce the word Nevada? Steven, a Nevada native now living in Baltimore, Maryland, says he's forever encountering people who pronounce the name of his home state incorrectly, with an ah sound in the middle. The a in that second syllable is short.

Rose works at a trailer shop South Central Pennsylvania and often hears her co-workers adding the element -couple to a round number to indicate an indefinite amount, such as Bring me 20-couple screws, in the same way that others might say Bring me 20-odd screws. It's not all that common; more well established for indefinite quantities are the terms couple-three, couple-few, and a couple-two-three.

In June 2018, we appeared in San Antonio, Texas, to support San Antonio Youth Literacy in conjunction with Texas Public Radio. While there, Martha picked up the term blowin' and goin', a rhyming compound that means extremely busy, booming, or thriving.

Thomas in Bahama, North Carolina, says his father used to say You can't hang around the barbershop and not get your haircut, which seems to be a warning about being influenced by the company you keep. Similar ideas are expressed by the sayings Play stupid games, win stupid prizes, and If you wrestle with pigs you get dirty and the pig likes it, and Lie down with dogs, get up with fleas.

Sundance from Dallas, Texas, says his family uses the word coinkydink for coincidence. It's an intentional malapropism, like the playful pronunciation of schedule as skeduly and difficulty as difulgaty. Coinkydink has been around since at least the 1940s.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

In deafening workplaces, like sawmills and factories, workers develop their own elaborate sign language to discuss everything from how their weekend went to when the boss is on his way. Plus, English speakers borrowed the words lieutenant and precipice from French, and made some changes along the way, but not in ways you might suspect. Finally, how do you pronounce the name of the New York concert hall you can reach with lots of practice? Is it CAR-neg-ghee Hall … or Car-NEG-ghee? Plus, no great shakes, Gomer, a limerick about leopards, foafiness, and sleep in the arms of Morpheus.

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Try this tricky puzzle: Take the words new door and rearrange their letters into one word.

How do you pronounce the name Carnegie? The Scottish industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, pronounced it with an accent on the second syllable, as his namesake the Carnegie Corporation of New York takes pains to make clear. Good luck explaining that to New Yorkers, though. They may know that the famous concert venue is named in his honor, but it's become traditional to stress the first syllable in Carnegie Hall. In the 19th century, people would have encountered his name in print first rather than hearing it by radio broadcast and incorrectly surmised it was CAR-neh-ghee, not car-NEH-ghee.

A Dallas woman says that when she rebukes the advances of the courtly old gent she's dating, he apologizes with the words I'm sorry for losing my faculties. Using the term my faculties in this sense is not all that common, but understandable if you think of one's faculties as "the ability to control impulses and behavior."

Foafiness, which derives from friend of a friend, is the condition of knowing a lot about someone even though you've never actually met, such as when you feel like you know a friend's spouse or children solely because you've read so much about them on Facebook. But is there a term for "experiential foafiness," when you feel like you've visited someplace but then realize you've only read about it or seen it in a video?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski brings a quiz based on what editors for the Oxford English Dictionary say are the 100 Most Common Words in English.

Is it okay use the word ask as a noun, as in What's our ask going to be? Or should we substitute the word question or request? Actually, the noun ask has handy applications in the world of business and fundraising, where it has a more specific meaning. It's taken on a useful function in the same way as other nouns that started as verbs, including reveal, fail, and tell.

A Burlington, Vermont, listener says that when he was a boy, his dad used to call him a little Gomer. It's a reference to the 1960's sitcom "Gomer Pyle," which featured a bumbling but good-hearted U.S. Marine from the fictional town of Mayberry, North Carolina. As a result, the name Gomer is now a gently derogatory term for "rube" or "hick."

Glenn Reinhardt and his 8-year-old daughter Camryn of San Antonio, Texas, co-authored a limerick that makes clever use of the words leopard, shepherd, and peppered.

A native French speaker wants clarification about the use of the word precipice in English.

A listener in Lashio, Myanmar, reports that a term of endearment in the local language translates as "my little liver."

In deafening industrial workplaces, such as textile factories and sawmills, workers often develop their own elaborate system of sign language, communicating everything from how their weekend went or to straighten up because the boss is coming.

The phrase no great shakes means "no great thing" or "insignificant." The term may have arisen from the idea of shaking dice and then having a disappointing toss. If so, it would fall into a long line of words and phrases arising from gambling. Or it may derive from an old sense of the word shake meaning "swagger" or "boast."

A listener in Montreal, Canada, asks: How do you pronounce lieutentant? The British say LEF-ten-ant, while Americans say LOO-ten-ant. In the United States, Noah Webster insisted on the latter because it hews more closely to the word's etymological roots, the lieu meaning "place" and lieutenant literally connoting a "placeholder," that is, an officer carrying out duties on behalf of a higher-up.

Why doesn't an usher ush? The word goes all the way back to Latin os, meaning "mouth," and its derivative ostium, meaning "door." An usher was originally a servant in charge of letting people in and out of a door.

A San Diego woman says her mother always tucked her into bed with the comforting wish, Sweet dreams, and rest in the arms of Morpheus. This allusion to mythology evokes a time when people were more familiar with Greek myth, and the shape-shifting god Morpheus who ruled over sleep and dreams and inspired both the word metamorphosis and the name of the sleep-inducing drug, morphine.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Sensuous words and terms of endearment. Think of a beautiful word. Now, is it simply the word's sound that makes it beautiful? Or does its appeal also depend on meaning? Also, pet names for lovers around the world: You might call your beloved "honey," or "babe," or "boo." But in Swedish, your loved one is a "sweet nose," and in Persian, you can just say you hope a mouse eats them. Finally, in certain parts of the U.S., going out to see a stripper may not mean what you think it means. Plus, clutch, dank, girled up, gorilla warfare, dead ringer, spitten image, butter beans vs. lima beans, and the whole shebang.

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May a mouse eat you, or in Persian, moosh bokharadet, is a term of endearment suggesting the recipient is small and cute. Another picturesque hypocorism: French mon petit chou, "sweetheart," but literally, "my little cabbage."

To go gangbusters is to "perform well and vigorously" or "act with energy and speed," as in an economy going gangbusters. The term recalls the swift aggression of 1930's police forces decisively breaking up criminal gangs. The old-time radio show Gangbusters, known for its noisy opening sequence, complete with sirens and the rattle of tommy guns, helped popularize the term.

Sotnos, with an umlaut over that first o, is a Swedish term of endearment. Literally, it means "sweet nose."

A listener in Billings, Montana, wonders about two of her boyfriend's favorite slang terms: clutch and dank. Clutch most likely derives from the world of sports, where a clutch play requires peak performance from an athlete, giving rise to clutch meaning "great." Dank, on the other hand, is used among cannabis aficionados to describe the smell of good marijuana, and was popularized by Manny the Hippie's appearances on David Letterman's show.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski is on the hunt for four-letter words hidden inside related words. For example, find the related four letter word hidden in the last word of this sentence: A union member might find him despicable.

When writing a business letter, what's a modern salutation that doesn't sound as stuffy as Dear Sir or Dear Madam? To Whom It May Concern, perhaps? The answer depends on the context and the intended audience.

A Boardman, Ohio, was confused as a child after reading about guerrilla warfare and wondering what those big, hairy primates could possibly be fighting about.

In mining country, a stripper is an huge piece of machinery churns up the soil in search of coal veins. This caused no end of hilarity one Christmas Day for a Terre Haute, Indiana, family when a new in-law was scandalized by the thought that all the menfolk were enthusiastically heading out to see a new stripper.

More than a century ago, the Springfield Republican newspaper in Massachusetts proposed a new word for that twitterpated time in an adolescent's life when one discovers the joys of flirtation: being all girled up. The Republican is also the publication containing the first known instance of someone suggesting the term Ms. as an honorific.

Schadenfreude, from German for "damage-joy," means "delight in the misfortune of others."

How dry is it? In the middle of a drought, you might answer that question is So dry the trees are bribing the dogs.

What makes a word beautiful? Is it merely how it sounds? Or does a word's meaning affect its aesthetic effect? Max Beerbohm had some helpful thoughts about gondola, scrofula, and other words in his essay "The Naming of Streets." Several years ago, Grant wrote a column on this topic for The New York Times.

The origin of the whole shebang, meaning "the whole thing," is somewhat mysterious. It may derive from an Irish word, shabeen, which meant "a disreputable drinking establishment," then expanded to denote other kinds of structures, including "an encampment." The phrase the whole shebang was popularized during the U.S. Civil War.

Two familiar terms that have inspired lots of bogus etymologies are dead ringer and spitting image. Dead ringer probably comes from horse racing, where a ringer is a horse that may look like other horses in a race but is actually from a higher class of competitors, and therefore a sure bet. The dead in this sense suggests the idea of "exact" or "without a doubt," also found in such phrases as dead certain. As for the term variously spelled spitting image or spittin' image or spit and image, Yale University linguist Larry Horn has argued convincingly that the original form is actually spitten image, likening a father-son resemblance to an exact copy spat out from the original.

If you want to reassure someone, you might say I've got your back. In Persian, however, to indicate the same thing, you'd say the equivalent of "I have your air," which is havato daram.

What's the difference between butter beans, lima beans, and wax beans? The answer depends on where you live and what dialect you speak.

Oh, those romantic Germans! Among their many terms of endearment is the one that translates as "mouse bear."

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

How often do you hear the words campaign and political in the same breath? Oddly enough, 19th-century grammarians railed against using campaign to mean "an electoral contest." Martha and Grant discuss why. And, lost in translation: a daughter accidentally insults her Spanish-speaking mother with the English phrase You can't teach an old dog new tricks. Finally, just how many are a couple? Does a couple always mean just two? Or does "Hand me a couple of napkins" ever really mean "Give me a few"?

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Today's pet peeve is often tomorrow's standard usage. Nineteenth-century grammarians railed against the use of the word campaign to denote an electoral contest, arguing it was an inappropriate use of a military term. C.W. Bardeen's 1883 volume Verbal Pitfalls: A Manual of 1500 Words Commonly Misused is a trove of similarly silly and often unintentionally hilarious advice.

The slang phrase XYZ, meaning "examine your zipper," has been used since at least the 1960's as a subtle tipoff to let someone know his zipper is down. A variant, XYZ PDQ, means "examine your zipper pretty darn quick." Other surreptitious suggestions for someone with an open fly: There's a dime on the counter, Are you advertising?, and What do birds do?

A listener in Palmer, Massachusetts, wants a term for when something, such as a piece of art, evokes fondness by combining both old and new things, such as a Monet painting reimagined by a digital artist. How about a combination of the Italian words for "new" and "old," nuovovecchio? Or newstalgia, perhaps? Retrostalgia?

A bollard is a post that helps guide traffic. It probably derives from the Middle English word bole, meaning "tree trunk."

You'uns, a dialectal form of the second-person plural, generally means "you and your kin." The term is heard in Pennsylvania, Ohio, Kentucky, and much of the South, reflecting migration patterns of immigrants from the British Isles. It's also related to yinz, heard in western Pennsylvania to mean the same thing.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski serves up a sibilant quiz about three-word phrases that have words beginning with S separated by the word and. For example, what 1970's sitcom featured a theme song by Quincy Jones called "The Street Beater"?

Go lemony at is slang for "get angry."

Does the term a couple mean "two and only two items"? Nope. Plenty of folks use couple to mean "a small but indefinite" quantity, and to insist otherwise is pure peevishness.

A colloquial apology for telling an overly long story is Sorry I had to go around my elbow to get to my thumb. The phrase is also a handy way to indicate you took the opposite of a shortcut.

A woman whose mother is a native Spanish speaker learning English was bothered when her daughter used the phrase You can't teach an old dog new tricks, taking offense at the idea that her daughter was calling her a dog. She might instead have used A leopard can't change its spots, or As the twig is bent, so inclines the tree, and from Latin, Senex psittacus negligit ferulam, or An old parrot doesn't mind the stick.

The words plethora and drastic both have roots in ancient Greek. Both were first used in English as medical terms, plethora indicating "an excess of bodily fluid" and drastic meaning "having an effect."

In his 1869 volume Vulgarisms and Other Errors of Speech, self-appointed grammar maven gave specious advice against using the word love when you merely mean "like."

A San Diego, California, listener bemoans the lack of a specific term for the person who is married to one's brother or sister. The best we can do in English is brother-in-law or sister-in-law, but often that needs further clarification.

The slang expression No Tea, No Shade, meaning "No disrespect, but …" is common in the drag community, where T means "truth." The related phrase All Tea, All Shade, means "This statement is true, so I don't care if it offends you or not." At least as early as the 1920's the slang verb to shade has meant "to defeat."

Martha's fond of videos about Appalachian dialect, and in one she came across the expression, I'd just as soon be in hell with my back broke, meaning "I strongly prefer to be anywhere else."

English speakers borrowed the German term Witzelsucht (or "joke addiction") to mean "excessive punning and a compulsion to tell bad jokes." While it might sound amusing to have a word for such behavior, the word refers specifically to a brain malfunction that's actually quite serious.

In Disrupted: My Misadventure in the Start-Up Bubble, Dan Lyons writes about slang he heard during his time working at a hot new startup. If someone was fired, that person was described as having graduated, and the word delight and the neologism delightion were used as terms for what the company aimed to provide to customers.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
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The names of professional sports teams often have surprising histories -- like the baseball team name inspired by, of all things, trolley-car accidents. Plus, some questions to debate at your next barbecue: Is a hot dog a sandwich if it's in a bun? And when exactly does dusk or dawn begin? Dictionary editors wrestle with such questions all the time, and it turns out that writing a definition is a lot harder than you think. Finally, a new word for your John Hancock: When you use your finger to sign an iPad, what do you call that electronic scribble? Plus, hang a Roscoe, Peck's Bad Boy, coming down the pike, sozzling, stroppy, grammagrams, and umbers.

FULL DETAILS

Try this riddle: You throw away the outside and cook the inside, then eat the outside and throw away the inside. What is it?

A caller from Los Angeles, California, wonders why we say hang a Roscoe for "turn right" when giving directions. This phrase, as well as hang a Louie, meaning "turn left," go back at least as far as the 1960's. These expressions are much like the military practice of using proper names for directional phrases in order to maintain clarity. Some people substitute the word bang for hang, as in bang a Uey (or U-ee) for "make a U-turn."

The phrase coming down the pike refers to something approaching or otherwise in the works. The original idea had to do with literally coming down a turnpike.

In the late 19th century, Wisconsin newspaperman George Wilbur Peck wrote a series of columns about a fictional boy who was the personification of mischief. The popular character inspired stage and movie adaptations, and the term Peck's Bad Boy came to refer to someone similarly incorrigible.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski tees up a trivia quiz about how sports teams got their names. For example, are the Cleveland Browns so named because one of their founders was named Paul Brown, or because of the orange-brown clay on the banks of the Cuyahoga River?

A listener in Bayfield, Wisconsin, says her grandmother used to tell her to go sozzle in the bathtub. John Russell Bartlett's 1848 Dictionary of Americanisms defines the verb to sozzle this way: "to loll; to lounge; to go lazily or sluttishly about the house."

A professional shoemaker in Columbiana, Ohio, wonders why the words cobbler and cobble have negative connotations, given that shoemaking is a highly skilled trade. The notion of cobbling something together in a haphazard or half-hearted way goes back to the days when a cobbler's task was more focused on mending shoes, rather than making them. But Grant quotes a passage from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar in which such a tradesman articulates the nobility of his profession: I am, indeed, sir, a surgeon to old shoes; when they are in great danger, I recover them. As proper men as ever trod upon neat's leather have gone upon my handiwork.

The slang term stroppy is an adjective meaning "annoying" or "difficult to deal with." It might be related to the similarly unpleasant word, obstreperous.

If you simply read each letter aloud, you can see why O.U.Q.T.! U.R.A.B.U.T.! can be interpreted to mean "Oh, you cutie! You are a beauty!" A statement expressed that way with letters, numerals, or drawings is called a rebus, or, if it's solely expressed with letters and numerals, a grammagram. Great examples include the F.U.N.E.X.? ("Have you any eggs?") gag by the British comedy duo The Two Ronnies, and William Steig's book CDC?

A door divided across the middle so that the bottom half stays closed while the top half opens is known as a Dutch door, a stable door, or a half-door. Some people informally call it a Mr. Ed door, named after a TV series popular in the 1960's about a talking horse named Mr. Ed who frequently stood behind such a door.

Is a hot dog a sandwich if it's in a bun? Why or why not? Is a burrito a sandwich? (A Massachusetts judge actually ruled on that question in 2006.) What about a veggie wrap? These kinds of questions about the limits and core meanings of various words are more complicated that you might think. Lexicographers try to tease out the answers when writing dictionary entries.

Some people are using the word fingature to mean that scribble you do on an electronic pad when asked to sign for a credit card payment.

A woman who grew up in Albuquerque recalls that when one of her schoolmates got in trouble, she and their peers would say ominously, Umbers! This slang term is apparently a hyperlocal version of similarly elongated exclamations like Maaaaaan! Or Burrrrrn! that youngsters use to call attention to another's faux pas.

An Indianapolis, Indiana, listener says that his mother-in-law was asked by a child where she was going, would jokingly sing that she was going to the Turkey trot trot trot, across the lot, lot, lot, feeling fine, fine, fine until Thanksgiving time. Trouble. Trouble trouble. Trouble, trouble, trouble, trouble on the double. Sounds like she was singing a version of the Turkey Trot Blues.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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You may have heard the advice that to build your vocabulary you should read, read, and then read some more--and make sure to include a wide variety of publications. But what if you just don't have that kind of time? Martha and Grant show how to learn new words by making the most of the time you do have. Also, when new words are added to a dictionary, do others get removed to make room? Plus, words of encouragement, words of exasperation, and a polite Japanese way to say goodbye when a co-worker leaves at the end of the day. Also, you bet your boots, the worm has turned, raise hell and put a chunk under it, bread and butter, on tomorrow, a love letter to libraries and an apology to marmots.

FULL DETAILS

After inadvertently maligning marmots in an earlier discussion of the term whistle pig, Martha makes a formal apology to any marmots that might be listening.

Uff-da! is an exclamation of disgust or annoyance. In Norwegian, it means roughly the same as Yiddish Oy vey!, and is now common in areas of the U.S. settled by Norwegians, particularly Wisconsin and Minnesota.

The worm has turned suggests a reversal of fortune, particularly the kind of situation in which a meek person begins behaving more confidently or starts defending himself. In other words, even the lowliest of creatures will still strike back if sufficiently provoked, an idea Shakespeare used in Henry VI, Part 3, where Lord Clifford observes, "The smallest worm will turn being trodden on, and doves will peck in safeguard of their brood."

Raise hell and put a chunk under it is simply an intensified version of the phrase raise hell, meaning "to cause trouble" or "create a noisy disturbance."

The phrases You bet your boots! and You bet your britches! mean "without a doubt" and most likely originate from gambling culture, where you wouldn't want to bet your boots or trousers without being confident that you'd win.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski takes us on a road trip, which means another round of the License Plate Game!

A Chicago-area listener wonders: When dictionaries go from print to online, are any words removed? What's the best print dictionary to replace the old one on her dictionary stand? For more about dictionaries and their history, Grant recommends the Cordell Collection of Dictionaries at Indiana State University in Terre Haute, Indiana.

When two people are walking side-by-side holding hands but briefly separate to go around an obstacle on opposite sites, they might say bread and butter. This phrase apparently stems from an old superstition that if the two people want to remain inseparable as bread and butter, they should invoke that kind of togetherness. There are several variations of this practice, including the worry that if they fail to utter the phrase, they'll soon quarrel. Another version appears early in an episode of the old TV series The Twilight Zone, featuring a very young William Shatner.

John Webster's 1623 tragedy The Duchess of Malfi includes the memorable lines
Glories, like glowworms, afar off shine bright, / But looked to near have neither heat nor light. Much later, Stephen Crane expressed a similar idea in his poem A Man Saw a Ball of Gold in the Sky.

A woman in Monticello, Florida, is bothered by the phrase on tomorrow, and feels that the word on is redundant. However, this construction is a dialect feature, not a grammatical mistake. It has roots in the United Kingdom and probably derives from the phrase on the morrow.

What phrases do you use to encourage others to pick themselves up and dust themselves off? move on? What words do you say to acknowledge someone's bad luck and encourage them to move on? In a discussion on our Facebook group, listeners offer lots of suggestions, including tough beans, tough darts, suck it up, tough nougies, and you knew it was a snake when you picked it up.

A listener in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates, requests advice about expanding her vocabulary as a writer, but admits she spends only about ten minutes a day reading. The hosts offer several suggestions: Make sure to stop and look up unfamiliar words; listen to podcasts, which will also introduce you to new words; check the etymology, which is sometimes a helpful memory aid; build vocabulary practice into your routine with a word-a-day calendar or a subscription to Anu Garg's A.Word.A.Day newsletter.

A teacher in Oakley, Vermont, noted a curious construction among his students while teaching in Maine. They would say things like We're all going to the party, and so isn't he orI like to play basketball, and so doesn't he. Primarily heard in eastern New England, this locution has a kind of internal logic, explained in more detail at one of our favorite resources, The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project.

A Jackson, Mississippi, woman who used to work in Japan says that each day as she left the office, her colleagues would say Otsukaresama desu, which means something along the lines of "Thank you for your hard work." Although its literal translation suggests that the hearer must be exhausted, it's simply understood as a polite, set phrase with no exact equivalent in English.

Pulitzer-winning historian Barbara Tuchman has observed that her single most formative educational experience was exploring Harvard's Widener Library. She captured the feelings of many library lovers when she added that her own daughter couldn't enter that building "without feeling that she ought to carry a compass, a sandwich, and a whistle."

To go at something bald-headed means "to rush at something head-on." The same idea informs the phrase to I'm going to pinch you bald-headed, which an exasperated parent might say to a misbehaving child. The more common version is snatch you bald-headed, a version of which Mark Twain used in his Letters from Hawaii.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

This week on "A Way with Words": The language of political speech. Politicians have to repeat themselves so often that they naturally develop a repertoire of stock phrases to fall back on. But is there any special meaning to subtler locutions, such as beginning a sentence with the words "Now, look…"? Also, a peculiar twist in Southern speech may leave outsiders scratching their heads: In parts of the South "I wouldn't care to" actually means "I would indeed like to." Finally, how the word "nerd" went from a dismissive term to a badge of honor. Also, dog in the manger, crumb crushers, hairy panic, pink slips, make a branch, and horning hour.

FULL DETAILS

A listener in Weathersfield, Vermont, remembers going on car trips as a young child and wondering why, toward the end of the day, her parents would be on the lookout for motels with bacon seed.

Someone who is likened to a dog in the manger is acting spitefully, claiming something they don't even need or want in order to prevent others from having it. The story that inspired this phrase goes all the way back to ancient Greece.

A Denton, Texas, caller wonders: Are politicians increasingly starting sentences with the phrase Now, look . . . ?

A listener in Ellsworth, Michigan, shares a favorite simile from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams: The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.

Make a branch is a euphemism that means "to urinate," the word branch being a dialectal term for "a small stream."

Quiz Guy John Chaneski puts on his toque and serves up a quiz about kitchen spices.

A San Antonio, Texas, listener is puzzled about a story in The Guardian about Mavis Staples speculating about her romance with Bob Dylan: "If we’d had some little plum-crushers, how our lives would be. The kids would be singing now, and Bobby and I would be holding each other up." Plum-crushers? Chances are, though, that the reporter misheard a different slang term common in the African-American community.

Nerd used to be a term of derision, connoting someone who was socially awkward and obsessed with a narrow field of interest. Now it's used more admiringly for anyone who has a passion for a particular topic. Linguists call that type of softening amelioration.

A Toronto, Canada, caller wonders how a notice that an employee is being fired ever came to be known as a pink slip.

Martha reads Jessica Goodfellow's poem about the sound of water, "Chance of Precipitation," which first appeared in the Beloit Poetry Journal.

A man who moved to Kingsport, Tennessee, was puzzled when he offered one of his new neighbors a refill on her beverage. She said I wouldn't care to have any, which he understood to be a refusal. What she meant was that she did want another glass. Turns out in that part of the country I wouldn't care to can mean I would like to, the key word being care, as in "mind" or "be bothered."

If someone's really intelligent, they might be described with the simile as smart as a bee sting.

We're off like a dirty shirt indicates the speaker is "leaving right away" or "commencing immediately." Similar phrases include off like a prom dress and off like a bride's nightie. All of them suggest haste, urgency, and speed.

Hairy panic is a weed that's wreaking havoc in a small Australian town. The panic in its name has nothing to do with extreme anxiety or overpowering fear. Hairy panic, also known as panic grass, in the scientific genus Panicum, which comprises certain cereal-producing grasses, and derives from Latin panus, or "ear of millet."

A woman in Bozeman, Montana, wonders if any other families use the term horning hour as synonym for happy hour. The term's a bit of a mystery, although it may have something to do with horning as in a shivaree, charivari, or other noisy celebration in the Old West.

One way of saying someone's a tightwad or cheapskate is to say he has fishhooks in his pocket, meaning he's so reluctant to reach into his pocket for his wallet, it's as if he'd suffer bodily injury if he did. In Australia, a similar idea is expressed with the phrases he has scorpions in his pocket or he has mousetraps in his pocket. In Argentina, what's lurking in a penny-pincher's pocket is a crocodile.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

How do languages change and grow? Does every language acquire new words in the same way? Martha and Grant focus on how that process happens in English and Spanish. Plus, the stories behind the Spanish word "gringo" and the old instruction to elementary school students to sit "Indian Style." Finally, the English equivalents of German sayings provide clever ways to think about naps, procrastination, lemons, and more. Also: catawampus, raunchy, awful vs. awesome, Man Friday, and no-see-ums.

FULL DETAILS

If you're looking forlorn and at a loss, a German speaker might describe you with a phrase that translates as "ordered but not picked up." It's as if you're a forgotten pizza sitting on a restaurant counter.

Sitting on the floor Indian style, with one's legs crossed, is a reference to Native Americans' habit of sitting that way, a practice recorded early in this country's history in the journals of French traders. Increasingly, though, schools across the United States are replacing this expression with the term criss-cross applesauce. In the United Kingdom, however, this way of sitting is more commonly known as Turkish style or tailor style.

A nine-year-old from Yuma, Arizona, wants to know the origin of catawampus. So do etymologists. Catawampus means "askew," "awry," or "crooked." We do know the word has been around for more than a century, and is spelled many different ways, such as cattywampus and caddywampus. It may derive from the Scots word wampish, meaning to "wriggle," "twist," or "swerve."

How sour is it? If you speak German, you might answer with a phrase that translates as "That's so sour it will pull the holes in your socks together."

A sixth-grade teacher in San Antonio, Texas, is skeptical about a story that the gringo derives from a song lyric. He's right. The most likely source of this word is the Spanish word for "Greek," griego, a term applied to foreigners much the same way that English speakers might say that an unintelligible language is Greek to me. The ancient Greeks, on the other hand, imitated the sound of foreigners with the word barbaroi, the source of our own word barbarian.

The board game Clue inspired this week's puzzle from our Quiz Guy John Chaneski. It also inspired him to create an online petition to give Mrs. White a doctor's degree.

What's the meaning of the word raunchy? A woman in Indianapolis, Indiana, thinks it means something naughty or ribald, but to her husband's family, the word can mean "icky" or otherwise "unpleasant." She learned this when one of them mentioned that her husband's grandfather was feeling raunchy. What they mean was that he had a bad cold. The word raunchy has undergone a transformation over the years, from merely "unkempt" or "sloppy" to "coarse" and "vulgar."

A German idiom for "I'm going to take a nap" translates as "I have to take a look at myself from the inside."

A native of Colombia wants to know: Do different languages add new words in similar ways? He believes that Spanish, for example, is far less open to innovation than English.

Awesome and awful may have the same root, but they've evolved opposite meanings. Awful goes back more than a thousand years, originally meaning "full of awe" and later, "causing dread." Awesome showed up later and fulfills a different semantic role, meaning "fantastic" or "wonderful."

More listeners weigh in on our earlier discussion about the word gypsy, and whether it's to be avoided.

A listener in Norwich, Connecticut, is going through a trove of love letters her parents sent each other during World War II. In one of them, her father repeatedly used the word hideous in an ironic way to mean "wonderful." Is that part of the slang of the time?

An astute German phrase about procrastination translates as "In the evening, lazy people get busy."

A young woman is puzzled when her boyfriend's father says he was looking for someone who needs a Good Boy Friday. It's most likely a reference to Daniel Defoe's 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe. The title character spends 30 years on a remote tropical island, and eventually saves the life of an islander who becomes his helper. Crusoe decides to call him Friday, since that's the day of the week when they first encountered each other. Over time, English speakers began using the term Man Friday to mean a manservant or valet, and later the term Girl Friday came to mean an office assistant or secretary.

The term no-see-ums refers to those pesky gnats that come out in the heat and humidity and are so tiny they're almost invisible. The term goes back at least as far as the 1830's, and is heard particularly in the Northeastern United States.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

The stories behind slang, political and otherwise. The dated term "jingoism" denotes a kind of belligerent nationalism. But the word's roots lie in an old English drinking-house song that was popular during wartime. Speaking of fightin' words, the expression "out the side of your neck" came up in a feud between Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa--and let's just say the phrase is hardly complimentary. Finally, a German publishing company has declared that the top slang term among that country's youth is a name for someone who's completely absorbed in his cell phone. That word is...Smombie! And if you're guessing that Smombie comes from "zombie," you're right. Plus, thaw vs. unthaw, dinner vs. supper, groundhog vs. whistle pig, riddles galore, speed bumps and sleeping policemen, pirooting around, and kick into touch.

FULL DETAILS

Riddle: This two-syllable word has five letters. If you remove letters from it one by one, its pronunciation is still the same.

A husband and wife have a heated dispute. The topic? Whether thaw and unthaw mean the same thing.

What English speakers call speed bumps or sleeping policemen go by different names in various parts of the Spanish-speaking world. In Argentina, traffic is slowed by lomos de burro, or "burro's backs." In Puerto Rico that bump in the road is a muerto, or "dead person." In Mexico, those things are called topes, a word that's probably onomatopoetic.

A St. Petersburg, Florida, listener says when she used to ask her mother what was for dinner, her mom's answer was often Root little pig or die, meaning "You'll have to fend for yourself." An older version, root hog or die, goes all the way back to the memoirs of Davy Crockett, published in 1834. It refers to a time when hogs weren't fenced in and had to find most of their own food.

The German publisher Langenscheidt declared Smombie as the Youth Word of the Year for 2015. A portmanteau of the German borrowings Smartphone and Zombie, Smombie denotes someone so absorbed in their small, glowing screen that they're oblivious to the rest of the world. Runner-up words included merkeln, "to do nothing" or "to decide nothing"--a reference to Chancellor Angela Merkel's deliberate decision-making style--and Maulpesto, or "halitosis"-- literally, "mouth pesto."

Puzzle Person John Chaneski proffers problems pertaining to the letter P. What alliterative term, for example, also means "wet blanket"?

A San Antonio, Texas, caller wonders: What's a good word for a shortcut that ends up taking much longer than the recommended route? You might call the opposite of a shortcut a longcut, or perhaps even a longpaste. But there's also the joking faux-Latinate term circumbendibus, first used in 17th-century England to mean "a roundabout process."

A listener from Oconomowoc, Wisconsin, sent us this riddle: I begin at the end. I am constant but never the same. I am frequently captured but never possessed. What am I?

Jingoism, or "extreme nationalism," derives from a drinking-hall song popular in the 1870's, with the belligerent refrain: "We don't want to fight but by jingo if we do / We've got the ships, we've got the men, and got the money too / We've fought the Bear before and while we're Britons true / The Russians shall not have Constantinople." The term jingo came to denote "fervent patriot espousing an aggressive foreign policy."

In rugby and soccer to kick into touch means to "kick a ball out of play." The phrase by extension can mean to "take some kind of action so that a decision is postponed" or otherwise get rid of a problem.

The Twitter feud between Kanye West and Wiz Khalifa has a listener wondering about the phrase talk out the side of your neck, meaning to "talk trash about someone." It's simply a variation of talking out of the side of one's mouth.

When they happen to say the same word at the very same time, many children play a version of the Jinx! game that ends with the declaration, You owe me a Coke! Martha shares an old version from the Ozarks that ends with a different line: What goes up the chimney? Smoke!

Many listeners responded to our conversation about the use of the term auntie to refer to an older woman who is not a blood relative. It turns out that throughout much of Africa, Asia, as well as among Native Americans, the word auntie, or its equivalent in another language, is commonly used as a term of respect for an older woman who is close to one's family but not related by blood.

A Las Vegas, Nevada, listener says her South Dakota-born mother always refers to supper as the last meal of the day and dinner as the largest meal of the day. It's caused some confusion in the family. Linguist Bert Vaux has produced dialect maps of the United States showing that in fact quite a bit of variation in the meaning of these terms depending on which part of the country you're from.

How do you make the number one disappear? (You can do it if you add a letter.)

Whistle pig, woodchuck, and groundhog are all terms for a type of large squirrel, or marmot, found in the United States. The name whistle pig, common in Appalachia, is a jocular reference to the sound they make.

On our Facebook group, a listener posted a photo of a doubletake-worthy sign in her local grocery, which reads We Now Offer Boxes to Bag Your Groceries.

Pirooting around can means "whirling around," as well as "prowling" or "nosing around." This expression is most commonly heard in the American South and Southwest. Piroot is most likely a variant of pirouette and is probably influenced by root, as in root around. Similarly, rootle is a dialectal term that means to "root around" or "poke about."

What do you call that force that keeps you lounging on the couch rather than get up the energy to go outdoors? A listener calls it house gravity.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Martha and Grant have book recommendations, including a collection of short stories inspired by dictionaries, and a techno-thriller for teens. Or, how about novels with an upbeat message? Publishers call this genre "up lit." Plus, a clergyman ponders an arresting phrase in the book Peter Pan: What does the author mean when he says that children can be “gay and innocent and heartless”? Finally, watch out: if you spend money freely, you just might be called . . . . a dingthrift. Plus, waterfalling, pegan, up a gump stump, spendthrift, vice, cabochon, cultural cringe, welsh, and neat but not gaudy.

FULL DETAILS

The slang term birdie refers to drinking from a bottle without touching it with your lips. You might ask for a sip, for example, by promising Don't worry--I'll birdie it. This sanitary sipping method is also jokingly called waterfalling.

A listener in Southampton, New York, puzzles over the language at the end of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan, in which the narrator assures that the story will continue so long as children are gay and innocent and heartless. What does heartless mean in this context?

If you're a pegan, then your diet is limited to a combination of paleo and vegan.

Judy from Tallahassee, Florida, is curious about the word spendthrift, which means someone who spends money freely. The word thrift in this case means wealth, and is the past participle of thrive. A more obvious word that means the same thing: spendall. Another is dingthrift, someone who dings, or makes a dent in, their savings.

The term cultural cringe refers to a tendency to regard one's own culture as inferior to that of another.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's shares Writer's Math, a puzzle in which the names of numbers hidden within consecutive letters in a sentence. For example, what number lurks in the sentence Launch yourself on every wave?

Alice in Atlanta, Georgia, seeks a term for an adult who has lost both their parents. The best that English can offer is probably adult orphan or elder orphan.

Vice is a noun meaning bad behavior, but it's also an adjective referring to an official who is second in command. Karen, a seventh-and-eighth-grade history teacher in Waco, Texas, says her students wonder why. These two senses of vice come from two separate Latin words: vice, meaning in place of, and vitium, meaning fault or blemish. The two English descendants of these words ended up being spelled exactly the same way, even though they mean completely different things.

The little-used word famulus means assistant, and originally referred to the assistant of a sorcerer or scholar.

Rod in LaPorte, Indiana, has Welsh ancestry, and always wondered if the expressions to welsh on a bet suggests that the Welsh are dishonest. The verb to welsh and the noun welsher are indeed mild ethnic slurs. To welsh dates back to at least the 1850s, and because it may offend, should be replaced by other words such as renege, waffle, or flip-flop. Similarly, taffy, another old word for the Welsh, long carried similar connotations of being a habitual liar and cheater.

Chandler from Chesapeake, Virginia, wonder about a term her in-laws use to mean in abundance, as in We have strawberries up the gump stump. The expression seems to have evolved from an earlier phrase possum up a gum tree or possum up a gum stump, referring to a hunted animal that's trapped. Over time, it became the rhyming phrase up a gump stump, and like the phrase up the wazoo, came to mean in abundance.

Book recommendation time! Martha's reading Dictionary Stories by Jez Burrows, short stories based on example sentences from dictionaries, and Grant recommends Julia Durango's The Leveler, a techno-thriller for teens about virtual worlds.

Named for anesthesiologist Dr. Virginia Apgar, the Apgar score--a measure of a newborn's appearance, pulse, grimace, activity, and respiration--is both an eponym and an acronym.

Publishers use the term up lit to describe contemporary novels with an upbeat message focusing on kindness and empathy.

Shawn, who lives in Washington State, is used to hearing the phrase right up your alley to describe something that's particularly fitting for someone. Then she heard a British vlogger use the phrase right up your street in the same way. Since the early 1900s, the phrases right up one's alley, or right down one's alley, or the more old-fashioned in one's street, all mean pretty much the same thing. Both up one's alley and up one's street suggest the idea of a place that's quite familiar. In its original sense, alley meant a wide space lined with trees, deriving from the French alee.

Publishers use the term up lit to describe contemporary novels with an upbeat message focusing on kindness and empathy.

To have one's work cut out comes from an earlier phrase to have all one's work cut out. Picture a tailor who's working as fast as possible with the help of an assistant who's cutting out the pieces to be sewn. If you have your work cut out for you, you have a big job ahead, with a series of smaller tasks coming at you thick and fast.

A cabochon is a convex gem or bead that's highly polished but not faceted.

Scott from Copper Canyon, Texas, wonders about a expression he heard from his childhood in the Deep South: neat but not gaudy. He understood it to mean appropriate, but not over the top. The expression goes back to 1600s and has many variations. Early versions and elaborations included as Neat but not gaudy, said the devil when he painted his tail pea-green, or Neat but not gaudy, said the devil when he tied up his tail with a red ribbon. Sometimes the artistic creature was a monkey.

Twitter user @crookedroads770 observed that his two-year-old son referred to an owl as a wood penguin.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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The game of baseball has always inspired colorful commentary. Sometimes that means using familiar words in unfamiliar ways. The word "stuff," for example, can refer to a pitcher's repertoire, or to the spin on a ball, or what happens to the ball after a batter hits it. Also: nostalgia for summer evenings and fond terms for fireflies, plus a word to describe that feeling when your favorite restaurant closes for good. "Noshtalgia," anyone? And: homonyms, forswunk, sweetbreads, get on the stick, back friend, farblonjet, and taco de ojo.

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Fireflies have lots of different names in English, including lightning bug, lighter fly, glowworm, and third-shift mosquito. These insects have similarly poetic names in other languages. In Brazil, it's a vagalume or wandering light, and the Hebrew term for it translates as little ember or little spark.

Jeff, a junior-high band director from Lafayette, Indiana, led a spring concert as part of the Bernstein at 100 celebration featuring work by Leonard Bernstein (pronounced BERN-steyn) as well as composer Elmer Bernstein (pronounced BERN-steen). Since these surnames are spelled the same, but pronounced differently, Jeff wonders: Are they homographs, homonyms, or heteronyms?

To be forswunk means to be totally worn out from overwork. It's from forswink, meaning to exhaust by labor.

Chelsea says that after moving from the Midwest to Norfolk, Virginia, she was confused by traffic reports indicating that a local bridge was open. Turns out the bridge is a drawbridge, and by open, the announcers were saying that the bridge was lifted for boats and barges, and therefore not open to cars. This is an example of polysemy, or the fact that words have more than one meaning. Another example is Janus words, also known as antagonyms or enantiodromes, such as cleave, which can mean either to stick together or to split.

In Spanish, taco de ojo literally means taco of the eye, but in Mexican slang, it's the equivalent of English eye candy, or someone who's very nice to look at.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle involves dropping a letter from a fictional character to form the name of a new one. For example, if the clue is: He once used the Force to turn people to the Dark Side, but now all he does is hang out in bars and toss pointy objects at a board, who would that fictional character be?

Kevin, a longtime vegetarian in St. Louis, Missouri, queasily recounts how he accidentally ordered sweetbreads in a fancy restaurant, thinking they were some kind of deep-fried bread, only to discover that it's a kind of meat--a thymus gland, or the pancreas of a lamb. The origin of the misleading term sweetbreads is uncertain. In his book Cupboard Love, Mark Morton suggests that this name is a marketing ploy to make organ meat more appealing, like the similarly euphemistic terms Cape Cod turkey for codfish, Welsh rabbit for a cheese-and-toast dish, and Rocky Mountain oysters for deep-fried bull testicles.

Like the brand name ASICS, which derives from an acronym, the name of NECCO wafers is also an acronym--at least partially. The candy takes its name from that of the New England Confectionary Company.

Iris from Cave Junction, Oregon, wonders about the expressions get on the stick, meaning get going, and piping hot, meaning extremely hot. While some have associated the phrase get on the stick with an automotive origin, a more likely etymology involves an old dialectal use of stick meaning a rate of speed, and to cut stick meaning to go away quickly. Piping hot, on the other hand, refers to liquid so hot that it forces a kettle to make a whistling sound. Similarly, the Japanese dish shabu-shabu has a name imitative of its piping-hot, hissing broth.

What do you call a firefly in Jamaica? A peenie-wallie. For a lovely use of this term, check out Valerie Bloom's poem Two Seasons. Better yet, listen to the audio.

Katie from Mansfield, Texas, is curious about the term ruthless meaning merciless or having no remorse. In the 13th century, the word ruth meant the quality of being compassionate. Ruthless appeared in the language shortly thereafter, but the word ruth itself faded away. Linguists refer to such terms as unpaired words or missing opposites. Another example is disconsolate; although the word consolate was used centuries ago, it's no longer used today.

Stepmother's blessing is a slang term for hangnail.

Ben in Sydney, Australia, writes with a suggestion for a word describing that feeling you get upon discovering that your favorite restaurant has closed. He calls it noshtalgia, and shares a touching story about his own experience with it. Noshtalgia, he says, is a combination of nosh, meaning to eat, and nostalgia, from Greek words that literally mean return home pain.

Sarah from Leyden, Massachusetts, wonders about the many ways baseball commentators and sportswriters use the word stuff, as in The stuff is there, but the command is off, or The kid's got great stuff, but he's only got one pitch. The term most often refers to a pitcher's repertoire, and has been used that way since at least 1905. Stuff may also refer to the spin a pitcher adds to the ball, as well as the batter's effect on the ball's trajectory. A fantastic resource for all such lingo is Paul Dickson's book, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary.

Why do we use the plural for pieces of clothing worn below the waist, like trousers, pants, shorts, and jeans?

The expression back friend is an old term that means an enemy who pretends to be a friend. It's more insidious than the modern coinage, frenemy.

Elliott, from Cape Cod, Massachusetts, asks about the Yiddish word variously spelled farblonjet, farblunget, and other ways, meaning lost, befuddled, confused. It may derive from a Polish term meaning to go astray.

The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form, also known as OEDILF, includes a limerick by Sheila B. Blume that illustrates the use of the Yiddish word farblunget, meaning confused or befuddled.
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This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Brand names, children's games, and the etiquette of phone conversations. Those clever plastic PEZ dispensers come in all shapes and sizes -- but where did the word PEZ come from? The popular candy's name is the product of wordplay involving the German word for "peppermint." Also, the story behind that sing-songy playground taunt: "Neener, neener, NEEEEEEEEEEner!" Listen closely, and you'll hear the same melody as other familiar children's songs. Finally, the process of ending a phone conversation is much more complex than you might think. Linguists call this verbal choreography "leave-taking." It's less about the literal meaning of the words and more about finding a way to agree it's time to hang up. Also, Hold 'er Newt, copacetic, drupelet, pluggers, pantywaist, this little piggy, and the word with the bark on it.

FULL DETAILS

When an Austrian candy maker needed a name for his new line of mints, he took the first, middle, and last letters of the German word Pfefferminz, or "peppermint, "to form the brand name PEZ. He later marketed the candies as an alternative for smokers, and packaged them plastic dispensers in the shape of cigarette lighters. The candy proved so popular that now PEZ dispensers come in all shapes and sizes.

A Georgia caller says when her grandfather had to make a sudden stop while driving, he'd yell Hold 'er Newt, she smells alfalfa! This phrase, and variations like Hold 'er Newt, she's a-headin' for the pea patch, and Hold 'er Newt, she's headin' for the barn, alludes to controlling a horse that's starting to bolt for a favorite destination. Occasionally, the name is spelled Knute instead of Newt. The name Newt has long been a synonym for "dolt" or "bumpkin."

Lord Byron continues to make readers think with these words about language: But words are things, and a small drop of ink, falling like dew, upon a thought, produces that which make thousands, perhaps millions, think.

Why does the playground taunt Neener, neener, neener have that familiar singsongy melody?

Jeffrey Salzber, a theater lighting designer and college instructor from Essex Junction, Vermont, says that when explaining to students the need to be prepared for any and all possibilities, he invokes Salzberg's Theory of Pizza: It is better to have pizza you don't want, than to want pizza you don't have.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's latest puzzle involves changing a movie plot by adding a single letter to the original title. For example, the movie in which Melissa McCarthy plays a deskbound CIA analyst becomes a story about the same character, who's now become very old, but still lively and energetic.

Don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Although there are many proposed etymologies for the word copacetic, the truth is no one knows the origin of this word meaning "fine" or "extremely satisfactory."

A drupe is a fleshy fruit with a pit, such as a cherry or peach. A drupelet is a smaller version, such as the little seeded parts that make up a raspberry or blackberry. It was the similarity of druplets to a smartphone's keyboard that helped professional namers come up with the now-familiar smartphone name, Blackberry.

A caller from University Park, Maryland, wonders what's really going on when someone says That's a great question. As it turns out, that is a great question.

This little piggy went to market, this little piggy stayed home, this little piggy had corned beef and cabbage, this little piggy had none. At least, that's the way a caller from Sebastian, Florida, remembers the children's rhyme. Most people remember the fourth little piggy eating roast beef. Did you say it a different way? Tell us about it.

The Japanese developers of an early camera named it Kwannon, in honor of the Buddhist goddess of mercy. Later, the company changed the name to Canon.

A Zionsville, Indiana, man recalls that when his mother issued a warning to her kids, she would add for emphasis: And that's the word with the bark on it. The bark in this case refers to rough-hewn wood that still has bark on it--in other words, it's the pure, unadorned truth.

A customer-service representative from Seattle, Washington, is curious about the phrases people use as a part of leave-taking when they're finishing a telephone conversation. Linguists who conduct discourse analysis on such conversations say these exchanges are less about the statements' literal meaning and more about ways of coming to a mutual agreement that it's time to hang up. Incidentally, physicians whose patients ask the most important questions or disclose key information just as the doctor is leaving refer to this as doorknobbing or getting doorknobbed.

Tokuji Hayakawa was an early-20th-century entrepreneur whose inventions included a mechanical pencil he called the Ever-Ready Sharp Pencil, and later renamed the Ever-Sharp Pencil. Over time his company branched into other types of inventions, and its name was eventually shortened to Sharp.

A rock or particle of debris out in space is called a meteoroid. If it enters the earth's atmosphere, it's a called meteor. So why is it called a meteorite when it falls to earth?

If someone's called a pantywaist, they're being disparaged as weak or timid. The term refers to a baby garment popular in the early 20th century that snapped at the waist. Some people misunderstand the term as pantywaste or panty waste, but that's what linguists jokingly call an eggcorn.

A pair of Australian men interrupted their night of partying to foil a robbery, and captured much of it on video. They went on to give a hilarious interview about it all, in which one mentioned that he "tripped over a sign and busted my plugger." The word plugger is an Aussie name for the type of rubber footwear also known as a flip-flop.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

When does a word's past make it too sensitive to use in the present? In contra dancing, there's a particular move that dancers traditionally call a gypsy. But there's a growing recognition that many people find the term gypsy offensive. A group of contra dancers is debating whether to drop that term. Plus, the surprising story behind why we use the phrase in a nutshell to sum things up. A hint: it goes all the way back to Homer's Iliad. And finally, games that feature imaginary Broadway shows and tweaked movie titles with new plots. Also, the phrases put mustard on it, lately deceased, resting on one's laurels, and throw your hat into the room, plus similes galore.

FULL DETAILS

A game making the rounds online involves adding the ending -ing to the names of movies, resulting in clever new plots. For example, on our Facebook group, one member observed that The Blair Witch Project becomes The Blair Witch Projecting, "in which high-schooler Blair Witch reads too much into the inflection of her friends' words."

Which is correct: rest on one's laurels or rest on one's morals? The right phrase, which refers to refusing to settle for one's past accomplishments, is the former. In classical times, winners of competitions were awarded crowns made from the fragrant leaves of bay laurels. For the same reason, we bestow such honors as Poet Laureate and Nobel Laureate.

When someone urges you to put some mustard on it, they want you to add some energy and vigor. It's a reference to the piquancy of real, spicy mustard, and has a long history in baseball.

Need a synonym for "nose"? Try this handy word from a 1904 dialect dictionary: sneeze-horn.

Those little musical interludes on radio programs, particularly public radio shows, go by lots of names, including stinger, button, bumper, and bridge. By the way, the fellow who chooses and inserts them in our show is our engineer and technical editor, Tim Felten, who also happens to be a professional musician.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle about Broadway show titles--but with a twist.

There's a long tradition in contra dancing of a particular move called a "gypsy." Many people now consider the term "gypsy" offensive, however, because of the history of discrimination against people of Romani descent, long referred to as gypsies. So a group of contra dancers is debating whether to drop that term. We explain why they should.

In the game of adding -ing to movie titles, Erin Brockovich becomes Erin Brockoviching, the story of a crotchety Irishwoman's habit of complaining.

When is it appropriate to use the word late to describe someone who has died? Late, in this sense, is short for lately deceased. There's no hard and fast time frame, although it's been suggested that anywhere from five to 30 years is about right. It's best to use the word in cases where it may not be clear whether the person is still alive, or when it appears in a historical context, such as "The Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964 in honor of the late John F. Kennedy."

In the game of appending -ing to a movie title to change its plot, the movies Strangers on a Train and Network both become films about corporate life.

A simile is a rhetorical device that describes by comparing two different things or ideas using the word like or as. But what makes a good simile? The 1910 book Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases, by Yale public speaking instructor Grenville Kleiser, offers a long list similes he'd collected for students to use as models, although some clearly work better than others.

In a nutshell refers to something that's "put concisely," in just a few words. The phrase goes all the way back to antiquity, when the Roman historian Pliny described a copy of The Iliad written in such tiny script that it could fit inside a nutshell.

Among many African-Americans, the term kitchen refers to the hair at the nape of the neck. It may derive from Scots kinch, a "twist of rope" or "kink."

Some of the more successful similes in Grenville Kleiser's 1910 book Fifteen Thousand Useful Phrases include The sky was like a peach and Like footsteps on wool and Quaking and quivering like a short-haired puppy after a ducking.

To throw your hat into the room is to ascertain whether someone's angry with you, perhaps stemming from the idea of tossing your hat in ahead of to see if someone shoots at it. Ronald Reagan used the expression this way when apologizing to Margaret Thatcher for invading Grenada in 1983 without notifying the British in advance.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Have you ever offered to foster a dog or cat, but wound up adopting instead? There's an alliterative term for that. And when you're on the job, do niceties like "Yes, ma'am" and "No, sir" make you sound too formal? Not if it comes naturally. And what about the term "auntie" (AHN-tee)? In some circles, it's considered respectful to address a woman that way, even if she's not a relative. Also, the old saying "The proof is in the pudding" makes no sense when you think about it. That's because the original meaning of pudding had nothing to do with the kind we eat for dessert today.

FULL DETAILS

When people who foster rescue animals break down and adopt the animal instead, you've happily committed a foster flunk.

A native of Houston, Texas, moves to a few hundred miles north to Dallas and discovers that people there say she's wrong to call the road alongside the highway a feeder road rather than a frontage road. Actually, both terms are correct. The Texas Highway Man offers a helpful glossary of road and traffic terms, particularly those used in Texas.

A listener from Silver City, New Mexico, writes that when he was a child and pouted with his lower lip stuck out, his aunt would say Stick that out a little farther, and I'll write the Ten Commandments on it with a mop.

Snarky refers to someone or something "irritable," "sharply critical," or "ill-tempered." It goes back to a 19th-century word meaning "to snort."

According to the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, the expression throw it over the hill means "to get rid of something." In Appalachia, the phrase can also mean "wrap it up," as in bring something to a close.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz that's all about the word for. An example: There's a cave that accommodates a large ursine mammal when it hibernates during the winter. But what's it "for"?

A listener in Billings, Montana, says his brother is an English teacher who corrects his pronunciation of forte, meaning "strong point." Pedants will insist that it should be pronounced FORT, but that reflects an assumption about its etymology that's flat-out wrong. Besides, the far more common pronunciation now is FOR-tay. The bottom line is t's a word that raises hackles either way you say it, so it's best to replace it with a synonym.

If someone spilled a box of paper clips, for example, would you say that they wasted the paper clips, even though the clips could be picked up and re-used? Although most people wouldn't, this sense of waste meaning "to spill" is used among many African-American speakers in the American South, particularly in Texas.

Our discussion of eponymous laws prompted Peg Brekel of Casa Grande, Arizona, to send us one based on her years of experience in a pharmacy, where she had to keep minding the counter even during her lunch break. Peg's Law: The number of customers who come to the counter is directly proportional to how good your food tastes hot.

Is saying Yes, Ma'am and No, Sir when addressing someone in conversation too formal or off-putting? Not if it's clear that those niceties come naturally to you.

A Milwaukee, Wisconsin, listener who heard our conversation about the phrase sharp as a marshmallow sandwich wonders about a similar expression that denotes a person who's not all that bright: sharp as a bag of marsh. Variations of this insult include sharp as a bowling ball and sharp as bag of wet mice.

A dancer in the Broadway production of The Lion King says he and his colleagues are curious about the use of the term Auntie (pronounced "AHN-tee) to refer to an older woman, regardless of whether she's a blood relative. Auntie is often used among African-American speakers in the American South as a sign of respect for an older woman for whom one has affection.

If you're in the three-comma club, you're a billionaire--a reference to the number of commas needed to separate all those zeroes in your net worth.

The verb to kibitz has more than one meaning. It can mean "to chitchat" or "to look on giving unsolicited advice." The word comes to English through Yiddish, and may derive from German Kiebitz, a reference to a folk belief that the bird is a notorious meddler.

On the face of it, the expression the proof is in the pudding doesn't make sense. It's a shortening of the proverbial saying, the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Pudding is an old word for sausage, and in this case the proof is the act of testing it by tasting it.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

In the 11 years Martha and I have been doing A Way with Words together, we’ve developed an attitude.

It’s a positive attitude. It’s who we really are.

It’s the attitude we take toward language, linguistics, and the people who use them.

For example, we believe that if we all — you, me, everyone — try to perfect our understanding of language and how it’s truly used, we’ll all understand each other better, we’ll learn to respect other identities and other worldviews, and we will more successfully avoid conflict.

Language and respect — language and fairness — language and justice — they’re all tied together.

Treating people with humanity is a part of really knowing how language works.

We’ve now written about our attitude and beliefs, and more, and published it all as a kind of platform that explains our mission, vision, and values.

Go to https://waywordradio.org/mission to read the full statement, and to support the show and its mission with a donation that can make a difference.

https://waywordradio.org/donate

Thank you.

Grant Barrett

co-host of A Way with Words.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.

https://waywordradio.org/

Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

How colors got their names, and a strange way to write. The terms "blue" and "orange" arrived in English via French, so why didn't we also adapt the French for black and white? Plus, not every example of writing goes in one direction across the page. In antiquity, people sometimes wrote right to left, then left to right, then back again -- the same pattern you use when mowing a lawn. There's a word for that! And: a whiff of those fragrant duplicated worksheets that used to be passed out in elementary schools. Do you call them mimeographed pages or ditto sheets? Also, three-way chili, hangry, frogmarch, the cat may look at the queen, hen turd tea, and the rhetorical backoff I'm just saying.

FULL DETAILS

Is there a word or phrase that's particular to your hometown? The editors of the Oxford English Dictionary would like to hear about it. In Cincinnati, for example, three-way refers to a kind of style of serving chili. You can contribute your examples on the OED's site, or talk about it on Twitter using the hashtag #wordswhereyouare.

If you're of a certain age, you may remember the smell of pages from ditto machines. Before those fragrant pages, there were sheets printed by mimeographs. Both the words ditto and mimeograph were originally brand names. Xerox machines later came along, a brand name deriving from the Greek word xeros, or dry, a reference to the printing process. From the same Greek root comes xeroscaping, which is landscaping that requries little or no water. The word ditto goes back to an Italian word that means said, while mimeograph comes from Greek words that mean "to write the same." Other terms for similar types of printing devices are formograph, mimeoscope, spirit duplicator, hectograph, roneograph, and pyrograph.

When trying to make themselves understood, kids cab be wonderfully creative with language. A couple of examples sent in by listeners: lasterday, referring to any time in the past, and spicy, describing bath water that's too hot.

Colleen from Fairbanks, Alaska, is pondering the word hangry, a portmanteau of hungry and angry, and applied to someone who's irritable as the result of hunger. Although hangry has been around sincet at least the 1950s, it enjoyed a boost in popularity in the 1990s. In 2018, the Oxford English Dictionary added an entry for this useful adjective.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's quiz involves words and phrases that the late writer Tom Wolfe helped popularize. For example, what phrase is associated with Wolfe's 1979 book with a title that might be paraphrased as Just What Is Needed?

Why does English derive words for some colors, such as blue and orange, from French, but not words for other colors, such as black and white? A fantastic resource about the history of colors is Kassia St. Clair's The Secret Lives of Color.

On Twitter, @mollybackes notes that in Wisconsin, a Tyme machine dispenses cash, not time travel.

Nancy in Panama City Beach, Florida, remembers that as a girl, whenever she asked why her mother was looking at her, her mother would respond, Well, can't the cat look at the queen? This phrase goes all the way back to the mid-16th century. A 1652 book of proverbs includes the version What, a cat may look on a king, you know. Another version goes, a cat is free to contemplate a monarch.

To frogmarch someone means to hustle them out of a place, usually by grabbing their collar and pinning their arms behind. Originally, this verb referred to police carrying an unruly person out of a building face down with a different person grasping each limb.

Steve in Dennis, Massachusetts, remembers a cartoon that showed a boy trying to persuade a donkey to pull a cart by holding out a carrot suspended from a stick. Is that the origin of the expression carrot and stick? The original metaphor involved the idea of motivating an animal with intermittent rewards and punishment -- that is, proffering a carrot or threatening with a stick.

In his collection of essays, A Temple of Texts, writer William Gass observed: The true alchemists do not change lead into gold; they change the world into words."

Boustrophedonic writing goes from right to left, then left to right, then right to left again. This term derives from Greek word bous, meaning "ox," also found in bucolic and bulimia (literally, ox hunger) and strophe, meaning turn, like the downward turn that is a catastrophe. The adjectival form is boustrophedonic.

Mark from Los Angeles, California, is curious about the slang term gank, meaning to steal.

Monte from San Antonio, Texas, responded to our query about what to call people who hold up traffic in turn lanes. Monte and his fellow truck drivers refer to such motorists as steering-wheel holders.

Eric in Fairbanks, Alaska, notes the use of the phrase I'm just saying as a way to soften one's comment or avoid responsibility for an observation. Linguists, who've been studying this phrase since the early 2000s, call such a statement a rhetorical backoff. Other examples are present company excluded, no offense, not to be critical, no offense or the even more elaborate I'm not saying, I'm just saying.

Julie in Nantucket, Massachussetts, was tickled when her father used the expression weak as hen turd tea. More commonly called chicken poop tea, or chicken poo tea, or in Australia chook pop tea, hen turd tea is a mixture of poultry manure steeped in water that some believe is helpful to spread over garden soil.
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This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

--

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Teen slang from the South, and food words that are tricky to pronounce. High schoolers in Huntsville, Alabama, give Martha and Grant an earful about their slang -- including a term particular to their hometown. All we can say is: Don't be a "forf"! And: How do you pronounce the name of that tasty Louisiana specialty: Is it JUM-buh-lye-yah or JAM-buh-lye-yah? And which syllable do you stress when pronouncing the spice spelled T-U-R-M-E-R-I-C? Finally, the word spelled W-A-T-E-R is of course pretty simple . . . so you might be surprised it can be pronounced at LEAST 15 different ways! Plus gnat flat, looking brave, vog, Russian mountains, high hat, whisker fatigue, chi hoo -- eh, fuggedaboudit!

FULL DETAILS

During a visit to Lee High School in Huntstville, Alabama, we collect a treasure trove of slang, including a term that seems to be particular to the Huntsville area: forf, which as a verb means to fail to follow through on commitments, and as a noun denotes the kind of person who does that, or in other words, a flake. Thanks to our friends at WLRH in Huntsville for inviting us.

Jared in Liberty, New York, wonders when and how the term Fuggedaboudit originated and how came to be popularly associated with the New York metropolitan area. The films of Martin Scorsese had a lot to do with that. The word doesn't always literally mean forget about it; it can also be used to mean No problem! or Certainly!

The Spanish term for rollercoaster, montana rusa, or "Russian mountain," refers to the earliest versions of rollercoasters, which were Russian slopes for sled built from wood and covered with ice. Oddly enough, the Russian for roller coaster translates as "American mountain."

Pearl, a youngster in Massachusetts, asks how to pronounce the name of the East Indian spice turmeric.The accent falls on the first syllable, and pronouncing that first r sound is optional.

Students at Lee High School in Huntstville, Alabama use the slang terms snack and whole meal. A snack is an attractive person, and if you're better than a snack, you're a whole meal!

"Rhyme and Time" is the name of this week's puzzle from Quiz Guy John Chaneski. All the answers are rhyming words separated by the word and. For example, what do you call the technique for narrowing the aspect ratio of a wide-screen movie so it will fit on your TV screen?

Peg in Papillion, Nebraska, has been reading Winston Graham's Poldark series, which is set in Cornwall around the turn of the 19th century. The characters sometimes greet each other with You're looking brave. Although brave usually means courageous, it's also been used to mean finely dressed or excellent. This sense also appears in the related Scots term brawf and as well as braw, all of which may derive from the Italian word bravo, meaning good or brave.

Aiya from Toronto, Canada, finds that whenever he moves to a new location, he adopts some of the local dialect, which feels a bit uncomfortable. At one point, for example, he found himself unable to recall if he used on accident or by accident to refer to something that happened accidentally. It's natural to pick up some of the lingo of those around you, so no need to overthink it. In the case of the phrases on accident versus and by accident, though, something very interesting is going on.

The housing shortage in crowded urban areas has led to ever smaller domiciles known as micro-units. Even smaller ones are sometimes called nano units or gnat flats.

Gary from Santa Maria, California, has been arguing with a friend for years over how to pronounce that tasty Louisiana mix of meat, vegetables, and rice called jambalaya.

Vog is the air pollution caused when sulphur dioxide and other volcanic gases react with oxygen. The word vog is a portmanteau of volcano and fog.

Martha reads the poem "Instructions on Not Giving Up" by the poet Ada Limon. Used with permission.

Rachel from San Diego wonders whether the exuberant Hawaiian cry Chi hoo! is onomatopoetic--that is, if the sound of the word resembles what it actually denotes. The cry is not originally Hawaiian. It's a version of the Samoan war cry known as a fa'aamu or sisu or ususu. The Honolulu Advertiser's Lee Cataluna has written about its use in Hawaii.

In South Africa, the word spookasem is a term for cotton candy, although it literally translates as ghost's breath. Elsewhere in the English-speaking word, the sweet stuff is called candy floss or fairy floss.

Cindy in Virginia Beach, Virginia, is going through her mother's diary from the 1930's and finds the term high hat used as a transitive verb. To high hat someone means to act in a supercilious, condescending, affected manner, as if wearing a high hat. In a someone similar way today, the slang term to cap someone can mean to be boastful.

In the United States alone, there are 15 different pronunciations of the word water!

Cats' whiskers, or vibrissae, are exceedingly sensitive. If a cat seems reluctant to eat out of a particular bowl, she may be bothered by whisker fatigue.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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A request from Martha. - 13 June 2018

Have you ever wanted to know who we really are? How Grant and I really see ourselves?

Well, for one thing, we believe that talking about language should be about the variety of its possibilities. It shouldn’t be about limiting, or condemning, the different language of other people.

Isn’t it cool that there are more than 15 pronunciations of water in the United States?

Isn’t it fascinating that our language preserves the footprints of historical migrations?

Isn’t it compelling to reach for the right word — only to find yourself sounding just like your parents or grandparents?

And isn’t it just fine not to judge anyone for those things?

We think it is.

On our website you can read our mission, vision, and values statement. It’s not boring corporatese! It’s something we put together with each other, the board of our nonprofit, our staff, and through interactions with listeners.

It’s who we really are.

Go to https://waywordradio.org/mission to read the full statement. To endorse that statement — and to support the show and its mission — make a donation that will make a difference.

https://waywordradio.org/donate

We can’t do it without you.

Thank you.

Martha Barnette
co-host of A Way with Words.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.

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Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

There's a proverb that goes "Beloved children have many names." That's at least as true when it comes to the names we give our pets. "Fluffy" becomes "Fluffers" becomes "FluffFace" becomes "FlufferNutter, Queen of the Universe." Speaking of the celestial, how DID the top politician in California come to be named Governor Moonbeam, anyway? Blame it on a clever newspaper columnist. And: still more names for those slowpokes in the left-turn lane. Plus munge and kludge, monkey blood and chopped liver, a German word for pout, and the land of the living.

FULL DETAILS

There's a proverb that goes Beloved children have many names. That's also true for pets, and listeners are discussing that process on Facebook.

Gary in Denton, Texas, is looking for a word for the pout that precedes a baby's wail. The Germans have a word for that: Schippchen, which means little shovel, and refers to the shape of that wet, protruding lower lip.

The phrase the land of the living goes all the way back to passages in the Bible like Psalm 52:5. Since at least the 1700s, this expression has been used to denote the realm of those still alive.

In the 1940s, the noun munge was student slang for crud or filth, then later became a verb denoting the action of messing with data in a way that might produce the equivalent of trash or rubbish. Over time, munge, which was sometimes spelled mung, lost its negative connotation and simply meant to manipulate data, as in to munge the numbers. Another computing-related term is kludge, which means to come up with a jerry-rigged solution, and may derive from a German word meaning clever.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a brain-stretching challenge to think of the longest word that begins and ends with a particular pair of letters. For example, what's the longest word you can think of that starts with A and ends with A?

Jessica in Omaha, Nebraska, was excited to discover an arrowhead, then puzzled when archaeologists told her that its age was probably between 6000-3000 BP. Why do some scientists measure time with the designation BP, or Before Present, instead of BC or BCE? The reason has to do with the advent of carbon dating techniques.

Obstetricians use the term multip as shorthand for multiparous, the adjective describing a woman who has given birth to more than one child. A woman who is nulliparous has not given birth at all, and a primipara has given birth only once.

Why is California governor Jerry Brown sometimes called Governor Moonbeam? This ethereal moniker was bestowed by the great Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko to suggest a kind of hippie-dippie, insubstantial, lack of practicality.

Cartoonist Sarah Anderson has a very funny take on the multiplicity of names we give our cats.

Clementine, a young caller from Omaha, Nebraska, wonders why we use the term run-of-the-mill to describe something ordinary. The expression originates world of manufacturing, where a run of the mill is the entire run of things being produced, whether it's lumber or bricks, including defective products. This sense of the word run as an overall production process also appears in the expression run of the mine and run of the kiln. (In the process of discussing this last one, we're surprised to learn from each other that's there's more than one way to pronounce the word kiln!)

During a discussion in our Facebook group, a listener shares that her cat's name evolved from Poor Nameless Cat to PNC to Pansy.

What shall we call those drivers who take so much time when the left-turn light changes to green that you miss your chance to go and sit through another red light? Our conversation about that prompted a whole slew of emails from listeners who've clearly had time in traffic to think about it. Their suggestions include lane loafer, lane lingerer, lazy lefty, left-turn loiterer, lane loiterer, left-lane loiterer, laneygaggers, light laggers, light lingerers, light malingerers. There were also punny offerings, such as phonehead and light-wait. Another suggestion, playing on the term rubbernecker, was bottlenecker.

A Fort Worth, Texas, man remembers putting monkey blood on cuts and scrapes, and wonders about its name. It's not really monkey's blood; it's a bright red substance variously known as Mercurochrome or Merthiolate, also known as Thiomersal. In parts of the Spanish speaking world, that substance is also called sangre de mono or sangre de chango, both of which literally mean monkey blood.

A San Diego, California, man tweets his request for a term for what a dog does when she's happily writhing around on the grass. How about shnerking? Other terms people use for it are stink bathing, mole diving, itchy-scratchies, flea smothering, scruffling, or being a grass shark.

Does the expression to be roped into doing something carry a negative connotation? It all depends on the context.

Following up on our conversation about unconventional forms of diet and exercise, Martha shares an exercise regimen that turns into a paraprosdokian.

A woman in Reno, Nevada, wonders about the expression What am I, chopped liver? Chopped liver is a traditional Jewish dish that's always a side item, never the main course. Speaking of traditional Jewish foods, the term schmaltzy, meaning overly sentimental, derives from the Yiddish term shmalts, which means chicken or goose fat.

In our online discussion about the variety of things we call our pets, one woman shares how her pet's name went from Lucy to Queen of the Universe. Sounds like a perfectly natural progression to us!

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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When writing textbooks about slavery, which words best reflect its cold, hard reality? Some historians are dropping the word "slave" in favor of terms like "enslaved person" and "captive," arguing that these terms are more accurate. And raising a bilingual child is tough enough, but what about teaching them three languages? It's an ambitious goal, but there's help if you want to try. Plus, a class of sixth-graders wonders about the playful vocabulary of The Lord of the Rings. Where did Tolkien come up with this stuff? Also, funny school mascots, grawlixes, that melon's busted, attercop, Tomnoddy, purgolders, and dolly vs. trolley vs. hand truck.

FULL DETAILS

In an earlier episode, we discussed funny school mascot names. Listeners wrote in with more, including the Belfry Bats (the high school mascot of Belfry, Montana) and the Macon Whoopie hockey team, from Macon, Georgia.

A Fort Worth, Texas, couple disagrees about how to pronounce the word gymnast, but both JIM-nist and the more evenly stressed JIM-NAST are fine.

A musician from Youngstown, Ohio, is designing an album cover for his band's latest release. He wants to use a grawlix, one of those strings of punctuation marks that substitute for profanity. "Beetle Bailey" cartoonist Mort Walker coined the term, but is there a grammar of grawlixes?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle about words and phrases that people have tried to trademark, including a two-word phrase indicating that someone's employment has been terminated, which a certain presidential candidate tried unsuccessfully to claim as his own.

He's a native English speaker who's fluent in Spanish. She grew up in Cameroon speaking French. They're planning a family, and hoping to raise their children to speak all three. What are the best strategies for teaching children to speak more than two languages? The Multilingual Children's Association offers helpful tips.

Offbeat mascot names from Montana include the Powell County Wardens (so named because the high school is in the same county as the Montana State Prison), and the Missoula Loyola Sacred Heart Breakers.

Growing up in Jamaica, a woman used to hear her fashion-designer mother invoke this phrase to indicate that something was good enough, even if it was flawed: A man on a galloping horse wouldn't see it. Variations include it'll never be seen on a galloping horse and a blind man on a galloping horse wouldn't see it. The idea is that the listener to relax and take the long view. The expression has a long history in Ireland and England, and the decades of Irish influence in Jamaica may also account for her mother's having heard it.

The country of Cameroon is so named because a 15th-century Portuguese explorer was so struck by the abundance of shrimp in a local river, he dubbed it Rio dos Camaroes, or "river of shrimp."

The organization Historic Hudson Valley describes the African-American celebration of Pinkster in an exemplary way. It avoids the use of the word slave and instead uses terms such as enslaved people, enslaved Africans, and captives. It's a subtle yet powerful means of affirming that slavery is not an inherent condition, but rather one imposed from outside.

A sixth-grade teacher from San Antonio, Texas, says he and his students are reading The Lord of the Rings. They're curious about the words attercop, which means "spider" (and a relative of the word cobweb) and Tomnoddy, which means "fool." Grant recommends the book The Ring of Words, as well as these online resources: Why Did Tolkien Use Archaic Language? and A Tolkien English Glossary.

If you're in the Ozarks, you might hear the expression that means the same as water under the bridge or spilled milk: that melon's busted. The idea in all three cases is that something irrevocable has happened, and there's no going back.

A listener from Abilene, Texas, recounts the incredulous reaction he got when he was in England and asked some burly fellows for a dolly, meaning a wheeled conveyance for moving heavy loads. He asked for a two-wheeler, then a hand truck, and finally learned that what they were expecting him to ask for a trolley.

Madison East High School in Madison, Wisconsin, is the proud home of the Purgolders. That school mascot resembles a golden puma in purple attire, with a portmanteau name that combines those two colors.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Vocabulary that trickles down from the top of the world. Malamute, kayak, and parka are just some of the words that have found their way into English from the language of indigenous people in northern climes. Also, the surprising language of physicists: in the 1970s, some scientists argued that two quarks should be called "truth" and "beauty." Finally, the many layers of words and worlds we invoke when we describe someone as "the apple of my eye." Plus, to have brass on one's face, frozen statues, good craic, prepone, agathism and agathakakological, and the positive use of I don't care to.

FULL DETAILS

In the 1970s, physicists predicted the discovery of two quarks called T and B for top and bottom. Some poetically-minded physicists argued that the T and B quarks should instead be called Truth and Beauty, but the terms top and bottom eventually won out. terms. For the record, beauty lasts about one picosecond before decaying—at least when you're talking about quarks.

Pepper in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, wonders why something valuable to someone is called the apple of their eye. The expression apple of one’s eye is very old, going back to the ninth century. The use of apple derives from the early misunderstanding that the pupil of the eye is a sphere. Similarly, the French word for pupil is prunelle, or little plum. The word pupil itself comes from Latin pupilla, or little doll, because if you look deeply into someone’s eyes, you’ll see a tiny reflection of yourself. For the same reason, the expression to look babies at each other referred to the way lovers look into each others’ eyes, close enough to see themselves.

The expression to have brass on one’s face is used in the South Atlantic region of the United States to describe someone who is bold or overconfident. There’s a similar idea in the word brazen, which derives from an Old English word for brass.

Aru in Omaha, Nebraska, says friends and colleagues tease him about his use of prepone, as in to put something in front of something. It’s a word commonly used in Indian English, is morphologically sound, and quite useful.

Our conversation about Spanish idioms involving food prompted a tweet from Tijuana, Mexico: del plato a la boca, se cae la sopa, or between the dish and the mouth, the soup spills, or don’t count your chickens before they hatch. A similar idea is reflected there’s many a slip betwixt the cup and the lip, an English proverb similar to a saying in ancient Greek.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's brain teaser involves puzzling out clues to words beginning with de-. For example: Hey, how can our team play baseball when somebody has quite literally stolen second?

Craig, a whale biologist in Alaska, wonders how many words have been adopted into English from such languages as Inuit, Yupik, Tlingit and Inupiaq. Indigenous languages in the far North have contributed mukluk, malamute, kayak, and parka.The word parka took an especially long route into English, coming originally from native peoples in the Russian region of the Arctic Circle. Native American terms also give us some familiar animal names, such as opossum and raccoon.

Agathism is the doctrine that all things ultimately tend toward good, even though the means by which tha happens may be evil or unpleasant or unfortunate. The word comes from Greek agathos, meaning good, which is also the source of agathakakological, an adjective describing a mixture of good and evil.

Rebecca in Austin, Texas, wonders why the terms cold sore and fever blister describe pretty much the same thing. Also, why do we say we have a cold, but we have the flu? The word flu comes from the Italian word for influence, influenza, and is a reference to an old belief that a contagious illness was influenced by celestial movements.

Nick, an Englishman who divides his time between Ireland and Virginia, says his American friends were baffled when he described a convivial evening with them as good craic, pronounced just like English crack. The word craic is often associated with the Irish, but it first appeared as crac in Northern England and Scotland, then migrated to Ireland, and its meaning evolved from talk or excited chatter to fun and good times. Another evocative Irish word is banjaxed, which describes something messed up.

A proverb about what family members learn from each other: Parents teach their children to talk; children teach their parents silence.

The children’s game of frozen statues putting players in awkward poses, which they must then hold for a while. This outdoor pastime has many variations and goes by many names, including falling statues, swinging statues, squat-where-you-be, statue makers, and game of statues. A similar game of spinning around together and then releasing each other is called going to Texas.

Wayne in Sherman, Texas wonders how the term pear-shaped came to describe something that’s gone badly. The expression seems to have arisen during Falklands War of the early 1980s. If you need a word for pear-shaped, there's always pyriform, from the Latin word for pear, pirum.

Our conversation about the term bear-caught, describing someone with heatstroke, prompted Sondra in Florida to share a poem on the topic written years ago by her late husband, Bert Furbee.

Jane in Austin, Texas, is curious about the expression how the cow ate the cabbage, meaning to give someone a talking-to.

Sugar weather refers to a period of time during the spring in Canada marked by warm days and cold nights, when the sap starts running in the trees.

Jim from Bowling Green, Kentucky, says he's heard some folks in his area use the phrase I don't care when they mean to accept an offer. This affirmative use is somewhat similar to saying Don't mind if I do, meaning yes, thank you.

On our Facebook group, Brett asks: What do you call a society run by rabbits? A carrotocracy? How about a whatsupdocracy?

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Secret codes, ciphers, and telegrams. It used to be that in order to transmit information during wartime, various industries encoded their messages letter by letter with an elaborate system--much like today's digital encryption. Grant breaks down some of those secret codes--and shares the story of the most extensive telegram ever sent. Plus, we've all been there: Your friends are on a date, and you're tagging along. Are you a third wheel--or the fifth wheel? There's more than one term for the odd person out. Finally, a rhyming quiz about famous poems. For example, what immortal line of poetry rhymes with: "Prose is a nose is a hose is a pose"? Plus, women named after their mothers, variations on "Happy Birthday," at bay, nannies' charges, and a blues singer who taught us to jump steady.

FULL DETAILS

Great news for scavenger-hunt designers, teenage sleepover guests, and anyone else interested in being cryptic! The old-school commercial codes used for hiding information from the enemy in a telegraphs is at your fingertips on archive.org. Have fun.

If you're single but tagging along on someone else's date, you might be described as a fifth wheel, a term that goes back to Thomas Jefferson's day. Not until much later, after the bicycle had been invented, the term third wheel started becoming more common.

The long popular and newly legal-to-sing "Happy Birthday to You" has always been ripe for lyrical variations, particularly at the end of the song. Some add a cha cha cha or forever more on Channel 4, but a listener tipped us off to another version: Without a shirt!

We spoke on the show not long ago about yuppies and dinks, but neglected to mention silks: households with a single income and lots of kids.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski brings a game of schmoetry—as in, famous lines of poetry where most of the words are replaced with other words that rhyme. For example, "Prose is a nose is a hose is a pose" is a schmoetic take on what famous poem?

A young woman who works as a nanny wants to know why the term charge is used to refer to the youngsters she cares for. Charge goes back to a Latin root meaning, "to carry," and it essentially has to do with being responsible for something difficult. That same sense of "to carry" informs the word charger, as in a type of decorative dinnerware that "carries" a plate.

Plenty of literature is available, and discoverable, online. But there's nothing like the spontaneity, or stochasticity, of browsing through a library and discovering great books at random.

After a recent discussion on the show about garage-sailing, a listener from Henderson, Kentucky, sent us an apt haiku: Early birds gather near a green sea/ Garage doors billow on the morning wind/ Yard-saling.

To jump steady refers to either knocking back booze or knocking boots (or, if you’re really talented, both). It's an idiom made popular by blues singers like Lucille Bogan.

Long distance communication used to be pretty expensive, but few messages have made a bigger dent than William Seward's diplomatic telegram to France, which in 1866 cost him more than $300,000 in today's currency. This pricey message aptly became known as Seward’s Other Folly.

Someone who's being rude or pushy might be said to have more nerves than a cranberry merchant. This idiom is probably a variation on the phrase busier than a cranberry merchant in November, which relates to the short, hectic harvesting season right before Thanksgiving.

The Spanish version of being a fifth wheel on a date is toca el violin, which translates to being the one who plays the violin, as in, they provide the background music. In German, there's a version that translates to, "useless as a goiter."

It's far less common for women in the United States to name their daughters after themselves, but it has been done. Eleanor Roosevelt, for one, is actually Anna Eleanor Roosevelt, Jr.

A listener from Dallas, Texas, wonders why we say here, here to cheer someone on, and there, there to calm someone down. Actually, the phrase is hear, hear, and it's imperative, as in, listen to this guy. There, there, on the other hand is the sort of thing a parent might say to console a blubbering child, as in "There, there, I fixed it."

We spoke on the show not long ago about how the phrase to keep something at bay derives from hunting. A listener wrote in with an evocative description of its origin, referring specifically to that period when cornered prey is able to keep predators away--that is, at bay--but only briefly. It's a poignant moment of bravery.

This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Funny cat videos and cute online photos inspire equally adorable slang terms we use to talk about them. When a cat leaves its tongue out, that's a blep. A boop is a gentle tap on its nose. Also, when is a salamander not a salamander? The name of this animal once referred to a mythical beast that was impervious to fire. Now it also refers to heating devices. And: the story of how the Italian term for a dish towel became a word heard halfway across the world in Rome, New York. Plus, Bozo buttons, betsubara, both vs. bolth, straight vs. shtraight, mlem, hoosegow, sticky bottle and magic spanner, all served up with a helping helping of caster sugar.

FULL DETAILS

A listener shares a story on our Facebook group about how a child's misunderstanding that illustrates the power of metaphor.

Michael in San Diego, California, plays a game with his 3-year-daughter that involves spotting small round property markers in the sidewalk, which he calls bozo buttons. His mother played the same game as a youngster, but calls those metal discs monkey buttons. It's unclear whether there's a connection with the Bozo button from the old Bozo the Clown TV show from the 1960s. Losing contestants on that show received a button with a picture of the clown on it, and the term Bozo button came to mean the prize you get when you think you deserve an award but no one else agrees.

You know how you can feel full after a meal, but then dessert arrives and you suddenly find a little more room? The Japanese have a term for this: betsubara, which literally means other stomach. In English, it's your dessert stomach.

Jan in Ketchikan, Alaska, says when she worked in a hospital in Maine, co-workers described a patient with a low pain threshold or otherwise reluctant to move about as spleeny. New Englanders in particular use the term spleeny to mean fussy, hypochondriacal, or malingering. The blood-filtering organ called the spleen takes its name from a similar-sounding word in ancient Greek. The phrase to vent your spleen means to express anger.

A listener notes that among the many Italian-Americans in Rome, New York, term mappine is commonly used for dish towel. In some some dialects of Italy, particularly the Piedmont and Neapolitan regions, the word mappina means cloth or towel or rag. In the mouths of Italian-Americans, that final syllable was dropped, a linguistic process known as lenition, and handed down through generations, resulting in variable spellings such as mopeen. Mappine also extends metaphorically to someone who is filthy or disreputable or spineless. Another term used by many Italian-Americans is gagootz, from the Italian word for a type of squash, which applies to someone acting goofy.

In an earlier episode, we talked about plogging and trashercize, those workouts that involve picking up trash while jogging or walking. Jeannie from Port Wing, Wisconsin, wrote to share another fitness gimmick, the Bean Diet. Just open a bag of dried beans, toss them into the air, and then squat or bend over to pick them all up.

Funny cat videos and squee-worthy photos on sites like Cute Overload have inspired equally adorable slang terms. When a cat leaves its tongue out, that's a blep. A boop is a gentle tap on a critter's nose, so if a friendly pup is nearby, you can reach out and boop a snoot. Mlem is a cats' gentle licking of its whiskers. Tocks, short for buttocks, is a fuzzy behind that makes you say Anh!, and those squishy pink pads on a paw are fondly referred to as toe beans. Many more affectionately silly terms are in Cute Overload's glossary, and are also found in the Dogspotting group on Facebook and the @weratedogs Twitter feed. Linguist Gretchen McCullough, co-host of the Lingthusiasm podcast, has described still more cute internet language involving animals, such as doggo for dog.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's brain teaser this week is inspired by the Grammys, Emmys, and other awards shows. For example, if the nominees Double Bubble, Juicy Fruit, Dentyne, Trident, and Orbit, what coveted honor are they competing for?

We've talked before about needing a word for the disappointment you feel when your favorite restaurant closes for good. A listener suggests a pun on melancholy, meal-ancholy.

Jason in San Antonio, Texas, is curious why the term salamander is applied to small heater on a construction site. In ancient lore, the mythical beast called a salamander was impervious to fire. Later salamander was applied to various heating instruments, from an 18th century browning iron to modern pizza broilers. Salamander has also been applied metaphorically to the seeming invincibility of brave soldiers, fire-eating jugglers, and women who stay chaste despite temptation.

Benjamin in Seattle, Washington, was surprised when someone pointed out his nonstandard pronunciation of the word both as bolth. About 10 percent of respondents to our online survey said they pronounce the word both with an l sound in it.

Martha shares a poem by Mexican-American poet Sandra Cisneros, "Peaches--Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo." It's from My Wicked, Wicked Ways, copyright 1987 by Sandra Cisneros. By special arrangement with Third Woman Press. Published by Vintage Books in paperback and ebook, in hardcover by Alfred A. Knopf. By permission of Susan Bergholz Literary Service. All rights reserved.

Eben, a chef in Lummi Bay, Washington, who blogs about food at UrbanMonique, is curious about the term caster sugar, which denotes sugar less fine than powdered sugar, but less coarse than the regular table variety. The name caster sugar derives from the fact that it's typically sprinkled, or cast, from a small container with holes that accommodate the size of the grains. It's also called baker's sugar or castor sugar, although the spelling it sharese with foul-tasting castor oil is merely a coincidence.

Our conversation about gram weenies, those ultralight backpackers who go to extremes to shave off every last bit of excess weight in their gear, prompts a bicyclist in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to share some cycling slang about ways to find a competitive edge. A weight weenie is a cyclist concerned about ensuring that their wheels and other bike components are the lightest weight possible. Another term, sticky bottle, refers to the way that during a race, a support team pulling up alongside a biker to hand off a water bottle will hang onto the bottle slightly longer than needed, allowing the biker to briefly hitch a ride. The expression magic spanner involves a similarly shady strategy--handing the biker a wrench from the support car, but holding on a little longer than necessary, helping to pull the biker along for a few seconds.

Paul in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, has noticed that some people pronounce street as shtreet and straight as shtraight. Why do some people add that sh sound?

Sandee from New York City thought that she was the only person who had misunderstood a line from the song "Ladies Who Lunch" from the Stephen Sondheim musical Company, memorably performed on Broadway by Elaine Stritch. Years later, however, she learned that Stritch had had the same misunderstanding. Such an instance of words misheard is known as a mondegreen.

The word hoosegow means jail, and derives from the Spanish word for tribunal, juzgado. In some dialects of Spanish, the d sound is not pronounced.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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The dilemma continues over how to spell dilemma! Grant and Martha try to suss out the backstory of why some people spell that word with an "n." At lot of them, it seems, went to Catholic school. Maybe that's a clue? Plus, the saying "Close, but no cigar" gets traced back to an old carnival game. And the French horn isn't actually French—so why in the world do we call it that ? Plus, a word game based on famous ad slogans, the plural form of the computer mouse, a Southern way to greet a sneeze, and remembering a beloved crossword puzzle writer.

FULL DETAILS

The dilemma continues over how to spell dilemma. Are there Catholic school teachers out there still teaching their students to spell it the wrong way, i.e., dilemna?

The saying close but no cigar comes from the famous carnival game wherein a bold fellow tries to swing a sledgehammer hard enough to make a bell ring. The winner of the game, which was popular around 1900, would win a cigar. The game still exists, of course, but tobacco is no longer an appropriate prize for a family game.

Here's a riddle: What seven-letter word becomes longer when the third letter is removed?

The most common plural form of mouse—as in, a computer mouse—is mice. But since the mouse was introduced in the 1960's, tech insiders have applied their own sense of humor and irony to the usage of mice.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a game based on nicknames and slogans sure to test your knowledge of both geography and niche comestibles, such as the product sold with the line, That's rich.

We heard from a woman who told her boyfriend about her plan to get her haircut. He responded that he thought that particular style would make her hair "worse." Does the word worse in this case imply that her hair was bad to begin with?

Nook-shotten is an old word meaning that something has many corners or projections. Shakespeare used it in Henry V when he spoke about the nook-shotten isle of Albion.

Scat cat, your tail's on fire is a fun variant of scat cat, get your tail out of the gravy—both of which are Southern ways to say bless you after someone sneezes.

The crossword puzzle community lost an exceptional man when Merl Reagle died recently. Reagle was a gifted puzzle writer and a lovely person who gave his crosswords a sense of life outside the arcane world of word puzzles.

What do you call the phenomenon of running into a dear friend you haven't seen in decades? Deja you, maybe?

The French horn, a beautiful instrument known for its mellow sound, originated as a hunting horn. The French merely added some innovations that made it more of a practical, usable instrument. But professional musicians often prefer to call it simply the horn.

It might be the grooviest new holiday since Burning Man: Hippie Christmas is the annual festivity surrounding the end of the college school year, when students leave perfectly good clothing and household goods by the curb or the dumpster because they don't want to schlep it all back home.

That foam thing you put around a beer or soda can to keep your drink cold and your hand warm is called a koozie. Or a cozy. Or a coozy, or a kozy or any variant of those spellings. It originates from the tea cozy, pronounced with the long o sound. But a patented version with the brand name Koozie came about in the 1980's, making the double-o sound a popular way to pronounce it as well.

This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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An Ohio community is divided over the name of the local high school's mascot. For years, their teams have been called the Redskins. Is that name derogatory -- or does it honor the history of Native Americans in that area? And: You know when you're waiting in line to make a left turn at a traffic light, but the driver ahead of you is so busy with their cell phone that you end up having to sit through another red light? There ought to be a word for that, right? Maybe there is. Finally, the surprising connection between a passage of ancient poetry and familiar brand of athletic shoes. Plus rhyming phrases, far out, using a wheelchair vs. confined to a wheelchair, honey hole, pirate lingo, honte, and floorios.

FULL DETAILS

On Twitter @flaminghaystack asks: What if the person who named walkie talkies named everything? For starters, we might refer to a defibrillator as a hearty starty and stamps as licky stickies.

A San Diego, California, listener wonders if the expression far out originally had to do with surfing. This expression describing something excellent or otherwise impressive originated in the world of jazz, where far out suggested the idea of something beyond compare.

The Yiddish phrase Hak mir nisht keyn tshaynik and its variants have been used to tell someone to stop babbling or making noise. Literally, it means Don't knock me a teakettle.

After the death of theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking, @tommysantelli tweeted a powerful reminder about the language we use to describe someone who uses a wheelchair.

A Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, listener notes that the word cunning is sometimes used to describe a cute baby. In the 14th century, this adjective had to do with the idea of knowing, and eventually also acquired the meaning of quaint or charming. The word cute itself followed a somewhat similar path, deriving from acute, meaning sharp or knowledgeable.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a take-off puzzle this week, offering clues to rhyming two-word phrases made by removing the letter D from the beginning of one of them. For example, if your sound equipment was damaged in a flood, what are you left with?

A debate is raging in a Cincinnati, Ohio, community over the name of a local high school mascot, the Redskins. What's the origin of the word redskin, and is it a derogatory term or an homage to Native Americans? The book Redskins: Insult and Brand by C. Richard King is a helpful resource on this topic. In this local dispute, the adults seem to be arguing past each other, and the hosts suggest that the students themselves should be brought into the discussion.

Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time. This may be a Jewish proverb, although its provenance is uncertain. In any case, it's a reminder that while young people still have much to learn, they also know things their elders don't.

A law enforcement professional describes a dispute that arose over the term honey hole. He and some of his colleagues understand it to mean a place where many citations would be written, but two others took offense at what they perceived as a sexual connotation. Actually, the term honey hole has had a variety of meanings over the years, including a hole in a tree where honey is found, a good fishing or hunting spot, a place on a baseball field where a hit ball is likely to land, a strong source of income or profit, a hole made in a log to attract raccoons, a spot where in-ground compost is made. Honey hole is also used ironically to mean a latrine or an area where one is likely to catch a serious illness like malaria.

A ninth-grade English teacher in Canfield, Ohio, says that when her class reached the climactic scene in The Odyssey where Odysseus bends his mighty bow and kills his wife's suitors, a student wondered whether the correct phrase is shoot a bow or shoot an arrow. The latter is far more common.

The Latin phrase mens sana in corpore sano, or "a healthy mind in a healthy body," comes from one of the Satires of the ancient Roman poet Juvenal. Fast-forward to 1977, when the Japanese manufacturer of athletic footwear was looking for a name for his new product. He chose an acronym based on a phrase with roughly the same translation, anima sana in corpore sano, or ASICS.

You know when you're waiting in line to make a left turn at a traffic light, but the pokey driver ahead of you is so busy with their cell phone that you end up having to sit through another red light? Shouldn't there be a word for those selfish drivers? How about left-lane losers? Or light hogs? Maybe lanesquatters? A listener in La Jolla, California, believes that naming this phenomenon will be the first step to ending it.

Honeypots is a children's game in which players sit or squat with their hands gripping the backs of their thighs, while other players lift them up by the armpits and shake or swing them in an attempt to make them lose their grip. What fun!

Why is the past tense of buy not buyed but bought? Often the verbs most likely to have such irregular forms are the simplest, reflecting the residue of centuries-old grammatical features.

A chance encounter with University of California San Diego professor of history Mark Hanna, author of Pirate Nests and the Rise of the British Empire, 1570-1740, leads to a discussion of how the saying Arrr! came to be associated with pirates. This exclamation seems to have been popularized by British actor Robert Newton in the 1950 movie Treasure Island.

A woman in Lafayette, Louisiana, and wonders about the Cajun French word honte, which means extreme embarrassment and shame.

Food that fell on the floor that you go ahead and eat anyway? That's a floorio.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

This week on "A Way with Words": This week on "A Way with Words": Can language change bad behavior in crowded places? The Irish Railway system has launched ad campaign to encourage passengers to be more generous at boarding time. For example, have you ever rummaged through your belongings or pretended to have an intense phone conversation in order to keep someone from grabbing the seat next to you? Then you're busted -- there's a word for that! Also, one of America's top experts on garage sales is looking for the right term for that kind of bargain-hunting. Is it garage-sailing? Yard-selling? Or something else? Plus, a Godfather-themed word game you can't refuse. And conversational openers, see-saw vs. teeter-totter, ledged out, scartling, trade-last, and beat the band.

FULL DETAILS

If you're the type of person who wants so badly to sit alone on a train that you have strategies for deterring other passengers from taking the seat next to yours, the Irish train system is onto you. Irish Rail's #GiveUpYourSeat campaign has posters all over trains warning people about frummaging (pretending to rummage through your bag in the seat next to yours) and snoofing (spoof snoozing).

The guy who may be the nation's foremost garage sale expert called us from Crescent City, California, with a question that's vital for anyone writing or thinking about garage sales: Do the verbs garage-saling or yard-saling refer to the person holding the sale or the shopper visiting the sale?

Someone who looks like the wreck of Hesperus isn't exactly looking their best. The idiom comes from a Henry Wadsworth Longfellow poem, inspired by an 1839 blizzard off the coast of Massachusetts that destroyed 20 ships.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski presented a word game we couldn't refuse based on the line in The Godfather, "I’m gonna make him an offer he can't refuse." Except in this game, he can't refuse is replaced with other words that rhyme.

There's no one correct way to pronounce buried, but depending on where you live, it might be common to hear it in a way that rhymes with hurried. As the spelling of the word changed from the original old English version, byrgan, no single standard pronunciation was settled on.

A mobile-phoney, as defined by the Irish rail system's new ad campaign, is someone on a train who pretends to be having a phone conversation in order to prevent fellow passengers from taking the seat next to them.

The exhortation in Shakespeare's Henry V, "Once more unto the breach, dear friends," is now a part of common speech. But not every fan of the Bard knows what a breach is. It's simply a gap—a space between two things.

Scartle is an old Scots word meaning to scrape together little bits of things, like picking the coins and crumbs out of a car seat.

Bill Cosby is perhaps the latest but certainly not the first celebrity whom the public has fallen out of love with over something terrible they did that went public. Is there a term for this kind of mass disenchantment with a celebrity?

Goggle-bluffing is the train passenger's trick of averting your line of eyesight so as to fool other passengers into not taking the seat next to you.

The first occasion when a new mother sees company after having a baby is called the upsitting. But upsitting in certain cultures is also used to describe a courtship ritual where two people on either sides of a thin partition get to flirt with each other. William Charles Baldwin talks about it in his book, African Hunting, From Natal to Zambesi.

What do you call the piece of playground equipment with a long board and spots for a kid to sit on either end and make it go up and down? A see-saw? A teeter-totter? A flying jenny, or a joggling board? The term you're most familiar with likely has to do with where you grew up.

When hiking off-trail, it's important to keep an eye on where you've been as well as where you're going. Otherwise, you run the risk of what experienced hikers call being ledged out, which means you've descended to a point where you can't go any farther, but you've slid down so far that you can't go back up and try a different route. It's a good metaphor for life as well.

A trade-last, also known as a told-last, is a compliment that's relayed to the intended recipient by someone else.

We've spoken on the show before about conversation openers that differ from the often dreaded "What do you do?" and we heard from one listener who prefers "What keeps you busy?"

Beat the band, as in, it's snowing to beat the band, or he's dressed to beat the band, is an idiom that's mainly used as a positive intensifier. It evolved from shouting to beat the band, meaning someone is talking so loudly they can be heard over the music.

Billennials, or bilingual millennials, is a new term being bandied about by marketers and television programmers who've realized that young Americans who grew up in Spanish-speaking homes don't necessarily care for the traditional telenovela style shows on Spanish language networks.

This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

If you think they refer to umbrellas as bumbershoots in the UK, think again. The word bumbershoot actually originated in the United States! In Britain, it's a brolly. Plus, a man who works a ski resort shares the vocabulary he and coworkers use to describe grooming the snow. And there's more than one way to pronounce the name of the bread that you pile with lox and cream cheese. Also: strong like bull, whistle britches, long suit and strong suit, homey and homely, wet behind the ears, and dead nuts.

FULL DETAILS

If you think they refer to umbrellas as bumbershoots in the UK, think again. The word bumbershoot actually originated in the United States; in Britain, it's a brolly. You'll learn that and much more about the differences between British English and American English in the marvelous new book The Prodigal Tongue, by linguist Lynne Murphy.

A middle-school teacher and her students in East Grand Rapids, Michigan, have a question about one girl's pronunciation of the word bagel. Is this round yeast roll with a hole in the middle pronounced BAY-gul or BAG-ul? Although most people pronounce it with a long a, a growing number are pronouncing it to rhyme with waggle.

A ski slope groomer in Stowe, Vermont, says he and his colleagues vehicles that make corduroy, the packed, ridged surfaces of snow that are perfect for skiing. Another term for corduroy, or someone who wears it, is whistle britches, because of the sound they make when the wearer is walking.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a quiz similar to the board game Tribond, in which the object is to figure out the bond that links three things. For example, what's the common bond that links the words playground, trombone, and microscope?

In The Prodigal Tongue, linguist Lynne Murphy recounts the story of a friend from the US who was confused when her physician inquired about her waterworks. In Britain, that's a slang term for urinary tract.

The terms long suit and strong suit, are both used metaphorically to refer to a particular strength someone possesses. Both expressions arose from card playing.

In the US, if you're ambivalent about something, you're said to be of two minds. In the UK, however, they use a different preposition -- they're said to be in two minds. Also, Americans talk about brainstorms, which in Britain are called brain showers.

A woman in Bowling Green, Kentucky wonders: How did the phrase wet behind ears come to describe someone who's inexperienced?

Martha shares a quote from author Madeleine L'Engle about how growing up means accepting vulnerability.

An Escanoba, Michigan, construction worker who specializes in plumbing and pipefitting says that when he and his co-workers finish a job just so, they say approvingly Dead nuts! But he wonders if there's anything obscene about that expression.

In the US, if you step on a Lego, you scream bloody murder; in the UK, you step on a piece of Lego and scream blue murder. Also, in the US, you eat scrambled eggs; in the UK, it's scrambled egg.

The Prodigal Tongue: The Love-Hate Relationship Between American and British English by linguist Lynne Murphy is a trove of information about differences between these two versions of English. Murphy's blog, Separated by a Common Language, is another great source, and you can take online quizzes to test your knowledge of the two.

A woman in Omaha, Nebraska, wonders about the difference between the adjectives homey and homely. In the UK, the word homely is a positive term that means cozy.

If you're in England and want some cream cheese to go with your bagel, ask for Philadelphia.

The word bougie evolved from bourgeois, meaning characteristic of the middle class. Bougie often has a derogatory sense, but not always.

Bert Vaux, the linguist whose data was the basis of the wildly popular New York Times Dialect Quiz, is collecting more data about American English, and invites you to take a survey. The answers will help inform a new app he's working on.

A woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, says she's been described as strong like ox, smart like streetcar. Is that a compliment? Other variations include strong like bull and smart like tractor or smart like dump truck. The phrase strong like bull was likely popularized by the character of Uncle Tonoose on the 1950s sitcom, The Danny Thomas Show.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

According to Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, it's important to master the basics of writing, but there comes a time when you have to strike out on your own and teach yourself. Also, some Spanish idioms involving food: What does it mean to flip the tortilla or to eat turkey at a dance? Plus, a conversation about the difference between compassion and sympathy. Also recursive acronyms, bear-caught, leaverites, jonesing, mon oeil, Jane Austen's pins, high-water pants, and save your breath to cool your soup.

FULL DETAILS

In English, if someone's terrified, they might be shaking like a leaf. In Spanish, the phrase is temblar como un flan, or to tremble like a flan. The Spanish phrase darle la vuelta a la tortilla literally means to flip the tortilla, but metaphorically it means to turn the tide, as in an athletic contest where the losing team finds a way to start winning.

Is the word mac actually an acronym for macaroni and cheese? No, just a shortening of the term. If it mac were an acronym, however, it would be a recursive acronym, or one that refers to itself.

A San Antonio, Texas, listener recalls that when she was a youngster, she'd pester her mother by asking the name of lots and lots of rocks on the ground. Her mother eventually began referring to those specimens as leaverites--as in leave 'er right there. The term is popular among geology enthusiasts.

The saying You might as well save your breath to cool your soup is centuries old. Variants include save your breath to cool your porridge and save your breath to cool your pottage. In all those cases, it's a wry way to suggest that someone to be less long-winded.

A San Diego, California, man is having a dispute with his wife, who is a linguist. How exactly do you pronounce the word exactly?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle inspired rhyming terms with the eee-aww, eee-aww, eee-aww sounds of police sirens. For example, what sound does a donkey make?

A podcast listener in Buenos Aires, Argentina, wonders about the differences between the words compassion, sympathy, and empathy.

The Spanish phrase estar en la edad del pavo literally translates as to be in the age of the turkey--to be, in other words, at that awkward age. Comer pavo, literally to eat turkey, means to sit alone at a dance because no one has asked you to join them. The Spanish word pavo comes from Latin word pavo, which means peacock, and is the source of the English word pavonine, which means resembling a peacock or having coloration similar to a peacock's.

An Omaha, Nebraska, man asks about the origin of the term bear-caught, which applies to someone with sunstroke or heat exhaustion. The point of popularization for this expression appears to be the 1965 book by Donn Pearce and subsequent movie, Cool Hand Luke.

In many cultures, tugging at one's lower eyelid is an expression of skepticism, as if to indicate that the person is being watchful and alert and won't be taken in. In the United States, the gesture may be accompanied by a phrase like Do you see the green of my eye? In France, it's accompanied by mon oeil, or my eye, and in Japan, this action is referred to as akanbe or red eye.

In a 1994 interview in The Paris Review, Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe offered some great advice about having faith in your process as a writer based on his own experiences as an undergraduate.

To be jonesing for something means to be craving it. The phrase arose in 1960's drug culture, but beyond that, there are competing stories about its origin.

The cut-and-paste feature in word-processing programs makes it easy to rearrange text. But in the past, some writers literally cut and pinned their copy. At the University of Oxford's Bodleian Libraries, you can see the pins Jane Austen used to fasten together parts of pages from her unfinished novel, The Watsons.

A listener in Fargo, North Dakota, ask which is correct: graduated from high school or graduated high school? Increasingly, the former is falling by the wayside.

A member of our Facebook group posted a photo of a box that left him completely puzzled until he realized that if you look at the word spoons upside down, it spells suoods.

A Lakeland, Florida, woman wonders about the use of the term floodin' or flooding to describe someone wearing pants that are too short, as in He's floodin.' There are many terms for such ill-fitting pants, including flash-flooders, flood pants, floods, high waders, and high waters, all based on the image of keeping one's pants above the ankles in order to avoid getting them wet in a flood.

In English, women give birth; in Spanish, they give to the light, expressed as dar a luz or dar a la luz. Another luminous word, alumbrando, is applied to a woman who is giving birth.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

A young patron's sense of wonder prompts a moving tweet by a staffer at the Toronto Public Library.

The phrases to put on the dog and putting on the dog refer to ostentatious behavior, and in particular to dressing in a flashy way. But what do dogs have to do with stylish clothing?

Our discussion about the many ways to say someone is pregnant prompts a listener to share another one he picked up from broadcaster Paul Harvey: infanticipating.

A woman in San Diego, California, says that when she was making too much noise as a youngster, her dad would gently reprimand her by saying You're a noisy piece of cheese.

Need a mnemonic to remember difference between the spelling of the palate in your mouth and an artist's palette? Associate the one in your mouth with the past tense of the verb to eat.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski, who also writes for Paid Off, a game show starring Michael Torpey, offers a game-show style puzzle. For example, what are the top 3 most likely responses from Google's autocomplete feature if you type in the question Why does my arm . . . ?

Whatever happened to saying You're welcome? A Lantana, Texas, woman observes that during media interviews, people will often respond to a Thank you by saying Thank you themselves.

A listener in Hope, North Wales, points out that there's punny way to spell a hungry horse in four letters. (Hint: one synonym for horse is gee-gee.)

A 10-year-old in Steamboat Springs, Colorado, says friends correct him whenever he says funner and funnest. Are they really words, and if so, is it okay to use them?

A law enforcement officer says he and his colleagues are curious about how the word pig came to be used as a derogatory term for police. This use has a long history that goes back more than two centuries.

The term cowbelly is used in Louisiana to mean both a kind of work shoe and soft river mud. This kind of silt has been described evocatively by writer Conger Beasley, Jr.

A tweet soliciting the biggest lies people heard from other kids while growing up turns up some whoppers, like the boy who claimed his great-great-great-great grandfather was Elvis.

What you call the space between two mountain peaks depends on which part of the country you're in. The word gap is used more in the Southern United States, notch in the Northeast, and saddle or pass in the West.

There's a word for those noble souls who're picking up litter while they jog. They're ploggers. The neologisms plogger and plogging are a combination of the English word jogging and Swedish plocka upp, which means pick up.

A listener in Omaha, Nebraska, says that when he was being particularly inquisitive, his grandmother would exclaim, You ask more questions than a Philadelphia lawyer! This term for a particularly shrewd attorney goes all the way back to the late 18th century, and may be a reference either to Ben Franklin or the Philadelphia attorney Andrew Hamilton, who successfully defended German-American printer John Peter Zenger.

The term mind-boggling describes something that has a powerful effect on the mind. Sometimes it's misunderstood as mind-bottling, an eggcorn popularized by a Will Farrell movie.

The Italian-American slang word skutch refers to someone who's being annoying, and derives from the Italian word scocciare, which means to pester.

The Japanese have a term for the act of buying books but letting them pile up without reading them. It's tsundoku.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

--

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

What’s in a mascot name? Maybe you’re a fan of the Banana Slugs, or you cheer for the Winged Beavers. Perhaps your loyalty lies with the Fighting Artichokes. There are some strange names for sports team out there. But what’s even stranger is the origin of the word mascot itself. It’s from a 19th-century opera! And: the host of a television show about gardening is tired of using the verb “to plant,” and is desperate for an alternative. But coming up with one is harder than you might think! Plus, a word for that sinking feeling when your favorite restaurant closes. Also, a word quiz based on the party game Taboo, the history of cataract, a begrudging ode to office jargon, and an old children’s song about popping the heads off of flowers.

This episode first aired October 2, 2015.

Come From Away, a new musical about the 7000 passengers whose planes were diverted to Gander, Newfoundland, after the September 11th attacks, is not only a fine piece of theater. It’s also a rich trove of Newfoundland language, including “come from away,” and a noun that means “visitor.”

Evergreen State College in Washington is certainly in the running for best school mascot, with the Geoduck. But you can’t forget the UC Santa Cruz Fighting Banana Slugs, or the Scottsdale Community College Fighting Artichokes. The term mascot itself was popularized by a 19th century French comic opera, called La Mascotte. The word is also related to the Spanish term for “pet,” mascota.

The Dictionary of Newfoundland English offers a look at some intriguing vocabulary from that part of the world, such as the expression “best kind,” meaning “in the best state or condition.”

If you pronounce roof to rhyme with hoof, you’re not alone. Millions of people all over the U.S. say it that way, though the pronunciation with the long o sound is more common.

You’re not a true resident of Poca, West Virginia, if you’re not cheering on the local high school, the Poca Dots.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski brought us a puzzle based on one of his favorite party games: Taboo. If he gave you a series of terms that all match up with a certain word — like car, clock, burglar, and siren — what word would you say goes with them?

We got a call from Nan Sterman, host of the public television gardening show A Growing Passion, who writes so much about plants that she’s looking for some alternatives to the verb “to plant.” But what to say if you don’t want to sound pretentious or stilted? What about variations such as “Stick that little guy in the soil,” or “Bury that gem in a pot?”

“Fair weather to you, and snow to your heels,” is one way for Newfoundlanders to wish each other good luck.

The Fibber McGee drawer is that essential place where you quickly shove a bunch of junk when you need to clean up fast and don’t have the time or care to organize anything. It comes from the old radio comedy, Fibber McGee and Molly, which featured a running gag in which Fibber had a closet crammed with junk that fell cacophonously to the floor whenever he opened it.

The high school in Hoopeston, Illinois, calls its teams the Hoopeston Area Cornjerkers, and in Avon, Connecticut, the Avon Old Farms Winged Beavers are a beloved hockey team. In case you’re shopping for school districts.

A cataract is not only an eye condition, it’s also a waterfall. And the two uses of the word are related, in the sense that in the ancient world, a cataracta was one of those iron gates that hung outside a city, such as Pompeii, to protect against invading hoardes.

A chemist who spent years working in the pharmaceutical industry sent us an amusing sendup of corporatespeak that begins, “It is what it is, so let’s all reach out and circle the wagons…” Although his jargon-laden riff wonderfully satirizes such cliched writing, it’s worth noting that many find the phrase “circle the wagons” objectionable.

“Biting the bit,” akin to champing at the bit, means someone’s raring to go, or out of control.

Expressions like, “I don’t not like that,” or, “You can’t not like being out,” are versions of litotes, a rhetorical device used for expressing understatement.

In Newfoundland, the word wonderful is often used as an intensifier for both positive and negative things. For example, a Newfoundlander might refer to something as a wonderful loss.

There’s an old children’s ditty that goes, “Mama had a baby and its head popped off,” which you sing while popping the top off of a dandelion or similar flower.

Is there a word for when your favorite restaurant closes? What about goneappetit?

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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This week on "A Way with Words": Slang from the 19th century. The slang coming out of Victorian mouths was more colorful than you might think. A 1909 collection of contemporary slang records clever terms for everything from a bald head to the act of sidling through a crowd. Plus, how to remember the difference between CAV-al-ry and CAL-va-ry. And: what's the best way to improve how introverts are perceived in our society? For starters, don't bother asking for help from dictionary editors. Also, collieshangles, knowledge box, nanty narking, biz bag, burn bag, yuppies, and amberbivalence.

FULL DETAILS

Mind the grease is a handy phrase to use when you're trying to sidle through a crowd. It's found in 1909 volume of English slang called Passing English of the Victorian Era. Speaking of greasy, in those days something extravagant might be described as butter upon bacon.

If you're telling a story involving someone with an accent, and while relaying what so-and-so said, you imitate that person's accent, is that cool? If your retelling starts to sound offensive or gets in the way of good communication, best to try paraphrasing rather than performing.

Collieshangles is an old Scottish term for a quarrel, possibly deriving from the notion of two collie dogs fighting.

We've previously discussed the term going commando, meaning "dressed without underwear." It first appears in print in 1974, but likely goes back further than that. The scene in a 1996 episode of Friends, wherein Joey goes commando in Chandler's clothes, likely popularized the saying.

A Chicago-area listener suggests that approaching to a yellow traffic light and deciding whether or not to go for it might be described as amberbivalence. It's somewhat like that decision you face when coming toward what you know is a stale green light—do you gun it or brake it?

Quiz Guy John Chaneski wasn't savvy enough way back when to snag an email address like john@aol.com, but he was clever enough to come up with a game about apt email addresses that serve as a pun on the word at. For example, a prescient lawyer might have claimed attorney@law.com.

What's the difference between cavalry and calvary? The first of these two refers to the group of soldiers on horseback, and is a linguistic relative of such "horsey" words as caballero, the Spanish horse-riding gentleman, and cavalcade, originally a "parade of horses." The word calvary, on the other hand, derives from the Latin calvaria, "skull," and refers to the hill where Jesus was crucified, known in Aramaic as Golgotha, or "place of the skull."

Knowledge box is an old slang term for noggin; one 1755 describes someone who "almost cracked his knowledge box."

An introvert in Baltimore, Maryland, is unhappy with an online definition of introvert, and is speaking up about wanting it changed. The definition describes an introvert as someone preoccupied with their own thoughts and feelings—such as a selfish person, or a narcissist. The problem is, Google's definitions come from another dictionary, and dictionary definitions themselves come from perceived popular usage. So the way to change a definition isn't to petition lexicographers, but to change the popular understanding of a term.

What's the female equivalent of a man cave? Some people are promoting the term she shed.

Ann Patchett, the author of This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage, among other books, has some great advice about writing. She says the key is to practice writing several hours a day for the sheer joy of getting better, and find the thing that you alone can say.

The term biz bag, meaning a bag to stuff your discarded items in, comes from an old commercial for Biz stain-removing detergent.

If you're looking for a little nanty narking, try going back to the 19th century and having a great time, because that's a jaunty term the British used for it back then.

Betamax players and hair metal bands may be trapped in the 1980's, but the term yuppie, meaning "young urban professional," is alive and well. Dink, meaning dual income, no kids, is also worth throwing around in a marketing presentation.

In the world of covert secret agents, a burn bag is the go-to receptacle for important papers you'd like to have burned rather than intercepted by the enemy.

A listener from Santa Monica, California, says he's going to mow something down, as in, he's going to eat a huge amount of food really fast. But when he writes it, he spells mow as mau, and pronounces it to rhyme with cow. Ever heard of this?

A fly-rink, in 19th-century slang, is a bald head—perfect for flies to skate around on!

This episode is hosted by Grant Barrett and Martha Barnette.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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The highly specialized vocabulary of people who work outdoors, like farmers and fishermen, can bring us closer to the natural world. Also, a woman who trains sled dogs discusses the words she uses to communicate with her animals. You may be surprised to hear that "Mush!" is not one of them! Finally, if you're getting ready to go rock climbing, you'll first want the beta--a word with roots in the technology of video recording. Plus church key, browse line, smeuse, nitnoy, mommick, zawn, zwer, boom dog, and I think my pig is whistling.

FULL DETAILS

There's a word hole in a hedge or wall made by the repeated passage of a small animal. It's called a smeuse. This dialectal term from the UK is one of hundreds from Landmarks, a book of essays in which Robert Macfarlane seeks to reanimate our connection with nature by showcasing some of the specialized language involving features of the natural world.

A listener doing volunteer work in Tempe, Arizona, is puzzled when a co-worker refers to a bottle opener as a church key.

The highest point on trees that grazing animals can reach is called the browse line.

A rock climber in Omaha, Nebraska, wonders about the term beta, which her fellow climbers use to refer to information about a particular route. It's a reference to using Betamax video to record information about a climb. A good source for the vocabulary used in this sport is Matt Samet's The Climbing Dictionary: Mountaineering Slang, Terms, Neologisms, & Lingo.

Samuel Butler once likened definitions to a kind of scratching.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's punny puzzle involves words that end in -ISH. For example, something that's somewhat like a mark used to identify livestock might be what word that ends in -ISH?

In dogsledding, the exclamations gee and haw are used for left and right respectively. A woman in Fairbanks, Alaska, uses those terms when training her dogs for the Iditarod and wonders about their origin. (As promised, here are her pups.)

The German idiom Ich glaub mein Schwein pfeift is used to express tremendous surprise. Literally, it means I think my pig is whistling!

The term nitnoy means a little bit, and most likely derives from a Thai term that means the same thing.

Robert Macfarlane's book Landmarks, a collection of dialectal terms for features of the natural landscape, includes zwen, the sound of partridges taking off, and zawn, a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff.

A young woman in Las Cruces, New Mexico, is conflicted after a professor writes a glowing recommendation for her that also describes her as sassy. Isn't sassy a gendered term that should be avoided? And if so, how should she handle the situation?

According to Robert Macfarlane's book Landmarks, long, thin patches of snow that have not yet melted are called snow bones.

A trucker in Glasgow, Kentucky, wonders about the term boom dog, a device used to secure things on a trailer. The boom may be inspired by a ship's boom. The word dog has long been used in a variety of ways to refer to something that holds something else tightly in place.

A caller from coastal North Carolina says that in her part of the country, people use the word mommicked to mean flustered or deeply frustrated. It derives from mammock, which means to tear or muddle, and was used that way in Shakespeare's time. She reports they'll also say I'm bent double for I'm laughing really hard, and use the phrase in the merkles, to describe someone's lost their way--a phrase that probably derives from in the myrtles, or in other words, having wandered away from a cleared path.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
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The stories behind symbols and expressions around the world. The peace symbol popular during 1960's antiwar demonstrations had been around for decades. It originated in the antinuclear movement in the UK. Also, why do we say someone who's enthusiastic is all "gung ho"? The term derives from Chinese words meaning "work together." It was popularized by a Marine officer who admired the can-do spirit of Chinese industrial collectives. Plus, a tasty spin on stuffed foccacia that originated in eastern Sicily and is now a popular menu item in Omaha, Nebraska. Also: curling parents, sharking, ribey, a great book for young readers, and man lettuce.

FULL DETAILS

In English-speaking countries, overprotective Moms and Dads are called helicopter parents for the way they hover and meddle in their children's lives. In Denmark, they're called curling foraeldre, or curling parents, alluding to the sport of curling and frantic efforts to sweep away all obstacles in their offspring's path.

A man in Orlando, Florida, asks if there's a word for slowly circling a parking lot in search of a space for your car. Slang terms for this practice include sharking and sharking for parking, and sometimes such drivers are jokingly called vultures.

Following up on our conversation about the need for a collective noun for librarians, a Ranchester, Wyoming, man suggests a Marian of librarians, a nod to The Music Man. And a woman in Bennington, Vermont, suggests that although many people are likely to propose a hush of librarians, she thinks a far more appropriate term would be a riot of librarians.

A Chicago, Illinois, man says his Appalachian relatives describe a thin or gaunt person as ribey. This adjective probably derives from the Scots term ribe, meaning a tall, scraggly plant and by extension a tall, thin person.

The low, wheeled device that auto mechanics use to slide under a car is called a creeper.

After noting how similar the word genre sounds to his own first name, Quiz Guy John Chaneski crafted a quiz that involves replacing the letters gen- with John- to form an entirely new word. For example, he says, from now on when you talk about a person's role in society as a man or a woman, as opposed to their biological sex, you'll be talking about not gender, but ...?

A Huntsville, Alabama, man asks: What's the origin of the peace symbol? A good resource on this topic is Peace: The Biography of a Symbol, by Ken Kolsbun.

In cycling slang, on the rivet refers to putting out maximum effort, and derives from the way cyclists lean all the way forward on the hard bicycle seat, which traditionally has a flat rivet in the very front.

An Omaha, Nebraska, woman wonders about an Italian food that's like a stuffed, pizza-size calzone stuffed with potatoes and spinach, or meat, or broccoli. She's seen it spelled several ways, including goodierooni, goudarooni, and cudaruni. The original version, cudduruni, comes from Sicily and is found in Sicilian dictionaries as far back as the 16th century.

A Mandarin Chinese speaker is curious about the origin of gung ho, referring to great enthusiasm. It derives from an anglicized Chinese expression, kung-ho, meaning "work together," which was adapted and popularized by Marine officer Evans Fordyce Carlson as gung ho.

Grant recommends a book for young readers by Rita Williams-Garcia. It's called One Crazy Summer, and it's about three girls who travel to Oakland, California, in 1968 to meet the mother who abandoned them.

The parent of a highschooler in Madison, Wisconsin, says that at the beginning of each semester, when her daughter's classmates introduce themselves and their preferred pronouns, gender-neutral students often say their pronouns are they and their. Linguist Denis Baron has compiled an extensive list of other epicene pronouns. Although they and their may be applied to an individual, in that case, it's best to use plural verb.

Texas journalist Molly Ivins delighted in collecting colorful expressions from state legislators, including Who put Tabasco sauce in his oatmeal?, said of a suddenly invigorated colleague.

A Houston, Texas, woman asks: Why are there so many different dictionaries?

What's man lettuce? A Tallahassee, Florida, listener uses that term for beard. If you have a beard you might be said said to be barbigerous. If you get it trimmed, you've had a pogonotomy.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

Gerrymandering is the practice of redistricting to tip the political scales. Originally, though, this strategy was called "GARY-mandering" with a hard "g." But why? And: Mark Twain and Helen Keller had a devoted friendship. When he heard accusations that she'd plagiarized a story, Twain wrote Keller a fond letter assuring her that there's nothing new under the sun. Finally, a well-crafted message header makes email more efficient. A subject line that contains just the word "Question" is almost as useless as no subject line at all. Plus, flop sweat, vintage clothing, the solfege system, on line vs. in line, groaking, the Hawaiian fish dish called poke, and around the gool.

FULL DETAILS

Someone who's anxious about performing may break out in a flop sweat, meaning excessive perspiration. The term flop sweat comes from theater slang, and the idea of sweating profusely due to nervousness that a production will flop. In the film Broadcast News, Albert Brooks's character breaks into a flop sweat when he finally gets a shot at hosting the newscast, only to be so rattled that he starts sweating heavily, to the point where it soaks right through his shirt.

The term Re: in a message header, means "regarding" or "with reference to," but it's not an abbreviation for either one of those things. It comes from a form of the Latin word res meaning "matter" or "thing." The hosts discuss strategies for making an email subject line more efficient.

A listener in New York City wonders about how to pronounce gerrymander, which means "to redraw the lines of an electoral district so as to favor a particular political party." The term comes a joking reference to Massachusetts governor Elbridge Gerry, who in 1812 presided over such a redistricting. Gerry pronounced his name with a hard g, and for a while, the term gerrymandering also retained that pronunciation. In the absence of audible mass media, the name spread, but the pronunciation varied. By 1850, for example, an Indiana politician alluded to this variation, declaring, "You are constantly gerrymandering the State, or jerrymandering, as I maintain the word should be pronounced, the g being soft."

The World Tae Kwan Do Federation has dropped the word Federation from its name, and will no longer be known as the WTF. As the organization's president explained: "In the digital age, the acronym of our federation has developed negative connotations unrelated to our organization and so it was important that we rebranded to better engage with our fans."

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's musical puzzle is based on the solfege system of the syllables do, re, mi, fa, so, la, ti. Each answer is composed of combinations or repetitions of those notes. For example, if the musical question is about a bird that's now extinct, what's the musical answer?

The word vintage, from the Latin word vinum, or "wine," originally applied to the yield of vineyard during a specific season or a particular place. Over time, vintage came to be applied to automobiles, and eventually to clothing. The term vintage clothing suggests more than simply "old clothes" or "hand-me-downs"; it carries an additional connotation of taste and style and flair.

Dallas Morning News restaurant critic Leslie Brenner has written about the popular fish dish called poke, which takes its name from a Hawaiian word that means "to cut crosswise." Many other foods take their names for the way they're sliced, including mozzarella, feta, scrod, schnitzel, and even the pea dish called dahl, which goes back ultimately to a Sanskrit word meaning "to split." The way poke traveled between Hawaii and the mainland mirrors the migration of many other words.

A New York City man wonders if there's any truth to the story that New Yorkers say they stand on line, as opposed to in line, because of lines painted on the floor at Ellis Island. Although such lines are useful for managing large queues, the origin of this usage is uncertain. What we do know is that New Yorkers have been using on line in this way for at least 100 years.

Mark Twain and Helen Keller enjoyed a close, enduring friendship. When he learned that she was mortified to have once been accused of plagiarism, he sent her a fond letter as touching as it was reassuring.

A San Diego, California, man recalls working on a cruise ship with a Canadian who insisted the proper phrase is not Let me buy you a beer, but Let me pay you a beer. Is that construction ever correct?

We've talked before about surprising local pronunciations, like the name of a particular town or street. A term or pronunciation that distinguishes locals from outsiders is called a shibboleth. The word derives from the biblical story of the warring Gileadites and Ephraimites. Gileadites would demand that fleeing Ephraimites pronounce the word shibboleth, and if they could not, because their own language lacked an sh sound, they were exposed as the enemy and executed on the spot.

To groak is an obscure verb that means "to look longingly at something, as a dog begging for food. In the Scots language, it's more commonly spelled growk.

A woman in Monkton, Vermont, says that when she and her 91-year-old mother return from a leisurely drive, her mother will proclaim That was a nice ride around the gool. The phrase going around the gool appears in the Dictionary of American Regional English in a 1990 citation from Vermont. It appears to come from an older Scots word that could mean "a hollow between hills" or some sort of "anatomical cleft."

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

The only time you'll ever see the sun's outer atmosphere is during a full solar eclipse, when sun itself is completely covered. That hazy ring is called the corona, from the Latin word for "crown" -- just like the little crown on a bottle of Corona beer. Plus, the phrase "throw the baby out with the bathwater" contains a vivid image of accidentally tossing something -- and so does the phrase "to fly off the handle." But where did we get the expression "to hell in a handbasket"? The origin of this phrase is murky, although it may have to do with the fact that handbaskets are easily carried. Also: Biscuit Belt vs. Pine Belt, how to pronounce via, streely, pizza, tuckered out, FOOSH, and Sorry, Charlie!

FULL DETAILS

You probably know about the Rust Belt and the Bible Belt, but have you heard of the Smile Belt? How about the Biscuit Belt or the Pine Belt? The word belt is sometimes used to denote a loosely defined geographical area.

An Omaha, Nebraska, woman reports that a customer emailed her after a sales presentation to correct her pronunciation of the word via, meaning "through" or "by means of." In this case, the customer wasn't right: via can be pronounced either VEE-ah or VYE-uh. There's a slight preference for the former if you're talking about a road, and the latter in the case of the method.

A Huntsville, Alabama, man finds that his younger co-workers have never heard the phrase going to hell in a handbasket. Although the expression is at least as old as the U.S. Civil War, its etymology remains unclear. In the early 1960s, the humorist H. Allen Smith helped popularize the phrase with his book To Hell in a Handbasket, a dubious title for an autobiography.

If you're tired of telling youngsters to hurry up and close the refrigerator door, try this admonishing them with this phrase or one like it: Stop letting the penguins out!

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a puzzle involving synonyms for the word hard. For example, the title of a popular Netflix series might otherwise be known as the Hard Kimmy Schmidt.

A Vermont family used to tease one of its members with the phrase Sorry, Charlie! She's surprised to learn that this catchphrase comes from a long-running series of TV commercials for canned tuna.

A bolt-hole is a place where you can escape to avoid people you don't want to run into. This term for "a type of refuge" is used mainly in Britain, comes from the idea of a place where an animal might hide or bolt from if disturbed.

A listener in Cambridge, Wisconsin, says her mother, who is of Irish descent, used to tell her children to wash their hair so it wouldn't be streely. This word derives from Irish for "unkempt," and perhaps ultimately from a Gaelic term having to do with something "flapping" or "undone."

In Ireland, if you say someone's not as slow as he walks easy, you mean he's a whole lot smarter than he appears.

A listener in Quebec, Canada, wonders about the origin of to fly off the handle, meaning "to lose control." It refers to the image of the head of an axe becoming loose and flying through the air.

The word pizza derives from an Italian term at least a thousand years old for a type of savory flat bread. The type of pie we now think of as pizza, with tomato sauce, has been around since the 15th century, when tomatoes were first brought back to Europe from the New World.

During a full solar eclipse, you can see the sun's glowing outer atmosphere called the corona. In Latin, the term corona, means "crown" or "garland." It's the source of coronation, as well as the coronary arteries that wreathe the human heart, and coroner, originally an officer of the Crown. Another eclipse-related term, penumbra, comes from Latin for "almost shadow," and refers to the shadow cast by the earth or moon over an area where a partial eclipse is visible. A related word, umbrage, means "a sense of offense" or "resentment."

To be tuckered out, or "tired," is thought to derive from the image of a starved quadruped that's so skinny and worn out that it has a "tucked" appearance just behind the ribs. It may have been influenced by an older verb tuck, meaning "to chastise."

A lecturer in business law in St. Cloud, Minnesota, is astonished to discover his students are unfamiliar with throw the baby out with the bathwater, meaning "to accidentally get rid of the good while getting rid of the bad." You can find out pretty much everything you could ever possibly want to know about this phrase from an article by Wolfgang Mieder.

For a luscious description of exactly what you will see during a total solar eclipse, check out Dan McGlaun's site, Eclipse 2017.

A middle school teacher in Flower Mound, Texas, responds to students' protests and excuses with If all our butts were candied nuts, we'd all be fat for Christmas. It's probably a variation of a phrase popularized by former Dallas Cowboys star turned sports commentator Dandy Don Meredith, who often observed, If 'ifs' and 'buts' were candy and nuts, wouldn't it be a merry Christmas?" The practice of using ifs and buts as nouns goes back at least 900 years.

The medical term FOOSH is an acronym for a painful injury. It stands for "fall onto outstretched hand."

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

--

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
https://waywordradio.org/
Copyright Wayword, Inc., a 501(c)(3) corporation. All rights reserved.

A second-generation Filipino-American finds that when he speaks English, his personality is firm, direct, and matter-of-fact. But when he speaks with family members in Tagalog, he feels more soft-spoken, kind, and respectful. Research shows that when our linguistic context shifts, so does our sense of culture. Also: why do we describe movies that are humorously exaggerated and over-the-top as "campy"? This type of "camp" isn't where your parents sent you for the summer. It derives from slang in the gay community. Finally, if someone looks after another person, do you call them a caregiver? Or a caretaker? Plus crusticles, screenhearthing, growlerly and boudoir, krexing, delope, and go do-do.

FULL DETAILS

Is there a word to describe focusing so intently on your computer that you don't notice the sun has gone down and the only light in your room is from your computer screen? A Twitter user suggests the neologism screenhearthing. Or is there a better word? Screensetting, perhaps. The English word focus, by the way, derives from Latin focus, meaning hearth or fireplace.

A deckhand on the Lake Champlain ferry in Burlington, Vermont, wonders if there's a word for those accumulated chunks of ice in the wheel wells of cars. He calls them crusticles, but as we've discussed before, they go by lots of names, including snow snot, fenderbergs, carsicles, slush puppies, and kickies.

Charles Dickens is credited with the first use of the term growlery to mean a person's private sitting room or a place to retreat when one is in a bad mood. Long before that, the French were using the term boudoir for something similar. Boudoir comes from bouder, meaning to sulk.

A worker in Montgomery, Alabama, doctor's office reports that when the office is extremely busy, she and her colleagues will say We're slammin' or We're slammed. It's a common expression in the American South, and particularly in the restaurant business.

Members of our Facebook group have been sharing stories of signs altered in funny ways, such as the one that someone with a can of spray paint changed from No Logging Allowed to No Flogging Allowed.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's "Coffee Cup" quiz requires the addition of the letters M (as in milk) or S (as in sugar) to a word to form another word that fits a clue. For example, if the original word is cap, but what he's looking for is a place to pitch his tent, which letter would you add?

A New York City man who grew up speaking both English and Tagalog reports an experience common to bilinguals: his behavior and emotions tend to shift when he's speaking one language as opposed to the other. Two good books on the topic: Life with Two Languages: An Introduction to Bilingualism by Francois Grosjean and Hunger of Memory by Richard Rodriguez.

A Huntsville, Alabama, physical therapist notes that patients with a hamstring cramp will sometimes say I've got a rising in my leader. Rising is a dialectal term for swelling, and leader is a regional term for tendon or muscle, perhaps inspired by the old use of the term leader for the ropy stalk of a plant. Another dialectal term for a medical condition is the sugar, which means diabetes.

What's the difference, if any, between a caregiver and a caretaker? Generally in the United States, a caretaker is someone who tends property; a caregiver looks after a person. The term caregiver is far more recent.

Our discussion about grammagrams prompts listeners to send in several more stories from their workplaces. A high-school drama teacher in Arlington, Texas, reports that in the theater world, the letter Q is scribbled in scripts to mean cue. A plumber points out that pipes that are Y-shaped are called wyes. A Virginia man who works in a shipyard that refuels nuclear submarines says that because the abbreviation for Bill of Materials is BOM, he and his colleagues joke about exploding nuclear BOMs.

The noun camp and the adjective campy refer to movies, theater, or a style or an exaggerated manner of creative or personal expression that combines high and low elements of culture. These terms were first used in the underground gay community, and may have originated from French se camper, which means to strike a pose. Camp was introduced into mainstream discourse by Susan Sontag's 1964 essay Notes on Camp.

Delope is a term used in duelling that to throw away one's shot. Incidentally, before taking office, elected officials in Kentucky, including notary publics, must swear they have never fought in a duel.

A listener in Richmond, Virginia, is understandably bothered by the overuse of the word gentleman, as when media outlets report that police have apprehended the gentleman suspected of committing a heinous crime.

A new arrival to Baton Rouge, Louisiana, is curious about a phrase used by her husband's family: go do-do (DOH-doh), for go to sleep. It's from French dormir, to sleep. Grant recommends the Dictionary of Louisiana French: As Spoken in Cajun, Creole, and American Indian Communities.

Krex is a dialectal term, probably from German and related to Yiddish, that means to grumble or complain.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

--

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

Podcast listeners, contact us with your questions and comments! Email words@waywordradio.org or call toll-free 24 hours a day (877) 929-9673 in the US and Canada. Everywhere else call +1 (619) 800-4443.
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Family words, and words about being in a family way. How many different ways ARE there to say you're have a baby on the way? Sure, you can say you're pregnant, or that you're great with child. But there are lots of other terms. How about clucky, awkward, eating for two, lumpy, clucky, or swallowed a pumpkin seed? And: the story behind the word supercalifragilisticexpialidocious. It's older than the Mary Poppins movie. Plus, the made-up foreignisms families share with each other. Anyone for scrambled eggs and . . . oikenstrippen?

FULL DETAILS

In our Facebook group, Laurie Stiers shared the fake German name her father used for bacon: oikenstrippen. That prompted a discussion of other faux foreignisms, such as pronouncing Target as tar-ZHAY or Kroger as kroh-ZHAY.

A father-to-be in Susanville, California, wonders about how many different ways there are to say a woman is pregnant. He likes the term great with child, but isn't crazy about knocked up. Fortunately, there are more than 120 terms, including: swallowed a pumpkin seed, swallowed a watermelon seed, lumpy, clucky, awkward, eating for two, delicate condition, in the familiar way, double-ribbed, preggers, poisoned, with a kid in the basket, joined the pudding club, shot in the giblets, full in the belly, belly up, apron up, up the spout, up the stick, and up the way.

A woman in Omaha, Nebraska, is puzzled when a friend refers to the fatty tail bump of a cooked chicken as the bishop's nose. The term may reference this structure's resemblance to a human nose or perhaps to a bishop's miter. This jocular name may reflect anti-Catholic sentiment in 17th-century England. This structure is also called the parson's nose or the north end of a chicken flying south or the last part over the fence. The French term for this morsel is le sot-l'y-laisse, meaning a silly person leaves it, the idea being that only a fool would pass up this savory bite.

Lapidary prose is so elegant and precise that it's worthy of being carved into stone. Lapidary comes from Latin lapis, meaning stone, and is related to the brilliant blue stone, lapis lazuli, and the word dilapidated, from a Latin word meaning to destroy--originally, to pelt with stones.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle is based on a Twitter thread that involves intentionally misunderstanding the name of the adult cartoon show Rick and Morty. For example, isn't Rick and Morty what occurs when you die and your body gets all stiff? Oh no, wait that's . . . .

A listener in Evansville, Indiana, wonders: Why do we say when something is undesirable that it's for the birds?

The term wordsmith is formed by analogy with older words such as blacksmith, goldsmith, silversmith, and locksmith--all denoting skill and expertise with a particular medium.

Our conversation about rebuses and grammagrams prompts several listeners to note that people in scientific fields sometimes use the letters NRG as a stand-in for the word energy.

A Traverse City, Michigan, man is curious about the phrase his mother-in-law uses: breathing a scab. She uses it to indicate that someone who's pushing limits or otherwise on thin ice metaphorically. Actually, the phrase is breeding a scab, and it describes someone whose behavior risks retaliation, such as a punch in the nose that might actually leave a scab.

A Black Mountain, North Carolina, man is trying to popularize the word earspace, which he feels can be used in two different ways. One sense is the room a person has to take in something by listening, as in I have earspace for a new podcast. The other meaning suggests things that sound somewhat similar, as in the following sentence: Nickel Creek and The Mountain Goats are in the same earspace for me because the bands have a similar sound and I listen to them when I'm in the same mood.

The rarely used English noun list, meaning desire or craving, is entirely different from the word list that denotes a series of things. That meaning is at the root of the term listless, which in its original sense meant a lack of desire. Similarly, the word listy is an old term that means desirous. Another word that isn't what it seems is the adjective full-blown, which means fully developed, such as a full-blown case of pneumonia. The blown in this sense literally means in bloom or having blossomed, and is from the same linguistic root as the word peachblow, which means having the color of a peach blossom.

A San Diego, California, man says a colleague jokingly greets him with What's cookin' good lookin'? It's a version of a question popularized by a Hank Williams song that goes Hey, good-lookin, whatcha got cookin'? This greeting goes back to at least the 1920s.

Our earlier conversation about gram weenies, another name for ultralight backpackers, prompted a San Diego, California, man to email with the story of Bill Lear, the inventor of the LearJet, who once said he'd trade his own grandmother for a one-pound reduction of weight in the design of one of his aircraft. As a result, Lear's engineers adopted the term grandmother as a synonym for one pound.

Which is correct, toward or towards, meaning in the direction of? If you're in the United States, the far more common term is toward.

If you're not feeling quite right, you might describe yourself as awvish. This dialectal term used in parts of Northern England may derive from a local pronunciation of the word half.

The mouthful supercalifragilisticexpialidocious is often associated with the song by the same name in the 1964 movie Mary Poppins. But versions of this word were around for decades, including in a 1949 song called Supercalafajalistickespeealadojus. That similarly formed the basis of an unsuccessful copyright infringement lawsuit against brothers Richard and Robert Sherman, who wrote the song for the Disney movie.

The scientific name for that part of a fowl otherwise known as the pope's nose or the bishop's nose is uropygium. The Greek root of this word, pyge, meaning "rump," is also found in the English adjectives callipygian, which means having a shapely butt, and dasypygal, which means having hairy buttocks.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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How would you like to be welcomed to married life by friends and neighbors descending on your home for a noisy celebration, tearing off the labels of all your canned foods and scattering cornflakes in your bed? That tradition has almost died out, but such a party used to be called a shivaree (SHIV-uh-ree). Also: the expression My name is Legion goes back to a Bible story that also gave us another English word that's much more obscure. Finally, tips for reading a book AND looking up the words you don't know--without losing the narrative thread. Plus lazy wind, plumb, bucklebuster, squinnies and grinnies, pollyfoxing and bollyfoxing, That smarts!, and hanged or hung.

FULL DETAILS

A listener shared a story in our Facebook group about hearing the term lazy wind, which refers to the kind of wind that's so bitterly cold that it seems to go straight through you, rather than going around you.

A woman in Puyallup, Washington, disagrees with her husband about the pronunciation of avocado. She pronounces it as if it were spelled alvocado, but the standard pronunciation is ah-voh-KAH-doh. A small minority of English speakers insert an l sound in the first syllable, which arises from the way the tongue works inside the mouth when pronouncing such a vowel. Something similar happens with the word both, which a some people pronounce as bolth.

Leah, a 9-year-old from Argyle, Texas, heard her mother answer a question with No, no, no--absolutely yes. Why did her mother do that? There are two things going on: the surface meaning of sentence, and the metanarrative.

A woman in Hemet, California, wonders about plumb crazy, as in totally, completely crazy. The plumb in this case has to do with a plumb line, a weighted line used to determine verticality, and derives from Latin plumbum, the word for the metal known as lead and abbreviated on the periodic table as Pb.

In theater slang, a bucklebuster is a line that's sure to get a big laugh.

Ermahgerd! Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle this week was inspired by the Gersberms meme, and involves adding R sounds to book titles to create books with entirely different plots. For example what George Orwell novella would be about a horse, a duck, a dog, and several pigs, and how they get rid of people and start their own company?

Martha and Grant share tips and tricks for learning unfamiliar words in a book without breaking up the narrative. A handy online resource for quick lookups is onelook.com, which lets you search several dictionaries at once.

After Martha gave a presentation to the Special Libraries Association's Southern California chapter, she was left wondering whether there's a good collective noun for a group of librarians. A Dewey?

A San Diego, California, listener recalls that growing up in Mississippi, friends and family would use the terms bollyfox or bollyfoxing, referring to a sassy way of walking. The more common version is pollyfox, meaning to waste time or lollygag.

An opera singer from Ontario, Canada, just finished a run of La Faniculla del West with the Virginia Opera. His character is put to death by hanging. Is it correct to say his character was hanged? Or was his character hung?

The adjective gadarene describes something headlong or precipitate, such as a gadarene rush to pass legislation. It derives from a story in the gospel of Matthew in which Jesus visits the land of the Gadarenes and casts out demons from someone possessed by them. The exorcised demons invade a herd of swine, driving the animals mad, and sending them plunging to their deaths in the Sea of Galilee. From another version of the story in the Book of Mark comes a phrase that may be more familiar: My name is Legion.

A shivaree, also spelled charivari, is a raucous tradition of playing tricks on a newlywed couple. The practice was immortalized in the 1955 musical Oklahoma! (Starts at 2:09:22)

Among whale-watchers, the term flying pickle is used to refer to a newborn baby humpback whale breaching the surface.

A listener in Abilene, Texas, wonders about the expression That smarts! The verb to smart, meaning to sting or cause sharp pain goes back more than a thousand years. The adjective smart meaning intelligent evolved from that sense of something sharp.

Can you munch frozen yogurt, or does the verb to munch imply that whatever's being eaten has some crunch or resistance to it?

A woman who has spent most of her life in Des Moines, Iowa, says she's always used the word squinny for chipmunk, but doesn't hear it outside of her hometown. The term is definitely specific to Iowa, but an even more common word for the same striped animal in that area is grinnie.

In 1963, the writer James Baldwin was the subject of a profile in LIFE magazine, in which he observed, "You think your pain and heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read."

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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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:

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New research shows that you may be less influenced by superstitious behavior like walking under ladders or the magic of four-leaf clovers if you're reading about it in another language. And: sometimes not cursing will catch someone's ear even more than a real curse word. Finally, in what sport do you enjoy a glass-off and speck out before getting flushed? Martha brings back a firsthand report from the language of paragliding.

FULL DETAILS

In what sport would you hear the slang terms glass off, speck out, and get flushed? They're all expressions used in paragliding. Glass-off refers to a smooth, effortless takeoff; to speck out is to go so high that you're nearly invisible to those on the ground; to get flushed means to lose lift and be forced to make a landing. The United States Hang Gliding and Paragliding Association offers a glossary of the slang of free flight. As promised, here's video that Martha shot while getting flushed toward the end of her first paragliding flight. The song is "Fear of Flying," by Pam Delgado, performed by Blame Sally, and used with permission. (By the way, we have no idea who Cindy is, but we hope she said yes.)

A roofer in Virginia Beach, Virginia, has a dispute with his boss over how to pronounce the word roof. Most people pronounce it to rhyme with the word proof, but about 10 percent of the English-speaking world population pronounces roof like the word rough.

A listener in Williamsburg, Virginia, wants to know the correct pronunciation of the condiment known as Worcestershire sauce. The proper pronunciation involves what linguists call haplology, the loss of a syllable next to a similar-sounding one.

This week's puzzle by Quiz Guy John Chaneski involves limericks based on notable news from 2017. For example, how would you finish this one? My dependable British authorities / Say the royals have excellent qualities / Like handsome Prince Harry / Who announced he will marry / Meghan Markle who hails from the ________________.

The piece of playground equipment you slide down goes by several different names, depending on which part of the U.S. you're from: slide, sliding board, sliding plank, and sliding pond.

A Fort Worth, Texas, woman remembers her grandfather used to say You live and learn, then you die and forget it all. She wonders if he made it up. Actually, this phrase goes back to the 1840s and may allude to the brevity of life or to putting trivial matters into perspective.

Our discussion about finding a word that means both nervous but excited prompted several suggestions from listeners. A listener in Melbourne, Australia, contributed another term used in his part of the world: toey. If you're toey, you're full of anxious anticipation--an allusion, perhaps, to a horse pawing at the ground.

A listener in Huntsville, Alabama, says that in her native Scotland, the phrase send out for messages means to send someone to go shopping. The phrase stems from a time when people actually did pick up their postal mail or other messages at the local store.

To eat al desko is a joking term for having lunch at work without leaving the office.

New research published in The Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology suggests that people who speak more than one language tend to be less superstitious if they're reading or thinking in a different language.

A San Antonio, Texas, woman wonders about the phrase to ask for your John Henry, meaning to ask for your signature. It's a variant of the far more common phrase, to ask for your John Hancock, a reference to the bold signature of John Hancock, one of the original signers of the U.S. Declaration of Independence.

The slang of paragliding includes the term cu's, also known as cumies, also known as cumulus clouds, which indicate good lift is available. For paragliders, the term cloud street refers to a line of cumulus clouds that stretches for miles, suggesting ideal conditions for flying.

A Los Angeles, California, man says his mother studiously avoided swearing. Instead of a curse word, she substituted the word piffle, which was often even more effective than a four-letter word because it was so unexpected. Piffle is most likely onomatopoetic, suggesting a disgusted exhalation through pursed lips. It's common in the United Kingdom, and figured in the title of the popular 2006 British television program about etymology, Balderdash & Piffle.

Someone does both paragliding and hang gliding is jokingly said to be biwingual. Really!

A woman in Perote, Alabama, wonders about the phrase happy as Larry, meaning very happy. This expression is commonly heard in Britain and Australia. It may derive from a jocular reference to the biblical Lazarus, who presumably would have been happy to be raised from the dead. Or it might be some sort of rhyming slang that evolved from very happy to Larry happy to happy as Larry. But the truth is no one knows who this particular Larry is or why he's so pleased.

Among paragliders, the expression the locals refers not to humans, but to birds. If the locals are able to soar without flapping their wings, then paragliders know that conditions are good for flying.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

--

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

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This week it’s butterflies, belly flowers, plot bunnies, foxes, and cuckoos. Also, writing advice from Mark Twain and a wonderful bit of prose from Sara Pennypacker's book Pax. And are there word origins? Well, does a duck swim? We'll hear the stories of polka, smarmy, bully pulpit, and the exes and ohs we use to show our affection. Plus! Sarcastic interrogatives, the echo questions we give as answers to other people's no-duh queries.

FULL DETAILS

Hiking in the mountains, Martha kept noticing butterflies at about 4,000-to-5,000 feet above sea level. Those butterflies are hilltopping. It’s when male butterflies of many species go to high points to advertise their fortitude and genes to the female butterflies.

Judy in Huntsville, Alabama, has hundreds of song lyrics playing on auto-shuffle in her head. When the Polka Dot Polka started playing, she began to wonder how polka dots came to be associated with the music. It turns out that the polka dance craze of the early 1800s — named after the Polish word for a Polish woman — gave its name to a lot of things, including this fabric pattern.

Writing advice from Mark Twain, who was not a fan of adjectives. In The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson, he says, “As to the adjective, when in doubt, strike it out.” He also wrote a letter with clever, useful advice that still holds true for the modern writer.

When you would ask the father of Chris from Reno, Nevada, something to which he thought the answer was obvious, he’d answer with jokey phrases like “Is a pig pork?” or “Is the Pope Catholic?” or “Does a bear poop in the woods?” (but with a different verb!). These sarcastic interrogatives, also known as a kind of echo question, are wonderfully discussed in an article by Charles Clay Doyle titled “Is the Pope Still Catholic?” in the journal Western Folklore. (The article is free with registration.)

The Greek word for the cuckoo bird, kokkux, is related to our word coccyx, the tailbone, because the bone looks like the bill of a cuckoo.

Our New York City quiz guy John Chaneski joins us for a punny word quiz. How to play: There’s a pun with a key word missing. You need to fill in the blank. For example, if you don’t pay your e_______, you get repossessed. The answer: exorcist. Get it?

Steve in Bend, Oregon, asks: Does bully pulpit mean what people think it means? Is the bully the same as the bully you might find in a schoolyard? What did Teddy Roosevelt really mean when he said he had a bully pulpit? There’s an old meaning that has fallen away that changes how we understand the phrase.

Hamid in San Diego, California, says that his wife is a job recruiter who finds people to fill high-profile positions. She will come home and say, “This candidate’s a shoo-in.” What’s the story with shoo-in? Where does it come from? It has something to do with an old slang term for rigging a horse race. It’s not, shoe-in, by the way, although that is a common misspelling, and it has nothing to do with footwear. There are many everyday terms that come from horse-racing, such as the term hands-down.

Growing up in Kentucky, where the state religion seems to be basketball, Martha played a lot of rounds of horse, where players compete to make baskets from the same court positions, shot for shot. If you miss, you get a letter from the word horse. If you get all the letters, you lose. Basketball star Steph Curry instead challenged a bunch of high school students to a game of sesquipedalian. We’ve talked about long words like that before.

Rodney in Suffolk, Virginia, is interested in the word tattoo. His grandmother didn’t use it to mean skin art. She used it to rave about seeing a great concert or band: “It was just such a wonderful tattoo!” It might have something to do with a musical military tradition involving a tattoo (of Dutch origin) that is unrelated to the skin tattoo (which has a Tahitian origin).

A belly flower is a small low-growing flower you have to get down on the ground to see.

Martha recommends Pax, by Sara Pennypacker, a book targeted at children but in which adults will find much to admire and mull over. In preparing the book, Pennypacker spent a great deal of time studying the behavior of foxes. Martha shares a particularly perfect passage.

Zach from Plano, Texas, watched the documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi. In it, a protegé of the star sushi chef ends a long explanation about how much he’s learned from his mentor by saying, “I don’t sleep with my feet in his direction.” What does this Japanese expression it mean?

Man-eating spiders! Martha tells a charming story about how illustrators and authors work together when they make children’s books.

Greg, calling from Norfolk, Virginia, says that when he uses the word smarmy, some people seem not to know it. What does it mean? Where does it come from? Is it even a real word? It’s related to an old verb meaning to smear or be-daub. It’s kind of like the word unctuous.

Andrea in Haslett, Michigan, and her six-year-old daughter Neevee had a question about the way we show love in writing. When they were texting back and forth with Neevee’s daddy, she got to wondering where where we get X and O for kisses and hugs. It may have something to do with the way people used to sign and kiss important documents, and the Christian cross.

Plot bunnies are writing ideas that you can’t get rid of. The only way to purge yourself of the ideas is to write them!

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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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:

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Pranks, cranks, and chips. As a kid, you may have played that game where you phone someone to say, "Is your refrigerator running? Then you better go catch it!" What's the term for that kind of practical joke? Is it a crank call or a prank call? There's a big difference. Also, if someone has a chip on his shoulder, he's spoiling for a fight -- but what kind of chip are we talking about? Potato? Poker? Hint: the phrase arose at a time when there were many more wooden structures around. Finally, a conversation with an expert on polar bears leads to a discussion of history and folklore around the world.

FULL DETAILS

After our conversation about a verbose admonition to use short words, a Tallahassee, Florida, man called with a version he learned as a boy: Do you have the audacity to doubt my veracity? Or even to insinuate that I would prevaricate? While I'll thrust my phalanges into your physiognomy with such intensity that it will horizontalize your perpendicularity.

There's a difference between a crank call and a prank call.

If someone has a chip on their shoulder, they're spoiling for a fight. The phrase derives from the old practice of literally putting a chip of wood or other small object on one's shoulder, and daring an adversary to knock the chip off--a gesture indicating that a line had been crossed and the opponent was ready to fight.

In Ireland, the word omadhaun means "a foolish person."

Quiz Guy John Chaneski's puzzle this week involves adding a letter to the names of famous bands to come up with entirely new ones. For example, Billy Joe Armstrong, Mike Dirnt, and Tre Cool are trading in their instruments for a lime-colored delivery truck. What are they known as now?

Those strings of amber lights on 18-wheelers are known as chicken lights. But why? Although the term's origin is unclear, a participant in a discussion forum of the American Historical Truck Society suggests they may have been originally associated with trucks hauling Frank Perdue chickens.

Noon of night is an archaism, a poetic way of saying "midnight."

A New York City listener recalls that as a youth in Erie, Pennsylvania, he and his peers referred to a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich as a choke-and-slide or choke-n-slide. It's a reference to the qualities of the sticky peanut butter and the slippery jelly. The colloquial names of some other foods also refer to how they make their way down the throat, including gap-and-swallow and slick-and-go-down or slip-go-down. Other foods named for action associated with them are saltimbocca, literally "jump into the mouth," and tiramisu, from Italian for "pick me up!"

A woman who grew up in south central Minnesota grew up using the phrase too yet, which can have various meanings at the end of a sentence, usually with some negative sense. An article by Peter Veltman in American Speech suggests that the tag too yet used this way is a calque from Dutch.

A conversation with a leading expert on polar bears has Martha thinking about several bear-related words, including the term arctic and the feminine name Ursula.

In the 1940's, kids commonly teased a playmate who'd just gotten a short haircut by pointing at them and saying Baldy Sour! Baldy Sour!

A man in Bowling Green, Kentucky wonders: is the correct phrase You have another thing coming? Or is it You have another think coming?

The medical term tragomaschalia means "smelly armpit sweat," and derives from Greek words that mean "goat armpit."

A woman from Abilene, Texas, is preparing to make a move to the Northeast, and was amused when a realtor in her new hometown used the phrase Bada boom, bada bing, a phrase she'd heard only in movies. It's possible that this term is older than the 1960's, although so far no such record has been found.

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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:

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What's the best way for someone busy to learn lots of new words quickly for a test like the GRE? Looking up their origins can help. Or record yourself reading the words and definitions and play them back while you're doing other chores. Plus, book recommendations for youngsters. Finally, military slang, and the one-word prank that sends Army recruits running--or at least the ones who are in on the joke! Also: fanboys, technophyte, galoot, landsickness, to have one's habits on, Zonk!, and a sciurine eulogy.

FULL DETAILS

On our Facebook group, a listener asks if anyone else's children have been taught the term fanboy, meaning "coordinating conjunction." These connecting words include for, and, nor, but, or, yet, and so, and a helpful way to remember them is with the acronym FANBOYS.

A Huntsville, Alabama, listener says that when someone was being abrasive or mean or defiant, her mother would say she's got her habits on. This phrase appears in the work of many blues singers, including Lucille Bogan and Bessie Smith, and writers such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston.

A vast Corinthian column. A fair, flaxen-haired sister with golden ringlets. An old citizen of the town. A harp upon which the wind makes music. An athlete that shows its well-developed muscles. A great green feather stuck in the ground. These are all phrases that Henry David Thoreau used in his journals to describe what familiar sight?

A woman in Fort Worth, Texas, wonders if she's alone in using the phrase single as a jaybird to describe herself as unpartnered. The far more common phrase is naked as a jaybird, which is of uncertain origin, but which may stem from a young jay's featherless appearance.

A man who's not so handy with computers described himself not as a technophobe, but as a technophyte--a misapprehension of the components of the term neophyte, a word stemming from Greek words meaning "newly planted."

Quiz Guy John Chaneski offers a puzzle inspired by the word age, featuring punny, one-word answers that end in -age and answer a question, such as "How old do you have to be to study podiatry"?

What's the best way to learn lots of new vocabulary while studying for a test like the GRE?

A man in Rupert, Vermont, says his wife affectionately calls him a big galooly. It's unclear where that word might have come from, although it might derive from galoot.

Spread out like a week's washing is a colloquial way to describe something extending far and wide.

In Kansas, the gravelly residue from mines is often called chat, or less commonly, chert.

The German word for "mnemonic device" is Eselsbrucke, or literally, "donkey bridge."

Grant has two recommendations for young readers: Full of Beans, by Jennifer L. Holm, and the Lumberjanes series, by Noelle Stevenson and Grace Ellis, illustrated by Brooke Allen.

A listener in Fort Rucker, Alabama, remembers a prank played on new Army recruits: when a sergeant barked the order Zonk!, all the seasoned soldiers would fall out of formation and run away, leaving the newbies to wonder what was going on.

What's for the word for when you get off a boat, but still feel like you're moving? It's called landsickness. A more severe version is mal de debarquement, French for "sickness from disembarkation," abbreviated MdDS.

A theater professor who has cast many students in productions wonders about the past tense of the verb to cast. Is it cast or casted?

A listener in Bonifay, Florida, says when she was young and asked her mother what she was doing, her mother would respond I'm stacking greased bb's with boxing gloves on. This nonsensical phrase is part of a long tradition of parents brushing off inquiries with creative responses, including layoes to catch medlars and I'm sewing buttons on ice cream.

In the early 18th century, squirrels were popular pets in Britain and the American colonies. In fact, Benjamin Franklin once wrote a grand eulogy for a girl's pet squirrel named Mungo. The adjective sciurine means "referring or pertaining to squirrels."

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

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Why do we call a frankfurter a "hot dog"? It seems an unsettling 19th-century rumor is to blame. Also, if someone quits something abruptly, why do we say they quit "cold turkey"? This term's roots may lie in the history of boxing. Plus, a transgender listener with nieces and nephews is looking for a gender-neutral term for the sibling of one's parent. Finally, the words "barber" and "doctor" don't necessarily mean what you think. They can both be weather words, referring to very different types of wind.

FULL DETAILS

Brickfielder, Simoom, and Haboob are all types of winds. Others include snow eater and chinook.

Why do we call a frankfurter a hot dog? In the late 19th century, hot dog was a jocular reference to rumors that these sausages were stuffed with dog meat. They were also called hot pups.

Say you're introducing someone to a married heterosexual couple, and both members of the couple are physicians. What titles should you use? This is Dr. and Dr. Jones? Dr. and Mrs.? What if one holds Ph.D.? What if both hold doctorates?

Here's a humorous take on how optimists differ from pessimists.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski has been swapping out letters on Broadway marquees to create the names of entirely new theatrical productions. For example, what Broadway play might you be watching if it's about a famous woman who leaves her career as a sharpshooter for a job at McDonald's?

The grandmother of a woman in Council Bluffs, Iowa, says tousled hair looks like a Hoorah's nest. Also spelled hurrah's nest or hooraw's nest, this means "an untidy mess" or "a commotion." Its origin is uncertain. In 1829, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow described someone as having a head like a hurra's nest. The term's origin is obscure, although it might have to do with the nest of an imaginary creature.

A transgender and gender-nonconforming listener wonders if there's a gender-neutral term for "aunt" or "uncle." Some people have suggested pibling, meaning the "sibling of one's parent." Others have proposed baba, titi, bibi, zizi, unty or untie, or simply cousin. In the same way that kids often come up with a pet name for their grandparents, perhaps nieces and nephews (or nieflings, as they're sometimes collectively called) will come up with their own term. The tumblr Gender Queeries has more suggestions for all kinds of gender-neutral words denoting kinship.

A thesaurus, a collection of synonyms, derives from the Latin word thesaurus, or literally, "treasury."

A San Antonio, Texas, man says his 6-year-old son wonders: If the plural of house is houses, why is the plural of mouse mice? And why is the plural of tooth teeth? These plurals are vestiges of a time when the middle vowel sound in some nouns changed to form the plural. Other old plural forms are reflected in such words as children and oxen.

"A cool wind" or "a wind that brings good health" is sometimes called a doctor, such as the Freemantle Doctor of Western Australia. A barber wind is a harsh wind so cold and wet it can freeze a person's hair and beard.

Jessica Goodfellow spent several weeks as an artist-in-residence at Denali National Park and Preserve in Alaska while finishing her latest book, Whiteout. The poems in this collection explore the stark natural beauty of that mountain, which drew her uncle there for a climb that turned out to be deadly. Martha shares one of those poems, "The Magpie."

When you quit something abruptly, you're said to quit cold turkey. This expression's origin is unknown, although its earliest recording uses are from 19th-century boxing.

A listener in Port Washington, Wisconsin asks: When is it appropriate to get rid of an old edition of a dictionary?

The cloth case for a pillow is variously known as a pillowcase, a pillow slip, or a pillow cover.

An Evansville, Indiana, says she responds to the question How are you? with a phrase she adopted from her grandmother: If I was any better, I'd be twins. There are several versions along these lines: If I was any better, I'd be you; If I was any better, there'd be two of me; If I was any better, I'd be dangerous, and If I was any better, vitamins would be taking me. In all of these jokey responses, the meaning is straightforward. It's simply that the speaker is doing very well indeed.

Kapai is a Maori term used in New Zealand meaning "good."

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Donate to help support A Way with Words all year long https://waywordradio.org/donate

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We’ve got a curious problem here at A Way with Words . Over the last decade, we’ve grown the show from just 12 stations in four states to more than 300 signals in 37 states.

What that means is that our success is outpacing our resources! We have more listeners to help, more stations provide service to, more email, more phone calls, more of everything that it takes to run the business behind the scenes.

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Martha and Grant

Words of the year and correcting a mispronounced name. Taking a look back at some notable words and phrases from 2017: Remember path of totality? How about "milkshake duck"? Also, a committee has to choose a new mascot for a school's sports teams. They want to call them the Knights, as in the heroes in shining armor. But is the word knight gender-neutral? Finally, Finally, a Spanish-speaking man tries in vain to correct peoples' mispronunciation of his first name. But should he bother? Plus: daylighting, a grammagram, an anagram, serendipity, fidget spinner, sports dictionaries, and brand spanking new.

FULL DETAILS

Grant reviews notable words and phrases from 2017. One is path of totality, meaning the part of the earth completely covered in shadow when the moon blocks the sun. Another is milkshake duck, which arose from a tweet by Australian cartoonist Ben Ward. Milkshake duck encapsulates the idea that in the age of social media, people can become suddenly famous and admired, only to suffer a swift fall when unsavory information about them swiftly comes to light. Ward's popular comic strip is called One Giant Hand.

A Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, woman serves on a committee that is choosing a new school. Some members propose calling their sports teams the Steel Knights. But is the term knight gender-neutral?

Daylighting refers to uncovering built-over rivers and streams and reintegrating them into the urban landscape.

An 8-year-old from San Diego wonders about the origin of the term bullseye.

The name Britney Spears anagrams to the name a certain Protestant denomination.

Great news! You have a 50 percent chance of getting all of the answers to Quiz Guy John Chaneski's "Band or Short Story?" puzzle. For example, is My Life with The Thrill Kill Kult an electronic industrial rock band or the title of a short story?

Can words ever be perfect synonyms? No. Words can have approximate synonyms, but there are always shades of implicit and explicit meaning. Consider, for example, the terms butt and derriere. Although both refer to the same part of the anatomy, they carry somewhat different connotations.

A winemaker in Suttons Bay, Michigan, reports that he and his coworkers indicate that a vat contains no wine by marking it with the letters MT, which when pronounced together, sound like the word empty. Such a combination of letters is a kind of rebus known as a grammagram or gramogram.

A North Carolina man moved to Grand Forks, North Dakota, and encountered puzzlement when he used the word souge to mean plunge into water or immerse abruptly. More often spelled souse, this term is more likely to be heard in the Southern U.S.

A lexical lagniappe at a gas pump leads to a discussion of the word serendipity, coined by 18th-century writer Horace Walpole.

The spanking in the phrase brand spanking new has been used as an intensifier since the 16th century, and may be related to a Danish word meaning to strut.

Listeners write in with suggestions for a young caller's request for a single term to describe someone in a state of nervous anticipation. They propose aflutter, atwitter, nervousited, happrehensive, and a noun form, antrepidation.

A Corpus Christi, Texas, man named Luis is exasperated when people insist on pronouncing his name LOO-is rather than Loo-EES, which is the way he prefers, and reflects his Spanish-speaking heritage. He's well within his rights to correct them.

One term that rose to prominence in 2017: fidget spinner.

The KPBS Radio Reading Service provides audio recordings of daily newspapers for the visually impaired. A volunteer who reads for the service has trouble understanding some of the jargon from the sports pages. Good references for the language of sports include The Dickson Baseball Dictionary by Paul Dickson, the Dictionary of Sports and Games Technology by Adrian Room, and A Dictionary of Sports Studies by Alan Tomlinson. In addition, OneLook Dictionary Search lets you search several dictionaries at once.

A listener in Enterprise, Alabama, recalls that when a storm was approaching his grandfather would say It's going to come up a Joe Moore. This slang term comes from the word mojo, meaning a magic spell or magic power. By metathesis, which is what linguists call the transposition of letters or sounds in a word, mojo became jomo, and ultimately Joe Moore.

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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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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Books for word lovers, plus the stories behind some familiar terms. Want a gift for your favorite bibliophile? Martha and Grant have recommendations, from a collection of curious words to some fun with Farsi. Plus, some people yell "Geronimo!" when they jump out of an airplane, but why that particular word? Also, we call something that heats air a heater, so why do we call something that cools the air an air conditioner? The answer lies in the history of manufacturing. Also, quaaltagh, snuba, the last straw vs. the last draw, and I have to go see a man about a horse.

FULL DETAILS

There's a word for the first person to walk through your door on New Year's Day. The word quaaltagh, and it's used on the Isle of Man. This Manx term is one of many linguistic delights in a book Martha recommends for word lovers: The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities: A Yearbook of Forgotten Words, by Paul Anthony Jones.

Why do we use the term air-conditioner to refer a mechanism for cooling air, when we use the word heater to describe a mechanism for heating air? The term air conditioning was borrowed from the textile industry, where it referred to filtering and dehumidifying. The first use of this term is in a 1909 paper by Stuart Cramer called Recent Developments in Air Conditioning.

Snuba is a portmanteau--a combination of snorkel and scuba--and refers to snorkeling several feet underwater while breathing through a long hose that's attached to an air supply float on a raft.

What do you call that last small irritation, burden, or annoyance that finally makes a situation untenable? Is it the last straw or the last draw? Hint: it has nothing to do with a shootout at the OK corral.

We've talked before about kids' funny misunderstandings of words. Martha shares another story from a Dallas, Texas, listener.
Quiz Guy John Chaneski has an inside-out puzzle that's clued by a short sequence of letters inside a longer one. For example, what holiday contains the letters KSGI?

A man in Surprise, Arizona, wonders why people jumping into a pool sometimes yell Geronimo! The history of this exclamation goes back to an eponymous 1939 movie about the famed Apache warrior Geronimo. The film was quickly popular on U.S. military bases, where the warrior's name became a rallying cry. A widely circulated story goes that in 1940, a U.S. Army private named Aubrey Eberhardt responded to teasing about his first parachute jump by yelling Geronimo! as he leapt into the wild blue yonder.

The acronym NIMBY stands for Not In My Back Yard. A more emphatic version used among urban planners is BANANA, which stands for Build Absolutely Nothing Anywhere Near Anything.

Someone who's really hungry might say I'm falling to staves, meaning they're famished. It's a reference to the way a barrel falls apart if the metal hoops that hold them together are removed.

A listener in Plaza, North Dakota, says he tried to signal some teenagers to lower their car window by moving his fist in a circle, but since they grew up with push-button window controls, they didn't understand the gesture. What's the best gesture now for communicating that you want someone to roll down their car window?

For the book lover on your gift list, Grant recommends the mix of magic in science in All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. He also likes the work of Firoozeh Dumas: It Ain't So Awful Falafel, about an Iranian teenage girl living in California, as well as Dumas's books for adults, Funny in Farsi, and Laughing Without An Accent. Martha recommends Kory Stamper's love letter to lexicography, Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, and Jessica Goodfellow's poetry collection about mountaineering, Whiteout.

A woman in Virginia Beach, Virginia, says her Appalachia-born grandmother would occasionally say that it was time to string the leather britches, or hang up the leather britches, or string up the leather britches. She was referring to preserving green beans. So why the leather and britches?

If you're living with a chronic illness or disability, you often have to ration your physical and mental energy. And if that illness isn't readily apparent to others, it can be hard to explain how debilitating that process can be. On her website But You don't Look Sick, writer Christine Miserandino, who has lupus, illustrates that process with handful of spoons, each representing a finite amount of physical and mental energy that must be spent in order to get through a typical day. Someone without a disability or illness starts each day with an unlimited number of spoons, while others must weigh which task is worth spending a spoon for, and then making more decisions as the supply is depleted. Inspired by that metaphor, a growing community of people facing such invisible challenges call themselves spoonies.

A listener in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, recalls that his grandfather used to announce he was headed to the restroom by saying I have to go see a man about a horse. An earlier version of the phrase is I have to go see a man about a dog. These phrase are among many euphemisms for leaving to take care of bathroom business, such as going to see Miss White or going to go pluck a rose.

A Burlington, Vermont, listener wants to settle a dispute: Can laughter be described as gregarious?

This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.

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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

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Here’s the perfect gift for your language nerd: a donation to A Way with Words.

For more than ten years we’ve been producing fun episodes about words and language that are heard millions of times each year by people like your word nerd.

Making the show takes money, of course. We don’t get any from NPR. And we don’t get any from your local station. We get much of our support from our podcast and radio fans.

This year, go to waywordradio.org/donate and sign up as a sustaining donor on behalf of the linguistics geek in your life. Your linguaphile. Your thesaurus brontosaurus. Your lexical BFF-exical.

PLUS! Thanks to a challenge grant from Jack and Caroline Raymond, your donation goes twice as far through the end of 2017! They will double whatever you give! It’s a two-for-one, but you have to donate before the end of the year to activate the challenge grant.

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Martha and Grant

The months of September, October, November, and December take their names from Latin words meaning "seven," "eight," "nine," and "ten." So why don't their names correspond to where they fall in the year? The answer lies in an earlier version of the Roman calendar. The sweltering period called the "dog days" takes its name from the movements of a certain star.
A new book offers an insider's view of the world of dictionary editing.

FULL DETAILS

You're trying to unscrew the stubborn lid on a jar of pickles and ask someone to hand you that flat, round, rubber thing that helps you get it open. What do you call that item? In a discussion on our Facebook group, listeners share several names, including rubber husband, second husband, rubber grippy thing, and round tuit.

A surfer in Imperial Beach, California, wonders who coined the word gnarly to describe waves that are particularly challenging. This term may have originated in the slang of surfers in South Africa in the 1970s, and eventually spread into everyday slang.

The slang term sky hag was originally a negative appellation for an older flight attendant. But it's now being reclaimed by longtime airline employees as a positive self-descriptor.

A woman in Mammoth Lakes, California, says her father used to offer this advice: In promulgating your esoteric cogitations or articulating your superficial sentimentalities, beware of preposterous ponderosities. In other words, don't use big words. This particular phrase and variations of it were passed around in 19th century, much like internet memes today.

Gram weenie is a slang term for an ultralight backpacker who goes to extreme lengths to shave off every last bit of weight they must carry.

Quiz Guy John Chaneski shares puzzle called "Blank in the Blank." For example, what classic toddler's toy shares its name with a fast-food restaurant?

A college student in Bowling Green, Kentucky, wonders about the origin of the word emoji. Although you might guess that the name for these little pictures inserted into text messages contains the English word emotion, that's just a coincidence. Instead, the word derives from Japanese e meaning "picture" and moji, meaning "letter" or "character."

The phrase to be nebby is heard particularly in Western Pennsylvania, and means to be "picky" or "gossipy." Originally, it meant "nosy" or "snooping." Nebby is a vestige of Scots-Irish, where the word neb means "nose" or "beak."

Some parents take homeschooling a step further with world-schooling, or educating children through shared travel experiences.

A San Antonio, Texas, listener recalls hearing the term las caniculas to denote a period of 12 days in January where the weather seems to run the gamut of all the kinds of weather that will be experienced in the coming year. This period is also known as las cabanuelas. Canicula derives from Latin for "little dog," a reference to Sirius, the brightest star in the constellation Canis Major, which at a certain time of the year appears in the eastern horizon just before sunrise, appearing to accompany the sun like a faithful pup. There's a great deal of folklore associated with la canicula, a term applied at different times in different Spanish-speaking countries. In English, this period in late summer is known as the dog days.

Word by Word: The Secret Life of Dictionaries, by Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper, is a must-read for anyone interested in language and how dictionaries are made.

The months September, October, November, and December derive from Latin words that mean "seven," "eight," "nine," and "ten" respectively. So why are they applied to the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth months of the year? The answer lies in the messy history of marking the year, described in detail in David Duncan's book, Calendar: Humanity's Epic Struggle to Determine a True and Accurate Year.

A sneck is a kind of latch. A listener in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, says his British relatives use the term snecklifter is sometimes used to mean "a gift that will get you in the door at a dinner party."

A U.S. Forest Service firefighter in Lakeland, Florida, also teaches classes on chainsaw safety, and wants to make sure he's using gender-neutral pronouns when doing so. The epicene pronoun they will work just fine.

The origin of skedaddle, meaning to "run away in a panic" or "flee," has proved elusive. Renowned etymologist Anatoly Liberman suggests it may be related to a Scottish term, skeindaddle, meaning "to spill." Its popularity in the United States took off during the Civil War.

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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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London +44 20 7193 2113
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Donate: http://waywordradio.org/donate
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Copyright 2017, Wayword LLC.