An Ear for Wine (episode #1410)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it is quiz time.

Oh, no.

Mini quiz.

Just a little one.

Okay.

Okay.

I have a couple of tweets that I’m going to read to you.

Okay.

These are actual tweets, and I want to see if you can guess what they have in common, okay?

Oh.

Here’s tweet number one.

Job seeker tip. When customizing your cover letter, relate your qualifications and experience to the needs of the company you’re applying to.

Okay, that’s tweet number one.

Tweet number two is, My prize in my Cracker Jack box, whoever does quality control needs to get fired.

Oh, I know.

You do?

Do you know?

Yes, they have.

Do you know?

Each of these tweets has all the letters of the alphabet.

Oh, my gosh.

Right?

Oh, my gosh, yes.

And there’s a name for that.

Pan-gram tweets.

How did you know this, Grant?

Oh, my gosh.

I read the blogs.

I also follow about 600 people on Twitter who specialized in language and puzzles.

I can’t believe you got that.

No, but those are really good.

They’re really good, right?

And these are accidental, right?

Yes.

They weren’t written to kind of fakely include the letters.

They just happened to be real.

I’m so impressed that you got that.

I’m a man of the world.

You know, Twitter has reached my part of the continent.

Oh, that’s right.

There’s a whole Twitter feed called Pangram Tweets.

Yeah, it’s super awesome.

Run by Jesse Scheidler.

Right, yeah.

Former North American editor for the Oxford English Dictionary has this program that actually searches Twitter, searches the fire hose of Twitter content to find these tweets that accidentally have all the letters.

And it’s really weird.

I mean, these are pangrams like the one that you use in typing class about the quick brown fox jumping over the lazy sleeping dog.

But yeah, as you said, these just happen to pop up.

Like, Queen Elizabeth presents Angelina Jolie as an honorary dame for work to end war zone sexual violence.

That has all the letters.

And the thing is, if you read that feed, it’s sort of weirdly, I don’t know.

They have something in common, but they don’t.

It’s sort of like all the people on an airplane.

You know, do you ever look around on an airplane and think, well, you know, we’re never going to be here together again in the same way.

But we have something in common.

We’re all going to Phoenix.

Yeah.

There’s something that we share that we don’t know what it is that we all need to be in Phoenix.

Yes, exactly.

And so we’re going to scatter at the airport.

I really recommend this Twitter feed.

This Twitter feed is called Pangram Tweets.

That’s P-A-N-G-R-A-M.

Yeah.

And their characteristic is that they contain all the letters of the alphabet.

Yeah.

Accidentally.

Yeah.

And it’s just kind of fun to check in on every once in a while.

Well, this is a show about words and language, the goofy stuff, the fun stuff, puzzles and questions and quizzes and riddles.

We’ll take your calls at 877-929-9673 or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jan. I’m calling from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Hi, Jan. How are you doing?

Hey, Jan.

I’m great.

Welcome to the show. What’s going on?

Well, I’m actually from Indianapolis. I happen to be in Santa Rosa Beach on vacation this week.

But I have an interesting question for you.

I work as a sommelier. I’m a full-time sommelier at a fine dining restaurant.

How cool.

Yeah.

So you’re a wine expert.

It’s a pretty nice gig.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I’m also a member of the Guild of Sommeliers.

I’m certified through the Court of Master Sommeliers.

And, by the way, a little background.

I have a bachelor’s degree in linguistics and a minor in French.

And despite all of that, I can’t tell anybody what the word sommelier means.

But you bring in your game.

She’s like, all right, let me give you my credentials.

I’m super awesome, but here’s the thing I don’t know.

Whoa.

Okay.

Where did you get your master’s in linguistics?

I have a bachelor’s in linguistics from Indiana University.

Very good. Good school.

I think the more interesting question is how did you get from there to being a sommelier?

Yeah. What’s the path?

Well, I would say that was my midlife crisis career change.

I always had a passion for wine, and I decided to start studying it and make it a career.

So instead of drinking alone, binging on Netflix, you decided to make it legitimate.

Exactly.

Well, if you know French, then you probably know that it goes back to the idea of a pack animal, right?

Actually, no, I didn’t remember that. It’s been a few years since I started French.

Okay, okay. Yeah, yeah, the word sommelier, and actually the word sumpter in English.

A sumpter is a, it’s a related word that means a pack animal.

But originally a sommelier was somebody like an officer in charge of provisions, an officer who was in charge of the things that the pack animals carried, whether for royalty or in the military.

And over time, that word got applied specifically to somebody who deals with provisions, deals with stuff.

And then it narrowed even further to become the word for someone like you who’s in charge of all those wonderful things.

So the general sense that is carried through the centuries is a procurer of the treats and delights.

Supplies, yeah.

Yeah, the supplies.

How interesting.

Yeah. And then the pack animal transfer is really interesting that the word for the animal should then be transferred to the person. I wonder if it started as slightly pejorative or humorous.

I don’t know.

Basically calling the guy a donkey or an ass.

Oh, I don’t think that’s…

Wait a minute. I don’t like where this is going.

Yeah. I don’t think it’s going there.

You sound wonderful, Jan. I doubt that that applies.

So, Jan, it seems to me that there are lots of sommeliers who come from surprising backgrounds, like you have a linguistics background, for example.

Yes, I think that’s true.

You know, I’ve met many, and they do come from just a varied background.

Some people do start out young in the restaurant business, and then they are able to—they just really get interested in wine through that and then, you know, pursue it.

But a lot of people come from a varied background.

If I wanted to break into the business, what’s the main skill that I need to have?

Patience for practicing.

You know, it’s like any other skill.

It’s learned.

And a lot of people think that, you know, oh, you must have a fantastic palate.

Well, I have a decent palate, but most of it is tasting and remembering and remembering what you’ve tasted and being able to apply that to then different wines or different foods in terms of your memory of tasting.

Grant, I think, you know, we’ve gone to Indianapolis before.

I think we’re due for another trip.

I want to see the cellar.

Where can we find you?

Actually, I’m going to stay in the cellar.

I am at a fine dining steakhouse called Peterson’s, and actually in Fishers, Indiana, which is just right across the street from Indiana.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much for your call, Jan.

My pleasure.

Thanks, Jan.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

If you want to talk about the language of your job or your work world, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a great quote from Rebecca Solnit.

She’s the one who wrote Men Explain Things to Me.

Oh, yeah.

And this is about books.

She writes, The object we call a book is not the real book, but its potential.

Like a musical score or a seed.

It exists fully only in the act of being read, and its real home is inside the head of the reader, where the symphony resounds, the seed germinates.

A book is a heart that only beats in the chest of another.

Ooh, I like that, right?

Yeah.

I love that, that this inner thing on the shelf takes new life when the reader’s eyes light upon the page.

Exactly.

Ooh, nice.

Yeah, and I love the analogy with the symphony and the seed.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello, Martha.

Hi.

My name is Reed Schoonover, and I’m calling about something that my wife and I have gone round and round about for the many years we’ve been married.

Okay.

Where are you, Reed? Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Clintonville, Wisconsin.

Okay.

So here’s the rub.

My wife, Patricia, who kindly consented to come back from Montana with me, I met her while I was in graduate school out there in Missoula, has always pronounced the word groceries, which I have just pronounced correctly, as groceries.

And I have pooled many people off and on over the years.

And here in Wisconsin, and I’ve never, and my wife’s laughing at me here right now, I’ve never had anyone tell me that it’s pronounced groceries.

I suspect it’s a Montana thing.

Well, you know, we’ve got some news, and I hope you pass this on to her as we’re talking about it.

Her pronunciation is also widespread.

Oh, it is.

Yeah. Well, here’s the thing about this word.

We’re talking about G-R-O-C-E-R-Y.

You can pronounce it with two syllables or three syllables, and you can pronounce it with an S in the middle or a sh, like an SH sound in the middle.

Now, most language authorities say that the S sound is preferred.

However, the linguistic surveys show that a staggering number of people say groceries or groceries.

Lots of people.

And there’s a little bit of a regional variation there, not much of one, where New Englanders and Easterners might be more likely to use the S sound in grocery.

And people in the Great Plains, which is close to Montana, might be more likely to use the shh sound.

So she probably came by that pronunciation honestly.

She probably learned it from her environment, perhaps from her grocer.

Who knows?

Not her grocer.

It is very, very common pronunciation.

Well, thank you so much for clearing that up.

And I suppose I’ll eat a little crow, but not as much as I might have.

That’s a good way to put it.

You know, I always have to say that one of the meta-narratives about this kind of call where a couple calls with their language disputes is, I hope that this is the way that we get out those day-to-day frustrations with each other so that whatever else we’re really angry about just comes out in these useless debates.

That’s exactly the way it works.

And I do like, on your website, I believe it’s the Ingrid Bergman quote about a kiss when words are superfluous.

And, you know, when it comes to that point, it’s either grocery or grocery or a kiss.

Nice.

Yeah, that’s nice.

Nice.

Well, you said it had been many years.

It sounds like that.

Oh, yeah, 44.

Oh, whoa.

Congratulations on that.

Well.

Here’s to 50, all right?

Thank you so much, and thanks for answering my question.

Give our best to your wife, will you?

Oh, I certainly will.

Quietly, of course.

Quietly.

Take care now.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You will find a lot of people peeving about the grocery pronunciation, but it’s unfounded, and I think they just need to get over it.

Yeah.

We know you fight about things in your family.

We don’t want to hear about the laundry, but call us about the language stuff.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

You know, Grant, there are a lot of intentional pangrams.

We were talking about pangrams earlier, the sentences that have all the letters of the alphabet together.

I’ve got a couple more for you.

Now, these are intentional ones.

These aren’t the random tweets that I saw in that Twitter feed.

The explorer was frozen in his big kayak just after making queer discoveries.

That’s great.

That’s a good one.

Or whenever the black fox jumped, the squirrel gazed suspiciously.

That’s the shortest one I’ve found.

Okay, yeah.

How many letters is that total?

30-ish?

40-ish?

I’ll count them right now.

No, don’t do that.

One, two, three.

Call us with your language questions.

877-929-9673.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And hey, there he is.

It’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

What do you got there?

Something easy, I hope?

Yeah, I think you’ll like this one.

I’m terrible at remembering adages and proverbs.

I always get the last word wrong.

Luckily, I can usually remember the cadence and the rhyme.

For example, there’s this old German proverb, a clear conscience is a soft willow.

Wait, that’s not quite right.

A clear conscience is a soft willow.

No, no, it’s not willow.

It rhymes with willow.

That’s right.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Yes, I like that.

I also like a soft pillow.

Who doesn’t?

So it’s with clear conscience that I share with you these proverbs from around the world.

Remember, the last word is wrong.

The appropriate word will rhyme with it.

Here we go.

Got it.

Here’s an Irish proverb.

A drink precedes a glory.

A drink precedes a story.

Yes, that’s right.

That’s what it is here.

Let me make a note of that to myself.

Very good.

A drink precedes a story.

Here’s a Persian proverb.

A broken hand works, but not a broken cart.

A broken hand works, but not a broken heart?

Yes, that’s very good.

That’s a bittersweet one there.

Yes, isn’t it?

Yeah.

An Irish proverb again.

A friend’s eye is a good clearer.

Steerer?

A friend’s eye is a good mirror.

Yes, a friend’s eye is a good mirror.

Martha, you’re good at proverbs.

That’s good.

How about this German proverb?

A teacher is better than two crooks.

Better than two books?

Yes, a teacher is better than two books.

Good as a book if you don’t have someone to help you with that.

Better than two crooks, too.

That’s true.

Either way, it works.

The Yiddish proverb.

All things grow with time except beef.

Grief?

Yes.

All things grow with time except grief.

Nice.

Nicely done.

Scottish proverb.

Better wear out shoes than beets.

Than feets?

Feets?

Than streets.

No.

Than meets.

Than cleats.

I think this proverb means it’s better to be an active person than a lazy person.

Oh, than sheets.

Sheets.

Yes.

Better wear out shoes than sheets.

I don’t know.

I was going to say, I’m not arguing with that one.

Well, it depends on what you’re doing with the sheets.

How about this African proverb?

Do not look where you fell, but where you crypt.

Tripped?

Yes.

No, well, try it again.

It’s close.

Do not look where you fell, but where you tripped?

It’s not that?

Not exactly tripped.

Slipped.

Slipped.

Slipped, yes.

Do not look where you fell, but where you slipped.

I like that.

Here’s an English proverb.

He that seeks trouble never kisses.

No, never misses.

That’s right.

And finally, an Irish proverb.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the claimant.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the raiment.

You have sour clothing.

The claimant.

No, not raiment.

But sour is the claimant, did you say?

That’s why I said claimant, yeah.

And you said raiment, and both those words were wrong.

Oh, the payment.

Yes.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the payment.

Nice.

Very good.

Well, thank you, John.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

All right.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language at all, you can always give us a call at 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. My name is Wally Edelson, and I’m calling from Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Well, hello, Wally. Welcome to the show.

Okay. Back in the day, growing up in Philadelphia, wherever I went, whether it was school or a party or a trip, throughout the 30 years I lived there, my personal belongings that I carried always went into my pocketbook.

But now here in the panhandle, at a recent function, I admired someone’s pocketbook.

And the woman said, quote, are you having a senior moment? This is a handbag.

What on earth is a pocketbook?

Are you serious?

I am very serious.

I mean, living in this part of the state of Florida, I lived in Miami for 40-some years.

There are a lot of people here who are either snowbirds or have their second home here from Mississippi, Alabama, Louisiana.

And they said, this is a handbag or a shoulder bag or a purse.

What is a pocketbook?

That’s the only thing I ever called anything I put my belongings in.

So I didn’t know if that’s a regional word or a cultural word.

As far as we know, it’s not a regional term, but it certainly is a generational term.

My mother carried a pocketbook for sure.

Pocketbook, and so that applies just to a purse.

Yeah.

Right, a purse, a tote bag, a shoulder bag, a handbook.

I have no particular expertise at this, but I had always understood that a pocketbook was a very specific type.

It’s the small handheld one, maybe with the zipper or the clasp on top.

It’s probably about the size of a book and maybe has accordion size or cost size.

So you open it up and it’ll hold just a few things like your money, your credit cards, ID, glasses, what have you.

But it doesn’t have a strap.

That’s what I had understood pocketbook to be.

Well, now what you’re describing, Grant, I would call a wallet.

What about you, Wally?

Yeah, that to me would be a wallet.

But whether it was usually the kind of bags we carried back in the 40s, 30s, it wasn’t very large, but it did go over my shoulder.

Sometimes it would be, you know, small, but I never called it anything but a pocketbook.

And I didn’t know if that was because of the Northeast or the South didn’t call it a pocketbook.

We didn’t have paperbacks back then.

Right, right.

Well, do you ever use the word purse then?

Now I do.

You do?

For the same thing, for the same article.

For the same thing.

So I was not having a senior moment when I called it a pocketbook.

Well, I wouldn’t call it a senior moment.

I would call it maybe a generational moment.

Yeah, it’s very unlikely.

What about that?

Generational moment.

Young ladies in their 20s.

All my friends, my aunts, my grandparents, my grandmom always put stuff in her pocketbook.

At least you cleared that up.

I’m happy to hear that.

Well, we’re really glad you called, Wally.

I’m sure we’ll hear about this from other folks.

Thanks, Wally.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Take care.

Bye.

You know, purse is an interesting word.

I didn’t realize until recently that if you purse your lips, it has to do with the kind of old leather purse with the leather strap, you know, that you draw, like purse strings.

Right.

So it pulls everything tight.

Yeah.

And so your lips look like the top of a little purse, you know, a little bag that’s drawn together like that.

Very interesting.

Never occurred to me.

We know there’s a generational difference in the words that you use.

See if we can help you sort it out.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, who is this?

Doug Coburn.

I’m calling from Brighton, Ontario, Canada.

Well, Doug, welcome to the show.

We’re really happy to talk to you.

Hiya, Doug.

What’s on your mind?

Well, what’s on my mind is my wife, Linda, and I always get into an argument about the word center, C-E-N-T-E-R, or C-E-N-T-R-E.

We always get into this argument of which word we should be using in a sentence.

And I just found it curious.

One word with the same letters has two totally different meanings.

Wait, it has two different meanings or two different spellings?

Well, it has two different spellings and two different meanings.

How do you differentiate the meanings of those?

Center, C-E-N-T-E-R, is like the center of a target.

Well, center, C-E-N-T-R-E, is like a medical center.

Oh, I right. Like a facility of some kind.

Oh, I see. Okay, so you’re talking about, say, a place as opposed to the middle of something.

That’s correct.

Okay.

I’ve never heard that meaning distinction between the two spellings, and none of the dictionaries that I know of make any reference at all to the fact that there may be a difference in meaning for the two spellings.

They’re considered equal variants of the same word.

Now, are you looking at American dictionaries or British?

I’m looking at everything, actually.

I have Canadian, British, Australian, American, South African, you name it.

If it’s in English, I have it.

You’ve got all the bases covered.

Yeah, I was a dictionary editor for a long time.

You should see my shelves.

I have tons and tons.

But it’s really interesting, though, right, Martha, this spelling difference.

There’s somebody to blame, I think.

There is somebody to blame.

Noah Webster.

Do you know Noah’s story?

I know that, if I’m correct, that after the American Revolution, he thought America should have its own language, and he took a lot of British words and dropped the U out of them.

He did that.

He suggested a lot of spelling changes, some of which stuck in this country, and some of which didn’t.

For example, he wanted to take the word soup, S-O-U-P, and spell it S-O-O-P.

He thought that made more sense and looked more aesthetically pleasing.

And the same with the word women.

That one didn’t stick either.

Wait, the Y spelling was his?

No, no, not the Y, but something very similar, the W-I-M-M-E-N.

He proposed that for women.

That’s really interesting.

And that one didn’t stick, but center did in this country, the…

Yeah, we spell it E-R.

And it follows on many other words that the British and the Canadians also spell E-R.

It’s only a handful of words that they do the R-E spelling for, right?

Right, right.

Like theater, for example.

So your debate about this with your wife, what are the sides here?

What’s the claim?

Well, the argument is that I have always been a very poor speller all my life.

That gene never got passed along from my parents.

My wife, on the other hand, is a fantastic speller and is very good with words.

So I kind of have to defer to her.

Well, you’re not to blame for this.

There’s another really interesting thing happening in Canada.

You’re like a piece of taffy stretched between two hands.

And one of those hands is the United States and the other one is the United Kingdom, at least in terms of spelling and language, okay?

I’ve never heard that analogy, but it’s very good.

And there’s a really great book, so expertly done by Joe Clark, a couple of years ago.

It’s called Organizing Our Marvelous Neighbors.

You can find it online.

And he uses one of the variant spellings for marvelous, and one of the variant spelling for neighbors, and one of the variant spelling for organizing.

And the entire premise of Organizing Our Marvelous Neighbors by Joe Clark is that Canadians do not have a consistent way to spell many of these words that the British and the Americans disagree on.

You guys are kind of stuck, and you will find from newspaper to newspaper or from school to school, from style guide to style guide, very different opinions on exactly how these spellings should be permanently put into Canadian English.

Yeah, so I guess you can spell it either way.

Yeah, you can.

So I may have a bit of ammunition here to win the odd argument with my wife.

Yeah, but it’s just that one word.

You’re also going to have to get your act together on the rest of the words, you know.

Okay.

We’ll give our best to her, okay?

Yeah, and you know what?

Don’t worry about this spelling.

I always like to tell people that some of our greatest writers, F. Scott Fitzgerald, for example, were terrible spellers.

So don’t worry too much about it.

As long as your ideas are good, you’re okay.

All right?

All right then.

Great.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Have a good day.

Bye.

Goodbye.

Call us with your language disputes and questions, 877-929-9673.

Or you can send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Remember when we put out the question about what do you call those little crusty things in your eyes when you wake up in the morning?

Oh, yeah, you wake up.

I call them sleep and you call them eye boogers or something, right?

No, I don’t call them eye boogers.

Something crass, right?

I call them sleepy.

Sleepy.

Oh, something cute, of course.

Yeah.

We heard from Debra in Dallas, Texas, who says that her parents immigrated from the Philippines, and there that stuff in your eyes is called morning stars.

Morning stars.

That may be the best one yet, right?

I know.

They also in the Philippines apparently say morning glory, but her family called them morning stars, which I think is really lovely.

Well, if you’ve got a term for the crusties in your eyes when you wake up in the morning, let us know, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelly Garner from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hey, Kelly. Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, there is a phrase that I grew up hearing my grandparents say, and it’s called a Georgia bath.

A Georgia bath, like Georgia the state?

Correct.

And we would travel to football games to watch the University of Florida play.

And we would travel in our RV and we would be in parking lots of stadiums, and the morning of the game, you know, we would wake up and they would say, okay, go take your Georgia bath.

And we all knew what that meant.

And that was to go into the small bathroom of the RV and take your washcloth and a bar of soap.

And you could fill up the very small sink in there and you would wash the important parts.

And that was your Georgia bath. And I never realized that it was a phrase that other people did not use. And I don’t know where it came from. I don’t know if they made it up.

But I still say to my kids today, you know, even in the bathtub, when I’m talking about a a quick bath, we’re not going to play in the bathtub. I say, let’s go take a Georgia bath.

I don’t know that term. I’ve never heard that before. I mean, I know a bunch of other terms for different kinds of showers and baths, but not that one.

Yeah. The ones where you wash just the important parts.

Yeah. Yeah.

Like Kelly said, right?

Some crass stuff that we can’t say on the air, but there’s things like sponge bath, which that kind of amounts to, right?

Well, growing up in Kentucky, I heard French bath all the time. Take a French bath.

What’s that?

Just washing, you know, just sort of sponging off where you need to sponge off.

You know what, Kelly?

I’ve never heard the Georgia bath.

Let me throw a couple at you.

Have you ever heard marine shower?

It goes by other names, a marine shower as in like the military marines.

Yeah, I haven’t heard of that one.

That’s when you just douse yourself with cologne or deodorant.

Oh, right.

Like throw on some Axe body spray and consider yourself done.

Just cover it up, right?

Or maybe in the previous generations they were used high karate.

And then there’s another one, navy shower.

And this has actually been widely used in parts of the country, such as the Southeast and the West, by officials to describe the kind of bath you take when you want to save water.

And the navy shower is you turn the water on briefly to get wet, you turn it off, and you soap up.

And you turn it on to rinse, and then you’re done.

And that’s it.

So your water is on maybe for two minutes max.

I haven’t heard of that one in particular, but I’ve done that before.

You know, if the water is really cold at a place, you don’t want it on you.

Of course, you only use as much water as you have to just to get clean.

And Kelly, you mentioned that you went to sporting events.

We did.

We are big University of Florida Gator fans, and we would go to all the away football games.

And I did kind of wonder if my grandparents had made that up, because since we’re Florida fans, one of our rivals is the University of Georgia.

That was my question.

So I wondered if it was kind of a derogatory term.

Like a bulldog bath or something.

Yeah, Georgia bulldogs smell.

A put-down of your opponents.

We need to hear from some bulldog fans to find out if they take Florida baths, clearly.

Gator baths.

Gator baths.

Well, Kelly, you’ve sprung a new one on me, and I always love when that happens.

But we’re going to toss this out to the universe who listens to the show and find out if they know more about it and if they use it too, all right?

All right. Thank you so much. This has been so much fun. I love y’all’s show.

Take care. Go Gators.

Thanks so much, Kelly.

Thanks. Go Gators.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, how do you take a bath? Well, we don’t really want to know the details,

But if you’ve got a word for these exceptional baths, the unusual ones,

The one you take when you’re a little hard up, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

I have one more term for that little crust that forms in your eyes when you sleep.

We heard from Rob in Johnson City, Tennessee, who says that his wife grew up calling them sleepy seeds, which I like.

Sarah Dopp from Vermont said that when she was growing up, they called them eye winkers.

Eye winkers. That’s a new one to me.

Eye winkers in your eyes.

And then we heard from Tracy Willis in Indianapolis who says that her family calls them Googlies.

Okay.

And what’s really weird is that Amber wrote us to say that ever since she was 10 years old, she called the stuff that accumulates in her eyes Google.

Google.

Yeah.

Yeah.

She said, I don’t think I heard it from anyone else.

It just seemed to fit.

I also use Google referring to baby spit up as in baby Google.

Give us a call at 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Embrace your inner word nerd.

Stick around as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Think of the place you grew up or maybe the place you live now.

Who is the writer whose work best evokes the sense of being in that place?

When I was 14, my family moved from my native Kentucky to central Florida, and we lived there for just a year.

And my ninth grade English class was assigned to read a story by Kentucky writer Jesse Stewart.

And Grant, I can remember sitting there in the Sunshine State, reading his writing about the change of seasons back home in Kentucky, which I had missed.

And it absolutely gave me goosebumps.

I want to read a passage from that same piece that I just loved.

It has to do with a place called Dubya Hollow.

And he writes,

Dubya Hollow is a place in the sun, fenced in by the wind.

It’s just a place with four seasons, wind, sun, rain, snow,

With scrub oaks and old log houses and new plank shacks,

A place that’s somewhere for some and nowhere for most.

In the spring, you can hear the beetles and the whippoorwills.

You can hear the wind slushing around in the leaves.

In the summer, you can hear the wind and the corn blades parleying around.

You can hear the grasshoppers and the crickets.

You can hear the lazy wind.

The whole hollow looks lazy in the summer sun.

And the sun always shines on W. Hollow in Kentucky.

It never reaches some of it until noon, but it gets there.

Nice.

I’ve been in hollows like that in Kentucky.

It’s not exactly where I grew up, but I’ve spent a considerable amount of time in those kinds of hollows.

And there was something about the writing of Jesse Stewart that always takes me to that state.

Because he was one of your people?

Yeah.

You felt like an insider, like you were part of the same group or same set?

Well, he just evoked, I think in a really physical, sensuous way, what I had experienced physically.

And I’m just wondering, do you have something like that for you?

Of course I do. I have one to match you.

I left Missouri after about 22 years there, and I still basically think of myself as about a third Missourian.

And another third New Yorker, and I guess the new third’s Californian.

We’ll see how that goes.

But at the bottom of that was always having to explain to the world around me what it meant to be from Missouri because there was a lot of misunderstanding.

And there’s a really nice passage in the 1982 book Blue Highways by William Least Heat Moon, also known as Bill Trogdon.

It’s a book that he wrote after he divorced and then drove a truck around the country.

And he talks about what it means to be a Missourian, which he is and which I am.

He writes,

And that is literally what it is.

You just can’t win.

I once applied for a job in the Virgin Islands,

And the editor of the newspaper there thought for sure that I must be a racist.

Because of the way that Missouri had fallen politically during the Civil War.

She just assumed that everyone from Missouri must be a dyed-in-the-wool racist who wanted to bring back the Confederacy.

And so as a Missourian, you frequently encounter that sometimes you’re lumped in with Ohio, which makes no sense to Missourians.

Some people think that it’s basically Montana.

There must be giant cattle ranches.

They just have no idea, really.

Yeah, well, you’re right there in the middle, so you’re not really Southern and you’re not really Northern.

Yeah, exactly.

Missouri itself is—

Eastern or Western.

I mean, I could write a whole treatise on this.

Missouri is divided many ways.

And if we were to redraw the map of the United States based upon people’s allegiances to ideas or language or point of origin, Missouri wouldn’t exist.

It just only lines on a map.

Well, I think it’s a really interesting question to ask what writer really sums up a state.

I know that’s hard to do, right?

But I wonder, I’d love to hear from our listeners.

Yeah, sure.

If you have a book or a passage or a line or two that for you represents who you are and where you’re from,

Whether it’s your adopted home or your birth home, let us know.

words@waywordradio.org or 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mi Vong.

Where are you calling from, Mi?

I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

I’m a firstborn generation Vietnamese American, and I didn’t speak English until I was six.

And I remember going through kindergarten wondering, because back then they didn’t have ESL,

You know, English as a second language to teach us.

And I remember the teacher was trying to teach us the alphabet and everything,

And the teacher told me to go up there and try to, you know, spell a word,

And told me to spell apple.

And it was the first letter, so, you know, the A had to be capitalized.

But instead of me making the A tall, I made the smaller A just taller instead of making the capital A.

And she said I was wrong.

But then I asked her, I was like, well, why is like a small C, like a big C, you know, a small O is a big O.

You know, P is a big P and V and W.

Other letters like A, Q, you know, and G, and so on and so forth,

Are like different, you know, different letter sizes, different letter shapes.

Right.

Oh, what an interesting question.

That’s a really…

Yeah, and she couldn’t answer it.

And then she said, she told me, it just is.

Because I said so.

Exactly.

So I was like, okay, to me, like, white’s not white.

It’s purple because I said so.

Oh, okay.

We can help you with this.

It’s complicated, but I think I can give you a short answer here that will allow you to research this a little more, okay?

Okay, awesome.

So the first thing you’ve got to understand that the alphabet as we know it came to us.

It’s not even secondhand.

It’s like a sixthhand alphabet.

It has literally been passed from generation to generation so often that it’s become corrupted.

So keep that corruption in mind.

Originally, our alphabet, most of it came from the Phoenicians.

And then it was borrowed by the Greeks who took the sounds of the letters and applied them to their own language, even though they didn’t share very much vocabulary at all.

And then the Greek letters were borrowed by the Etruscans, which were in turn borrowed by the Roman peoples and the Italians.

So this is messy.

And every single time that happened, the culture made a change.

Well, we don’t have that sound, but we like that letter.

We’re going to use it for some other purpose.

And you’ve also got to remember that in there somewhere, there were only capital letters.

Many languages did not have lowercase letters.

So in the language trade, we’d call those majuscules, are the big letters, and minuscules

Are the lowercase letters.

And so once they needed those lowercase letters, usually for handwriting, scribes needed them.

It’s faster to write certain kinds of letters.

Then they borrowed again from the same alphabet sets, only this time they wrote them a little

Differently. And then the lowercase letters started transforming over the centuries of the

Millennia in their own way and sometimes separately from the capital letters. That’s the short, short,

Short version. Do you want a really good book that will give you more? Wow, that’s the short version.

A really great book that is totally readable by anyone is the book Letter Perfect. And the author

Is David Sachs, S-A-C-K-S. And he’s really, really passionate about this topic. And the book is very,

Readable. Okay, that’s cool. So you were telling me, you know, all these cultures that put all of

These letters together. Yeah. So are we literally going over thousands of years, obviously thousands

Of years here, or like across, you know, time here, or what’s the time range here? At least,

At least as early as 700 BC, though it probably dates back even further, probably 900 or even

A thousand years BC. Wow. So three millennia. Me, we appreciate your calling. Okay, thanks.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call or send us email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Carolyn Cernich from Humboldt County, California.

Hi, Carolyn.

Welcome to the show.

How are you doing?

What can we help you with?

Well, we have a little challenge.

I am the elections official in Humboldt County.

And one of the things that we have to do is record all the ballot information,

Exactly as it’s presented to us, for use on equipment that is accessible to people who have disabilities.

And something that we’ve come across in recent years, and it seems to be getting more and more common,

Is the use of SLASH.

For example, a candidate for perhaps a school board will describe himself as attorney-slash-father.

Or because jurisdictions are limited in the number of words they can use on the ballot

When they’re presenting their initiative to the voters,

They’ll use phrases like public safety-slash-essential-services measure

Or a phrase like constructing slash acquiring facilities.

And our problem is how do you say that?

Because the voter who would read those words, attorney slash father,

Would probably see it as this person is an attorney and a father.

But the slash may not mean and in the case of public safety essential services measure.

It’s more like and or, or perhaps or.

Right.

And so you’re talking about hearing that, like people with disabilities?

So it’s people with impaired vision.

You are reading them, and they are listening to the audio, right?

That’s right, yes.

And the law in California is very particular about I have to present it exactly as it’s presented to me.

So do I say slash?

Do I say and or and or and slash or?

I think you have in your question, Karen, I think you have your answer.

It is slash.

This is widely used in a variety of contexts throughout English in all the continents where English is spoken.

And almost everyone says slash except for some of the people in the UK who might say stroke instead.

So they might say actor stroke model.

Actor slash model, for example, is a very common phrase.

So common it appears in some dictionaries, meaning somebody who is an actor and a model.

We have a number of different cases in English where we do read punctuation and we say the

Punctuation. For example, if we’re talking about radio frequencies, we might say 103.3. We’re

Saying point for the punctuation to indicate that’s what it is. And you’re right. I’m sorry?

Or dot com.

Dot com, exactly. You’re right in that it is serving as a conjunction here. You might call

It a coordinating conjunction or just a coordinator, depending on which language authority you’re

Going to follow. And a lot has been written about this because it’s a relatively, let’s not say it’s

A new phenomenon, but let’s say that it’s newly looked at. Jeffrey Pullum looked at it and Anne

Curzan have looked at it, two linguists that we know and respect. And if you want, we’ll post

Links to their stuff online. But they’ve talked very specific about how particularly among the

Younger set slash can be used to separate two ideas in the same way that a semicolon may separate

To ideas. They’re kind of related, but not exactly related. And don’t they use the word slash written.

Out? Yes, they do. Yeah. And text messages and emails, the younger folks may actually spell out the word slash rather than putting the slash. I like how much you’ve thought about this and that you realize that sometimes the slash is serving as a joining conjunction or a kind of a logical conjunction that says either or. So it sounds like you’re headed in the right direction there.

Yeah. I would just say slash. I think it’s widespread enough. And many language authorities again have talked about it as being a real thing. So I think you’re on safe ground there.

Okay.

Yeah.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, good luck.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, what linguistic problems are vexing you at work? Let us know about it. 877-929-9673 is the number to call. Or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

It seems like there’s a whole subculture on Instagram of only posting photos of Starbucks cups that get your name wrong, right? So if you have a really complicated name or even a simple one, it’s amazing how many spellings the baristas at Starbucks will come up with when they ask for your name.

Yeah, so some people have started adopting coffee nims, which is they come up with a simple name for themselves, which can’t be confused and is easy to understand.

Oh, interesting.

So Jack.

Yeah.

Very simple, one syllable, easy to spell words. The coffee nims. So it goes along with your nom de guerre, nom de plume. I like that. Right? It could be a javanim, too.

Javanim.

I kind of like that. But a coffee nim has some legs. People have started to use it. I think Elvis is a good one.

Elvis is great.

Who else is?

Yeah, and everybody will look at you, and you’ll have your moment in the spotlight.

Exactly. I usually make coffee at home, and so I don’t use a coffee nim. But grant is surprisingly hard for people to remember.

Yeah.

The gram?

No, it’s not.

It’s grant.

Yeah.

Grant.

Or does the British say grant? Give me and Martita a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Jennifer. I’m calling from Traverse City, Michigan.

Hey, Jennifer. Welcome. What’s up? What can we do for you?

I have a question about the word reef, R-E-E-F, and I’m just wondering if you can help me understand some current usage of that word.

Ooh, yes, please. I have been married to my husband for 19 years, and I think that this word might come from his family because a lot of my friends and family, of my own friends and my own family, do not know this word. I’m not sure if it’s a family word or where this word, the usage of this word has kind of originated from.

And how do you use it?

I guess the best way to describe it is if the word reef is being used as if you’re applying a lot of pressure or a lot of torque in order to open something or pry something open, something of that nature.

Oh, so you would be reefing?

Yes.

So reefing a jar or reefing a window that’s stuck or something like that?

Exactly. Yes, exactly.

Is your husband’s family, are they sailors?

My husband actually was in the Navy for a couple of years, and he does have an uncle who was in the Navy as well, but I believe that’s as far as it goes.

Here’s why I asked that question, because we’re pretty sure that this use of reef comes from sailing originally, and we find it in citations in the Dictionary of American Regional English throughout the northern part of the United States. But when you reef in sailing, you take off part of a sail that’s meant to be taken off in order to reduce the amount of surface area so that the boat doesn’t go as fast, basically. And that’s reefing, and it requires very vigorous motion to do that. There’s a certain kind of jerking, I think, that you do to get it off there. And the citations for this go back to the mid-1950s, so it’s probably older than that. And I would not be surprised if he learned this just from his environment, probably not from the Navy, because the citations are literally from your part of the country. Like the Dictionary of American Regional English shows Michigan citations and Great Lakes citations. So it’s probably, maybe it’s sailors on the Great Lakes use this. I don’t know.

Yeah, I knew it had some kind of nautical reference. I’m not a big sailor, so I didn’t know exactly what it meant. And when I was finding some of my own friends and family were surprised by this word, but I did go and look it up in the dictionary, and I didn’t see this kind of definition for it. I did see the nautical term, and so I suspected it maybe had roots there, but I wasn’t sure.

Yeah, that’s why we have all these words in our daily vocabulary, which are not recorded in mainstream dictionaries because they’re not widely used, but they’re widely enough used that specialty dictionaries like the Dictionary of American Regional English will put them in print for exactly the reason that we’re here today, which is plenty of people use it, just not everybody. So, yeah, it comes from sailing. It means to push or pull with a lot of force.

Oh, well, great. Thank you so much for clarifying that.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for calling. I really appreciate it. Thanks for calling. Take care now.

Absolutely.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, is there a word that has you puzzled? Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org. And you can also find us on Facebook and on Twitter at Wayword.

That’s all for today’s broadcast. But don’t wait till next week to chat with us. Find us on Facebook, Twitter, iTunes, or SoundCloud. Check out our website, too, at waywordradio.org, where you’ll find a dictionary, a newsletter, mobile apps, and a discussion forum. And you can listen to hundreds of past episodes for free. You can also leave us a message anytime, day or night, at 877-929-9673. Share your family’s stories about language or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or in school. You can also email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine. The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten. We have production help from James Ramsey and Tamar Wittenberg. A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

The show is coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California. Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

Tomato and I like tomato. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let’s call the whole thing up. But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.