Chopped Liver

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.

There’s an old proverb that goes, beloved children have many names.

But I think an even more appropriate proverb would be beloved pets have many names.

Because there’s this real creative exuberance that people who live with pets tend to have when we name our animals.

I’m sure you’ve had this experience, Grant.

Yeah, we don’t name them once, right?

Right.

Keep naming them and renaming them.

Renaming them and renaming them until they’re unrecognizable.

And we’ve been talking about that on our Facebook group, and there were some great examples there.

Deanna wrote that her pet’s name took a journey that went like this.

Romeo, Romy, Rome Rome, Moo-me, Moo-moo, Shmoomoo, Mush-mush, Boopy.

And I bet the dog answers to all of them, right?

Well, of course, yeah.

And then Cherise wrote, I too have a Romeo.

He’s gone from Romeo to Romo to Momo to Mo to Momosius Maximus.

And Cherise also has a pet named Apollo who went from Apollo to Apollo to Apollo pudding to pudding pie to powwow to wow-wo to wow.

Yep, he went from the god Apollo to wow.

That’s great.

And there’s so many of these, both on the Facebook page and the Facebook group.

And the best thing is people are posting pictures of their animals.

Of course.

So you have to go through and like them all, right?

Because they’re all good dogs and cats.

Yes.

But why is it that we do that more with animals than with humans?

I really think that’s true.

I did that with my son.

Did you?

As a baby, yeah.

I mean, he’s got his name, which is Guthrie.

Yeah.

But I called him, it was very chubby, so I called him Fatty and Fatty Manz.

But an affectionate.

Fatty Manz, the unnecessary plural.

And then I called him Kiki Man because he kicked a lot even before he was born.

And then I called him Kiko Man Soy Sauce.

Oh, no.

And Sweetest Boy, of course, and a bunch of stuff like that.

Okay.

So you’re saying that you think we do it equally for children.

I think there’s something about that relationship with a baby and a pet which is so emotional.

I think we have a hard time completely expressing it with just one name, right?

Because I noticed that a lot of those tended to the loving and the cutesy.

-huh.

Yeah, the cutesy sounds.

It’s not like you’re calling them, you know, that one dog goes from Mark to Jeff to Sarah to Judy.

Right, yeah.

It always comes up with something adorable in there.

Yeah.

I’ll share some more of those later in the show.

We know you give your pet strange names, but you’re welcome to call us about anything related to the language, 877-929-9673.

Talk to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And tell us all about it on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Gary Kaki. I’m calling from Denton, Texas.

Hi, Gary. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Gary.

The reason why I’m calling is I was hoping y’all could clarify a family colloquialism that I discovered.

So I recently had a son, and he has that face that is a powerful frown,

Which inevitably leads to a wail, and he starts crying afterwards.

And when my parents were in town, my father mentioned that his mom referred to that face as a shipshire,

And he said he had never heard anybody else say it.

And that got us thinking, where did that come from?

And I’ve done a little research, and I haven’t been able to find any answers myself.

And I was hoping y’all could help shed some light on that.

We certainly can.

And that’s such a terrible moment, isn’t it, when you see that little lower lip coming out,

And you know it’s about to happen?

Yes, and I find it so interesting that I didn’t find a word for it,

Because everybody that I’ve described that face to knows exactly what I’m talking about,

And it’s not a frown, and it’s not a cry, but it’s something completely distinct.

It’s a kind of pout, right?

Correct. It’s a pout, or I’ve been calling it a frown with momentum.

That’s good.

Yeah, yeah. It’s on its way to being a whale, right?

Correct.

Yes, and the Germans do have a term for this, and it’s schippchen.

And you spell that S-C-H-I-P-P-C-H-E-N, Schipchen, and it means little shovel, which I think is so adorable.

It’s like this little shovel of a lip coming out right before they start crying.

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

And that makes a lot of sense given my family history.

My grandmother was a German immigrant.

So it would make a lot of sense that she used that word,

Especially considering that there doesn’t seem to be an English equivalent to it that I found.

That is incredibly interesting.

Well, we’re glad to help you.

Thanks, Gary. Really appreciate it.

Y’all have a great day.

You too. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What’s the word or phrase that’s bouncing around in your family conversations?

Give us a call about it. 877-929-9673.

Have you ever welcomed a friend back after they’ve been working a whole lot

Or they’ve been sick for a while and you say, hey, welcome to the land of the living?

Yeah, they’ve just kind of appeared as if they’d been hidden in a cave for a while.

Yes.

Did you know that that’s a biblical expression?

Is it Lazarus or Jesus?

No, no.

It goes all the way back to Hebrew scripture.

There are phrases in the Bible from the Psalms and Isaiah where the phrase the land of the living is used.

Like, for example, Psalm 52, 5.

God shall likewise destroy thee forever.

He shall take thee away and pluck thee out of thy dwelling place and root thee out of the land of the living.

And the expression has been used in English directly coming from that since at least the 1700s.

Interesting.

It’s so interwoven.

All of this stuff from the Bible and Shakespeare and card games and gunslinging and gold rush days and baseball and football.

There’s these things that we say.

You have to think about them and go, oh, yeah, there’s a story.

Yeah, right?

We’re carrying around this history in every word.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

This is Ainsley.

I’m calling from San Diego.

Hi, Ainsley.

Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Thank you.

I have a question about a comment my coworker made the other week.

We were discussing a spreadsheet together, and after review, we received some ambitious feedback,

And he made the comment that we would have to munge the numbers.

And I had never heard that word before, and a couple sentences later, he then said,

We will have to kludge it together.

So in the span of a couple minutes, he had two unique words that he thinks are typical, normal every day.

So I was wondering if you had any feedback on the word munch to begin with.

Yeah.

Do you want ambitious feedback?

I like that expression, too.

Does that mean vigorous feedback, like detailed feedback?

It gave us some lofty goals to work towards.

I see.

I like that.

Lofty goals.

And what do you think he meant about munging the numbers?

So originally I thought manipulate in maybe more of a negative context, but after talking it through a little more, it’s more of just seeing what we could do or figuring it out.

Maybe manipulate, but not so maliciously manipulate, just see what we can do with them.

That conforms with the way that I know the word to munge, and it’s almost always about data.

Frequently about numbers or things that you can put in tables and rows and columns, that sort of thing.

It’s a real word. It’s not that common. It is in some dictionaries, not all of them.

And it does mean to manipulate numbers and data.

But its story is a little more interesting than that because it did used to be negative.

So I’m super interested that you thought that there was a negative quality to what he was suggesting that somehow was a a little bit bad to be munging numbers.

That is interesting to hear, but I know that he wouldn’t have anticipated that it would be taken negatively.

The way that it sounded, because of the expectations put on us,

That it would require some behind-the-scenes work.

So that’s why I took it that way.

So it first pops up in the 1940s, but in the 1940s it just means crud or junk or filth or rubbish.

It could be used in student context to talk about the bad food served at a cafeteria or some gunk that’s on your belongings after, you know, walking in the mud, that sort of thing.

And it’s specifically marked in the slang dictionaries as being student slang.

And then over time, it moves.

And once computers become a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, MUNGE, sometimes spelled with an E, M-U-N-G-E, sometimes without, munge starts to be referred to to mess around with data in a way where sometimes you’re not certain about the results, where you may get trash or rubbish as a result of working with this data and running it through scripts or applying programs or formulas to it.

And then the negative tone starts to fall away.

And now pretty much if you munge data, it’s you take a set of numbers and you do things with them.

You manipulate them so that they can serve another purpose or serve another master.

Okay. He has done a lot of work with engineers, so maybe that’s where he originally picked it up.

That would make sense to me. Yeah, absolutely. I would expect engineers and Unix longbeards and those sort of people would know the term to munch data.

It’s common enough to be in some slang dictionaries and one or two mainstream dictionaries, but it’s not an everyday word, really.

Okay. That makes me feel a little bit better because I did a survey, and four out of five people have not heard of the word munch, at least in our office.

Oh, that’s okay. There we go. Yeah. And are you all young? Is it a young office?

It’s actually not very young. So it’s an older generation for the most part.

Yeah. And then the other word, just to dispense with that pretty quick, kludge is how it’s often said.

The kludge is how it looks like it’s spelled, K-L-U-D-G-E, is also another one that kind of comes from the early days of the computing era.

And it’s probably from a German word having to do with being smart or clever.

But now a kludge is kind of a half-assed workaround or like a jerry-rigged solution or something that works but shouldn’t, that kind of thing.

Yeah, I’ve heard people talk about a kludgy solution too.

There is the old joke, which isn’t true, that the origin of the word is it’s the sound a piece of hardware makes when you drop it into the ocean because it doesn’t work.

Well, that makes sense then that it was used with munch because it sounds like together that then we’ll come up with something.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Ainsley, they’re definitely from the same era, the same sort of people would use those words.

Yeah.

So good luck munging those numbers.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Thank you for your call.

Thanks for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye.

I use kludge a lot, but I don’t, munch is a word I know but don’t really use.

And you say kludge rather than kludge.

Yeah, I say kludge.

That’s how I learned it.

But the dictionaries show that it’s often kludge.

And kludge has a nicer sound to it.

It’s a slingier sound to me.

Yeah.

I like them both.

But the kludge is like, you do these on your car where I’ve seen somebody’s antenna, radio antenna broke off.

And so they took a drinking straw and inserted it into the metal part in the car and then inserted the antenna into that.

And it doesn’t really connect, but it looks nice or nicer.

You can do a lot of kludging with duct tape, right?

Yeah, exactly.

877-929-9673.

This show’s about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stick around.

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 is our quiz guy, Mr. John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

When I can’t sleep, I don’t count sheep.

I construct word puzzles.

All in my head, I first try to think of the longest word I can that starts with A and that ends with A.

Now, see if you can think of one.

A word that starts with A and ends with A, the longest word that you can.

Habacadabra.

That’s really good.

I was going to say anaconda, but that’s not as long.

That’s the exact word.

That’s not that long.

That’s the word I came up with.

That’s how it works.

You try to come up with a long word.

That’s eight letters.

We’re looking for common words.

I’ll give you a clue to the longest word I can find if you can’t think of one.

But you guys can just, you know, shout out your words and see which of you gets the longest one, okay?

What’s the longest word you can think of that begins with A and ends with B?

Ad-lib?

That’s only five, though.

That’s only five.

Okay, I only found actually two words, two longest words, and they’re both six letters.

See if you can think of any of them.

I want something from Arabic.

Oh, that’s a good guess.

A to B.

A to B.

Here’s a clue to the first word I came up with.

A confident, relaxed manner when dealing with difficulty.

That does not help.

All right.

Here’s an easier one.

Here’s an easier one.

What a sponge does.

Absorb.

Absorb is sexy, yeah.

But the confident, relaxed manner is when you deal with things with aplomb.

Aplomb, yes.

Very good.

Okay.

How about what’s the longest word you can think of that begins with A and ends with C?

Oh, that’s going to be something I see at the end probably, I’m thinking.

Oh.

By the way, we’re not using extreme technical or scientific term.

Anticlimactic.

Anticlimactic is 13 letters.

That’s fantastic, Grant.

Good on you.

Very good.

I thought of apathetic.

That’s only nine.

But how about a word like a memoir, for example, related to a story about a person told by that person?

Autobiographic?

Autobiographic.

Yes, that’s 14 letters.

14.

Very good.

Okay.

Okay.

How about starting with A and ending with D?

Ooh.

Well, simple stuff like accelerated or…

That’s pretty good.

Oh, that’s good.

How about a word that means given human form or personality to?

Oh, anthropomorphized.

Yes.

Ooh, that’s good.

That’s 17 letters.

Like when I say my dog is a pretty princess, and she is.

So I think we’ll stop with those.

And like I said, by now you’re hopefully asleep.

I was going to say, now we know what you do.

That’s what I do in my head at night, yes.

John, thank you for the quiz.

A little game for you to play.

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Thank you, guys.

Talk to you then.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Or share your ideas with us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jessica from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Jessica. Welcome to the show.

So I have a little tale for you that involves my question.

Okay.

Okay, so I was visiting my parents.

I live in Omaha, Nebraska, and I was visiting my parents who live in St. Petersburg, Florida, last month.

And they have a little private beach where they live.

And I noticed that the beach had changed since I had been there last.

I think probably because of Hurricane Irma, it had washed a whole bunch of new and different shells on the beach.

And so I was looking for shells, and I picked up something, and I realized that I had found an arrowhead.

Cool.

That’s cool.

Yeah, it was such a, like, magical find.

And so I ran up to their condo, and I got online, and I started to research arrowhead because I had no idea how old it could possibly be.

And everything I found had the date followed by BP instead of like AD or BC, and I found that really confusing.

BP as in like Betty Paul or something like that.

Or Balboa Park.

Balboa Park, right.

Right, right, exactly.

So I did message some archaeologists, but I’m still kind of unclear about why that’s used.

And did you ever get a date for your arrowhead?

I did.

They said that it ranged in date from about 6,000 to 3,000 BP.

Okay.

That’s outstanding.

So, yeah.

So you’ve found a couple of cool things here.

One was the arrowhead, and then the other was this unusual way of dating things.

Because, as you suggested, traditionally in Western culture we date things as B.C., before Christ, and A.D., Anno Domini, which means the year of our Lord, right?

B.C. And A.D.

Some people use BCE for before common era, and other people use CE for common era.

So one thing that you’re underscoring is the fact that people measure time differently.

There are different ways to look at the passage of years.

For example, the Islamic calendar starts at a different point, and the Chinese calendar starts at a different point.

So that’s kind of cool in and of itself.

But then the BP is, as you suggested, a way that certain kinds of scientists use to measure time.

And it’s a little complicated, but my understanding of it is that it’s based on the use of radiocarbon dating,

which started, in a practical sense, around the year 1950.

And so BP stands for before present.

And that moment is the first day of January in 1950, which is about when radiocarbon dating started.

And it’s a way of dating back in time.

It’s so old.

I didn’t even realize that.

I mean, I guess just naively, I didn’t even realize that something man-made like that would exist and I would find it.

Yeah.

You know, just in Florida.

Yeah, that’s great.

It’s so cool.

It’s fantastic.

I love it.

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. What an interesting, interesting thing to learn.

That’s great. What are you going to do with it?

Well, I was carrying it around with me, but then I felt super anxious that I would lose it because I, but I also felt really cocky having it.

Like I had a little secret, like I had the oldest thing and nobody knew it.

So now, so now I just have it on display in my house.

That’s nice. Beachcomber’s dream.

Yeah.

Congratulations.

Jessica, thanks for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks, guys.

Have a great day.

Take care.

That’s super cool.

Bye.

Bye.

Tell us what you think on Twitter @wayword.

And we’re taking your questions at 877-929-9673.

I stumbled across a word that was new to me the other day.

MULTIP.

M-U-L-T-I-P.

That’s familiar. What is that?

It is literally familiar if you’re talking about family, because it is a term used by obstetricians to refer to a woman who has given birth more than once.

Multi.

It’s a shortening of a longer word, multiparous, which means to have given birth more than once.

It’s related to the term nulliparous, N-U-L-L-I-P-A-R-O-U-S, nulliparous, which means never having given birth.

And then there’s primip, which is having given birth once.

Oh, is that right?

And so a woman who’s given birth once, she’s a primipara.

Is that right?

Yeah.

Primipara.

I mean, I don’t know that that word is actually used by anyone, but it’s in the dictionary.

But a primip, huh?

Is the short version of it?

Well, I think they say primip for the short version and primipara for the name of the woman, what you would call her.

She’s a primipora.

Who knew?

Or not just a woman, but it could be animals as well.

They use these terms across the animal kingdom.

Cool.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Fadi from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

So I had a question about a recent kind of sparring between a couple of politicians.

That’s the governor of California.

And the president, the latter, called the former Moonbeam on Twitter.

So I got to thinking, I didn’t know why he was called Moonbeam.

And so I researched it and realized that the governor had been called Moonbeam in the past.

But I still didn’t know why he was called that and why is it supposed to be derogatory.

That’s a wonderful question.

The reason that I like it is because it has all these cultural understandings

that I think we’re all going to get as Californians

and people who maybe grew up with Jerry Brown or at least have known about him.

But if you’re from Indiana and you sound like English isn’t your first language, is that right?

English is my second language, and so I had to do some digging.

I went to even the Urban Dictionary online and still didn’t really give a definitive answer.

The short version is this. He got the nickname from a Chicago newspaper columnist named Mike

Royko. And Mike was a great columnist, fantastic. He’s cut from the old cloth, the blue collar guy

who could say in a few words that it would take other people pages to do. He just really

understood people and he understood the cultural and political interplay between the different

layers of American society. And so when Jerry Brown first came onto the national scene

early to mid-1970s, Mike Royko kind of slapped this movie label on him to suggest that Jerry

Brown was kind of from the hippie culture, just kind of looking too far into the stars and not

paying attention to the practical realities of the world and talking about airy, fairy things

instead of practical day-to-day realities of getting down to work and doing the business that

needs to be done and just the meat and potatoes stuff and maybe a suggesting a little bit of

crystals and rainbows and insubstantial, yeah, insubstantial and kind of a vague spirituality

without actually having a religion, that sort of thing. And certainly the other thing about the

the nickname Moonbeam is it’s very much like actual names that were given to some kids in

the days of the hippie movement in the 1960s and the 1970s where they were given these names like

Star child or I can’t even think of all the ones now, but there are a ton of these names that

collected here and the rainbow was a common name or to name somebody tree or different things like

that and to suggest a greater connection to the mother earth or to nature as a whole or to this

large universe that we’re all a part of.

So really it was a really effective

single word way to paint Jerry Brown as one of these

hippie leftist Californians who just didn’t get the real

world and was off in outer space paying attention to his own fingernails and not

to the work that needed to be done. That’s very interesting. If you read

Jerry Brown’s thoughts on the nickname Moonbeam, he’s wavered over

the many decades, he’s had these two separate sessions as governor of the state. He’s about to

finish here in California at the age of 80. He’s wavered between really embracing the nickname and

kind of loving the fact that he does appreciate this quirkiness that Californians have. They

will strike off on their own direction and do their own thing regardless of what the rest of

the country is doing. And on the other hand, sometimes he just felt it pigeonholed him too

much and people didn’t appreciate that he’s been capable of putting the state back on a good budget

and doing the hard work of building freeways or fixing the infrastructure or solidifying the

things that we all need on our everyday lives to be successful. So he was able in a way to

reappropriate it? Sometimes. To reappropriate the name? Yeah, sometimes. Okay, very good. Good way to put it.

Fadi, thank you so much for calling. Thank you so much. We really appreciate it. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Thank you.

We know there’s something you hear every day that you don’t quite understand.

Let us help you sort it out, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about the multiplicity of names that we give to our pets,

and there’s a great cartoon by Sarah Anderson.

I love her stuff.

Yeah, I do too.

And this is a cartoon that involves a young woman talking to her little black cat.

And she says, oh, hello, my little poof, my mush, cutie, squish, kitten pie, little beanie, toe cutie.

And then the last frame is this other cat talking to the black cat saying, what’s your name?

And the cat’s like,

doesn’t know.

He’s got a little identity crisis.

By the way, I like your little cutesy voice there.

I’ve had lots of practice talking to cats.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Clementine.

Hi, Clementine. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Where are you calling from?

Omaha, Nebraska.

We’re delighted to have you, Clementine.

What’s on your mind today?

Well, the other day I heard my grandma talking about a place, and she said it was run-of-the-mill.

And I thought, I don’t know why run-of-the-mill means ordinary and boring, because my parents have this friend, and he owns a mill.

And when I was little, I used to run around in it, and it was really fun.

What kind of mill is it?

A flour mill.

Clementine, that is an excellent question.

Well, this term goes back to the world of manufacturing.

You know, there are lots of different kinds of mills.

For example, if you have a lumber mill and you’re cutting up, say, 10,000 planks of wood, you’re going to have some of those planks of wood that don’t turn out as well as the other ones.

Maybe they’re discolored or they’re broken or the wood had a hole in it.

And so out of that group of products, you’ve got the whole group, the rejects and the good ones. It hasn’t been inspected yet. And you refer to that as run of the mill.

So run of the mill refers to products that haven’t been gone through to inspect their quality. Or maybe like from a textile mill that’s making, say, sheets and pillowcases. Maybe you’re going to have some stitching that’s off or they just cut the cloth wrong. And that whole big group of sheets and pillowcases before you start sorting them out and finding the ones that are bad, that’s run of the mill. It’s the whole run.

Yeah. So a run here is any group or set of items that are manufactured together, things that are made all of the same kind. So that’s one run and might have another run on another day.

Yeah. Or you might talk about a run of newspapers being printed up one day or a run of books being published. Or a run of bad luck where you have a lot of bad luck in a row.

Yeah, that’s a good point, Grant. And so it’s not really the same as running around a mill like you were doing. Does that make sense?

Okay. Yeah. Well, Clementine, I’m super happy that you called us to ask about your language question. Do me a favor and call us anytime you have another language question.

All right. Okay. Thank you. You’re welcome. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

You know, this same idea of run of the mill has also survived in terms like run of the mine, which is, you know, from mining, the stuff that you get out of the mine.

And then run of the kill.

You know, if you’re K-I-L-N, if you’re baking a lot of bricks, cooking, you know, or ceramics, run of the kill.

Like building bricks.

But wait a second.

Kill, K-I-L-N, you say it without the N.

Yeah.

That’s an alternate pronunciation, right?

I guess it is.

I’m looking here now in 21 dictionaries, and I did not know that some people say the word kiln without the N.

It’s considered a valid, acceptable pronunciation.

I didn’t know there were people who said kiln with the N.

With the N.

Yeah.

How about that?

Learn something new every day.

Yeah.

I’ve spent a lot of time around ceramicists and potters, and they all talk about putting stuff in the kiln.

You know, you think you know your radio spouse, and something new comes along.

Isn’t that the beauty of doing writing together?

Well, what are you and your spouse arguing about that has to do with the language?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

On our Facebook group, Elaine wrote, had our cat for two weeks before we could agree on a name.

Meanwhile, she was called Poor Nameless Cat, which became PNC, which became Pansy.

Pansy.

Pansy.

Like a little cute flower, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Not the derogatory term, right?

Yeah.

That’s nice.

Yeah.

Pansy.

877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

Thank you.

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.

Remember the conversation we had about how irritating it is to be in the left lane, ready to make a turn at a traffic light, and you’re waiting for the person in front of you to go when the light turns green.

But they don’t.

And then they don’t.

They don’t.

Apparently, this is a universal complaint.

Oh, my goodness.

No one has noticed because our inbox went boom.

It went boom.

Yeah, our listeners really stepped up with terms for those turn lane slowpokes.

I think I had suggested the term lane squatters, and we heard a lot of other suggestions that were alliterative, like lane loafers, lane lingerers, lazy lefty, left turn loiterer, lane loiterer, left lane loiterer, laney gaggers, for those who are lollygagging in the left lane.

Clearly people have had a lot of time to sit there and think about this.

We heard from a fellow in Brooklyn who suggested light laggers and light lingerers, or maybe light mullingerers.

And we also heard from somebody who suggested phone head, sort of a play on phone head.

And David Winkler in Del Mar, California, suggested a punny answer.

He wanted to describe those people as lightweights.

W-A-I-T.

Yes, which I thought was great.

And finally, we heard from Carrie Jensen, who suggested, how about dubbing this driver a bottlenecker?

It has the same sound as rubbernecker and could apply to similar traffic situations where forward progress for many is gummed up by a single vehicle or two.

Carrie lives, she writes, in Spring Valley, Wisconsin, a town that doesn’t actually have any traffic lights.

Right now, that’s sounding really good to me.

It sounds really good.

You know what? Maybe we need more lights is where they have the light that’s right outside your window.

Then they have the one up above that everyone can see.

But there’s the one right there, eye height, just outside the driver’s window.

Like when they have these metered lanes for merging onto the freeway.

I don’t know if they have these in the whole country.

That’s what we need more of because that light changes.

You see it immediately, even from your peripheral vision.

Yeah, but if you’re in a phone fog.

Yeah, the best thing is to not have the phone on in the first place.

That’s exactly right.

It will give you a giant ticket if you’re even holding it in your hand.

That’s right.

No matter what you’re doing with it.

Yeah.

And I think our caller did have a great point about if we can find a term for this, if we can really define the problem that way, then we go a ways toward solving it.

Go a ways toward solving it.

Well, we know that you’ve got more ideas about what to call people who are in turn lanes and just don’t go when the light turns green.

Let us know.

words@waywordradio.org.

Or call us and tell us.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is William calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

How are y’all today?

Doing well, William.

What’s going on?

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

I guess these kids will never know what this monkey blood was.

It’s always called monkey blood, but being a medical historian, they call it mercuricombe is fine, but monkey blood, why monkey blood?

If they put it on your wound, it’s not going to sting.

They blow on it, it stings worse.

-huh.

Wait, mercurochrome, the red stuff, right?

Right.

It’s a slang term for it.

People love to goof around, and they have whimsy and caprice, and sometimes they’re guided by that more than they are common sense and logic.

Right.

Yeah, but not everybody calls it that.

I sure never heard that term growing up.

No, you know what’s funny about that, William, is monkey blood to refer to mercurochrome, which is the antiseptic that you might have put on your wounds back in the day.

It also actually refers sometimes to iodine or methylate or thimerosal, all four of those at different times.

I guess merthiolate and thimerosal are the same thing.

Well, and it sounds like the kind of thing that a parent would say to get a kid to stop crying about a skinned knee.

Oh, do you want some monkey blood?

You know, completely divert their attention from the fact that they’re…

And the kid’s like, what are you putting on me?

Well, as my grandmother was always, if you picture the understanding of Granny from Beverly Hillbillies, she never wanted to go to the doctor.

She’d rather pull something out of the garden or use natural herbs and all these natural cures.

And in the back of my mind, it’s no wonder why they lived to be 100.

They lived on this stuff, you know?

There are other things that have been called monkey blood besides mercurochrome, including red wine in the British Navy.

And in the U.K., raspberry or a strawberry topping for your ice cream, because, you know, this red liquid you pour on.

And there’s even, I’ve seen a few uses of, there’s this waterproof chemical sealant that is red. Use it on, like, boats and concrete. That’s also sometimes called monkey blood. Interesting.

That’s a whole different shift of putting this wound on there.

Oh, you stand your knee? Come over here. Give me some monkey blood. No, no, no. Dang, no.

One more thing before we go, William. It’s also in Spanish. Some Spanish speakers, not only in Texas, but in Mexico and a few other places, also call it sangre de mono or sangre de chango, which is literally monkey’s blood.

Really? Wow. I knew it was in the South because everybody talks of it, but the deal is I didn’t know it stretched that far.

Yeah, yeah. That’s a complicated history, right? I keep wondering if we got it from the Spanish speakers or if they got it from us or how that goes.

We’ll never know, maybe. William, thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it, man. I appreciate it. Thank you. Y’all be safe over there.

Okay, take care. Take care. Bye.

I remember being shocked when a friend of mine moved from Alabama to Kentucky and used that stuff because I always used Bactine.

Yeah. Yeah, and all of a sudden she was showing up with these big pink stains on her skin where she had cuts and scrapes.

The mercurochrome mark is kind of a badge of honor. You’ve got a wound. You’re kind of showing it off. At least when I was a kid, it was like wearing the Band-Aid. I kept that Band-Aid on as long as possible.

And maybe the mercurochrome is the same story. You leave it on as long as possible so everyone will ask you about your injury.

Yeah, a conversation piece.

We’d love to have a conversation with you. So call us about language, 877-929-9673.

Or send your inquiries and your stories to words@waywordradio.org.

On Twitter, a guy who goes by the handle Mikey Photos TCRG, who is a photographer here in San Diego, wrote to us and said, I need to know what it’s called when a dog is writhing around in the grass.

Kind of like on their back with their belly exposed and the paws up.

Right, right, right. And they’re not rolling in a scent or anything, right?

Well. Maybe. They could be.

His family calls it schnerking. S-H-N-E-R-K-I-N-G. Rhymes with twerking. Schnurking.

And he wonders if anybody else uses that term. And I couldn’t find anybody else who does, but people sure have words for this.

They do, don’t they?

Yeah. Yeah, I did an informal poll of my friends, and they referred to that action as stink bathing.

If the dog.

Right. If there’s like a dead animal or a doggy dude or some other dude that they’re rolling in.

Yeah. When my Labrador used to do that, I would call it mole diving because it was usually a rotting mole.

Yeah. We had a beagle that would love any old dead thing and she would roll in it.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. Or then just the more benign itchy scratchies or flea smothering or scruffling or being a grass shark.

Grass shark.

Yeah. Or a rug shark if you’re doing it indoors.

But that. They look so blissful. Every dog lover knows that action.

I think it’s, I always wonder if it’s something akin to bears needing to rub themselves on trees. It’s a mammal thing that we love to have our backs scratched.

Maybe that’s what they’re doing.

Well, they look so joyous, right? Don’t they?

Yeah. Dogs, man, they’re game for anything.

Well, maybe you have a term for it or a story about language you’d like to share. Call us 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Kathleen. I’m calling from west central Iowa.

Well, what would you like to talk with us about, Kathleen?

I had a conversation with my son who’s volunteering as a teacher in an orphanage in Honduras, and he used the term roped in as far as getting involved in different activities at the, they call it the ranch, is where the orphanage is located.

As the conversation went on, I asked him just for clarification. I said, so you’re using the term roped in, and my understanding of that is that there is some negative connotation.

And he didn’t agree, and he told me that at that moment, as we were speaking, he was Googling it, and Google came up with that it meant persuaded or talked into.

I guess when I use that phrase, I use it sort of rolling my eyes. You know, oh, somebody roped me into going to their fundraiser or something like that.

Like I’m amiable about it, but I still, it’s a little bit, there’s a little bit of pressure.

So Kathleen, for your son on the ranch in Honduras, to rope somebody in was just to simply get them involved.

But from where you stand, roping someone is about being persuaded with moral force or maybe even some trickery.

No, my grasp, and this is just knowing my son, was it something he wasn’t really enthusiastic about.

Oh, I see, gotcha.

And so he was being persuaded.

Right, talked into it.

Yes, but it wasn’t something he was really feeling passionate or really enthusiastic or excited about.

You know, what’s funny is when I look this up in the dictionaries, there’s kind of a conflict here.

Some dictionaries say that it’s British just to persuade someone, you know, to rope in means just to persuade, and that it’s American to trick or entice someone to get involved.

But other dictionaries say the opposite, that to persuade despite reluctance is British and just persuade somebody to do something is American.

But it sounds like in both Englishes, it really is context dependent whether or not there’s a negative value attached to being roped in, whether it’s kind of against your will or against your better judgment or something that you’re only doing just to make somebody else happy, not because you really want to.

So there isn’t any further, even from the British angle, I would think those, certainly those roots are older than the American.

Oh, certainly, yeah. Actually, interestingly, the figurative use of rope-in to refer to persuade a human to do something is the 1840s and is American and actually just made the trip back across the pond to the British.

So it’s actually not that old in terms of language, in terms of the history of the phrase.

Okay.

It goes back to when this country was far more about farmers and the idea of a farm and animals and horses and oxen was utterly ordinary.

In the 1840s, anyone alive thought of animals every day.

Which would also imply a lot more reluctance on the part of the animal.

It sort of reminds me of that word voluntold. Have you heard that one, Kathleen?

No, but it brings to mind volunteered.

Right.

Right. It’s a valuntold is where somebody volunteers you for something, whether or not you like it.

Oh, okay.

Okay. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Take care.

Enjoy.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Continuing on our tear about novel types of exercise, we talked about plogging, which is picking up trash while you’re jogging.

And we talked about the bean diet, which is you throw a bunch of beans up in the air and then pick them up off the ground.

You bend over to pick them up.

Or you do squats.

But I found another great exercise.

Begin by standing on a comfortable surface where you have plenty of room at each side.

With a five-pound potato bag in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can.

Try to reach a full minute and then relax.

Every day you’ll find that you can hold that position just a bit longer.

After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-pound potato bags.

Then try 50-pound potato bags.

And eventually you get to the point where you can lift a 100-pound potato bag in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a minute.

I’m at this level.

And then after you feel confident at that level, put a potato into each bag.

And my linguistic excuse for talking about that is that it’s sort of like a paraprosdokian, which we’ve talked about before.

An unexpected turn to something that someone is saying.

So I guess that’s the potato bag exercise.

All right. Send your goofball stuff to us at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Christina, and I’m calling from Reno, Nevada.

How’s it going, Christina?

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

Excellent. Thank you so much.

So I’ll just give you a little tiny back story.

I have a 10-year-old, and I’m trying to teach her methods in the kitchen.

And it’s like pulling teeth to get her to come and help me.

So one day I asked her if she wanted to help me make tortillas.

And she said yes, surprisingly.

So I got everything ready.

And my husband walks by and is like, hey, the Xbox is free.

So she goes, oh, never mind.

Not helping you, Mom.

So I was like, what? Excuse me?

And then I said, what am I, chopped liver?

And she kind of makes a face and is looking at me funny,

And she doesn’t know how to answer it.

She’s like, yeah, no, I don’t know.

What is that?

So I said, well, if I thought about it, I really do.

I like chopped liver, so I guess it’s not a bad thing.

But apparently the way that I use it, it is a bad thing.

So I was just curious as to where that came from.

I know that it’s usually like chopped liver and onions is a side dish,

And it’s not, it’s an afterthought.

And that’s kind of how I felt at that moment.

I love it.

So for you, if you said, what am I chopped liver?

It meant, am I worthless to you?

Why do I, why am I second best or am I low rated?

Correct.

Yeah.

Yes, correct.

And the origin of that, it’s interesting.

So the chopped liver in question is probably the traditional Jewish dish, at least in the United States.

And it’s not necessarily liver with onions.

It’s more likely to have chicken fat or goose fat in it and eggs and spices and a few other things.

It’s just like it’s on the table.

It’s utterly unimportant.

It’s like outnumbered by the bigger, better dishes.

It’s almost a condiment.

It’s not even as important as the cranberry sauce if you have it.

You know what I’m saying?

It’s just like there on the table.

You take a scoop of it.

It goes with the rest of your food.

But it’s not like that.

Everyone’s not like, oh, when is the chopped liver coming out of the kitchen?

It’s just there.

Well, I am, but…

Yeah, so sometime in the 1930s or so,

Chopped liver started to be used in this way as the least significant thing.

And not necessarily completely negative.

Like, it’s got some importance,

But it’s not as important as the other things going on around it.

And then by the late 60s, early 1970s,

We start to see this particular construction of,

What am I, chopped liver?

And you feel yourself falling into like a Jewish New Yorker kind of cadence

When you say, I feel like Mel Brooks when I say it.

I was going to say a Borscht Belt comedian.

Yeah, a Borscht Belt comedian, definitely.

But it’s probably from the Jewish tradition, not necessarily in New York, but possibly from New York.

Okay, very cool.

I have some info for her now.

Thank you guys so much.

So, Christina, you did lose out to the Xbox, it sounds like.

That’s a hard one, tortillas versus Xbox.

Yeah, you know, I can’t compete.

I want her to be a culinarian like me, and she wants to play video games like her stepdad.

So I’ve got to find a happy balance somewhere.

The trick is to not let her have any of the homemade tortillas when you’re done.

That’s right.

Yeah, there you go.

I’ll just be withholding.

And then next time, if she wants them, she’ll have to help.

Yeah, have some chopped liver.

Christina, thank you so much.

Really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you.

Thank you.

You’re very welcome.

I’ll listen to you next time.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You know, there’s a side note that I want to make here.

And I mentioned that chopped liver, you know, the recipe that I described sometimes has chicken or goose fat in it.

Do you know what the Yiddish word for that is?

Schmaltz.

Schmaltz.

That’s right.

That’s where we get the word schmaltz, meaning kind of cheesy or melodramatic entertainment.

It refers back to the Yiddish word for goose fat or chicken fat.

Schmaltz.

Schmaltz.

877-929-9673.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Here’s another example of the variations and elaborations that people can do with the names of their pets.

Riki wrote that her pet Lucy became Lucita, Lucita Amaria, Cita, Rus, Rusomatic, and Queen of the Universe.

You know, I noticed this trend that a lot of the pets eventually get called something royal or regal.

Yeah, somebody posted a photo of a cat with a tiara, actually.

Cats in particular, because they’re aloof to us most of the time.

Right.

They’re royalty.

They just need to be served.

Right.

And what do your animals call you?

They used to call us the food ladies.

The food ladies.

Yeah.

I think my cats are like pretty much the same thing that dogs do.

What doing?

We’re go.

That’s it.

That’s all they ever say.

877-929-9673.

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This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine,

Director and editor Tim Felten,

Director Colin Tedeschi,

And production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski

And that master of keeping it real,

Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

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

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego,

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.