This week on A Way with Words we start a brand-new season! Find out what a motorcyclist wears to keep from getting sunburned and why your little finger is called a pinkie. Plus, a recap of 2007—in limericks!

Read the original blog post and listen to this episode.

It's a brand-new season here on A Way with Words! To celebrate, Martha and Grant are noodling with anagrams—including the one in the title of this episode. Also:

A New York City schoolteacher asks, "Why do we call our little finger a pinkie?" and relates his invented etymology.

Another caller snickers over a newscaster's attempt to pronounce the word homage. Which of the six ways is best?

A Hoosier who's been hanging out on motorcycle discussion boards is curious about the origin of the term do-rag. Or is it dew-rag?

"Why is an undesirable task called a g-job?" asks a crew member on the set of the Fox Television series 24.

Martha shares a trick for remembering the answer to that perennial question: "Does a comma go inside or outside of quotation marks?"

The hosts weigh in on whether the expression "very fun" is grammatically correct.

What the heck is a podsnicker, anyway?

Puzzle-man Greg Pliska joins us for a recap of 2007—in limericks!

Is your DVD player always flashing "12:00"? A caller wonders if there's a word for a society ruled by children, something along the lines of patriarchy and matriarchy.

Also join us for another slang quiz, in which DeeDee picks "slon doon" as her favorite slang word. You can see what she's talking about in the picture below, taken by Kiwi world travelers Carol and Lawrie Chandler in Gansu Province, China.

You can see two other pictures of it here and here.

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Read the original blog post.

Thanks very much, John! Hope you'll keep listening, and sign up for our newsletter to get the latest about future episodes!

Penny said:

A 12-year old had given a puzzle–what 4-letter common male name can change the first letter to the next letter of the alphabet and create another 4-letter common male name.

My husband and I thought it was Mick and Nick.

Did anyone else come up with something else?

Penny, thanks for stopping by. We received several emails about this over the weekend, but I think it must have been from some other show. Does anyone know?

And given the parameters you describe, I suspect you're right. I mean, my first instinct was Brad and Crad. I like your answer better!

Michael, in English, dictionaries are the primary resource we have for learning what is considered acceptable pronunciation. Of course, there's no single answer for some words. Dictionaries differ because they are compiled using different principles, or because they are out-dated, misguided, or mistake-ridden. In general, pronunciation is determined for dictionaries based upon how a word is most commonly spoken. They do this by collecting lots of audio of speech and analyzing it. This way of acknowledging the speech of the majority generally works well.

Where it falls down, however, is that it can still leave out large groups of people who pronounce a word a different way but yet do not constitute a majority. These groups are mainly made of dialect-speakers. Dialect pronunciations aren't wrong, they're just different. Dialects, even in the US, are largely poorly represented in dictionary pronunciations, though dictionaries usually do very well in accounting for dialects' lexical differences.

Then we have have the common misunderstandings about pronunciation, in which people (too many who are "mavens") insist that the only right way is how they say it, or how they learned it when they were in school, or how they believe it was said in the past, or how it *looks* like it should be pronounced. These four common claims are basically indefensible positions but it's very difficult to dissuade people to abandon them, generally because they have a social or cultural stake in protecting a particular kind of English that they believe to represent a higher status. They're snobs.

So, in short, as English-speakers we all decide pronunciation by consensus. It's the only way that's accurate.

For a good summary of how we judge others by how they speak, and why many of our commonly held beliefs about accent and dialect are wrong, I highly recommend English with an Accent by Rosina Lippi-Green.

ckc said:

Unfortunately, when I mention your show to my college students (I also teach high school), their eyes glaze over. How do we get them interested and excited about words?

CKC, don't try much! Seriously. It's like trying to convince someone that your favorite band should be their favorite band, too. It almost never works and all you've managed to do is to set the bar much higher. After the hype, they'll be expecting fireworks, sacks of gold, and hotties lined up at the door.

The tactic I usually recommend I call by the innocuous name of "availability." It involves making sure that you include non-study, not-for-credit freebie reading material in your syllabus. In packets, throw in a word origin story that's related to the subject-matter, but don't make it testable must-know material. If you have an online area for your class, include regular links to interesting news articles or blog entries. Make your favorite books available for borrowing.

Then remember that you're not going to convince most students that language is really interesting and worth making into a hobby. Most of your books will be unborrowed. Many of the online posts will be unremarked upon. Much of the freebie reading material will not come up in conversation. I don't think you can get *everybody* interested in any one topic. But there will be a few students you'll connect with over language and words, and that'll be a pretty good result. When you find the few interested students, nurture their interest further by directing them to brilliant writing, reliable reference works, and the least-traveled corners of language trades.

Good luck!

Garage said:

Another question about punctuation placement: if you single quote a word at the end of a quote it would look like this: “She said she was ‘busy.'” Right?

Yes.

Thanks, Mike! I think you're right that we're more playful this season. We were a brand-new radio team last season, but we've gotten to know each other better over the last few months. And as you might suspect, to know Grant is to love him. (That is, when you're not giving him noogies for the way he misspells the word "website.")