Big Bang (episode #1605)

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, my taste in fiction ranges widely, but I’m currently reading a lot of science fiction that involves universe-spanning space battles and aliens and artificial intelligence, books by Neil Asher and John Scousey.

But, you know, the book that I’ve really enjoyed most this year is an episode of Sparrows by Rumer Godden, and it’s very different than space battles and aliens. There are no spacecraft, and all the mischief is on a much smaller scale. I really like the title, An Episode of Sparrows.

Yeah, by Rumer Godden, and her first name is spelled R-U-M-E-R. Published in 1955, the book centers mainly around the life of children on a small street in post-war London. It’s largely seen through their eyes and it’s about their difficulties in that time and in that place, and everything is filtered through their concerns. There’s a girl named Lovejoy who decides that she wants to start a garden and through her successes and her failures in gardening and through the allies and friends that she makes, the lives of the children and the adults in that area become transformed. And this whole book is such a snapshot of a time and a place.

And it’s a sweet book. And it’s not saccharine, though. And its victories are small ones. And they’re the kind of wins that I wouldn’t call jackpots, but more like birthday money, if that makes sense. You know? It does make sense. Yeah. And Rumer Godin herself is such a fascinating writer. She’s got this catalog of something 50 or 60 books, and she spent much of her life in India, grew up there partly as a child in India and what later became Bangladesh.

And so she has this rich and careful vocabulary that reflects her childhood in that rich and varied culture where she spanned these different worlds of the United Kingdom and the subcontinent. This book, An Episode of Sparrows, is probably my favorite book of the year, even though its it’s from 1955.

Oh, wow.

It’s from 55.

Yeah.

I will look forward to digging into that.

And I have a couple of books to recommend, and I’ll do that later in the show.

And in the meantime, we’d love to hear your thoughts about language. So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about words to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Alicia from Craryville, New York.

What’s on your mind?

What are you thinking about?

Well, me and my new husband were talking about, I was saying I was about to go over to my dad’s house. And I said it just like that. I’m going over to my dad’s. And he said, oh, you mean down to your dad’s? And then what ensued was a whole debate over whether or not over can be used in the place of saying up or down when going over to any location.

So what were the two locations? Where were you and where was your dad?

My dad lives in Massachusetts. So it’s Sheffield, Mass., but that is south of us, right? Now he’s nodding his head saying it’s not south.

Where is it?

It’s east.

Okay, so I’m now supposed to also know if something is west or east.

Wait, this is your dad or this is your new husband?

My new husband is saying this because he can just tell.

Do you still have the receipt for the new husband?

I already got rid of the receipt. But he can tell where something is just off the top of his head. And my argument was that most people are not Copernicus and can just say, I’m going easterly or whatever. We all just say, I’m going over.

So this is due southeast then?

Oh, but let’s not get in the weeds. That’s just not. I’m just trying to picture it. It’s up a level here.

So the argument here is whether or not over there can mean what?

Can mean any direction, really.

Yes.

Because if you’re sleeping at somebody’s house, you say, I’m sleeping over.

Yeah.

Or you say, I’m coming over.

Yeah.

So to me, over is general. It just means kind of two.

It can.

Over can mean a lot of things.

Yes.

And so your husband’s argument is?

Is that you should be saying you’re going down to somebody’s house or you’re going up to somebody’s house.

Oh.

Here’s the problem with prepositions. Prepositions are like tricksy things hobbitses. They’re like mushy and pulpy. They don’t carry fixed points of reference. They’re all about the context here.

But my question is, did he understand you?

He did understand. And then I told him about prescriptive grammar and what that means and how Grant would tell him that that is not okay.

So you’ve heard the show before it sounds like so so things like over can mean a lot of things but generally there’s a lot of things that can happen with over it can retain a sense of above because you’re kind of going above the ground as you go over to someone’s house right and also you’re kind of you’re talking about the continuous nature of going over when you’re going over somewhere over there. You’re talking about I’m continuously going as I’m traveling. It’s a continuous act of going over.

But there’s another thing that linguist John Taylor has written about. We’re talking about endpoints here. We’re directing attention to places which both the speaker and the hearer know about. You both knew about it. And that’s why I was asking about, did he know what you meant? So when you said over there, you were successfully communicating your meaning because you both knew the point of origin and the destination. So the communication was done regardless about his quibbling.

I like that part.

Yeah, of course. But I also agree that you can use up and down on in a map sense to talk about, you know, we went, you know, we went down to Texas for our vacation or we went up to, you know, Minnesota for some fishing. You know, those things all make sense too.

Yeah. So that can be used. It just, you were also with well within your linguistic rights to use over there.

That worked.

That does.

And I was just wondering if it had like some sort of demographic, like people in certain places more often use the directions, like up and down.

I don’t have any data on that. I do know that if you want to find something really fun, Google which cities use downtown and what they mean by downtown, because that’s something that varies a great deal. Not everyone thinks of downtown as the same.

Yeah, that would be a wonderful Saturday night activity for you and your new husband.

Google which cities use downtown.

Netflix and Googling downtown.

Yes, that will really spice up our next Saturday night.

Well, I’ve got to say, Alicia, if this is all you guys are arguing about, I hope that new marriage is going well.

It sounds like it is.

Thank you.

I’m so glad I got to speak to you guys. I love your show so much.

All right.

Take care now.

Be good to each other.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Sharon. I’m in Tallahassee, Florida.

Tallahassee, Florida. Welcome to the show.

The other day, we were working on writing or putting something on our website at work, and I hollered across the room to one of my coworkers and said, can you write a blurb for this? And suddenly I thought, where in the world did that word come from? We did a quick look, and then I went to your website, actually, to see if anybody had ever asked that question and didn’t find it on there. So we thought we’d email you and find out where blurb came from.

Yeah, the story of the word blurb is really cool, Sharon. It was coined by a guy named Gillette Burgess, and he was an artist and an author and a very funny guy. And in 1895, he wrote a poem that I bet you’ll recognize because schoolchildren for a long time now have had to memorize this one. He’s the guy who wrote, I never saw a purple cow. I never hoped to see one, but I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one. That’s the guy who wrote that.

That is crazy. Yeah.

A few years later, he published another book. And to call attention to it at a bookseller’s convention, he had this book plate printed up that was shamelessly over-the-top promotional.

I mean, the prose is really something.

It reads in part, we expect to sell 350 copies of this great grand book.

It has gush and go to it.

It has that certain something that makes you want to crawl through 30 miles of dense tropical jungle and bite somebody on the neck.

And he just goes on and on like that. And at the top of this page, he had a picture of a woman who was cupping her hand to her mouth and she’s yelling.

And in big letters above it, it says, yes, this is a blurb. All the other publishers commit them. Why shouldn’t we?

And then the picture of this woman shouting was captioned, Miss Belinda Blurb in the act of blurbing.

And so, you know, I mean, it’s a great example of advertising.

It was ridiculous, but it was memorable.

And the word blurb caught on as a result of that.

When we use the word blurb, we use it as a short, concise description of to lead people into the bigger story.

Yeah.

So that sounds a little different.

Well, it’s in the family of it.

He used blurb to mean something to entice you to go into the book.

And you’re using blurb to mean something to describe the larger text that might lead you to read the larger text.

So they’re related, I think.

Okay. Well, that’s very interesting. I appreciate you.

This book, too, is called Are You a Bromide?

And bromide is less common than blurb, but it was another coinage of his.

And a bromide came to mean, from this book, a platitude or a cliche or something that people say all the time unthinkingly.

Because the whole book is about bromides versus sulfites.

And bromides are people who just say the ordinary repetitious thing.

And sulfites are people who resist saying the ordinary repetitious thing.

And sulfite didn’t catch on to refer to people like that, but bromide did.

But bromide, instead of referring to the person, usually came to refer to the thing being said.

And so he lists a bunch of them.

And there are things like, you know, it’s not the heat, it’s the humidity, stuff like that.

Huh. Wow.

But that’s Gillette Burgess.

By the way, you can find a lot of his books at the Internet Archive if you ever want to dig through them and see what this goofy man was up to.

Sounds interesting. Thank you so much.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks so much for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, there are those everyday words that you pass around the office and you catch yourself short for a second.

You’re like, wait a second.

That’s a weird one.

Where did that one come from?

Why do we say that?

Martha and Grant might know.

877-929-9673.

Or no matter where you are in the world, there is a way to reach us.

Go to our website and find it at waywordradio.org/contact.

If you want to describe somebody who is sulky or out of temper, you can call them gumpelfoisted.

How dare you?

All right, break it down for us.

Okay, well, I can’t go very far.

I can tell you that it’s a Scottish word.

It’s spelled G-U-M-P-L-E hyphen foisted, F-O-I-S-T-E-D.

If somebody’s gumpel foisted, then they’re just grumpy.

So the foisted must be related to foisting something upon someone.

I suppose.

Forcing them to take it, gumpel foisted.

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 what ho, our quiz guy, John Chaneski, approacheth.

Hey, Martha.

And there he is.

So listen, if I may, I just want to try something for one second.

I just want to say, Marco.

Polo.

Wait, I see now.

It never fails.

When you say Marco, people will shout out Polo.

It does sometimes fail, but yeah.

Sometimes.

But I got to say, I mean, when I do trivia, anytime, usually about twice a year, the answer to a question is Marco Polo.

And when I say the answer is Marco, by the time I get to the end of the Marco, people are already yelling Polo.

And I love it.

You know, what I think is confusing about the game Marco Polo is that Marco Polo, you know, didn’t actually invent the game of Polo.

Did you know that?

I didn’t know that.

Really?

Yeah, so I thought, why not liven up the game by inserting explorers who did invent or discover things that have the O-O sound?

Let me explain.

Here’s an example.

He discovered the flightless birds on the island of Mauritius, which are now sadly extinct.

I would say, Marco.

Dodo.

Dodo, yes, you would say Dodo.

Marco Dodo.

Note, these are not actual historical figures.

There was no Marco Dodo.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, sorry to say.

Now, these answers, they might be one word or two.

Everybody in the pool, here we go.

Marco Polo rode in a caravan to China, but this explorer did it on a bouncy stick.

Marco. Pogo. Pogo. Yes, very good. A pioneer in the field of neckwear, he invented that cool little string tie that they wear down in Texas. Marco. Polo. Polo. Yes, very good. This explorer discovered the recipe for hot chocolate. Marco. Coco. Coco. Coco. Yes, very nice. Yummy.

Now, handy to have around in a drought, he invented shower heads that use much less water than regular shower heads.

Marco.

Low flow.

Low flow, yes.

Very obscure inventor, Marco Low flow.

This character eschewed exploring for music, specifically a double reed woodwind instrument.

Marco.

Oboe.

Marco Oboe.

This explorer also invented the camera.

Marco.

Oh.

Camera.

This might be too simple.

Maybe.

Camera.

Photo.

Yes, Marco photo.

This traveler somehow ended up in northern Utah at Brigham Young University.

Marco.

Provo.

Marco Provo, yes.

Finally, this explorer had a side gig in advertising.

He developed the Nike swoosh, McDonald’s Golden Arches, and the Michelin Man.

Wow.

Yeah.

Marco.

Logo.

Logo.

Logo, yes.

He has a lot to answer for.

He really does.

Okay, now that we’ve played Marco whoever, I know exactly where you two guys are.

You’re in San Diego.

There we go.

Thank you, John.

I guess you’ve got to go-go.

I do have to go-go, yes.

Well, there is something for everyone on A Way with Words, whether you’re a native speaker of English or a native speaker of another language from somewhere else in the world.

In the United States and Canada, call us toll-free 877-929-9673 or from anywhere else in the world.

There are a lot of ways to reach us on our website.

Go to waywordradio.org contact.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, how’s it going? This is Sean from New York.

So I was talking to my coworker about potentially not going into work the next day.

And I was texting her and I used a phrase that’s called banging out.

I said, maybe I’ll bang out from work tomorrow.

And then after I texted that to her, I thought about the phrase.

And I thought, where did that come from?

The only person I’d ever heard use it was my father.

So I thought because of his job, his employment, which is with the city of New York, I thought maybe it’s something that was particular to city workers or maybe even more specifically to first responders.

When I did a little preliminary research, I only saw a post on a form from like medical responders, like EMS attendants that said the phrase bang out.

So I was looking a little more into that because my co-worker had also heard it from one other person, but it didn’t seem like it was a widespread phrase.

Maybe it was particular to New York City or something.

So you used bang out to mean that you were going to call out sick?

Right, yes. Yes, that I would bang out from work.

Bang out, B-A-N-G, bang, like the noise bang.

Right, yeah, absolutely.

Gotcha. And your father’s work is what?

He’s a dispatcher for the police for the city of New York.

NYPD.

Yes, exactly.

I think one of the reasons that you might have had not a lot of luck finding information about this online is usually people say that they’re going to bang in instead of bang out.

Okay.

That’s interesting.

So people bang in sick.

The reason I know this is I have an entry for this in one of my books.

I did my 2006 book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English.

I traced this back to the 1980s, but since then I’ve traced it back to the 1960s.

And it’s particularly common, as you guessed, among first responders, firefighters and police officers, and even sanitation workers and prison guards.

And it’s common in not just New York City, but in Boston.

And you’ll find it sprinkled throughout Massachusetts and Vermont as well.

And it’s just those particular professions in those particular places who say that they’re going to bang in sick.

And a lot of times it doesn’t just mean that they’re going to call in sick.

It might mean that they’re going to fake call in sick.

They’re going to pretend to be sick.

And it started that way from the very start.

There was a transit strike in 1961 in Boston, and over 1,600 workers banged in sick as part of the strike.

That is, they called in and said, we’re not coming to work as a way of showing solidarity with this strike.

Wow, that’s wonderful. I’m surprised that it hasn’t spread so much.

I guess I just parrot all of my father’s phrases in idiosyncratic language.

Yeah, that’s the way it works, though. That’s how it works.

We just pick up stuff from the world around us.

You know, in the FBI, there’s a related phrase, but I’ve only been able to take it back to the 90s.

It’s called banging the books.

And if you bang the books in the FBI, it’s about inflating your overtime hours.

That is, you might take off work early, but then claim that you actually worked until you were supposed to.

Or you might take off at the regular time and then claim that you worked late.

And that’s a way to make sure that you try to get more money than you do.

And I noticed that both of you said call out sick.

I would have said call in sick.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Search the waywordradio.org website for our calls about call out sick versus call in sick because that’s a whole thing as well.

Very, very interesting.

I thank you so much.

It’s a tremendous pleasure and privilege to be able to call in to this show and listen to it for years.

Yeah, it’s our pleasure, Sean.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

We appreciate it.

You as well.

Have a good one.

Be well.

Bye, Sean.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it in an email, words@waywordradio.org.

We ask listeners around the world to send us their favorite phrases in their own languages.

And Pia Alarcón and Mauricio Rodriguez from Bogota, Colombia, sent us, son como uña y mugre, which means they’re like nail and dirt.

If you’re talking about a couple of people who are thick as thieves, they’re really close, they’re like fingernail and dirt.

Uña y mugre.

No, you do not.

You don’t get much closer than that.

That’s perfect, like fingernails and dirt.

Gracias, Pia y Mauricio, for the idiom.

We thank you very much for that.

And if you have an idiom or saying or proverb from your country, we’d love to hear it.

You can send it by email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or you can reach us from anywhere in the world.

Lots of different ways.

Find them at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Sasha Hart from Olive Hill, Kentucky.

It’s good to talk to you guys.

Hey, Sasha.

Hi, Sasha.

How are you doing?

Hey, pretty good.

So I am curious what your thoughts are on what I kind of thought was an Appalachian thing, but the phrase how come, to ask why, it doesn’t make any sense to me.

What’s your thoughts?

How come, meaning why.

Did you ever have a teacher warn you against using how come?

No, no one has ever even noticed that it exists.

Oh, I ask because sometimes it’s a favorite hobby horse of some prickly sticklers.

There’s frowned upon by English teachers sometimes who prefer that people would use why instead of how come.

Because how come tends to be informal.

It’s not the kind of thing you’re going to say, find in Supreme Court decisions, you know, or using language when you’re speaking before, say, King Charles or something like that, you know.

But both of them have existed for a very long time.

How come is an Americanism from the mid-1800s.

There’s some speculation that it’s a shortening of longer phrases such as how comes it that, but the evidence is lacking.

We don’t know that that’s what it’s from.

And there have been some attempts to connect how come to Irish and to Gullah, which is an African-influenced dialect of English from the Eastern Seaboard.

But those are also iffy, and not much work has been done since the middle of the 20th century to really get to the bottom of how how come exists in American English.

Maybe it’s the idea of how did you come to that conclusion, but that’s the best I could do.

Yeah, that’s a pretty standard kind of process when we think about it.

We try to extrapolate the how and the come and treat them as separate items and put in some other words to make it work.

But really we have to treat them as a team.

They are bridled together.

They’re a pair.

How come?

And really, they are just another questioning.

They go with when, what, where, why, how come.

How come together?

We don’t break them apart.

They operate as a unit.

And that’s how they should be treated.

So the mistake is to take them as something other than as a unit.

You will find how come used frequently across a wide spectrum of writers of all backgrounds, education levels, writing styles, all levels of formality, except for, of course, like I said, the most formal.

So it’s not like it’s used by ignorant people or people in only one part of the country.

It’s not just Appalachian or anything like that.

So how come is across the whole of the United States and into Canada.

And I think it even popped up in the United Kingdom.

Well, very cool.

I appreciate you guys brainstorming that with me.

Thank you.

Oh, it’s our pleasure.

Yeah, well, thank you.

We appreciate your questions.

Call us again sometime, Sasha.

I’ll see what I can come up with, okay?

All right.

Be well.

Take care.

See you guys.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, on this show, we talk about what we say and how come we say it.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Jared calling from Kaiser, Oregon.

Hi, Jared.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Thanks very much.

It’s great to be on with you guys.

My question came about something I hadn’t even thought about for quite a few years, but the show a few weeks ago about the funny papers was what kind of unlocked the memory.

I’m in my 40s now.

And a few years ago, I just happened to be at a store with my dad.

And we ran into this mutual friend.

We probably hadn’t seen this person in 20 or more years.

And when he asked how we were doing, my dad responded with this phrase where he said, well, I’m staying off the front page and I’m staying off the back page.

And I remember, I seem to remember exchanging a look with our friend as if to kind of say, what?

And I have a pretty good idea what he meant, but it was one of those things that just kind of faded into my memory.

And like I said, hadn’t even thought about it again until that show from a few weeks ago.

But I immediately knew who to ask about the possible origin of that phrase.

What did you take it to mean?

Well, I kind of figured the front page would be probably good headlines and the back page would maybe mean bad headlines like obituaries or crime reports or something like that.

I don’t know.

So your assumption was that he was talking about the front page of a newspaper in the back page then?

Yes. Yeah, that was what I was assuming.

And so basically he was saying, I’m fine, I’m staying out of trouble?

Nothing too terribly successful and nothing too troublesome, yeah.

Yeah, yeah, that makes sense.

I’m not aware of that specific phrase being ensconced in the language, but as you said, I think it makes sense.

You know, I remember growing up with the expression that a proper lady should only ever have her name in the newspaper two times in her life, when she was born and when she died.

You know, just, you know, don’t stand out too much in one respect or the other.

And so…

I heard that it’s three times.

Yeah, yeah, sometimes when you get married too.

When announcing their birth, marriage, or death.

Yeah, yeah, I’ve seen it that way as well.

Yeah, staying off the back pages.

In newspapers, as you suggested, often the back page, at least of the front section, will contain obituaries.

Sometimes they contain crime reports.

And I’m thinking, too, about tabloids.

Sometimes they have sensational stories about athletes on the back, you know, athletes who are getting into trouble, something like that.

Okay.

So it could be that.

But, Grant, I’m not aware of that specific phrase, although it makes perfect sense.

No, I’m not either.

But it’s interesting.

I wonder the further we get from paper newspapers being an everyday thing, if it will make less and less sense 50 years from now and it’ll be hard to find a paper newspaper.

Yeah, it’d be sort of like rolled down the window.

I think it’s a version of what Martha was mentioning about, you know, a lady or a gentleman should not appear in the newspaper.

And it’s one of the reasons, by the way, that in older newspapers, say in the 1800s, you’ll often find people writing letters to the editor under pseudonyms because they just didn’t want their name in the paper.

They didn’t want the publicity one way or the other, huh?

Right, right.

Even if what they were saying was fairly innocuous, like they were writing for the gardening column.

Jared, I think you suggested an interesting angle to it, which is that when you first mentioned staying off the front pages, I was thinking about staying off the front pages because you’re not getting into trouble.

It’s, you know, they say of local news, if it bleeds, it leads.

And you’re not getting into trouble.

But you also suggested that it may have to do with just not standing out too much.

Yeah, kind of to demur any sort of notoriety of any kind, you know, not taking a huge amount of credit or huge amount of blame, I guess.

-huh.

So I’m staying off the front page and staying off the back page.

I like it.

Yeah.

Not a tall poppy.

Yes.

No, and I know I’ve never heard it before or since.

Well, they’ve got to start somewhere, these expressions, don’t they?

They sure do.

Jared, thank you for your call.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I love the show.

Yeah, thank you very much.

Thanks, Jerry.

Thanks for listening.

Take care.

877-929-9673 or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

If you look up the word comfort in the Oxford English Dictionary, the first use of the word back in the 13th century was meant to strengthen, to strengthen morally or spiritually.

And it goes back to the Latin word fortis, which means strength.

It’s a relative of words like fortitude and fortify and fort.

If you’re comforting somebody, in a sense, you’re strengthening them.

And even though we’ve come some distance from that original usage, you feel like there’s still a sense of that there.

Sometimes when you’re comforting, you’re providing them with your own strength so that they can carry on.

Yeah, yeah.

I confess that that never occurred to me until I looked it up.

Right.

Okay.

I could see that.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words is about language seen through family, history, and culture.

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.

I promised a couple of book recommendations earlier in the show.

And one of them is a novel called This Life.

It’s by Qantas Conquest.

And he’s been incarcerated at Angola, the Louisiana State Prison, since 1997.

And the novel draws on his experience there.

But it’s not your usual prison story.

It’s not about plotting an escape.

And it’s not even particularly violent.

It’s a much more subtle novel about characters’ interior lives.

And you feel with his characters the initial shock of incarceration.

But then what?

I mean, you know you’ve made bad decisions.

But then from that point, given those circumstances, how do you choose to live your life?

And especially if you’re incarcerated at a young age, over the years, you’re going to change in various ways.

But how?

And it’s a book about searching for meaning, about creativity, friendship, mentorship.

And he ties the story together with the lyrical warfare, as he calls it, of rap and hip hop.

And this book has been getting some recognition.

In an interview with The New Yorker magazine, the author observed, once you’ve been in the fire for so long, you get used to the heat.

Once you get used to the heat, you start living, man.

And for me, the characters in this book were astonishingly vivid and memorable.

And that’s in part because I first listened to the audio version of this book.

And it’s narrated by Sean Crisden, who does an extraordinary job of bringing these people to life.

And, you know, Grant, it keeps happening to me that I listen to one book and then I end up going back and reading it in print.

And that’s what I’m doing now.

And that also happened to me with a book by an Albanian physicist named Lara Mersini-Hotten.

It’s called Before the Big Bang, The Origin of the Universe and What Lies Beyond.

And Laura Mersini-Hotten is a professor of theoretical physics and cosmology at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill.

And so her book is partly a memoir of growing up in Albania under the totalitarian communist regime.

She calls it the North Korea of Europe.

And she writes about the fact that what sustained her family during that awful time was that they valued art and literature and classical music and science.

She writes, the only place that was open to us was the sky and the stars above.

The state could not prevent us from looking up.

And eventually she gets a Fulbright and she escapes to the U.S. to study cosmology.

She ends up collaborating with Stephen Hawking, and she comes to theorize that the universe is really just one of many multiverses.

And her process of coming to that idea is really fascinating.

It’s detailed in the book.

And I will emphasize that I don’t begin to understand all of the science in this book, not at all.

But her storytelling and her lyricism and her sense of wonder really made it a page turner, even for somebody like me.

And actually, I guess I shouldn’t say page-turner because I was listening to this book, too.

It’s narrated by Exie Sands, who brings this warmth and this sure-footedness that makes the book pleasant to listen to even when I wasn’t understanding it.

Those are two very different books that I read this year that I really enjoyed.

And those books, again, are?

The first one is called This Life by Quintus Conquest.

And the second one is Before the Big Bang by Laura Mersini-Hawton.

We, of course, will link to those books on our website.

Let us know what you’re reading.

877-929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada.

And no matter where you are in the world, you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or find many other ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha.

Yes.

This is Alice from North Myrtle Beach, South Carolina.

I come from an Irish Catholic family, and I married a Sicilian man.

He’s American, but he’s of Sicilian heritage.

And we’ve been together a long time.

And his family has always had the Christmas tradition of making binalots, and it’s like a sausage bread.

And I have researched this term, and I’ve asked everybody in his family.

Nobody seems to know where the word binalata comes from.

So that is one kind of unusual word that I’m curious about.

I think what you’ve got there is an American version of a dialect word of a well-known Sicilian food item.

And the reason I say well-known is because there are seasonal celebrations, some in August and some around Christmas and some for Saints Day that feature this particular food item.

Now, I think so.

You’re going to have to describe me what’s in this.

What goes into it?

What is it like?

It’s almost like a pizza dough with cooked sausage and cheese and onions and olives.

Olive oil, you know, on the dough, and then it’s rolled up kind of like into a little, kind of like a Pillsbury crescent roll, and popped in the oven, and they’re delicious.

Okay, that’s it. I think we’re on the same track. This is known as an embriolata, I-M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A, and what you’re giving me is basically a transformation of that word.

The word has undergone numerous transformations.

Already, usually in Italian, they drop the I off the beginning.

So it’s known as mbrillata, which it’s just spelled M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A.

And it’s also known as mignolata, miscata, miscata, amiscata, mpignolata.

That makes sense.

Pignolati, briolate, other things.

And it’s exactly like you describe it. It is a dough a lot like pizza dough. It is rolled out.

You fill it with either sausage or bacon or minced pork, brown, maybe in a white wine.

There’s also a sauteed filling of onion and garlic, olives, maybe black olives, some herbs,

Possibly dill or fennel. And then you fill it in there and there’s a couple where you can either

Do it like you said you roll them individually like maybe a crescent roll or you can spread it

Out like one big rectangle and fill the cover the whole thing with this filling and then roll it from

A corner like you might roll a paper a cloth napkin and then form a giant circle like a wreath and

Pinch the ends together and bake it whole like a giant bread wreath and then when it’s nice and

Brown and obviously you put olive oil during the whole process you cut it into segments and so each

One of these segments looks you know the cross section has a nice rolled spiral effect and that

And that that gives you the imbulata. Oh, you are an angel. You’re an angel and this has given me so

Many great ideas for the Christmas time. Yeah, and I’m going to be I’m going to be the genius the

Star of the family. Yeah.

There’s a version with potatoes, diced, pre-cooked potatoes.

You can do cheeses, like a dry one, like a pecorino or a melting cheese.

And these come from parts of Sicilia, particularly Milena.

That’s where they have, every August, they have a celebration.

Specifically, this food dish, the Imbulata.

And as far as the origin of the word, it is believed, and I say it is, I’m using the passive intentionally.

It is believed that the word comes ultimately from a Greek word embryon.

You can hear something there that means enclosed within a casing

Because the fillings are enclosed within this bread casing.

Which I would think embryo and, yeah, that makes sense.

That makes perfect sense.

Yeah.

I am so grateful to you two and I love your show

And I love learning all these new words and where they come from.

So thank you so very much and you’ve given me some great ideas for Christmas.

Alice, I’m going to give you that spelling one more time so you can Google it.

And you’re going to get a bunch of pages in Italian.

Just translate them with Google or Bing or whatever, and you’ll get some great recipes.

The spelling again is M-B-R-I-U-L-A-T-A.

Okay.

All right, Alice, thank you so much.

Good luck.

Have fun at Christmas, all right?

And thank you so much.

I really appreciate it, and I love your show.

Keep up the good work.

All right, take care now.

Thanks, Alice.

Give our best to your family.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

By the way, if you ever want to hear Martha and I talk about food and language, we make guest appearances on Chris Kimball’s Milk Street.

Just go to the Milk Street website and search for Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett and you’ll find a lot of our special segments.

In English, if somebody’s making a big deal out of something that’s really trivial, we might say they’re making a mountain out of a molehill.

And there are other great expressions in other languages.

There’s one in Swedish that translates as they’re making a hen out of a feather.

Isn’t that nice?

And in Icelandic, you might say they’re making a camel out of a gnat.

A camel out of a gnat.

Those both sound like dangerous lab experiments.

Well, here’s one that’s preferable.

There’s one in Arabic that translates as, they’re making a wine shop out of a raisin.

Oh, a wine shop out of a raisin.

That’s a religious experience.

Oh, I do love these.

You’re welcome to join us on the show.

We have a 24-hour phone line that’s toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.

And you can call us on WhatsApp.

Find our number at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marissa calling from Tallahassee in Florida.

I had a question about a phrase that I heard on a family beach vacation.

And the person who said it is from East Tennessee.

And she said, as she was drinking coffee, she said, this coffee goes through me like salts through a widow woman.

And I had no idea what that meant and neither did she.

So I was hoping you guys could help me out.

Did she mean it went through her really fast?

Yes.

I see.

What salts and why a widow woman?

Yes.

Both of those questions.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is an old expression.

Dates back to the 1860s.

And salts refers to Epsom salts, basically magnesium sulfate, which were used as laxatives.

And so there are lots of things that those salts were said to go through, and it’s all about something going fast.

So you could say that something lit out like, or disappeared like, or hurried like, or go through like.

And we don’t know why sometimes it’s said like a widow or a widow woman.

We think it’s just because they were basically poor and had a poor diet.

So sometimes they were constipated.

So they were known to take Epsom salts.

But other than that, we’re not sure.

But sometimes it was salts through a hired girl or a tall Swede or a weak man, a sick child, a sick cow, a sick horse, a skeleton, a goose.

And you know geese don’t need any help doing their business anywhere they like.

Or skeletons.

Or skeletons.

So all of these things.

So it’s all about Epsom salts helping people do the number two.

Wow.

Well, that’s so great to know because I guess coffee does that too.

So thanks for enlightening me.

Yeah, exactly.

Coffee does do that.

Absolutely.

Well, I can’t wait to tell her.

Yeah, invite her over for a cup of coffee.

All right.

Will do.

Thanks for taking the time.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime.

Bye, Marissa.

All right.

Thanks.

Take care.

I love it when the old expressions continue to be used.

Whether it’s in English or another language, we’d love to help you get to the bottom of them.

Call us toll-free in the United States and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

And if you’re somewhere else in the world listening to my podcast,

Go to our website and find a new way to reach us, waywordradio.org/contact.

We were talking earlier about the expression to bang in sick or to bang out of work.

And it made me think of all those terms, Grant, for skipping school, too, or skipping out of something.

You know, in South Africa and India, they say bunking.

I’m bunking.

In the U.K., sometimes you’re wagging or you’re kipping or you’re twagging.

You’re skiving.

Skiving.

Yeah, that’s another one.

And in Ireland, you say I’m mitching.

Lots of different ways to get out of class.

We’d love to collect some more of these.

Send us yours, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, you’re talking with Barb Jones from Battle Creek, Michigan.

Hiya, Barb. Welcome to the show.

I wanted to tell you a little story about when I was four.

There was a young cousin that was in her 20s that came to visit from Georgia.

It was near my birthday. And of course, being four years old, I was so excited. And I said,

I’m going to have a birthday. And she said, I know. She says, I’m going to give you a box with

Five handles. Well, being four years old, I was so excited because in my mind, I could imagine

A box big enough to have five handles on it, you know, and I hadn’t gotten a big birthday present

Before. So when my birthday came, I was anticipating her coming over with that box.

At the time that she said it, I remember my aunt and my mom kind of giggling a little bit,

But I thought nothing of it being that young. So my birthday came and went and she didn’t come by,

But she did come by the next day. And I said, where’s my box with five handles?

And she said, here, lay across my lap.

And she had a little hairbrush, and she spanked me five times.

So the box with five handles was, you know, a spanking.

That’s what they used to do sometimes.

I mean, it wasn’t anything that hurt.

But it was just a tap on my rock five times because it was my birthday.

And, of course, she rewarded me by taking me to the ice cream store, getting me a big old rainbow sherbet cone.

But I was so disappointed.

And I really think I was traumatized from that.

A box with five handles was a spanking.

Yes.

Where in the world would that saying come from?

A box with five handles.

A box with five handles was a hand.

The handles were each of the five fingers.

And the box was the shape of the fist.

It forms kind of a square-shaped thing that looks like a box.

Yeah.

So it goes back to the 1870s.

It does? Really? Oh, my gosh.

I have never heard it before and I haven’t heard it since.

But it’s stuck in my head all these years.

I’m interested that you said that she was from Georgia.

Because we see this expression in a lot of the folklore from the Southeast,

Talking about a box with five handles, meaning, you know, a hand and five fingers whomping up

Beside the head. Oh, my goodness. That is amazing. Well, my mom being from Georgia.

Yeah, I’ve also seen a box with five nails, which you can imagine, you know, five fingers with five

Nails. Really? Oh, I have never heard any of those. Do you feel better now, Barb? Now that you

I do.

She remembers that ice cream with great fondness.

Well, yes, it was a great ice cream.

I had never had a big rainbow sherbet ice cream cone before, so that was kind of cool.

But still, she imprinted my brain for the rest of my life, and that was actually in the 1950s.

So I’ve had that in my head for a long time.

Barb, thank you for sharing your story and your memories.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Okay.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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Bye.