Baby Blues (episode #1542)

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. I always appreciate it when an expert in a specialized field can talk to non-experts in a way that’s clear and concise and understandable. And that’s why I was interested in a book called The Five-Minute Linguist. It’s a collection of dozens of very short essays by linguists from across the country. And each of them addresses some question involving language, the kind of thing that they might be asked at a dinner party or just sitting around drinking a beer. Things like, what causes somebody to have a foreign accent? Or what’s the difference between a language and a dialect? And the essays in this book are really bite-sized. They’re just three to five pages with references at the end, which makes it a really intriguing way to sort of wander through the topic of language and just follow whatever aspect intrigues you.

I had the good fortune to see the live version of The Five-Minute Linguist at the annual convention of the Linguistic Society of America conference in New Orleans.

Oh, I bet that was fun.

It was very fun. They presented it kind of like the moth. So all of these prepared speakers who clearly had rehearsed and had fantastic slideshows got up exactly five minutes, presented very exciting material in a very familiar, fun way, and there was voting. The audience voted and there were judges in the front. The emcee was John McWhorter, whom you may know from the Lexicon Valley podcast. And the judges were other podcasters. Gretchen McCulloch from the Lengthusiasm podcast. There was Patrick Cox from the Subtitle podcast, formerly of The World in Words. Ben Zimmer, who writes about language for The Wall Street Journal. And Ann Curzan, who does a language podcast for Michigan Radio, was there. Lane Green, who writes the language column for The Economist, was also one of the judges. And it was just the best. They really know how to take complicated subjects and explain it so that you enjoy it and understand it.

Yeah, there’s a real art form to taking a complicated subject and just distilling it in a way that makes people understand it.

I’d love to read The Five-Minute Physicist or The Five-Minute Geologist.

Right, The Five-Minute Astronaut or The Five-Minute Farmer.

I would read that.

Anyway, I appreciate what The Five-Minute Linguist is doing, both the live version and the book. It’s something that you and I try to do. Take this wonderful topic of language and make it something that everyone can understand.

And if you would like to join us on the radio to talk about language, 877-929-9673. Email us words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant. Hey, Martha. This is Rana.

Hi, Rana. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Rana. Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Jackson, Wyoming.

Excellent.

Welcome. What’s up?

Hey, I have a question for you about the word suffrage.

Suffrage. Wanted to know where it came from, what its origins were. And this came up because living in Wyoming, we celebrated the 150th anniversary of women’s suffrage here last year. We’re the equality state, the first state or territory that offered women the right to vote. Of all the other states. So that came up quite a bit last year, and I’m just curious about that word.

Well, suffrage is a really interesting word. A couple of surprises with it. It’s had several different meanings over the years, but the biggest surprise for me was that it doesn’t have anything to do with suffering. For the longest time, I thought it had to do with suffering.

Yeah, that was what I was thinking, and I thought, no, that can’t be right. And then I was thinking maybe it had to do with allowing, you know, like Jesus said, suffer the little children to come to me. So suffer the women to write the votes.

There you go.

Right. And I looked it up in my unabridged dictionary, which is pretty old.

Yeah.

And it said, like, from the Latin suffragem, a voting tablet or something?

Yeah, yeah, suffragium.

Yeah, which back in ancient Rome could mean a ballot or a voting tablet, as you said. It may come from an even older word that means a broken piece of tile used as a ballot, which is how you did it in antiquity. That’s actually where we get the word ostracism in English because it comes from the Greek word ostraca for tile pieces that were used to vote somebody out of the city.

Anyway, in terms of suffrage, the Latin word suffragium eventually gave us the term for this right to vote. You see that in the 18th century. You see suffrage being used with various adjectives to describe different systems of voting, like working class suffrage and universal suffrage and that kind of thing, and eventually women’s suffrage.

And another thing that surprised me about this term is the difference between a suffragist and a suffragette, which is super interesting. Did you ever think about that?

No, I didn’t.

There’s a difference?

Yeah, yeah. You may remember the old Mary Poppins movie in what was it, the early 1960s. There was a little subplot about family members being part of the suffragettes, and there was a song that went, well done, sister suffragette, which seems really positive. But the original term suffragist was somebody who simply advocated for voting rights. And then a sarcastic journalist in Britain started using the term suffragette to make fun of women who were trying to get the right to vote. And some women adopted that term suffragette as the way that groups adopted derogatory terms. They embraced it to control it, right?

Yeah.

But generally, it was a negative term, sort of making fun of women trying to get the right to vote with this sort of diminutive suffix. And so in the United States, suffragist was the term that was only ever widely used, and suffragette was more common in the UK.

Mm—

Oh.

So the word suffrage does go back to that old Latin term?

Yeah, suffragia. I mean, we don’t really know the origin, but yeah, that’s it.

Okay.

Wow. Well, thank you both very much. And I will try to keep suffragist in my mind for the U.S., for those people that wanted the right to vote.

And that’s for people of color as well?

It really got associated specifically with women. The whole notion of suffrage now, I think, is associated with that women’s movement.

Right. Everything else was just voting rights when it started referring to other disenfranchised communities. It just was voting rights.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much. I enjoy the show so much, and you two are delightful.

Oh, thank you very much.

Thanks for calling. It’s a great question, and congratulations again to Wyoming. And we love hearing from Wyoming, so call us again sometime, all right?

You bet.

Take care.

All right.

Thanks, Ron.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or try us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Colin. I’m calling from Newton, Massachusetts, but I live in West Hartford, Connecticut.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was listening to the show a few weeks back, and I thought about the most interesting word I’ve heard lately. The word that came to mind was the word dirty. The 14, 15-year-old boys in my town will use the term dirty as a very positive term, especially around athletes. And so, for example, a basketball player on a court will have just driven by someone and dunked, and they’ll go, that person is dirty. And another example would be we’re playing foosball in my house, and my son’s friends are over, and they’re all 14, 15 years old. And because I’m good at foosball, one of them said, our friend’s dad is dirty at foosball. And so I started to think about it and how about, as a youth, certain terms, again, we’re regional, only in Connecticut, for example, and some were beyond that. And then there’s a derivative of it that’s interesting, too, which is if someone’s really dirty, they’re filthy. And this is often talked about with pro athletes, but it can also be just talked about with someone who just happens to be good on a travel soccer team.

Yeah. These, they’re not regional. Neither one of these. These are widespread throughout sports, and they’ve got a long history.

You have teenagers in your house, I guess?

Yes. 15 and 19 at this point. 19 at the college.

Yeah. So they’re carrying on a long tradition, over 100 years of these words being used in the sporting world.

Some of the earliest uses we know are from boxing, to people talking about boxers with dirty punches who can really swing and get in there and knock somebody out.

Even before that, going back to the 1840s, we find filthy being used as an intensifier to really kind of exaggerate other adjectives and adverbs to indicate force and impact and indicate just kind of the strength of the word to follow.

Not meaning dirty, in no way meaning dirty, but just meaning more of the same.

When you find this happening again and again where something, a word is kind of stripped of everything except its force.

All that’s left is its emphasis.

Yeah, I think of filthy rich.

Yeah, filthy rich is a great example.

In slang studies, there’s always talk about the interplay between the different meanings of a word.

When you have a polysemous words, polysemous means that a word has more than one meaning.

There’s not a clear division between these senses.

There’s always an overlap.

There’s always an intersection between these meanings so that when you have something like filthy and you have part of it where it’s just as emphasis and part of it actually means dirty, sometimes the uses have layers.

Sometimes there’s a double entendre and you can definitely read it two ways.

And then you get that nice little, ooh, a little buzz, that frisson up where you get that nice.

This is why language is so fun.

This is why wordplay is so interesting.

I’m thinking particularly, for example, you can find uses of filthy being used in surfing.

Even now, people talk about filthy waves, filthy surf.

And it brings to mind, because my ears perk up about this kind of thing.

And the other one that’s come recently is the term just plain nice.

Nice?

That player is nice.

Meaning that they’re very skilled?

Very skilled, again.

So it came to mind, and I wonder how that one will come into play.

But maybe that’s for another conversation.

Oh, that looks so subtle, isn’t it?

You put a lot of thought on this, and I appreciate your thoughtfulness on this subject.

And do call us and report from the field with everything else that you’ve discovered about slang and teens, all right?

I will. Thank you so much, both of you. Have a great day.

Thanks, Colin. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We heard from Rabbi Michael Burke of San Diego, who wrote in response to our conversation about friendly hazing on the job.

He wrote,

When I was just 16, I was selling shoes at a mall, and one day my manager asked me to go to another shoe store on the other end of the mall and ask to borrow their wall stretcher.

I had started selling shoes when I was about 14 years old in my father’s store, and I began asking myself, what in the hell is a wall stretcher?

What could a wall stretcher possibly do?

I was pretty convinced by the time I reached the other store that it was a practical joke.

When I got to the store, I found a young guy like me and asked him, and he confirmed my suspicion.

Wall stretcher, though, it’s actually pretty funny.

Like, what would that do?

I love it.

And if you’re smart enough, then you just treat that as an outing to wander the mall for a while, right?

Right.

Stop by Jamba Juice.

Yeah, just go hang out at Spencer’s Gifts, get some funny T-shirts.

Whatever. We’d love to hear your stories about language. So call us 877-929-9673 or write us.

Like Rabbi Burke did. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Why we say what we say and how we say it. Stay tuned for more.

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 joining us now on the line is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

I have something very letter-based this week.

Now, what follows are words that begin with N-O.

No.

But all of the words, all the answers that follow are going to begin with N-O or N-O-T.

Not.

No or not.

Now, you add N-O to a word and you get that other word.

For example, I’m not taking off my hat, but I feel like I’m falling asleep.

That’s no doff or nod off.

Okay.

Now, some of the following could begin with not, like this is not an atom with a net electric charge, but it is an idea, would be.

A not ion.

Right.

Or?

Or a notion.

Or notion.

Not ion or notion.

Yes, very good.

So all of your answers will have two parts.

You’ll give me the not or no part, and then you’ll give me the full part.

Yes?

Okay.

Here we go.

I’m not a fan of a classic humor magazine, but I do like to wander about.

Not Nomad.

Right.

Or Nomad, right?

That one’s kind of pretty straightforward.

How about this one?

I refuse to give my approval to anything, so I’m just going to curl up in my little reading corner.

No, okay, and nook?

Yes, no, okay, and nook.

It looks like everything is off.

I’m not surprised.

It’s 12 p.m.

Not on.

No, no on or noon.

No on or noon, yes.

I have a bed and a chair, but no furniture to eat dinner on.

You have to admit, this is rather significant.

It is indeed.

So not able and no table or no table.

Notable.

Notable.

No table and notable.

Nicely done.

This place never has any strong winds.

It’s a city that’s a port of entry on the U.S.-Mexican border.

Oh, it has no gales.

Therefore, it’s Nogales.

Nogales, yes.

Well done.

Muy bien.

She is not, in fact, a physician who delivers babies, for short.

But she’s also inexperienced at using the internet.

Noob and no OB.

That’s right, yes.

Similarly, when I was in school, I absolutely refused to take gym, for short.

I mean, I really, really, really, really refused.

No P.E. Nope.

Nope, would not.

Finally, this water on the lake has not frozen yet.

But I will put up a sign that lets people know that.

Notice. Not ice. Notice. Not ice and notice. Yes, well done.

John, that was noice.

Noice. Thank you so much.

Thanks, John. Take care.

All right. Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

The show is about words and language and a little bit of goofing around.

If you’d like to goof around with us, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

My name is Paul Jeanette, and I’m calling from snowy Dryden, New York.

Well, hello, Paul.

Welcome to the show.

What’s on your mind, Paul?

Well, I am a transplant from the South, and I really enjoy observing differences in the ways people use words to express themselves where I live now in upstate New York versus where I grew up.

Everything from accents and syllables that are emphasized in words to greetings, metaphors, expressions, the whole magilla.

And I’d like to get y’all’s insights on a common way to criticize people that I’ve observed that seems to have almost a universal format, but with regional differences in the words that are used.

And it goes something like this.

When I was growing up in Tennessee, if I was involved in a conversation about someone who was not there, someone who was not part of that conversation,

If someone said, bless his heart, or maybe God bless him,

Then everyone involved in the conversation understood that one of the next things that person was going to say would be the word but,

And then they would follow that with a criticism of this other person who’s not there.

Yep, that sounds pretty familiar.

I thought you might think so, Martha.

So, for example, I can just hear my grandmother in Franklin, Tennessee saying, well, bless his heart, but that Bob is just the laziest person I know.

And then, for emphasis, she might tack on an I swanny or an I declare or something like that.

And here in upstate New York, people don’t tend to say things like bless his heart or God bless him.

But if you’re in a conversation with other people and you’re talking about someone who’s not there, and if someone says, don’t get me wrong, everyone knows, everyone knows that that’s going to be followed by the word but and then a criticism of the other person.

And sometimes extra words are added at the beginning, like, don’t get me wrong.

I mean, he’s a great guy, but that Bob is just the laziest person I know.

So I’d appreciate your insights on where does this come from? Why do we say or criticize people like this? And I’d especially be interested if you know of other regional variations in the words that are used, perhaps at the beginning.

Well, that’s really interesting. So we’re talking about linguistic hedges, where you say something critical, but you have a little preface there that smooths the way a little bit. It’s like you’re protecting yourself and also protecting the other person, right? It’s a conversational lubricant.

Yeah, a lot has been said about bless his heart, and you can search our website for more about that. And I don’t want to go into that here because, again, a lot has been said about that. Sometimes these are called compromisers or downtoners or softeners or downgraders or weakeners. But this is a part of politeness. And there’s a whole discipline, a sub-discipline of linguistics, which is about being polite to each other and how we do that. Because conversation isn’t only about exchange of information. And some linguists actually will argue that conversation isn’t mostly about exchange of information. It’s about the social glue that keeps the tribe together.

Fascinating. Fascinating. Have y’all or you guys heard of other regional differences besides bless his heart or don’t get me wrong? It’s not regional at all. There’s nothing regional about it. I mean, regional in the terms of it might be from country to country. But for the most part, these are inherent to the language as a whole. English has its, French has its, Russian has its, Chinese has its. They each have their own. And so every culture has some form of politeness. The rules of politeness are built into the language and you learn them as part of the language, which, again, is part of the culture that it’s attached to.

I’m thinking of this structure that you’re talking about, making a statement and then saying but. That’s one variety of it. There are also softeners like starting a sentence with all I know is da-da-da-da. So you’re discounting your own expertise in order to make the other person know that you don’t believe yourself to be arrogant and all-knowing.

Right. For fun, I’ve asked some people from other areas how they would say things like that. And a friend of mine who grew up in northern New Jersey said that there, you know, outside of New York City, if someone said not for nothing, then they would know there would be but and then a criticism. And a friend from London told me if someone said not to be funny, then you knew that but was coming along with a criticism.

Right. Not to be critical. You know what, Paul, you’re right. Those are good regional examples. Absolutely. I remember not for nothing when I lived in New York City. I remember very well that people on Long Island said that, and those are great regional examples. But I want to get away from this notion that there’s anything regional about this. It doesn’t have to be regional. I want to circle this around in a different direction and talk about the everyday ones that might slip by us.

One of the things that Martha and I often encounter is people complaining about things like, you know, sort of, and I mean, and people complain about these filler words. And our response typically is to say, if you take these filler words out of a conversation, then people often sound rude. And a lot of the padding in the conversation that we might write off as unnecessary filler is the softening that makes conversation palatable. It’s what makes it easy to take. So we don’t all sound crude and brutish and overly assertive and even arrogant. And so the stuff that you’re talking about here, this politeness, this wrapping of politeness, the ribbon and the bows and the stickers that we put on the language that we speak, this is the stuff that makes it all easy to take.

Fascinating. Yeah, right? Yeah. Much of the speech that we do on any given day is the wrapping and the bows. I can see that. Yeah. Yeah. That’s great. I really appreciate that.

Well, Paul, we appreciate your calling. Thank you very much for having me. I love your show. I really appreciate how you help us all to understand our language better. Thank you, Paul. Take care now. Appreciate it. Bye-bye. Okay. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. In response to our conversation a few weeks ago about changes on signs where a letter falls out or something like that, we heard from Kitty Daly from Burlington, Vermont. And she remembered that she had seen the back of a rental truck that had originally said, move it yourself with whatever the company was. Move it yourself with whatever. But somehow it had lost a couple of letters and it said, move it, you elf wit.

Nice. That’s outstanding. We’d love to hear your stories along these lines, so call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Daniil Bumashko. Where are you calling us from, Daniil? Traverse City, Michigan. Oh, excellent. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

So I had a question about a word. We were listening to one of your podcasts in class. It was about Jet Black, and our teacher asked, does anyone have any questions about any words? And I asked the word baby blue, why it’s called that.

Cool. So baby blue, you mean the sort of very light, delicate blue? Yeah. Yeah. Do you have any thoughts about that, Danielle, why we might say baby blue? I don’t know. Maybe like eyes, like when they’re first born, their eyes are like white-blue. That’s all I could think of, really, because not all eyes are blue when they’re born, but that’s my guess.

Right. Not all eyes are blue when babies are born, but for a lot of Caucasian babies, that is the case. They’re a sort of blue color that turns darker in the first year of life. So that may well be the association there that it’s the blue that little babies have, certain babies. And there was a poem back in the 1860s that was reprinted in a whole lot of newspapers that had a line in it about our dove had eyes of baby blue. And I suspect that that helped popularize that because we don’t really see it before the early 19th century.

Okay, that’s interesting. Yeah. Well, cool. Well, thank you. Thank you, Danielle. Thanks for your call. Appreciate it. Have a good day. Take care. Bye. Bye.

877-929-9673. I just got back from Sedona, Arizona, and I was doing a little bit of hiking, and I kept hearing people talk about social paths.

Oh, desire paths. Exactly. It’s the same thing as a desire path. I had never heard the term social path, all this hiking that I’ve done. Here you are with another one of those urban planning things. I know. Social paths. It’s an unofficial trail, an unofficial path that maybe was formed by erosion or humans going where they shouldn’t go or animals.

Right. So they cross a patch of ground where there’s no gravel laid or no concrete or no asphalt or something. And if enough people go that way, then a path is formed. Right. And I love that term desire path. You see that on a college campus, the fastest way to get to the cafeteria, right? They might be called cow paths sometimes, even if a cow has never traveled that way.

Super cool. 877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name is Eric Zuckner, calling from San Diego. Hi, Eric. Welcome to the show. Hello, Eric. What’s up?

So my question is about Pennsylvania vernacular. I’ve lived in a few different cities across the country, including Corpus Christi TX, Syracuse NY, Albany NY, Pittsburgh PA, and San Diego CA. Why do people from Pennsylvania insist on adding the abbreviation of their state at the end of each time they reference a city? In all of these other places I’ve lived, no one has ever done that. But in Pennsylvania, people feel required to say that to each other, and they all do, even if they’re speaking to other natives. I’ve looked up explanations online, and none have been satisfactory. So I’m curious what your opinion on that is.

Oh, what explanations have you seen? I have heard people abbreviate it because the name of the state is so long.

But there are other states that are equally long in syllable count, and those states don’t do it.

The other thing that I’ve heard is that there are so many cities that are close to the border.

You want to clarify that you’re actually talking about Pennsylvania.

And I don’t buy that answer either because there’s other states that have cities near the border.

And they don’t say that.

Boy, that’s really interesting.

Yeah, there are 13 states.

There are 12 other states besides Pennsylvania that have four syllables, so that doesn’t really seem to fit.

And it does seem like this thing that if you’re from Pennsylvania, you know this just like you know how to pronounce yingling beer or you know what a terrible towel is or a nittany lion, right?

That’s right.

Yeah, it’s almost like this little secret handshake.

You know, I’ve heard it in songs.

I’m thinking there’s a Huey Lewis song with Pittsburgh PA in it and James Brown.

Didn’t James Brown sing Pittsburgh PA in Living in America as well?

Yeah, that’s right.

So it’s been around for a while, but I don’t think we have a good explanation of why people say that.

It’s the same reason people do anything more than once and pass it on to person to person, right?

Yeah, maybe a point of pride.

Yeah, it becomes the thing the locals do to show that they’re locals, right?

Yeah.

This has been done, by the way, for at least 100 years.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it’s pretty old.

They were finding newspapers back in the early 1900s.

Okay, so it’s still an unknown characteristic of speech in Pennsylvania other than the I’m also from Pennsylvania lingo handshake.

But it’s one of those things like if you’re from Nevada and you know how to pronounce the state, you can go wink, wink.

I know that you’re an insider because you know how to pronounce the state, you know what we call a liquor store around here, you know which counties are dry.

It’s all that insider’s knowledge, that insider’s behavior that shows that you’re a local, right?

Okay.

Yeah, it’s that kind of stuff.

And I’m betting there are listeners all over the country right now who are not from Pennsylvania who are thinking, oh, my gosh.

The next time they hear somebody say they’re from Pennsylvania, they’re going to listen for that PA.

All my PA friends do that.

That’s correct.

Okay, so the final answer is that it’s just a method to indicate you’re part of the PA clan.

Is that right?

I think it is.

And why not?

Yeah, and a habit, as Grant said.

And why not?

Yeah, that’s fair.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Eric, we appreciate your calling.

Thanks, Eric.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye.

Call us if you’re living in a state where they do something similar, or if you have any other observation about language. We’re here to chat with you. 877-929-9673 or send your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a good word for either hangman or crossword puzzles. It’s the word pre, P-R-E-E.

Do you know this term, Pre?

It’s a Scottish word.

Pre means a trial or a taste or a sample.

And you can also pre a person’s mouth, which is to give them a kiss.

A sample a mouth?

Yeah.

Yeah.

A taste of one’s lips.

Right.

Or you pre a kiss or something like that.

And it didn’t make any sense to me until I realized that it’s a variant of prove, you know, to test, like Spanish probar.

And it’s like in the Scottish language, you know, you say gee rather than give.

Oh, of course.

It’s like pre rather than prove.

Perfect.

That makes perfect sense to me.

Pre a kiss.

I love that.

Excellent.

I’m adding that.

Okay.

Socking that one away for future use.

I bet.

877-929-9673.

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 I keep telling myself that this is the year I’m going to read more books than ever.

And my resolve was strengthened when I read an article in the Harvard Business Review by author Neil Pasricha.

He said that he went from reading just five books in one year to reading nearly a hundred, and he talked about the benefits.

He said, I’ve never felt more creatively alive in all areas of my life.

I feel more interesting.

I feel like a better father and my writing output has dramatically increased.

He said that reading many, many, many more books last year has been a domino that’s tipped over a slew of others.

And he’s disappointed that he hadn’t done it sooner.

But then the question is how, given all the other distractions in our lives.

And he had some good suggestions, most of which involved behavior modification.

They put their television in the basement.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Next to the water heater?

I guess so.

And it just made it easier because if you wanted entertainment, the first place you were passing by was the bookshelf.

And he had ways of making the bookshelf more enticing.

And then the other thing that he said was he applies that 10,000 steps rule to reading.

You know, the idea of 10,000 steps a day and parking your car farther away from the entrance to the store.

So you have to get in just a few more steps.

He was talking about finding little pockets of time to read.

And so I’ve been trying to do that, too.

But I was also reading an article about the whole 10,000 steps rule and how now physiologists are rethinking that and thinking that maybe you just need more exertion rather than 10,000 steps.

So I’m thinking, well, maybe I should read something really hard.

But I’m trying to find those little pockets and using audio books more and more.

I also want to work in some graphic novels because I don’t read them and I’d like to give those a try.

There’s some wonderful stuff out there.

Yeah, yeah.

I’ve started John Lewis’s, which is really wonderful, a civil rights hero.

And I’m looking at lists of best books and winnowing what I read, dangling these things in front of me.

Oh, I see. Providing yourself with temptations where you just can’t resist because the prospect of those wonderful things is too hard to resist.

Yeah. Again, behavior modification.

So, you know, because it’s just too easy to fritter away your time.

It certainly is.

Checking Twitter or email or whatever.

I don’t know. Do you have any strategies?

I do. One of them was, well, we don’t watch a lot of TV in my house.

One of the things we do is the TV is rarely on during the week.

Basically, it’s only on the weekend.

And even then, it’s only on the evenings and the weekend.

The TV is not on all day.

The other thing is, for myself, I don’t watch shows on my phone except on the weekend.

And even then, not usually.

So that leaves time for either work or books.

And my main distraction from reading is work.

So I’m trying to work less.

Sorry, Martha.

What’s more for you?

Oh, that’s all right.

Well, I’m wondering if our listeners have strategies for increasing the number of books they read in a year.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your tips to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dana Ayer from Oceanside, California.

Hi, Dana. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

I’m interested in the word Jody.

I’m a sociologist, but I used to be in the Army, in the infantry.

And the word Jody is used in two ways.

It’s used as a label for what otherwise might be called marching songs or cadences.

And then it’s also used to refer to a type of individual, the kind of guy who, when you’re off in the Army, steals your girlfriend back in the day when I was in.

And probably nowadays it could also be anybody of any gender who steals your significant other when you’re away in service.

I’m just curious about the history of the word.

Right. So we’re going to talk about the word and not the cadences themselves, really.

Although we should mention the Jody calls. These are the marching songs.

These are the chants. Sometimes they’re funny. Sometimes they’re dark. Sometimes they’re naughty.

But these are what the soldiers or the different military folks use in order to keep time as they’re marching, running, working out, that sort of thing.

But we’re talking about the term, not the activity, right?

Right.

It’s pretty interesting.

Some work has been done on this.

First, I need to mention a thesis that was done by Travis Sally at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, 2015.

It’s called Sound Off, An Introduction to the Study of American Military Marching Cadences.

And so this is something that I’d only recently seen that I hadn’t noticed the last time Martha and I had talked about this on the show,

which was 11 years ago because it hadn’t been published.

But there’s two pieces to this that I want to point out.

Jody is a corruption of Joe the Grinder.

And it comes from African-American folk tradition.

I figured that.

Yeah.

And so grinder here is a sexual reference.

It refers to a guy who is home making love to your gal.

And it’s not just from the military tradition, but it’s from the prison tradition.

So this is from the folklore of prisoners as well.

And sometimes he’s listed as Joe, J-O-E, space D as a middle initial grinder,

or Joe, J-O-E, the grinder as somebody who grinds.

And obviously you can see how immediately that would turn into Jody as a name, J-O-D-Y.

And it pops up in 1940s, but earlier than that, in the 1939, in a song, in a blues song.

And so we have it listed that early.

And there’s some evidence that it pops up in the song of men working in the fields in the South.

Black men working in the fields in the South.

Because it’s all the rhythm thing.

That’s right.

So it comes very distinctly from the tradition of folk songs sung in the fields in the South as you’re working.

So that’s the best evidence that we have.

Now, David Moorer has some evidence, which seems kind of iffy.

I love his work.

He did all kinds of work on mob sling, for example.

A lot of the stuff even now that you see in mob movies comes from David Moorer’s work of literally subscribing to newsletters from mobsters.

They had their own newsletters.

And then publishing that.

So this is the kind of guy that he was.

So even now, a lot of mobster slang in movies.

This is from David Moorer.

But in this particular thing, I’m not sure.

But he believes that it came from a character known as Oolong the Chinese Grind Boy.

Or Chinese Joe the Grinder.

Which is this fictional Chinese character who was in the folklore of prisons in California.

Who was supposedly at home romancing your gal while you were in prison.

However, he claims it was only orally transmitted,

and it appears in no written literature except in Morrer’s work.

So nobody’s written it down except for Morrer, and he says he heard it from prisoners.

So we have to take his word for it.

Yeah.

So that makes sense.

It comes out of that kind of common experience that both prisoners and soldiers have of being away from home and not being able to be with loved ones and significant others and everything like that.

And then once you get that rhythmic chanting thing, which is a lot of times probably about that, then it just kind of the thing referring to Jody becomes known as Jody.

That’s right.

That’s right.

So a lot of the songs were about Jody.

So anyway, just to be clear here for people who are already writing their angry emails,

we’re talking about the word, not the chant.

They have different histories.

The word for the chant met up with the chants after both already existed

and became applied to the chants after their histories were already in play.

So they don’t coexist.

They meet up somewhere along the way.

Do we know when the marching cadence usage starts off?

The story that’s usually told is Willie Duckworth, a black private station at Fort Slocum, New York, was overheard using it in 1944 by Colonel Bernard Lentz.

And then he spread it throughout the rest of the military.

However, it was already – chants were already being used by black soldiers throughout the military when Duckworth was overheard.

And we have evidence that black soldiers were using chants very similar to the modern cadences in World War I.

There is a song called Take Me Now, which was used by black soldiers in World War I, which is a corruption of a song called Mademoiselle from Armantier, which is an English song based on a French song.

Anyway, so by World War I, these chants were already being used by black soldiers.

Well, that makes sense because a lot of it, because of the racial discrimination, blackers were used in quartermaster units and pioneer units that were doing physical labor that wasn’t that different from what they had to do on chain gangs or, you know, in work and things like that.

So they kind of bring that tradition in and then it goes into the larger army.

That’s fascinating.

Yeah, and that’s a super short version. But yeah, like I said, the master’s thesis I mentioned by Travis Salley from 2015 at the University of Massachusetts Amherst called Sound Off, An Introduction to the Study of American Military Marching Cadences, really introduces a lot of new information that kind of upsets the Duckworth story that has kind of become this pat story that’s widespread throughout the military.

And a lot of military people will not, well, they won’t stand for the Duckworth story being supplanted.

They just insist the Duckworth story is true, partly because they have pride in it being an African-American origin story.

But the thing is, it’s still an African-American origin story.

It still comes from African-Americans.

It’s just in World War I, not World War II.

Right. No, and I mean, it is.

It’s one of those things, the talent of being able to call a Jody is something that is really appreciated in the military, right?

It’s particularly for for NCOs and for soldiers.

It’s it’s a way of distinguishing yourself. Right.

So it’s kind of it’s kind of related to that same tradition that that that connects up with rap.

Right. Because it’s an oral thing.

Dana, I’m getting the I’m getting the roundup lasso here.

And apparently you and I need to get a room.

Well, thank you very much. I appreciate it.

That was that was that was brilliant.

All right. Thank you.

Thank you very much for calling.

Cheers. Thank you.

All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye, Dana.

Bye-bye.

It’s such an interesting topic, though.

You know, this punches all my buttons.

I can see that.

This is everything that I do and love.

This is common myths overturned.

This is sociology.

This is anthropology.

This is linguistics.

This is folk history.

This is folklore.

Yeah.

This is people getting credit.

That’s where credit is due.

This is everything right here in this story.

In this one word.

There’s American culture, several different kinds of American culture, all in this one word, Jody.

Yep.

Right?

And it’s also, there’s something, I love the coarseness of it.

It’s about sex.

Well, speaking of course, when I was a young newspaper reporter, I was assigned to follow a recruit through Fort Knox, through basic training.

And so I would run along with the soldiers in the morning.

And those Jody cadences, I got to tell you, were filthy.

They were filthy. And sometimes, you know, they would look over and see this woman running with them and change the words.

But when they weren’t paying attention and I was listening, my goodness.

Yeah, I have a couple collections of those. I understand now that there is formally, at least officially, a tradition to remove the homophobic, racist, sexist, and so forth chants from the official ones that they do.

Although they’re still there, but there’s a movement to remove them.

No kidding.

Well, they were certainly creative and certainly entertaining, the ones I heard. But wow.

877-929-9673.

Grant, do you know what a neckdown is?

N-E-C-K-D-O-W-N.

Neckdown?

That’s where an internet neckbeard’s chest hair meets his beard.

Well, you’re the slang expert.

I don’t know.

What’s a neck down?

I was reading about the language of traffic.

And, you know, we’ve talked about that before, like bots, dots, and cats.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

A neck down is an extension of the curb that increases pedestrian space and shortens a street crossing.

If you saw a picture of it, you’d know what I’m talking about.

They’re also called curb extensions and bulb outs.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Bulb outs.

Sure.

Oh, yeah.

You know bulb outs?

Yes, of course.

I know those.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, they’re also called elephant ears or build-outs.

Yeah, so these are traffic calming techniques.

Yeah.

People instinctively slow when they see these.

Right.

Without stop signs, without signage, you can force people to slow, and they don’t quite realize what they’re doing.

Mm—

Exactly.

Exactly.

And so they’re also called neck downs, I guess, because you make the neck narrower for the car to go through.

And a sneck down is one that’s naturally formed by snow.

You know, cars are turning.

Sneck down.

A snickdown.

Okay.

Very good.

Ooh, good.

The language of traffic.

There’s lots more.

Anyway.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

It’s Mike Hayes from Nicholasville, Kentucky.

Hey, Mike.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

My grandfather, who lived with us most all of my life, had some odd sayings.

And one of them was we would ask him, you know, Granddaddy, do you want to go with us to, you know, the store or whatever?

He would say something like, might as well, can’t dance, it’s too wet to plow.

At first I thought, well, that’s just something he’s come up with, because I never heard anyone else say anything about it.

And then a lady I worked with said that she was just floored the other night because she was reading a novel, and there that saying was in the novel.

So apparently it’s not just my granddaddy’s saying.

Yeah, it’s a fairly well-known expression, and there are a number of variations on it.

The longer one that I know is, can’t dance, never could sing, and it’s too wet to plow.

Oh, that’s nice.

And it’s a way of saying, might as well.

Yeah.

Just kind of agreeing to whatever’s been suggested.

And the shorter version, too wet to plow, is kind of the farmer’s lament, which is plowing.

Certainly before the mechanical era was just one of those things that was almost never done.

And you can’t plow a wet field or shouldn’t do it because it’s hard on the man and hard on the plow and hard on the horse or the mule.

So you just don’t do it when it’s wet.

So what else are you going to do?

So what else are you going to do?

It must be a pretty old saying because my grandfather, he was born just before the Civil War.

Really?

He died when I was 14 in the late 60s.

Well, you know what’s funny is the earliest that I know about it is from 1960, but I would love to find it older than that.

I’ve always suspected that it’s older than 1960.

I found it in a newspaper from then.

Yeah.

It just has the flavor of something much older than that, though, doesn’t it?

It just, that seems too recent, really, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I think so.

So, yeah, so can’t dance, never could sing, and it’s too wet to plow.

Might as well.

Yep, might as well.

Some people use it, by the way, to say, what’s next?

Which is if you’re just kind of sitting there, you finish the chores.

If all your responsibilities are done, everyone’s kind of looking at each other.

Not knowing what else to do, you just kind of say that or some variation of it.

It means, now what are we going to do?

Yeah, that’ll make sense.

So you might go out back and shoot cans off the fence post.

Who knows?

Yeah.

Yeah, I love it.

Mike, thank you so much for sharing these family memories with us.

If you have any more, give us a call.

Thanks, Mike.

My pleasure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right, take care.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

Next time somebody asks you how windy it is, you can say,

It’s so windy I’ve seen a chicken lay the same egg three times.

I’ve heard that one.

I never heard that. I love that.

Or in Australia, it’s a chook.

Chook, yeah.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Caitlin O’Connell.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.