This episode first aired Friday, February 3, 2012. It will be available here for downloading or online listening Monday, February 6, 2012.

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

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

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

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

The so-called Wicked Bible is a 1631 version of the King James, printed by Robert Barker and Matin Lucas. This particular Bible is so called because the printers somehow managed to leave out the word not in the commandment against adultery. They were, indeed, punished. Behold the offending page.

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

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

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

You can hear Granny Clampett mentions asafidity bags twice in the first two minutes of this episode of The Beverly Hillbillies. There’s also a lengthy online discussion about this old folk tradition.

In an earlier episode, Martha and Grant discussed what to call a person who doesn’t eat fish. A listener calls with another suggestion: pescatrarian, from the Latin word that means “fish.”

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

Recent winners of the Scripps National Spelling Bee included cymotrichous, stromuhr, Laodicean, guerdon, serrefine, and Uhrsprache. How many do you know? The whole list.

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

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

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

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

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

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

This episode first aired Friday, January 27, 2012.

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

Double-talk, or doublespeak, is a form of gibberish that involves adding “ib” or other syllables to existing words. This sort of wordplay has been used among criminals using double-talk to communicate on the sly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hold ’er, Newt! This primarily Southern idiom means either “Hold on tight!” or “Giddy-up!” It apparently derives from the idea of a high-spirited horse. Variants of this expression sometimes add “She’s headed for the rhubarb” or “She’s headed for the barn!”

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

This episode first aired January 21, 2012.

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

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

What are those symbols cartoonists use in place of profanity? They’re called grawlixes — good to know for the next time you play a game we just invented called “Comic Strip Trope or Pokemon?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

The admonition “you don’t believe fatmeat is greasy” is found almost exclusively among African-Americans. The idea is apparently that if you don’t believe fat meat is greasy, you’re someone who misses the obvious.

What’s the difference between the words insure and ensure? To ensure means to make certain. Insure means to protect someone or something from risk, and should be used exclusively in a financial sense.

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

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

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

Did you know roly-polies, or pill bugs, aren’t even bugs? They’re isopods, meaning they have equal feet, and they’re technically crustaceans.

Autocorrect mistakes abound, but have you ever made the errors yourself, such as typing the word buy when you meant by? Studies in Computer Mediated Communications have linked this phenomenon to the way we process words phonetically before typing them out.

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

This episode first aired January 14, 2012.

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

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

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

As they say in Wasika, Minnesota, “If I don’t see you in the future, I’ll see you in the pasture.”

Our Quiz Guy John Chaneski has a new word game titled “The Secrets of Nym.” In Alcoholics Anonymous, “denial” is said to stand for “Don’t Even Notice I Am Lying,” which is a backronym. An acoustic guitar could be considered a retronym. And an editor named “Daily” is an example of an aptronym.

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

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

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

An old book of similes contains such gems as it’s “easy as peeling a hardboiled egg” and it’s as “hard to shave as an egg.”

Does “evidence-based” have a hyphen? Why, yes it does, because evidence-based functions as an adjective. While style guides indicate that we’re using fewer hyphens, evidence-based is an important one to keep intact, even when used after the verb (e.g. “the research is evidence-based”).

Here’s another great simile: “large as life and twice as natural.” As in, did you really see Elvis? Yep, he was large as life and twice as natural.

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

“You’d better behave, or I’ll knock you from an amazing grace to a floating opportunity!” This African-American saying, used as a motherly warning, first popped up in the 1930 play Mule Bone by Langston Hughes.

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s one that’s sure to lull a restless child into sleep: “night night chicken butt ham head yoo hoo!”

This episode first aired May 21, 2011.

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

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

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

8 Regional Foods You Might Not Know

Tavern Sandwich page at Barry Popik’s site.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s a joking menu you might enjoy. Not.

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

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

Why do we have piggy banks instead of any other kind of farm animal banks? In Scotland and Northern England, a kind of Middle Ages earthenware container called pygg. Today we fill our piggs, or piggy banks, with coins.

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

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

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

Martha shares another barb from the SlushPile Hell agent.

This episode originally aired May 14, 2011.

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

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

A bit about school bus history.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Who you calling a jabronie? And what exactly is a jabronie? (Or a jaboney, jadroney, jambone, jiboney, gibroni, gibroney, gabroney, jobroni, jobrone, etc.) Grant traces this playful insult, meaning a “rube” or “loser,” to the 1920s, when Italian immigrants brought over a similar-sounding Milanese term for “ham.” Jabronie is also commonly used in professional wrestling, referring to those guys set up to lose to the superstars.

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

This episode first aired May 28, 2011.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why are some American place names pronounced differently than the famous place they were named after? Why is Cairo, Ill., pronounced “KAY-roh”? Why do Midwesterners pronounce Versailles as “Ver-SALES” and the New Madrid Fault as “New MAD-rid”? Grant explains that these names are far removed from their earlier incarnations and function as a sort of shibboleth among the locals.

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

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

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

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

This episode first aired December 17, 2011. Listen here:

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Writers always seem to come up with brilliant quotes about writing, and why shouldn’t they? Douglas Adams has noted, “I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.” And Gloria Steinem once quipped: “I do not like to write. I like to have written.”

What’s the difference between hand grenades and pomegranates? Not much when you think about their shape and the fact that they’re both packed tightly with small things, which is why both share a linguistic root with the word granular.

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

Football, like most sports, brings its own set of idioms and jargon that ride the line between cleverness and cliche. The adjective multiple describes a player, an offense or defense, or even a whole team that has multiple threats or talents. And a pick six, one of the more exciting plays in football, is when a player makes an interception and scores a touchdown. For a more erudite take on the language of sports, David Foster Wallace’s “Roger Federer as Religious Experience” never fails.

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

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

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

A professional auctioneer shares some techniques for creating his mesmerizing, melodious patter. He explains that auctioneers are known as colonels, because colonels in the civil war were assigned with auctioning off captured property. And he warns to beware of so-called chandelier bidding. His final tip: Remember, at an auction, it’s cheaper to kiss somebody than to wave at them!

The 2011 words of the year list wouldn’t be complete without occupy, as in the Occupy protests that sprang up in Manhattan’s Zuccotti Park and elsewhere. And Zuccotti lung? It’s an illness that made its rounds among the camped-out protesters.

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

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

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

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

If your iPhone’s Siri thinks that two meetings in one day is not bad, does that make her an optimist? Since when did cellphones start making value judgments?

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

This episode first aired December 10, 2011. Listen here:

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

What are jo-jo potatoes? Starting in the 1960s, fried potato wedges took that name in some of the Northern states. jo-jos were often served in restaurants that also made a type of chicken which requires a special type of deep fat fryer. Jo-jos are simply unpeeled potato wedges thrown in the fryer, but the name may have derived from the idea of “junk,” because the potato scraps were considered worthless until restaurateurs realized they could be marketed and sold.

We’ll keep this short: perissology is the superfluity of words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Spanglish term “frajo,” meaning “cigarette,” evolved over a couple of generations of Mexican-American language. Primarily thanks to pachucos, sometimes known as zoot-suiters, the term developed from the verb “fajar“, meaning “to wrap up or roll.”

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

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

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

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

Zymology? That’s the study of joining or fastening.

This episode first aired December 3, 2011. Listen here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Speaking of those generational divides, did you know that Post-It notes haven’t always been around? Martha shares a listener’s funny email about that.

If you’re having a tough time finding something, remember that even a blind pig can find an acorn once in a while. This encouraging idiom actually comes from Ancient Rome, where the concept of a blind animal turning something up lent itself to the Latin saying that a blind dove sometimes finds a pea. An 18th-century Friedrich Schiller play employed the blind-pig-and-acorn version, and the play’s translation into English and French brought it into modern speech.

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

What does “out of pocket” mean? The answer splits down racial lines. Among many African-Americans, if someone’s out of pocket, they’re out of line or unruly. For most non-African-American speakers, out of pocket is primarily used in business settings, meaning that someone is either unavailable or out of the office, or they’re paying for something with personal money, with an expectation of being reimbursed later..

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

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

What crawled over your liver? This Pennsylvania Dutch idiom means “What’s the matter with you?”

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

This episode first aired April 2, 2011. Listen here:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Jack Lynch has an opinion on it, too.

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

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

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

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

Is the phrase whether or not redundant? Well, take this sentence: “Whether or not you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina.” Would that sound right without the or not? Now, the or not is technically redundant, but depending on the case, it’s best to pick the wording that won’t distract the reader or listener. The person in charge of the New York Times Style Manual comments on the question.

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

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

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

This episode first aired April 9, 2011. Listen here:

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

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

Martha shares a childhood misunderstanding sent in by a listener. Seems her three-year-old daughter confused the phrase “exposed to the elements” with “exposed to the elephants.”

What do you call an expert speller? A “Words With Friends” enthusiast wants to know. Martha tells her that a great speller is called an orthographer or orthographist, from the Latin roots ortho- meaning “straight” or “correct”, and -graph meaning “to write”. A bad speller, on the other hand, is a cacographer, or as it’s known among them, a kakagrifar.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we’re talking about the whole lot of something, we call it the whole kit and kaboodle. But what’s a kaboodle? In Dutch, a “kit en boedel” refer to a house and everything in it. For the sake of the English idiom, we just slapped the “k” in front.

Grant has two great children’s books to recommend: The Three Pigs by David Wiesner, a meta-narrative based on the classic title characters, and Elephant Wish, a touching cross-generational story by Lou Berger, the head writer of Sesame Street. Martha recommends The Word Project: Odd and Obscure Words, beautifully illustrated by Polly M. Law. Stop by your local bookseller and pick up a copy for your sweetheart, a.k.a. your pigsney!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More words that entered the language around 1937: “Spam,” “telecast,” and “whoops.”

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

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

Care for another helping of sonker? That’s another name for deep-dish cobbler.

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

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

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

Quisquillious describes something that’s trashy or worthless. It derives from the Latin for “rubbish.”

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

Martha quotes Steve Martin’s aphorism about language: “Some people have a way with words. Some people not have way.”

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

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

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

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

If it’s ten of five, what time is it? Is it the same as ten till five? Why, yes it is! Ten of five, or ten till five, are both appropriate ways to say 4:50.

Grant and Martha share some more terms that make a person sound old-fashioned these days. Ever get a blank stare when you mention the icebox?

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

How do you pronounce garage? Does it rhyme with “barrage,” or do you say it like the British so it rhymes with “carriage”? The variations abound, and they all work.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Depending on what generation you’re from, “Get your rubbers!” could mean put on your galoshes or it put on something else!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If someone’s in a swivet, they’re flustered or in distress. For example, you might be in a swivel if you’re late for a meeting or you’ve shown up to the SAT without a No. 2 pencil.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Did your hairstylist recommend you use product? Is your company moving product this quarter? The term product is in vogue, mainly for the purpose of simplification.

Why do department stores label their infants’ section “Baby” instead of “Babies’” à la “Men’s” or “Women’s”? For one, the Baby department includes more than just clothes; they’ve got strollers and cribs and pacifiers. Also, the baby of the family has a unique singular identity, unlike the rest of the kids.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The old Yiddish word bupkis, referring to something of little or no value, has of late been split up for dramatic effect. As in, that’s worth all of a bup and a kis!

What’s a doomaflatchie? A listener shares this alternate for doohickie, thingamajig, doodad, or any other one of those whatchamacalits.

Here’s the Tim McGraw song about his doomaflatchie.

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

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

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

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

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

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