Hi, my wife and I just moved to San Diego and we love your show. We're 'word nerds' and were surprised that your show isn't carried more widely!

Regarding the slang puzzle in this episode, I thought there were some discrepancies in the use of the phrase, "Alright men! I want you to fan out and locate the enemy's twenty and return to base at oh-dark-thirty."

On the show, Grant described "oh-dark-thirty" as an indeterminate time after dark. I've spent thirteen years in the Navy and Marine Corps, and I've participated in many events that started at "oh-dark-thirty." In my experience, the aforementioned phrase has been used mostly in a tongue-in-cheek manner, not as a means to issue an order or coordinate a return to base. The time itself is indeterminate, but the inference of the 'oh' is that it occurs in the early morning hours. As most folks have seen from the movies and TV, we use the 24-hour clock, i.e. 2 pm is 1400 hours (pronounced 'fourteen hundred') and 9:15 am is 0915 (pronounced 'zero-nine fifteen' or 'oh-nine-fifteen'). In a similar manner, oh-dark-thirthy is a faux-specific time sometime after midnight but well before sunrise; in common use this is some obscenely early time that prevents one from getting sleep on a normal human schedule. I think Martha's friend catching his plane at "oh-dark-thirty" can relate.

Also, I believe that "twenty" is police slang for location (as in, "what's your twenty?" means, "where are you?") There is, admittedly, a good bit of related or shared terminology between cops and soldiers. As of yet, however, I've not seen this slang in use in the military, though I've heard police officers use it frequently.

Thanks for a great show, we look forward to it every week!

I'm the guy you talked to who had the blister on the toe next to my big toe. After our conversation was broadcast, I found, via the Internet, a 2006 article in the Chicago Tribune by Eric Zorn in which he lists all five of the toe names proposed by that Yale medical student (John Phillips) in, he says, a letter to the New England Journal of Medicine, apparently in or around 1991. The names for toes in children's rhymes are cute, but they seem a little silly for use by adults. I don't think I could go to the gym and tell the guys I had a blister on my Rudy Whistle any more than I could tell them I had a blister on my porcellus domi. Indeed, afer our conversation, I couldn't even confirm that "the little toe" is an official name for the little toe, even though everyone seems to understand what you mean when you refer to it as such. All of this is an odd little gap in our anatomical lexicon. We need simple, adult names for the toes. As a requisite for a toe name, I propose that the name for any toe has to have the word "toe" in it. So I suggest we start right here and officially designate the toe on the "outide" of the foot as the "little toe" and the toe in the middle as "the middle toe." I'm open to suggestions for the others. Perhaps "the second toe" for the toe in between the big toe and the middle toe, and "the fourth toe" for the toe next to the little toe. The only problem with the latter is the possible confusion that arises if you are uncertain in which direction the speaker is counting. Or maybe "the index toe" and "the ring toe," analogous to the index finger and the ring finger. I will set my mind to work on this and get back to you if I come up with something better. Larry

Mathetes said:

Larry said:

I don’t think I could go to the gym and tell the guys I had a blister on my Rudy Whistle any more than I could tell them I had a blister on my porcellus domi.

Oh, Larry, I couldn’t disagree more strongly. There are so many layers of good (adult) humor in this. Just that it’s in Latin, so official and medical in form, and yet poking fun at itself at the same time … it’s just delicious.

Mathetes: Would you believe I actually took Latin in high school and was an alter boy until I was 18, reciting my parts in Latin. But my experience is that eyes tend to glaze over when one uses a Latin phrase. I fully appreciate the humor in the nomenclature proposed by John Phillips for the various porcelli, but if it didn’t take at Yale, I submit it’s not going to take among the general public. So my goal is to find some simple, common names that ordinary adults can use to refer to their toes without having to revert to childhood rhymes. And I do think that the common names have to have the word “toe” in it. That’s really the reason why Rudy Whistle doesn’t work for me. Besides the fact that I never heard that rhyme until Martha brought it to my attention. I certainly don’t think much about my toes until I whack one on the leg of a coffee table or a blister develops on one. But I once knew a woman who was so obsessed by the appearance of her toes that she subjected herself to full blown surgery to have them straightened. One would think podiatrists or foot fetishists or pedicurists would have long ago filled this odd little hole in the anatomical lexicon. Nice to talk to you.

Grant, I love the military slang. i just got around to listening to this ep on podcast.
There is also a difference between the Army and Marines on the time issue. The Army tends to include the word 'hours' and say 'oh', as in 'oh-five-hundred hours'. It may even be written out, like on the operating hours for the PX: "0700-1900 hours".
The Marines NEVER say the word 'hours', and almost always say 'zero'. And if the time is on the hour, sometimes omit the 'hundred'. Examples: 'Formation tomorrow is at zero-seven-thirty'; 'I had to get up at zero-five to catch my plane'

Martha's pronunciation was almost perfect, the only mistake being the first sound. The first sound Martha used was like the french"j" (sorry, I can't use the IPA here), if you think of the French word 'bonjour' that's the sound that stands for "j". Now the correct pronunciation is with a 'z' much like in the English 'zombie' or 'zebra' or 'zoo'. So it's 'z domu'.

The translation you gave there is spot on right. "from home" is a word-for-word translation from polish 'z domu'. It is a perfect example of a calque, and basing on my field experience I can assure you calques like these are frequent in Polish or Polish-descendent communities. The phrase does come up in genealogy studies, but, unfortunately, it slowly but surely disappears from spoken language. Nowadays the only contexts where you meet the phrase in Polish is in: official documents (secular and Church – Catholicism is still going strong in this country, and the Churches completes its own sets of documents on their parishoners); genealogy; small town and village communities. The latter one, so the small town and village communities is actually the only context where you can hear this expression spoken. From what your caller from Wisconsin said, the community she found herself in was fairly old, meaning that only the elderly members of the community spoke fluent Polish. That would confirm my observations in Poland. Here only the elderly people belonging to small local communities, where there still survives the respect of intimate family connections, does the term 'z domu' come up in spoken language. Other than that the term is only used in documents and genealogies, but ever more often it is substituted with the term "nazwisko paniańskie" which translates as "maiden name", especially so in secular documents.