Baby’s Breath (episode #1545)

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.

Grant, do you know what a beak is?

B-E-E-K?

I don’t know.

A bird watcher?

A different animal.

Baling whales.

Bees.

Bees.

Yeah.

Wait, so beekeeper?

Beekeepers call themselves beaks.

I just learned that.

B-E-E-K.

I did not know that.

Yeah.

How about that?

Beak?

Yeah.

And it got me thinking about fond terms that people have for themselves in their…

Hobbies and pastimes.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I came across another one just the other day, which is AFOLS.

That’s A-F-O-L.

It’s an acronym.

AFOLs. Do you know that one?

A-F-O-L.

-huh.

A fond overlooker.

Somebody who keeps an eye on the tiny railroads at, I don’t know, I have no idea.

What is it?

It’s so funny that you’re getting bits and pieces of the definitions when you talk about tiny railroads,

Because an AFOL is an adult fan of Lego.

Oh.

And that’s what they call each other.

There’s several documentaries online about AFOLs.

How about that?

AFOL.

Adult fan of Lego.

How about that?

And I guess they’re not barefoot walking through the house, right?

How about that?

Yeah.

So beaks and AFOLs.

And what else you got on that sheet?

Well, you know, I was thinking about the fact that, as you know, I do improv.

And a lot of times I’ll hear people talk about being imps.

We’re imps.

You know, my fellow imps.

I don’t hear that here in San Diego so much, but in other cities, yes.

Imps, people who do improv.

Yeah.

How about that?

So imps and eifols and beaks.

There are tons of these, and I know our listeners are just dying to share what they call themselves and their hobbies in their pastimes, right?

And I’m dying to hear it.

Me too.

Whether gearhead or…

Foamer, whatever, metalhead even.

Yeah, anorak.

Anorak.

But you’ve got to go deeper than that.

Give us the rare ones, the unusual ones.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or share that odd nickname for you and your fellow hobbyists on Twitter @wayword.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hey, what’s up?

Nothing. Who’s this?

This is Daryl Smyers. I’m calling from Kip Pleasant Grove Middle School in the southern part of Dallas, Texas.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Hi, Daryl.

Hey, how’s it going?

Great.

I’m a big music fan. I’ve been a big Beatles fan my whole life, and I was listening to a Paul McCartney album.

It came out in 1978.

And on that album, on a song called Famous Groupies, he uses the term pulkertude.

Now, I looked up pulkertude.

I’ve been teaching it to my kids for years.

But a word like that, where it comes from, it kind of sounds kind of German.

But I didn’t have a clue where it came from.

Pulkertude.

And by pulkertude, he meant what?

He said the line says, these magnificent examples of female pulkertude and luminosity.

And I believe when I looked it up, pulkertude meant something kind of like beauty on the inside.

Well, yeah, it means beauty in general.

It’s not Germanic. It goes all the way back to Latin.

And in fact, it’s one of the very first words you ever learn in Latin class,

Maybe like on the first day, the word pulcher, P-U-L-C-H-E-R,

Which means beautiful or handsome or fine.

Pulchritude found its way into English in the early 15th century,

Back when there were people who actually spoke Latin and read it on a regular basis.

I don’t think it’s a particularly lovely word.

No.

Do you, Grant?

Not at all.

Not at all.

And so you’ve got kind of this cognitive dissonance, right?

Because it’s kind of a clunky…

How would you describe it?

What don’t you like about it?

Well, it almost even sounds like kind of a disease.

Like I have a bad case of poker, dude.

That’s wonderful.

I never thought about it that way.

But yeah, why such an ugly word for or just unattractive word for such a beautiful thing?

Might appreciate the words autological and heterological.

When you are talking about an adjective that’s autological, it’s a word that describes itself.

Like if you use English as an adjective, that’s an autological adjective because English is an English word.

Or if you use the word short, you know, short is a short word, so that’s autological.

And an adjective is heterological if it doesn’t describe itself.

So, for example, the word long is not a long word.

And monosyllabic is a multisyllabic word.

So I think what you’ve got here is a heterological adjective, actually.

It’s a pulchritude. It’s heterological.

Yes.

It does not.

And where in the world did Paul McCartney decide to use it in a song?

I bet if we looked at a Corpus grant, we’d see a lot of female next to pulchritude.

You know, I mean, it’s almost this sort of self-conscious term that…

A showy literary word that you pull out when you’re just trying to show that you’re clever.

Yeah.

Well, Paul McCartney, if anything, he is clever.

Yeah, he certainly is.

He’s written some very beautiful, some of the best songs ever written, as far as I know.

Yeah, so it wasn’t like he needed a rhyme or something?

No, it doesn’t rhyme with anything.

It’s a very strange song.

So it’s one of the strangest.

And he has some strange songs, but that’s one of the strangest.

Oh, that’s so interesting.

Because it’s not like mellifluous, which is certainly autological, right?

Mellifluous is a beautiful word.

Yes, beautiful sounding.

Of course, I guess it’s sort of in the ear of the beholder, too.

Maybe we do have listeners who love the word polkertude.

Polkertude.

Even polkertude itself doesn’t sound beautiful.

No, it doesn’t.

It doesn’t.

Hey, I appreciate your time and giving me that answer.

A great answer. Well, Daryl, I appreciate

Your giving us the idea of pulchritude

As a disease.

And we appreciate our teachers as well, so keep up

The good work. Hey, seventh grade, I got my

Work cut out for me. Absolutely.

I’ve got a seventh grader at home. I know all about

That. All right. Take care now.

Thanks so much. Thanks, Daryl. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words

At waywordradio.org.

Hello there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Melissa from

Hysteria, California. Hi, Melissa.

So welcome.

What can we do for you?

I’m calling actually because I’m originally from Washington State, Tacoma, Washington.

And one of the things that we had on the corner of our block was a corner store.

So we literally had like a roll of houses on the corner.

There was a store, like a little liquor store type.

And my mom would let us walk down there.

She had six kids and she’d give us a few dollars each.

And we would go down there.

We’d get some corn dogs and a bag of JoJo’s each.

And it was about a dollar for like, you know, maybe like 10 JoJo’s.

And when I became an adult and I’m in California and I’ll go to the grocery store and I’ll ask for JoJo’s,

The people that I’m with will always look at me like, what?

But the person giving me the JoJo’s always gives them to me.

They always go straight for the potato wedges.

They know what I’m talking about.

But it seems like I’ve asked so many people.

No one in California knows what JoJo’s are.

A lot of our listeners don’t know what JoJo’s are.

You’re going to have to explain, Melissa.

Okay, so JoJo’s are potato wedges.

They’re just potatoes.

To me, french fries are french fries.

Yeah.

But when they’re a little thicker, they’re potato wedges.

But that’s JoJo’s to me.

So for you, do JoJo’s have the skin on the wedges?

They do.

And are they batter fried?

They might even be baked because they’re not like, yeah, they’re not like fried chicken or anything like that.

Yeah, they’re pretty soft.

They’re soft.

But can you see the skin?

Can you see the surface of the potato or they’ve been dipped in flour and then fried?

No, no flour.

Yeah, you can see the surface.

Okay.

So they’re sort of like steak fries.

Well, we know something about the story about why they’re called Jojo potatoes.

At least we think we do.

There’s a word researcher by the name of Barry Poppick.

He’s a colleague and a friend of the show.

You can find his work at BarryPoppick.com.

And he’s looked into this term.

And he reached out to a man named Brad French, who now owns a line of breading for food called Flavor Crisp.

And the story that Brad French tells is that in the early 1960s, there was a food trade show in Chicago.

And there was a line of equipment owned and operated by the Flavor Crisp Company, where they were frying up fish and chicken to show off their fryers.

And in between the fish and chicken, they would just throw in potatoes to cleanse the flavor of the oil.

And they would just pull the potatoes out and kind of set them aside to discard them because they considered them just like garbage and trash.

But what would happen is people coming by would eat the potatoes and then they would say, hey, what are these potatoes called?

Thinking that they were part of the food that was meant to be eaten.

They were actually just trash.

And one of the salesmen supposedly just blurted out JoJo’s instead of calling them junk or trash or garbage.

And so they started making those potatoes a thing, breading them.

And they figured out later that you could quarter a russet potato and cook them with chicken and it’d be done at the same time as chicken.

And so the JoJo potatoes became a thing started by the Flavor Crisp Company.

And so they became kind of established with the Flavor Crisp brand.

And you can find Jojo potatoes here and there throughout the northern part of the United States now, from Washington State over to New York State.

And how are they spelled on those menus?

Usually J-O, J-O, sometimes is one word, sometimes with a hyphen.

Oh, wow.

See, every time I’ve said it, I’ve always put an S at the end.

I’ve always used to say Jojo.

It’s like I would never say, oh, let’s go get like a Jojo or anything.

Oh, yeah.

Jojo’s plural.

Sure.

Yeah.

Jojo’s plural.

Definitely.

Yeah.

Childhood memories.

Yeah, Melissa, thanks for sharing those memories with us.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Boy, food and memory are so tied together.

Food, language, and memory, right?

The threesome right there.

877-929-9673.

Andrea Sansone teaches English as a second language, and on our Facebook group, she wrote,

I recently learned that the sentence, if you believe that, I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell to you,

Is not an expression that English learners are familiar with.

Is this a New York City area regional expression?

If you don’t use that particular expression to indicate being conned, what expression do you use?

And that prompted a lively discussion.

Oh, yeah, it sure did.

Yeah. I don’t think it’s particularly regional, though.

No, no. Often it’s not a Brooklyn Bridge to sell you. It’s just a bridge to sell you.

Because it’s that famous scam, right?

Right, right. There was more than one scam like that.

There was a fellow named George C. Parker who produced these impressive forged documents that he sold to people who wanted to try to put toll booths on the Brooklyn Bridge.

Gave them the rights and permission to collect tolls on the bridge.

Yeah. Different people brought up the idea of I’ve got swampland to sell you in Florida.

And several people mentioned the George Strait song, which I didn’t know, but apparently there’s a George Strait song.

I think it’s called Oceanfront Property.

And he says, if you leave me, I won’t miss you and I won’t ever take you back.

Girl, your memory won’t ever haunt me because I don’t love you.

Now, if you’ll buy that, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona from my front porch.

You can see the sea, I’ve got some oceanfront property in Arizona. If you buy that, I’ll throw the Golden Gate in for free.

So it’s just taking advantage of people’s bad understanding of geography, right?

Yeah. Because if you didn’t, Arizona sounds exotic, right? The West, it’s all about the Pacific Ocean, right?

Never mind that Arizona has to drive to San Diego to see the sea.

If you believe that, I’ve got a blank.

X to sell you.

Yeah.

Are there others of those?

Might be.

Let us know.

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 joining us on the line from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hey, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

What’s up, bud?

You know, when it gets cold out, I turn to the sun.

That is, words and phrases that contain the letters S-U-N together and in order.

Okay?

For example, a person perceived to be an inexperienced and unskillful motorist, especially one who lacks speed, is known by what sunny phrase?

Sunday driver.

Yeah, Sunday driver, indeed.

So all of these words, all of the answers to this quiz will contain the letters S-U-N.

Again, they’ll be together and in order, the beginning, the middle, and the end.

Here we go.

As definitions go, this is as nonspecific as you can get.

It’s a word for various miscellaneous items.

I think of it as things you purchase in a drugstore.

Sundries.

Sundries, yes. Very good.

While there’s no real medical reason to say anything when anyone sneezes, many people prefer to wish you good health with this word derived from a foreign language.

Gesundheit.

Gesundheit, indeed.

For those of you who are of a spiritual bent, there is an adjective that refers to seven weeks after Easter when the Holy Spirit is reported to have descended upon Jesus’ disciples.

Something Sunday?

Whitsuntide?

It is Whitsun, yes. Whitsun or Whitsuntide. Nicely done.

Now, if you’re writing to the officer in charge of a ship’s rigging, anchors, cables, and deck crew, you can use the ungainly nine-letter word which landlubbers mispronounce as boatswain or what rather economical five-letter word that is pronounced the correct way?

I usually get it wrong. I’m going to say it wrong.

Is it bosun or bosun?

It’s bosun. Yeah, bosun is fine.

But you don’t want to say boatswain.

That really sets you apart as wrong.

Or as a reader because you don’t actually go with the nine-letter word.

Originally, it was a 1964 blues ballad written for Nina Simone.

But in 1965, an up-tempo cover version by The Animals became a top 40 hit.

Finish this lyric, which ends with the song’s title.

I’m just a soul whose intentions are good.

Oh, Lord, please don’t let me be misunderstood.

Misunderstood. Yes, there’s our son in the middle.

The words origins are unclear.

Perhaps because it was sold on Mondays and consisted of leftover product, or it was sold on another day to circumvent blue laws, it doesn’t matter to me, it’s cold and creamy and delicious, and it’s called…

Oh, Sunday.

Sunday, yes.

Now, there are many sunny places in South America, and Paraguay’s climate ranges from tropical to subtropical, so it makes sense that what city is its capital?

Asuncion.

Asuncion, yes.

Finally, watch out.

English has borrowed this word from Japanese, where it’s a combination of the words for harbor and wave.

Tsunami.

Tsunami, exactly.

Yes, T-S-U-N-A-M-I.

Very good.

Those are my sunny words for a cool day.

Thank you, John.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

Really appreciate it.

Give our best to the family.

Will do.

You too.

All right, bye-bye.

Hey, we’re talking about language today, and we want your calls.

877-929-9673.

Email us, too, and we’ll talk about that.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you doing?

Hi, I’m doing well. Who are you and where are you calling from?

My name is Jess Rodriguez and I am calling from Keller, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Jess. What can we do for you?

Well, last year, my husband and I were talking about our newborn son, his fingers, his toes, and his baby’s breath, his little breath.

And it kind of got us talking about where the flower, I guess, baby’s breath, gets its name.

And I wanted to know, is there some kind of correlation between the two?

And that’s why I’m calling you today.

Do you have theories?

No, not really.

For some reason, to me, it sounded kind of Victorian.

Maybe it had something to do with lace.

But, you know, that’s really all I could naturally come up with.

And what’s your baby’s breath like?

You know, he’s actually got like morning breath because he’s a little bit older.

But back then, you know, when he was newborn, he was, I mean, perfect, right?

Of course.

Right, and then reality sets in.

Of course, and then reality sets in.

Then he falls off the bed a couple times, and you’ve got some dents and scratches.

He wakes you up in the middle of the night a few times, yeah.

Did it smell like baby’s breath flowers?

I mean, I assume that you smelled those and tried to see if there was a similarity.

You know, it’s funny.

I used to be a florist way back in the day, and I used to work with baby’s breath a lot, and I did not think that they smelled similar whatsoever.

I mean, you know, maybe just my son’s breath doesn’t smell like that.

I don’t know.

Maybe it doesn’t smell like flowers.

Well, some people do think that there’s a similarity.

There’s a gentleness about the smell of the plant and the smell of baby’s breath.

It’s not so much that they’re the same.

It’s just the lightness of it.

Does that make sense?

The softness of it.

It’s subtle.

It’s the subtleness of it.

And other people just say that they’re both, they kind of catch you unawares.

But I think a lot of this is just people just trying to make the correlation after the fact.

So the plant itself, this plant itself is fairly insubstantial, right?

Super fragile, right?

It’s not the hardiest of plants at all.

Since the mid-1800s, the plant has had that name and been used in flower arrangements.

There’s a lot of different varieties of it, subspecies and species of it.

The Latin name of it is interesting, if you’re interested in that.

Yes, I am.

The gypsophila paniculata means gypsum lover.

The gypsophila does because it prefers a lime-based soil, and the paniculata refers to the spreading flower clusters, the way that they branch out, kind of these clusters.

All right. Okay.

And I’m sure if you were doing flower arranging, I mean, the baby’s breath in an arrangement, you don’t just hand somebody an arrangement of baby’s breath, right?

No.

It’s just a little fillip, a little accent.

And from a distance, it’s kind of hard to make out when it’s amongst the other flowers, right?

The baby’s breath.

It’s a space filler that doesn’t, it goes unnoticed, really.

Yeah, it’s very gentle in its arrangement.

Like, it’s very soft.

It doesn’t make a big presence.

So I guess the bottom line is that we don’t really have a firm etymology on baby’s breath, but we can speculate.

There’s something about the subtleness, though.

The subtleness.

That makes sense.

Yeah, invited the comparison.

Yeah.

Jess, thank you so much for your call.

Well, that answers my question.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks for coming.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Baby head flowers.

That’s what I want.

That’s smell the top of a baby’s head.

That was the smell that I always loved.

Oh, oh, oh.

That would be good, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

And you bend the nose down.

Yeah.

And you inhale.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s the best.

Yeah, boy.

Even when they’re not at their best, when they haven’t recently bathed.

Something about a baby.

Right, the top of their head.

Top of their head.

I don’t know what it is.

877-929-9673.

We heard from Greg Dolkus in Auburn, California, who said he was listening to one of our old episodes where we were talking about the term for the person who drives the ice cream truck through residential neighborhoods.

You know, with the music playing and all that.

Because it turned out that in Nebraska, primarily, you call that person the ding-ding man.

The ding-ding man.

Greg said that brought back memories for him.

And he writes, years ago when our children were small, the ice cream truck would come through our neighborhood.

My wife and I referred to it as the music truck, never mentioning the delectable desserts contained therein.

This avoided the inevitable whining we knew we would get, and the kids continued their play while listening to the music in the background as the truck drove by.

Very effective.

Yeah, he says, fast forward to a conversation with our now grown children.

At some point in their lives, we don’t know quite when, they figured out what it was.

But by then the truck was no more.

They still haven’t forgiven us.

Weren’t the stickers of all the yummy treats on the side of the truck a giveaway?

You would think.

Maybe they were playing below the living room windowsill or something.

Right. They just couldn’t see.

Oh, the nice music truck.

877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Sam from Westfield, Indiana.

Hi, Sam. Welcome.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

So I work in human services, and I had a client’s mother use the phrase, you cannot cover the sun with a finger.

And it’s one of those phrases that you can kind of figure out what it means.

But I wanted to know if you had any stories for the origin of it.

What was the situation where it came up?

We were trying to work on a few things, a few more than she intended to, so just more than she was able to work on at one time.

So you had a lot of problems, and she bit off more than she could chew.

Only so much time.

And only so much time.

And so the expression was, you cannot cover the sun with one finger?

Mm-yes.

Okay.

What else can you tell us about the person who used this expression?

She’s from Puerto Rico, but I looked it up and it looked like it may have come from Cuba.

Martha, you speak some Spanish, Argentinian Spanish.

Did you know this one?

Not from Argentina, but I know the phrase.

Yeah.

Tapar el sol con un dedo.

Tapar el sol con un dedo, to cover the sun with a finger.

Yeah, and I think the idea is that you’re deluding yourself if you think that you can hide the sun just by holding up your finger.

It may look that way to you, but you’re not extinguishing the sun.

Right, so there’s two notions of this.

One is you’re solving the problem for yourself but not for other people.

Right, but the other thing is it’s just kind of a Band-Aid on a really big problem, right?

Right.

A tiny fix that doesn’t really solve it for everyone, solve the whole thing.

It’s not just Cuban or Puerto Rican.

And it is used throughout the Spanish-speaking cultures.

I’ve found versions of this in Cuba and Puerto Rico, but also in Mexico and Spain and Uruguay and Paraguay and some other Spanish-speaking countries.

So you will find it throughout the Spanish-speaking countries.

But, you know, I’ve found a variant of this in other countries where you can’t cover the sun with the palm of your hand.

But this is from a different set of countries, and they tend to be Muslim countries.

So Nigeria, North Africa, Serbia.

I’ve found that as far back as 1915.

No doubt in both cases, these expressions are much older than we think that they are.

And it’s exactly the same kind of uses.

It’s all about you’re bitten off more than you can chew or you’re trying to fix a big problem with a small solution in every single case.

So I do tend to see these being used very often these days in political contexts where opponents are accused of treating big problems in small ways.

So they have a weird context to them where they’re not the kind of thing you’d say.

Typically, these days, I don’t see them in fiction.

I haven’t seen them very often in fiction.

So I don’t know.

I don’t have a sense of it as an English saying.

No, me neither.

I don’t know.

No, I hadn’t heard it at all.

Biting off more than one can chew is kind of a good translation, but it doesn’t work perfectly because it doesn’t encompass all the different ways that these are used.

Any idea to which came first, the palm or the finger?

No, I don’t know.

They’re hard to track because I don’t have any Serbian or the other languages.

I’ve only found these in translation from these other languages in English.

So this is the best that I can do for you.

Sorry, bud.

That’s all right.

I appreciate the help.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Okay.

Thank you.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Hawaii, we know you’ve had an encounter at your job where somebody said something that mystified you, and it’s a thing.

It’s an expression.

It’s an idiom or an aphorism or a saying.

Call us, and we’ll try to sort it out.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org or on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Following up on our conversation about ways that you can haze a newbie on the job, we heard from Mike Taylor who says, when I was in the Coast Guard in basic training, they taught us that we were not to call rope rope.

We were to call it line.

One of the first pranks that they would play on you when you got to the ship was to send you down below for 100 feet of shoreline.

Ha, ha, ha.

He added the ha, ha, ha.

100 feet of shoreline. Har, har, har.

Where do I find that?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lynn Thomas.

I’m calling from Grapevine, Texas.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you, Lynn?

Well, I grew up in the Midwest, mostly Illinois, and I remember if I dressed myself when I was younger, my mom or dad might say to me, that’s quite a getup.

Or where did you get that getup?

And I knew that this was not a compliment.

It was something about what I was wearing looked a little strange or funny.

And I couldn’t see any connection between the words getup and clothes.

So I was just wondering where that might have come from.

So it was always something outlandish or didn’t match or most normal people wouldn’t wear outside the house.

Exactly.

Maybe wearing shorts with boots or some kind of costume or something.

Yeah, the kind of thing a kid would love to wear because it’s showy and expressive and, you know, they’re not bound by the normal rules, right?

Exactly.

Not altogether that embarrassed like an adult would be.

Yes, they’re a little free-for-all.

You know, it’s actually fairly simple.

Originally, starting in the late 1700s, you could get up as a verb, a person or a room or a theatrical production in a certain way.

You were dressing them or arranging them or decorating them, dressing them in finery, putting up silks or elaborate paper or anything just to make them wonderful and lovely and gorgeous.

And then by the mid-1800s, the noun form of get up appeared to refer to the arrangement or the appearance itself.

And then later, much later, the kind of simplified, almost neutered version that we have now, meaning just a kind of gaudy outfit appeared.

So, and that’s it.

So we went from something very elaborate, like a fantastic theatrical design to just a kid wearing, you know, snow boots and a swimming suit.

I like the swimming suit.

I used to say it to my daughters as well.

They’re in their 40s, but they clearly remember me saying it to them, and I’m sure it was along the lines that you’re talking about.

You’re going out in that?

Yeah, exactly.

You just kind of knew it was something strange or funny you were wearing, and it was a good idea to maybe change, but I don’t remember being told that I had to change, but you kind of knew, maybe I better not go out in this.

Yeah, somewhere in the middle before we got to kind of what you’re talking about, where the getup is a really kind of gaudy or mismatched outfit is the idea of a getup being a complicated outfit, something involving a lot of layers or a lot of straps.

Or just think about some of the women’s outfits in the 1700s and 1800s where there’s skirts and petticoats and silks and corsets and booted vats and all that sort of thing.

So that’s a get up where it’s just, you know, two hours to get dressed.

You have to get up a couple hours early, right?

Get up to put on the get up.

Yeah.

Tell me a little bit more about when it was used as a verb in the 1700s.

Yeah.

It was somebody dressing somebody else.

Yeah, somebody dressing somebody else.

But it wasn’t even just people.

It was about hair.

You might get up someone’s hair.

You might get up someone’s appearance.

You might have your maid get up your outfit for you, but you might also get up a theater to decorate it for a performance or to put on the scenery or to put up the curtains and the stage setting in the right way.

You might get up a book to produce it so that you are putting the plates together and putting the images together and all that sort of stuff.

Well, I never dreamed it went back that far.

Lynn, thanks so much for calling.

You are very welcome.

I enjoyed talking with you and I love your show.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Lynn.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

In his book, A Mouthful of Air, the writer Anthony Burgess talks about grammar.

And he says, grammar has its own fascination and, in a ghostly manner, its own peculiar truth.

There is a satisfactory boniness about grammar, which the flesh of vocabulary, or lexus, requires before it can become vertebrate and walk the earth.

That’s beautiful.

That’s very lovely.

What’s the book again?

A Mouthful of Air.

Which is a great title for a book, too.

Yeah, yeah.

I want to go read it now because he had a real fascination with languages and foreign languages.

And I love what he says about the boniness of grammar.

Boniness of grammar.

The structure in which everything hangs.

Yes.

And then it gets up and walks.

Words at WeWordRadio.org.

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’m seeing more and more people use the word Google ganger.

You know this term, right?

It’s like adapted from doppelganger in German, which means double goer, like somebody’s double.

But a Google ganger is a person with the same name as oneself whose online references are mixed among one’s own search results.

Grant, I get Google alerts for you, and I see that you have at least one Google ganger.

Oh, a whole bunch.

I think I first encountered this word in 2007, by the way.

Yeah.

I get Google gingers from Australia and New Zealand and a kid playing soccer in Alabama.

There’s a judge in California, and there was one who died in Texas, actually, with my name.

Oh, gee.

Yeah, poor guy.

Wow.

Well, there’s another Martha Barnette without the E on the end.

I almost met her because we were at the Word of South Festival there at the same time, but we just missed each other.

But there’s also, with the E, with the E on the end of Barnette, there’s the Martha Barnette Golf Classic in South Carolina.

How about that?

I did meet one of the Grant Barrett Google gangers when we did our show in Dallas a few years ago.

Oh, that’s right.

He is a great guy, stagehand.

Well, of course he is.

It was a stagehand at the theater in Texas.

And I have a photo with him.

Yeah.

Two Grant Barrett’s on stage together.

It was fantastic.

How about that?

What could be better?

Grant and Martha on stage together.

It was like two Time Lords meeting.

It was kind of wonderful.

I looked for the blue box.

Why do I think that we probably are going to hear some other Google ganger stories?

I would love to hear some more.

Oh, yeah.

Well, there’s a couple of famous ones of the guy who made the film with all the people with his name.

There’s a couple festivals that have happened with people who all have the same common name.

Oh, that would be cool.

The thing that I think I’ve mentioned this before, the thing that I want to do is that there’s a county in Minnesota, the county is Grant, and the county seat is Barrett.

Oh, my gosh.

And I want to go there.

Oh, my gosh.

I want all the Grant Barretts in the world to go there.

That would be delightful.

We’d love to hear your Google ganger stories.

Call us 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

My name is Ben Fluitt.

I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome, Ben.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well.

And Grant’s here, too.

Hey, bud, what’s up?

What can we do for you?

Hi, Grant.

I’m calling today because I watched the documentary Salesman not too long ago.

And they kept saying, believe you me.

And I was just wondering where that expression came from.

I don’t know anything about that documentary.

Salesman?

Yeah, why were they saying it a lot?

It’s Albert Maisel’s, I think, did it.

And it was, I want to say, like, I’m 22, so I’m going to date myself a little bit.

But I want to say it’s like the mid-70s or something like that.

But it’s just a ton of old dudes running around selling a Bible.

And they were just all, you know, talking about how they weren’t getting sales.

And they’d go, believe you, me.

And I realized no one said that anymore.

And everyone was saying it in this movie.

Okay.

And so the documentary?

Yeah.

Okay.

So it was filmed in the 70s?

Oh, geez.

I honestly think so.

But it might have even been sooner.

Okay.

Or not sooner, earlier.

So your question is, what’s up with Believe You, Me?

Yes.

And you don’t say it.

Oh, no, absolutely not.

If I have to say something like that, just say, oh, believe me.

How did it strike you besides sounding a little out of date?

I think it was the usage of both you and me.

You’re saying, believe you me.

So it sounded a little bit weird to me because you’re like, oh, trust me, but also believe in yourself.

Okay. Well, one of the reasons it sounds weird to you, I think, is because the word order is different than English usually has it.

Usually, we do subject-verb-object in modern English.

This has verb-subject-object.

Right.

So that’s the problem.

We would just say, believe me.

Believe me.

Or you believe me.

You believe me instead of believe you me.

And so what’s happening is there’s a little bit of emphasis.

Now, I noticed that in Fowler’s New Modern English Usage Guide, which I don’t actually check that often because I consider it a little stodgy and out of date.

But I checked it for some reason, and it calls this usage condescending.

And I thought about that for a while, why they would see it as condescending.

I think really my reaction to that is I see Believe You Me as actually emphatic and distancing.

And we’ve talked about distancing on the show.

It’s a way of being both firm and a little more informal.

So you take a little bit of the sting out of expressing your certainty.

And I think that might be what you were hearing from those salesmen.

That’s so interesting.

And that makes a lot of sense, too, because they were kind of bitter that no one was buying their Bibles.

Yeah.

Well, and it’s interesting that you mention Bibles because it’s a construction that you see a fair amount in the King James Version.

You see hear ye me and command ye me, which is also a kind of distancing, right?

I don’t know about condescending.

Yeah, that’s really interesting because I think in the context of the Bible, it makes a lot of sense just because there is that sort of separation that’s emphasized between, you know, the holier than thou and then those that are just, you know, believers and whatnot.

Really interesting stuff.

This rose to popularity in the 1920s for some reason.

It really kind of came to the fore.

This particular, believe you me, in the 1880s-ish.

But in the 1920s, it just kind of pops up.

A lot of stuff changed in language after the First World War.

And it had this vogue period in the 1920s.

It never really completely faded.

Even now, you still will hear it.

I don’t think it’s as popular as it was.

It does seem a little dated now.

I have heard it unironically from people in the last year.

And it catches your ear.

Yeah, it does catch your ear.

Because it’s that word order.

When you hear verb, subject, object, you’re like, I understand what you mean, but that’s not right.

Well, thank you guys so much.

Yeah, our pleasure, Ben.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Absolutely.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

877-929-9673.

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

Here’s a word I learned this week and I really like it.

It’s synanthrope.

That’s S-Y-N-A-N-T-H-R-O-P-E.

And you might be able to guess from the Greek roots there,

Sin meaning together, and then the anthrope meaning human.

Human, yeah.

Yeah, synanthropes are animals that aren’t pets but that live and thrive close to humans,

Like pigeons and raccoons and rats.

It’s not that common a word, but it’s been around since the 1940s.

And the reason I learned that word is because I was reading about something called the synanthrope preserve,

And it’s an audio tour of New York City that encourages listeners to see that place as a habitat for both human and animal residents.

It’s the work of artist Gal Nassim and experienced designer Jessica Scott Dutcher.

And you can listen to these audio tours at synpreserve.com.

That’s S-Y-N-P-R-E-S-E-R-V-E dot com, synpreserve.

I listened to some of it even though I wasn’t walking around New York City.

And it was just a really interesting way of looking at these animals whose habitat we share.

Instead of thinking as a human space, think of it as an animal space, right?

Yeah, we’re in there.

So you’re the interloper instead of them being the interloper.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, and most human spaces are like that.

Even here in San Diego, I encounter foxes and skunks and possums in my yard and rats and mice and feral cats.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, we’re…

Gophers and all kinds of things.

Yeah, we’re on a canyon and we run into coyotes all the time.

Yeah.

877-929-9673 or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Anna.

I am calling from Alden, Michigan.

It’s a beautiful lake country where I live.

Well, hey, Anna, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

I kind of have a recollection of when I was a young girl.

I remember being interested in vocabulary, and I remember a funny story,

And that story entails finding under a pillowcase in my parents’ bedroom

A little small plastic package.

And my mom’s reaction when she saw me finding it was that she grabbed it from me

And put it back in the linen closet.

And I was kind of a curious and resourceful child.

So I went to the said linen closet and got that small package and armed myself with a dictionary and then looked up the word.

And the word I found was prophylactic.

So I was curious about the origins of the word.

And I looked it up and see that it’s a noun and an adjective.

But I thought, you tell me what you know about that.

Anna, I love that you were how old?

Oh, I’m guessing maybe eight or nine, like third or fourth grade.

I mean, I do have a recall, but I’m just guessing maybe.

That’s a long time ago.

I’m 67, so.

I love your phrase, I was armed with a dictionary.

Good weapon.

Yes, it is a good weapon.

It is.

Okay, our spin on the word prophylactic, which usually means these days it means a condom, right?

Correct.

Well, you know, this word has always interested me because of its Greek root.

I can remember reading ancient Greek and coming across the word phylax in ancient Greek, which means guard or sentinel.

You know, it’s somebody who makes sure that you don’t get in.

That’s funny.

Yeah, yeah, and so that’s spelled P-H-Y-L-A-X in English,

But Phoolox gave us the word prophylactic and prophylaxis.

If you go to your dentist for a teeth cleaning, what they’re doing is dental prophylaxis.

That’s what they call it.

Correct.

Yeah, it’s like preventative, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, and it’s interesting that you mentioned preventative and preventive, the variant there,

Because for a long time, that was the term in English used for condom.

Prophylactic doesn’t come along until I think the mid, mid what, 20th century?

Yeah, it’s a relatively recent use of that term, prophylactic, meaning something that prevents things.

Usually in the past, it was used for disease.

Right.

But I just love that the Greek root is this, you know, little guy with a sword or a spear or something being a guard.

That’s funny. That is funny.

Thank you so much for your call.

Okay. You have a great day.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We love those long-lost memories about your stories involving language, and we’d love to hear yours.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email, words@waywordradio.org.

We had a conversation a while back about the first really big word that you learn, the one that you just couldn’t wait to show off to adults.

And that prompted a message from Patricia Lawler, who said, mine was anti-disestablishmentarianism, which I proudly walked around spouting when I was, oh, I think five years old, because my mother was really into words and language.

So I learned that word, and now I’m 83.

And I still don’t know what it means, but I enjoy being able to say it.

So, Patricia, properly it means opposition to the disestablishment of the Church of England.

But most of the time it’s just a word that you find in collections of really long words.

Gotcha.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vivian Craft from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Vivian. Welcome to the show.

I have a question for you.

So my father, who was born in 1913 in Pine County or Pine City, Minnesota, used to always use the phrase when we arrived home in St. Paul where we lived after a vacation.

And he would drive in, you know, put the car in neutral or turn it off, and he would go home again, home again, jiggity-jig.

It’s the only time he ever used his phrase, and I’ve never heard anyone else in the Midwest, in Minnesota, in areas that I grew up, use the phrase.

No one in the relatives, no one except my father.

And I was just wondering if you guys knew where it might have come from.

Oh, Vivian, absolutely.

My mother from the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia used to always do that.

When I was a little kid, every time we would pull into the driveway, she would do the same thing.

She would stop the car, say, home again, home again, jiggity jig.

And then she would turn off the car and shove that emergency brake.

I remember how that felt, just shoving that emergency brake.

But it was always that little ditty.

It was so funny because, like I said, he never used it.

My mother never used it.

My father came from a family of eight brothers and sisters.

No one else ever used it, just my dad.

Well, would you believe it’s really, really, really old?

It goes back to an old nursery rhyme that has to do with the idea of farmers taking things to market and going to the market to get things.

And one old version of it goes, to market, to market, to buy a fat pig.

Home again, home again, jiggity jig.

To market, to market, to buy a fat hog.

Home again, home again, jiggity jog.

To market, to market, to buy a plum bun.

Home again, home again, market is done.

And this goes back a couple hundred years at least.

And I think that the jiggity jig and the jiggity jog in that has to do with just kind of the way that farmers ride in wagons, you know, that motion.

There’s another nursery rhyme that actually goes, this is the way farmers ride jiggity jog, jiggity jog.

And so I think it really evokes that feeling of being on a bumpy wooden wagon.

Yeah, that nursery rhyme was a game where the child rides on the adult’s knee.

So it’s one of those things where you hold the kid’s hand and you try to bounce them up and down on your knee and so they fall off at the end of it.

Right. And you’re recreating that experience.

And so that jiggedy jog attached to the home again, home again from a different rhyme and they formed together in a new rhyme.

So it’s kind of lovely, isn’t it? The way that that old image and that old feeling got reapplied into automobiles.

Far from markets and wages.

It truly makes sense because my father was raised on a farm in Pine County and spent his first 23 years actually farming.

Wow.

Well, there you go.

I appreciate it.

Thank you so much for looking that up.

And I didn’t realize that that’s where it came from.

It’s very old.

Yeah, centuries old.

Are you carrying it on, by the way?

Actually, my son, my oldest son, when he heard my father saying it, he decided that he would add a little phrase of his own at the end.

And so it was humm again, humm again, jiggity jig.

And therefore we have another jig.

And therefore we have another jig?

That was what he added?

Yeah.

I mean, it was like, okay, sure.

That’s fine, Garrett.

Whatever you want.

Thanks for calling, Vivian.

Thank you for your time and your research.

Bye now.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

If you ever need a word for a really meaty burp.

No.

Well, if you do, the word is nidorosity.

Spell that, please.

N-I-D-O-R-O-S-I-T-Y.

Nidorosity.

Well, I’m pescatarian these days, so I won’t be needing that, thanks.

I’m not sure what that word would be, but the Latin word nidor is a vapor or a steam or a smell from anything that’s roasted or burned.

Wow.

And, yeah, Samuel Johnson included nidrosity in his 1755 dictionary.

He defined it as eructation with the taste of undigested roast meat.

Erectation.

Wow.

Your definition should not be more difficult than the word you’re defining.

Well, that was for all the nine-year-olds out there.

Niderosity.

Niderosity.

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.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or send us your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.,

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations

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.