Do you say something happened on accident or by accident? Is text-messaging is destroying our kids' writing ability? Where do horseradish, zarf, and ignoramus come from?
This episode first aired October 10, 2009. Listen here:
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A Burlington, Vt. caller wants to know: Is horseradish so named because of this root's strong resemblance to part of a horse's anatomy?
The word zarf means "a metal cupholder," but a Scrabble enthusiast says other players always challenge his use of that word. He wants to know its origin.
What word in the English language is an anagram of itself? Hint: It's a trick question.
Puzzle Dude John Chaneski has a quiz about the unofficial terms for familiar things that have less familiar official names. "The Academy Awards of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences," for example, are unofficially called the Oscars. So what's the unofficial name for what's officially known as Chomolungma?
If you use the expression on accident rather than by accident, it probably says less about where you live and more about how old you are.
Is there a word in the English language that means "to read by candlelight"? A listener in Kittery Point, Maine, used to read the dictionary every night as a teenager and came across such a word. She's been racking her brain to remember it.
An Orange County, California, listener describes how both his left-handed parents were forced as children to learn to write with their non-dominant hand. Their handwriting looked unusual, to say the least. Grant discusses myths about handedness and recommends the book Handwriting in America: A Cultural History by Tamara Thornton. By the way, if you're looking for the word that means "written toward the left," it's levographic.
Here's a bit of campus slang accompanied by a hand gesture: awkward turtle. Grant explains what it means and how it's used. Need a visual?
Text-messaging is destroying our kids' ability to write, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In a few parts of the country, such as eastern Wisconsin, the more common term for "water fountain" is bubbler. A man who heard the term frequently in Rhode Island wonders: How did bubbler make it all the way over to Rhode Island, but seemingly skip the states in between?
The story behind the word ignoramus is big fun. It involves a bumbling lawyer, a six-hour farce from the 17th century, and a Latin legal term. See? Big fun.
If you need proof that language is powerful, here's some. Researchers at Cornell recently reported that kids are more likely to eat their veggies if they're told the food has enticing names like "X-ray Vision Carrots" and "Dinosaur Broccoli Trees." Wonder how big a grant the researchers got to study what every parent already knows.
Did you learn the vowels as "a," "e," "i," "o" "u," and sometimes "y" and "w"? A caller who was taught that in second grade was left wondering: When and where does "w" function as a vowel?
I was so glad to hear the caller from California, who was also taught A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W! Mrs. Bassett taught us that in second grade in 1974, but could never give us an example. I had started to think that I never really saw that W on her bulletin board. I would be interested to know if that caller also was using the Houghton-Mifflin second grade reading series.
I went to a Catholic elementary school in New Jersey, and we were also taught that the vowels were a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and w. We were never given any examples of the y and w being used as vowels, as far as I can remember.
Y as a vowel is easy: by, cry, dry, fly. Or if you want longer words, there's that beloved set of five-letter ones for the crossword fans: crypt, glyph, lymph, nymph, sylph and tryst.
I once asked someone if he could think of a five-letter word with no vowels other than Y, wondering which of the above he'd come up with first. He surprised me with "thymy", then asked me if I could use it in a sentence.
When I first saw, "thymy", I thought it was a culinary term. That is, a food which has thyme in it might be said to taste thymy. (Maybe that really should be spelled, "thymey.")
I have always thought I misheard and/or was delusional in regarding "W" as a vowel. I absolutely learned the vowel rule with "W" and "Y". I stopped asking or admitting to anyone that I learned this 2nd grade rule about "W". I went to Catholic School (1966)so I thought it was just one more thing I needed to sort out. In my mind I seem to remember the example used was "yellow".
I don't care whether "w" is a vowel, I am just relieved in wasn't just me who heard this abstract! Thanks for discussing it!
My older brother and sister, 6 and 5 years older, were taught the "sometimes y and w" rule, but by the time I went to the same elementary school, my teacher made no mention of the w. I remember my brother and sister mentioning only the word cwm as an example. And I remember seeing the hymn tune at church Cwm Rhondda, perhaps better known as Guide Me, O Thou Great Jehovah.
I don't really buy that the rule was referring to the semivowel status of y and w in their ability to form glides and diphthongs: lots of other letters change the pronunciation of adjacent vowels without being considered vowels themselves. (e.g. con, corn; ban, barn; bun, burn; ten, tern) I think the rule was referring to true vocalic status (as in cwm as you mentioned), and that Grant's parroting theory is more likely the reason the w remained with minimal cause.
Besides, the letter m is much more deserving of legitimate vowel status in English than is the letter w, and m never gets a mention as far as I know. Consider: rhythm prism schism
and all of the many, many "movement" -ism words.
It is hard to explain the syllable count of these words without considering the vocalic m as a vowel. But I am not advocating to change the rule to "sometimes y and m".
While many other non-vowels in English are often pronounced as vocalic in running speech (e.g. r as in butter, m as in bottom, n as in button, l as in bottle), the above examples are different in that no legitimate vowel appears in the spelling, striking us with the reality of the vocalic m in the orthography.
Welcome, befoose, JWieme, and roni. I'm not sure what book the caller's teacher was using, but clearly you're not alone. I was carpooling with someone yesterday who heard the show and had the very same experience. Funny how often teachers must have arbitrarily taught that rule without even being able to summon an example, eh?
This show had a passing mention of Benson Bubblers in Portland —
The story behind this, as far as I recall, is that many years ago there was a wealthy Portland resident who on his death left the city a sum of money with the requirement that it be used to provide public drinking fountains. I think it was related to Prohibition (encouraging drinking of water over spirits), but I might be wrong on that part.
The W caller also asked about the "double U" derivation, and I have a recollection that in high school I learned the Spanish interpretation of the letter was more like "double V". What's the backstory on this one?
Regarding the "generational grump": John Medina (of "Brain Rules" fame) claims to have noticed a trend among his students that he considers disturbing, a trend away from knowing something and towards knowing where to find it. (The human brain is by nature lazy: why remember it when I know where i can find it? Almost every time management system is built upon this natural tendency.) He refers to it as "the database is getting poorer."
Looking at it superficially, there doesn't appear to be a problem with that, but the real issue comes with how human learning happens. We take something into the working area of our brains, twist it, turn it , poke it, etc. and then improvise off it. Like the Jazz musician that keeps a solid base of music theory in his head, not in order to regurgitate it but to create beautiful improvisations off of it, we learn new things best by stepping off a solid base of knowledge as soon as possible and discovering what's there.
If I don't know something, if I don't have the knowledge itself in my head but instead simply know where to find it, I can't improvise off of it, and worse, when I'm confronted with different or conflicting statements of truth about it, I don't have a solid base I can test against or improvise off of to help me decide which is true (a side effect of this is the reluctance to decide what is truth — two or more groups disagree about something, therefore each viewpoint must be equally worthy of note, and if you say they aren't, then you must be part of a conspiracy to suppress it). I become, if not more gullible at least more susceptible.
Also, if my knowledge base isn't solid, my "intellectual hard work" threshold lowers, and things that were easy for others to do, because they have that base to stand on, seem difficult to me.
Of course, this observation, like so many others, is unscientific and subject to bias of the bell curve: as the population grows, the area under the bell grows, and so, in absolute terms, you can expect to see more mediocrity around you than before which tempts you to leap to the conclusion that mediocrity is on the rise, when in truth the concentration of it in the population is remaining constant, balanced by an equal but unobserved/unnoticed rise in excellence.
But the fact that a noted scientist has observed this effect as well does give one pause.
I grew up in Cohasset MA (south shore between Boston and Cape Cod). We had bubblers in our elementary school in the 1960s, so the term did travel to our part of Mass., though the caller didn't find it where/when he was visiting.
Ten years ago my family moved to a small city in Wisconsin called Sheboygan. This town is about 15 miles away from an even smaller town called Kohler. Even though I never developed the habit of calling a drinking fountain a "bubbler", I have heard all of the stories. I was always told that Kohler made the first water fountain, and they called it the Bubbler. It was just the name of this particular model of fountain. That name stuck in that region, and every water fountain thereafter was also called a "bubbler" by the people that lived near the company. We do this today with other things as well. For example, some people call all soft drinks "Coke." Of course there are Pepsi products as well. Another well known one is Kleenex. Of course it is really just tissue, but many people refer to the brand name. Bubbler was the same way. In Wisconsin we have a lot of our own sayings. I found an online dictionary of sorts that will help you on your next visit to Wisconsin. I have also provided the web address to the Kohler Company.
VOWELS: A, E, I, O, U, W, Y – (trivia)
On an NPR Sunday morning show, I remember a Will Shorts puzzler asking for a place name (3 words, 12 letters) that contained all the letters that might be considered vowels, including W and Y. The answer: UTICA NEW YORK
Thank you for the welcome! Yes, some people in Sheboygan call "Sloppy Joes" "Hot Tamales". My parents are pastors. When we first moved to Sheboygan, my mom asked what the kids were going to eat for youth night at the church. The lady making the food answered "Hot Tamales". She wanted to know if my mom could pick up some hamburger buns at the store. My mom was trying to figure out what a hamburger bun had to do with a hot tamale, but she went to the store and picked up the buns anyway. We found out that night that "hot tamales" and "sloppy joes" are the same thing. I have no idea on how that go started, and I really have only heard that one woman use it. People in Sheboygan know what a sloppy joe is now. However, they still have trouble figuring out what a "pop" is instead of a "soda."
Also, my sister often substitutes an "e" sound where there is an "i" in a word. For example, she says, "Melk, and Pellow" instead of "Milk and Pillow" I tried really hard not to pick up the accent, and I think I've done a fairly good job. Sometimes I catch myself say something, and I think, "Wow I really sounded like I am from Sheboygan." By my accent you can tell that I am from the mid-northern region, but you cannot always connect me to Sheboygan right away.
I would not consider W as a vowel in Cow any more than I would consider L a vowel in Talk, etc. Most linguists consider W a semivowel because it has some vowel-like properties and some consonant-like properties. In Cow the W phonetically combines with the vowel O to shift the vowel sound. This makes it vowel-like. The same can be said of the L in Talk, but few, if any, would go so far as to call L a vowel in English. I suspect that the vowel qualities of W in English are greatly exaggerated, possibly by the arcane mention in the vowel jingle, and the few obscure words in which it is truly a vowel.
I must have missed this episode last year so have only just listened to it.
I was very surprised to hear that there are regions in the US that use the word "bubbler". In my experience everyone in Australia calls them bubblers. I have asked one or two English friends and they do not.
Seems that it not only skipped a few states in the US but bounced over the Pacific Ocean on its way from or to Oz.
"Bubbler" was one of the few new words I learned after moving to Wisconsin five years ago. Another was "ramp" for parking garage. Now that makes some sense to me, as a parking garage really is just one big ramp up and down.
In elementary school (early 70s–western Pennsylvania) I was taught the vowels are a-e-i-o-u and sometimes y. Not a word was said about W.
Another Wisconsin resident here! I moved to Madison 3.5 years ago from northern Illinois, so "bubbler" was new to me, too. I was sometimes even admonished for using "fountain" instead of bubbler… and for using pop instead of soda… and for hailing from Illinois anyhow, because some Wisconsinites think of all Illinoisans as annoying, uppity, vacationing, bad-driving Chicagoans (and suburbanites). It was a long time before I stopped being paranoid that any small mistake I made in my driving habits would be attributed to my Illinois plates, for instance.
However, Madison and I embraced one another warmly, and I have become even more fascinated with the language and regional accent differences. For instance, two weeks ago, I spent some time chatting with a farmer from the Wausau area (about two hours north of Madison), and he had a strong, wonderfully charming, what I'd call typical Wisconsin accent. And, when I first moved here, it took me less than a week at my new job to notice different accents — and I grew up less than 100 miles south of Madison!
Oh, and on the unique Sheboygan way of speaking: my friends in the Fox Valley area (Green Bay, Neenah, etc.) tell me that Sheboygan residents often turn S-words into Sch-words, as in, the fish known as "smelt" is pronounced "schmelt". ("You goin' to the schmelt fry Friday night?") I don't know why this quirk happens, but it's entertaining for those of us outside the area.
A Way with Words is my favorite show on public radio. Thanks, Martha and Grant, for fueling my love of language.
Regarding the alarmist opinion that texting will ruin literacy…
I'm looking for a historical analogy to compare it to. How about telegraphs? Did the terse nature of telegraphs raise alarm among the purists of the day?
Or how about when all the odd European letters (the German vowels with umlauts, the Danish representations of ae, oe, and aa, etc.) were formed due to a paper shortage? Did that raise the highbrows' eyebrows?
I think of this every time I hear your show's closing music:
Almost 20 years ago, some friends of mine related a story about a mutual friend of theirs (unfortunately, making this a friend-of-a-friend story). Their friend sang "Let's call the whole thing off" in a school choir audition. But, he had never heard the song performed and didn't know about the alternate pronounciations. So he sang, "you say to-may-to, I say to-may-to … you say po-tay-to, I say po-tay-to …"
On NPR's "Says You!" the story was told about one of the first auditions of the "potato-tomato" song (as it come to be known by many).
A young woman, Miss Levine, not knowing the song, sang each pair of words with identical pronunciation (as in the comic sketch).
When she finished, the director said, "Thank you, Miss Le-vine."
She corrected him: "Actually, it's Le-veen."
Rosemary, thanks so much for your kind words. We feel fortunate to be able to do this show week after week and share these conversations with folks like you.
Btw, dare I ask how Fox Valley residents pronounce the phrase "city streets"?
I may be misremembering, but I thought Grant said on the show that there'd be a link or a cite for the "Lansford"(?) longitudinal study on texting. There's a recent study from the UK in _Literacy_ 42.3 (Nov. 2008): 137-144 that reaches a similar conclusion: "Overall, these findings suggest that children's knowledge of textisms is not associated with poor written language outcomes for children in this age range [11-12 years old]."
Regarding the alarmist opinion that texting will ruin literacy…
I'm looking for a historical analogy to compare it to. How about telegraphs? Did the terse nature of telegraphs raise alarm among the purists of the day?
Or how about when all the odd European letters (the German vowels with umlauts, the Danish representations of ae, oe, and aa, etc.) were formed due to a paper shortage? Did that raise the highbrows' eyebrows?
Re: the telegraph shorthand, I think Crystal discusses the historical predecessors of IM and TXT abbreviations in Txtg the Gr8 Db8, and yes, IIRC, there was a similar reaction.
As for the "odd European letters" being formed due to a paper shortage, that sounds very much like a myth to me. I'm not a historian of writing systems, but these characters have predecessors in medieval manuscripts written on parchment and vellum and are much more likely to be derived from suspension marks in the medieval scripts. For example, in German MSs, you'll often find a little suspended "e" where you'd later see an umlaut/diaresis.
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