Cootie Shot (episode #1510)

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 have a set of terms here from around the country for a particular thing, and I would love it if you try to guess what it is.

Okay.

Okay. Belly tickler. Dipsy doodle. Johnny come lately. Duck and dip. How do you do? Tickle bump.

Yes, ma’am.

Cahot.

Cahot?

Or cahoo.

How do you spell that?

Either way.

C-A-H-O-T.

Oh, that one’s ringing at some bells.

Is it?

I don’t know.

I want to say that it’s horsetail weeds or Queen Anne’s Lace or something like that.

Right?

That’s the tickle part.

I love your brain.

You’re walking through it.

But that’s not right.

No, but it’s interesting that you got a jolt from the word cahot, which is French for jolt.

Oh.

Or cahole.

Oh, wait, is this all electric shock?

No, this is, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, this is an abrupt dip or bump in a road or path, either naturally occurring, especially in ice or snow, or deliberately made, especially to divert runoff, or more recently, to slow automobile traffic.

Oh, okay.

Would you call them bump ticklers, something like that?

What were they?

Belly ticklers.

Belly ticklers.

But the names that I like for it are Dipsy Doodle, because if you’re going over a bump, and Yes Ma’am, because you nod your head as if you’re saying, Yes Ma’am.

That little minor act of whiplash as you bounce in the hole.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah, or you can call it a Thank You Ma’am.

Right.

That one I’ve heard, actually.

Why did I not connect that?

Because I left it out.

Okay, gotcha.

But sometimes they’re called a Kiss Me Quick, because you’re riding in the wagon with your sweetie in the olden days.

It kind of bumps the two of you together in a real nice way.

Right, right.

It creates a little opportunity.

And it’s also sometimes called, particularly in southwestern Pennsylvania, it’s called a Yankee bump.

Why is that?

I don’t know the reason for Yankee bump, but people talk about piling snow and packing it down on a route where you sled so that you get that kind of airborne thing.

Oh, nice.

That was the holy grail as a kid in wintertime, to catch air when you were sledding.

Yeah, to catch air.

Yeah, but all those terms for a bump in the road.

Dipsy doodle.

That’s nice.

877-929-9673 or send your dipsy doodles to words@waywordradio.org or chat us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marissa McGrath calling from Bellingham, Washington.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

I was listening to your podcast the other day when I was on a road trip on the Olympic Peninsula. And I saw a sign that said, congested area, and which was obviously meant to let us know that even though it looked quite wooded and beautiful, that there were a lot of people living nearby.

And it reminded me of a vacation that I took to Falmouth, Massachusetts in 2010 with a bunch of friends where we saw a sign that we thought was hilarious that said, thickly settled, which took us a while to figure out meant the exact same thing.

So my boyfriend, Victor, and I that were on the road trip, he said, oh, you should call them. And kind of on a dare, I called you to ask about this, about these signs and how they get worded and how they’re sort of affected by local vernacular. I mean, thickly settled, it sounds so much like a Massachusetts. You can almost hear a Boston accent right there.

Yeah, I’m picturing pilgrims or something.

This area was thickly settled.

Yeah, it almost felt like, yeah, something that a person from old England rather than New England would write.

-huh, -huh.

That’s a really interesting observation.

Yeah, thickly settled was a term in Massachusetts law as far back as the 1830s, meaning someplace that has a lot of structures, either a business district or houses that were within 200 feet of each other, extending for a quarter of a mile.

It was a legal term.

So the signs on both of these cases are about warning you that you need to slow down because you’re coming across businesses and homes and cars and people?

Right. And we sort of thought it was in both instances in the car with my friends and my boyfriend. We were like, why don’t they just say slow? I mean, there’s so many different ways to do this, you know? You can change what the speed limit is. It just felt like a quaint quirk of this community.

But you’re saying that these kinds of signs would maybe be found all over Massachusetts?

Yeah, I think so.

Am I right?

They seem to be exclusive to Massachusetts?

I think so.

I mean, it seems like a road sign that Emily Dickinson would have written.

The thickly settled ones.

I know.

Yeah, and I thought about you guys in particular because that word thick, you know, it just, it’s not how, like congested is how we on the West Coast would talk about, you know, a lot of something that, you know, but thick, it seems like a very old fashioned way of expressing, you know, a large population or as you’re saying, like a lot of buildings in one place.

Yes, indeed. And the word thickly has dropped, I think, in terms of its usage. Just in general, we don’t say thickly so much. And thickly settled is pretty specific to Massachusetts, as far as I know.

I was just up in Oregon myself, and I remember seeing a rose sign that either said, I think it just said congested, which, you know, I just wanted to take a picture of myself in front of it because I was a little congested at the time.

Yeah, it’s a congested area. Here’s my face right now.

Because if you were there during the fires, the forest fires, you would absolutely have been congested probably at that time.

I want to go back to something that you hinted at there.

I don’t think that there’s a regional difference except that the regional laws are different. That is to say, it’s not that the people are saying congested more in the Northwest than they are in Massachusetts.

But one of the things that I think you’re hearing that we haven’t really zeroed in on is that congested is a Latin word. And thickly are old English words. And I think you’re hearing this kind of this, we can kind of unconsciously classify these words by their origins in our minds.

The Latin romance words tend to feel a little more highfalutin. They tend to feel a little more learned, a little more educated. And the Anglo-Saxon slash dramatic slash old Norse, old English words, so forth, they tend to feel a little closer to the earth, a little more historic.

A little more essential to the language.

They feel like the parts of the language that you build the rest of the language upon.

So it really reflects the culture of both places.

It’s funny because in the Seattle area, we’re often sort of called elitist or snobby or learned or book-loving.

I have to tell you, our fans in Massachusetts are some of the most… There are so many universities and small colleges up there. They are readers.

They are, I tell you what, I would love to see the reading battle between Washington State and Massachusetts because that would be something to behold.

I’m not trying to start beef.

No, no, no, that’s not what I mean.

But yeah, but in Falmouth in particular, on Cape Cod, and Cape Cod in general, has such a, exactly what you’re saying, like an earthy, down-home, like old-fashioned sort of feel.

And I love that as a visitor, as a regular visitor to Massachusetts. I love that about going there.

I think it’s really great.

And in fact, when we were there, my friends and I, we found Moxie. I don’t know if you’ve heard of this. It’s the sarsaparilla that is really common out there that my grandfather used to love.

And we actually invented, we were like, we have to come up with some Moxie, some cocktails made out of Moxie. And we invented one called Sickly Settled, which was a combination of Moxie and bourbon.

So there’s also a cocktail recipe for your listeners today.

I think you need one cranberry in there.

I bet you would be thickly settled after that.

I like the idea of a little mini cranberry bog.

Yeah, with the little rake.

Oh, my gosh.

Somebody who’s listening, please make this and take a picture of it.

I’ve got to tell you, I didn’t know when you started your question what we were going to break open.

Yeah, yeah. You’re welcome.

Yeah, that was a thank you.

And thank you very much for your call. Call us again sometime, all right?

Okay, thanks so much.

Take care, bye-bye.

All right, cheers.

What have you seen? You’ve been out there on the road. Something caught your eye.

You wrote it down, you took a picture, and now it’s time to share it with us.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

This is Pam, service in Eureka, California.

Hi, Pam. Welcome to the show.

My mother and grandmother, when they would go into a dark room or it was really dark at night, they would say it was as dark as the inside of a goat.

And that struck me as rather odd, because presumably neither lady had ever been inside a goat.

But I just considered, well, maybe it was just some little family weirdity.

But then I read an historic novel set in New Orleans in the early 19th century.

And there was a character in the story that said something was as dark as the inside of a cow.

And I thought, well, this is really weird.

Where are these people coming with this idea of inside of large ruminants they should be in darkness?

I wondered about it for years and finally decided, well, you’re the guys that would know, so I’d just give you a call and see what you say.

You know what, Pam? Neither of us has been inside of a ruminant.

No!

You thought we would know.

Although it reminds me of the Groucho Marx quote.

Do you know that one?

No, which one?

Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend. Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.

Oh, right.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Inside a goat, too, right.

So you were saying that you read the dark is the inside of a cow phrase in a book from the early 19th century?

Well, no, it was a historic novel set in the early 19th century in New Orleans.

And some character says this about the inside of a cow.

That’s really very like what mom and grandma used to say.

Yeah, well, it goes back even farther than that.

Dark as the inside of a cow has been around since at least Mark Twain.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he used that phrase in Roughing It in 1871.

And in Innocence Abroad.

-huh.

Yeah.

And you can sort of infer what the idea is.

I mean, if you’re in there with no light bulbs, it’s going to be dark, right?

And there are lots of different variations of it.

I haven’t heard the inside of a goat one before.

Have you, Grant?

No, but I’ve heard whale.

But there are lots of other ones, like inside of a whale, inside of a cat, inside of a black cat, inside of a sack, inside of a needle.

Joyce Carey wrote about something as dark as the inside of a cabinet minister, which I really like.

I don’t want to be in there either.

I’ve seen a few magician’s hat, coal scuttle, the devil’s waistcoat pocket.

Wow.

A little dark.

But goat? You haven’t heard goat?

Goat, I don’t know that one, no.

So that may be a family weirdity. I like that word, weirdity.

Weirdity may be a family weirdity as well. I’m not sure.

Well, is there any kind of regional thing about it?

I know that my mother’s family, some of it came from the South.

I don’t know my genealogy very well.

Yeah, I’m not aware of it being regional.

It’s not regional. It’s across all of the English-speaking world.

You’ll find it popping up anywhere English has spoken over the last 200-plus years.

Varieties of dark as the inside of an X.

Well, maybe my relatives couldn’t afford cows, so they just had goats.

Goats are great.

I like goats.

Pam, thank you for sharing this family phrase.

I’ll keep my eyes open and see if what other animals have had their interiors invaded by this phrase.

Yeah, let us know if you hear of any more, okay?

Okay. Bye.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by John Janeski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

You know, guys, when I do pub trivia, every once in a while we have to do a sports question, and most people complain, but some people like sports questions, so every once in a while you’ve got to do them.

Now, as far as sports and words go, I’m a fan of a particularly well-chosen team name.

Now, to my mind, the name has to fill several needs.

It has to inspire or intimidate or should denote strength or power, like the St. Louis Rams or the Colorado Rockies.

It could speak to local pride, like the New York Knickerbockers or the Houston Texans.

It could also have a clever connection to the city or the state, like the Minnesota Twins or the New England Revolution, right?

So, I’ll describe the providence of an actual sports team name that I find interesting or unusual.

Now, see if you can figure out the name of the team.

For example, the only team whose games I regularly attend may seem to be named for a large-scale weather event, but in actuality, this minor league baseball team is located near a legendary roller coaster, and that’s where they got their name.

Do you happen to know which one it is?

Is it the Heat?

Miami Heat?

No.

Is it the Thunder?

There’s a Thunder somewhere.

No.

This is actually a team I regularly attend.

Yes, the Brooklyn Cyclones.

Yeah, named after the Cyclone roller coaster.

That’s right.

Now, it sounds great.

It’s perfect.

You know, the Cyclone is very impressive, and it’s connected to the Coney Islands.

It’s great.

They are the minor league affiliate of the New York Metropolitans.

Let’s test your sports knowledge when it comes to nomenclature.

This NFL team may sound like they’re named for a dark avian associated with Halloween, but more specifically, or rather more literally, their name references a famous poem written by a famous resident of their city.

It’s the Baltimore Ravens.

Baltimore Ravens, right.

This NBA franchise, founded in 1985, alludes to the most popular tourist attraction in its state and the kingdom that resides within it.

The most popular tourist attraction in this state and the kingdom that resides within it.

Is it California?

No.

Is it Florida?

It is in Florida, yes, but it’s not a Florida.

It has a city name.

Yeah, I’m going to say the Orlando Tinkerbells.

Orlando Magic.

So close.

Oh, okay.

Orlando Magic, yes.

Since 1970, this Major League Baseball team has been named in honor of its city’s iconic industry.

It may sound like they make coffee, but it’s another very popular drink.

The Brewers, Milwaukee Brewers.

That’s right.

Beer.

Grinders?

What?

This Major League Baseball team had seven players get married in its first year, so they were nicknamed the Bridegrooms.

Intimidating, I know.

They were later given a name that referenced local mass transit.

They then moved to a city that doesn’t have trolleys, but they kept the last half of that name, what are they?

The Brooklyn Dodgers.

Right.

Well, they were the Brooklyn Dodgers, and now they are the L.A. Dodgers.

Formerly the Brooklyn Bridegrooms.

Right.

They still had the tail end of the trolley car system when the Dodgers showed up, but it was disappearing quickly.

They did.

They did not dodge marriage.

Finally, this major league soccer club’s name pays tribute to the man their city is named for and all the men who worked for him, specifically on a series of voyages about 500 years ago.

500 years ago.

So Columbus.

Yes.

Major League Soccer Club is the Columbus.

Of course, it’s always important that your team name is alliterative.

Columbus was in charge of spending the Queen’s money well.

Columbus and his men.

Columbus and his sailors.

Conquest.

Who mans a ship?

What’s that?

Who mans a ship?

What group of people?

Crew.

Yes, the Columbus crew.

That’s their soccer club name.

That’s a new one for me.

Yeah, very good.

Anyway, you guys did fantastic.

Very good on sports.

John, you did superbly.

It was perfecto.

I was superb.

Thank you.

I was perfecto.

John, thanks so much.

Thank you.

Talk to you next time.

And if you’d like to talk with us, call us 877-929-9673 or send your emails to words at.

Waywordradio.org or you can find us on Twitter at Wayword.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Karen Gallivan from Santa Barbara.

Well, hello, Karen. Welcome.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

One day, my husband and I were driving along, and of course, it got me thinking about different words.

And I love how you guys dig through everything.

And there was a word I’ve always been curious about.

The word I wanted to know about is it’s retire and retirement, because I think of people retiring after 30 years.

They’ve been in that dedicated, hardworking, five-day-a-week job.

And I think they’re going to have time to relax and go on indulging hobbies and travel and just slow down a little bit.

But the word retire to me sort of says to tire all over again when I think they should be relaxing.

So I’m curious about that.

Yeah, you know, when my dad retired, he said, I’m not retiring, I’m retreading for the journey ahead, which I really like.

There you go.

I like that.

Another 100,000 miles.

Yeah, exactly.

I was talking to my husband, and we had another thought this morning.

You know, usually at retirement age, you’ve raised your children, but grandchildren come along, and they retire you over again.

Oh, that’s good.

Yeah.

And then you send them home, right?

That’s the good part.

Yeah, well, I don’t have any yet, but when the day comes.

Fingers crossed.

Yeah.

All right.

So here’s the thing.

English is a tricky lady.

She’s got aces up her sleeves, and English is weird.

And one of the things that she does is she likes to throw words at us that look exactly alike, but they’re etymologically completely unrelated.

And so the T-I-R-E in retire has nothing whatsoever etymologically to do with the tire as in to be tired or to need to sleep.

And also etymologically has nothing to do with the tire as in the tire on the car.

So it’s three identical looking parts of words that are unrelated.

So that explains a lot of it right there, right?

So when you talk about retiring, we got it from French, ultimately from Latin.

And it basically means to take back or to withdraw.

And if you think, for example, about old-fashioned meal experiences, maybe you saw Downton Abbey.

And what happens after the meal?

They withdraw to another room.

They retire to that room, right?

Or maybe at the end of the night they retire to their bedroom.

So they are withdrawing from company and removing themselves from the regular situation to do something else.

And so when you are retiring from a career or an industry or a job, you are withdrawing yourself from that environment.

Makes sense that way.

There’s a lot of other languages used a form in that word, too.

In Spanish and Portuguese, the word for, I believe the word for withdraw or withdrawal is retiro, something like R-E-T-I-R-O.

Oh, yeah.

My husband, he’s fairly fluent in Spanish, and he said there’s the word tirar, to throw.

And he thought the same thing.

You’re going to, like, throw a new spin on life and, like, do it over again, kind of.

Yeah, throw or draw.

We’ve dissected it as well.

And did he talk about the Spanish word jubilacion?

No, but I think you would feel that with retirement.

Right.

Jubilation.

Jubilation.

Jubilation.

Yeah, that’s the word for retirement.

Yes, that’s wonderful.

Well, I appreciate it.

That’s great, you guys.

I appreciate the breakdown.

Well, we appreciate your calling.

Karen, thank you so much.

Enjoy.

Take care.

Thanks, Karen.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a different word for what it means to leave the working world

And go to the volunteer world

Or the charity world

Or the grandkid world,

Let us know, 877-929-9673

Or email words at wewordradio.org.

I learned a term the other day,

Step and repeat.

Do you know what this is,

A step and repeat?

I bet you do.

We learned it at the same place.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it’s the visual thing behind people who take photographs at like galas and special events that has all the logos that are repeated.

Yes.

Yeah.

So the long sheet of paper or foam core or board or whatever behind them, the curtain.

Yeah, it’s called a step and repeat or a step and repeat wall or a press wall.

And it’s one of those publicity backdrops that has all those logos behind the celebrities or whomever is getting photographed.

What’s really interesting to me is that step and repeat is an older term that has to do with photographic printing involving or pertaining to a procedure where you do something, where it’s a mechanism where you do one step and then another step, and then you do the same first step again.

Like when you’re printing stamps or printing backgrounds for checks.

So I thought that was really fascinating when I learned that it was transferred to this backdrop.

Oh, interesting.

But it’s still a printing, a kind of printing.

It’s a kind of printing, but there’s also the idea there of you have the celebrity standing there,

And you bring one person up to have a photograph with them, and then the other person up.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, so it’s kind of a combination of this.

But that’s not where the name comes.

It comes from the printing.

No, but I think it’s reinforced by that idea, a step and repeat.

Very good.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Ron from northeastern Wisconsin.

Hi, Ron.

Welcome to the show, Ron.

Well, I am curious about the use of alternate words maybe and perhaps.

I grew up with maybe.

I still use maybe.

People that I talk to also do.

But I’ve noticed for quite a while now that if I read the word, it tends to be perhaps.

And certainly if I see it on TV, whether news or a television show, it’s perhaps.

So, am I behind the times, or is this a regional thing, or is perhaps indeed a better word, maybe more elite?

I am not sure.

Let me give you another option for that, Ron, is that they’re both correct for the occasions in which they’re being used.

So, it sounds like you’re using maybe an everyday conversation, which is basically informal, right?

Yes, yes.

And you’re seeing perhaps in print, which is slightly more formal than spoken language,

And you’re seeing on television, which is definitely more formal than just everyday conversation.

And that actually is the distinction between the two.

There’s almost no semantic difference.

It really depends on the company that those two words keep, what other words appear near them,

What the sentences and paragraphs look like.

But they are generally synonyms.

The only difference is the register of the language perhaps tends to appear in slightly more elevated language

And maybe tends to appear in basically everyday language.

I wouldn’t even say informal language,

Just like the run-of-the-mill language that we speak with our friends and our family.

Sure.

Okay.

Throughout, it’s not a regional issue.

No, not at all.

The informality or the formality of the discussion lends it to perhaps or maybe.

Yeah, and perhaps isn’t.

It’s not like it’s this rarefied legal term or anything like that.

It’s just like a little bit up, you know?

It’s kind of like the assistant manager, whereas maybe is just the regular employee, you know what I’m saying?

Just a little bit up the chain.

Yeah, okay.

Okay, that makes sense.

I’ll probably continue to use maybe, but to understand the differences, it’s good for me to know that.

Well, Ron, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

Bye.

You know, I’m reminded of that old Taster’s Choice commercial.

Do you remember that?

The one with only the hands and the clever voices?

Well, it’s like a man and a woman in the doorway.

Oh, okay.

And at the end of one of them, one of them says,

Look, I’m in the middle of something right now, but perhaps.

And the woman says, perhaps.

In just a really, really sexy way.

I mean, if they had ended that with maybe, it wouldn’t have been the same thing.

Perhaps.

Well, what works about that, and I bet they discussed this for ages

At that ad agency that wrote that copy.

What works is that discrepancy between the register of the language

And the utter intimacy of the moment.

And you’ll find a lot of humor, particularly among the better writers,

Falls into that category, this real discrepancy of register and occasion.

And for some reason that tickles our fancy almost every time.

Yeah, yeah.

If you haven’t seen that commercial, you need to look it up on the Internet.

877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elizabeth Hopkins calling in from Suffolk, Virginia.

Well, hello, Elizabeth. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Thanks for having me.

Sure. What can we do for you?

I just became familiar with your program a few weeks ago.

I was happening to listening to it while I was in the car and remembered a situation that I was in when I was a kid of where I had moved from Hawaii to Indiana.

And a child’s rhyme had one word variant in Hawaii to Indiana.

And I pretty much not only made a fool of myself, but I was already an outsider moving from a very diverse culture to not so diverse culture.

And this one word variant, it was shocking.

And as a 10-year-old, it was pretty much expelled me from the in crowd.

Yeah, I got over it quickly, but it was awkward at the moment.

So the saying, I believe in most of the continental United States, is circle, circle, dot, dot, now I have my cootie shot, or you have your cootie shot.

So someone who would be, ooh, would all of a sudden be accepted because you gave them the inoculation, which is just circling and tapping the palm, the back of the hand.

Well, children’s rhyme.

Well, in Hawaii, it was circle, circle, dot, dot.

Now you have your uku shot, which means little bugs.

Uhu, like U-H-U?

I don’t know how it was spelled.

I was, you know, nine or ten years old, but I remember my mom explaining the word to me when I first learned it.

She goes, it means little, like ukulele.

It means little guitar.

So she said it was a derivative from that.

Okay, interesting.

I love this.

Okay, so you’re on the playground and you circle somebody and you touch your finger to their wrist?

The back of their hand.

So you draw two circles on the back of their hand and then you tap it twice.

Circle, circle, dot, dot.

And what’s really funny, I’m in a business networking and I had a coffee with somebody after I heard your program.

And I brought this up and he moved from Hawaii here to Virginia.

And he finished the children’s rhyme with me with a Uku shot.

And we’re both, you know, I was 35 years ago when I did this.

We’re both fast-fast.

And, yeah, and he was familiar.

So I was like, okay, I’m not remembering this wrong.

It’s not made up in my mind.

This really did happen.

Oh, that must have felt good.

Yeah, yeah, confirmation.

Exactly, 35 years later, right?

-huh.

Oh, and we can pile on more confirmation, at least for the larger notion of cootie shots.

The Hawaiian variant, by the way, is one that I haven’t heard before, and I’m delighted to get it.

Because a lot of folklore work has been done on the idea of cooties and things like cooties around the world.

Because this whole game where somebody catches a thing on the playground and has to be inoculated,

You can find it in the last 70 years in Italy, Germany, UK, Australia, and a whole bunch of other places.

And it has a bunch of different names.

The opies, this husband and wife folklore team, they found 26 different diseases that children could catch from each other on the playgrounds of the United Kingdom.

Diseases, quote unquote.

Like the lurgy.

Right.

So are you saying uku or uhu?

Uku.

Uku.

Okay.

Interesting.

Right.

Yeah, ukulele does come from Hawaiian words that mean jumping flea or jumping louse because of the way your fingers move on a ukulele when you’re playing really quickly.

Yes, I remember that now.

Yes.

Yeah, your Uku shot.

It must have been Yuku or Yuku.

Yuku shot.

Okay.

I love that.

I like that better than cooties, actually.

Yuku.

So did you adopt cooties?

Yes, I adopted the cootie shot instead, yes, very quickly.

And, you know, everything was fine.

But I just remember later on I became a teacher and I just remember, like you said, language is so powerful and how it includes you or excludes you.

And that was a circumstance that excluded me at one moment.

Well, this has been wonderful.

You’ve shared so much of your history and your story, and we really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for having me on the air.

I will hopefully think of some more transitions with moves.

All right, take care now.

Thanks, guys.

Bye-bye.

All right, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Came across a bit of railroad slang, bake a cake.

Do you know what it means to bake a cake?

Turn on all your lights? I don’t know. What?

It means to build up steam in a locomotive.

Okay, you’re stoking the fire.

Yeah, you’re stoking the fire.

In fact, another term from railroad slang for fireman is a bakehead.

A bakehead? All right.

877-929-9673.

The End

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.

If you care about writing well, and of course you do because you’re listening to our show,

I want you to hide yourself to the nearest bookstore or library and pick up a copy of a new book by Joe Moran.

It’s called First You Write a Sentence, The Elements of Reading, Writing, and Life.

And Joe Moran is a professor of English and cultural history at Liverpool John Moores University in England.

And the reason that I’m so excited about getting this book, which I don’t have yet, but I know I’m going to love it,

Is that I read an essay that he wrote in The Guardian.

It may be adapted from the book, I’m not sure, but just a taste of this prose made me want to get this book immediately.

He’s talking in the essay about how to write the perfect sentence.

And it’s really pretty close to a perfect essay. Let me just share a little bit of it.

He says, a good sentence imposes a logic on the world’s weirdness. It gets its power from the tension between the ease of its phrasing and the shock of its thought slid cleanly into the mind.

A sentence, as it proceeds, is a pairing away of options. Each added word, because of the English language’s dependence on word order reduces the writer’s alternatives and narrows the reader’s expectations.

But even up to the last word, the writer has choices and can throw in a curveball.

A sentence can begin in one place and end in another galaxy without breaking a single syntactic rule.

The poet Wayne Kestenbaum calls it organizing lava, this pleasure to be got from pushing a sentence in the wrong direction without altering its sweet grammatical composure.

Oh, I love it.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

Sweet grammatical composure.

Isn’t that great?

That book, again, is First You Write a Sentence, The Elements of Reading, Writing, and Life by Joe Moran.

If you’ve got a book you’d like to share with us, something you think we should all read, let us know, 877-929-9673.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Taryn. I use they, them pronouns and I’m calling from Washington, D.C.

Hi, Taryn.

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

So I have one of those classic, I didn’t realize I was saying this weirdly until I moved into another place questions.

I am originally from a small town in southeastern Massachusetts.

And I moved down to D.C. recently where we have all the, you know,

Smithsonian’s and all of that.

And all of my friends have been giving me a really hard time about the way that I say the word museum.

So I’m wondering if you guys have a rebuttal for me of some variety on maybe why I might say museum the way that I say museum.

And how do they want you to say it?

They want me to say museum with really enunciating that E-U-M.

I definitely remember being a kid and not understanding how to spell the word museum and getting stuck on that all the time because in my head it sounds like Z-A-M, but that’s not how it’s quote-unquote supposed to be pronounced.

So for you, the second syllable rhymes with game?

It’s more like Shazam, maybe.

Oh, so it’s more like gam or ham or pizam.

Okay.

Okay, because what I’m hearing here is what I’m hearing is like a long A vowel.

It sounds more like game to me, the vowel in game to me.

But if you are doing, if you are trying to do the Pam, lamb, cram vowel, then you would be in line with the way a fair number of people in the Northeast do say that word.

Now, it’s not that common, but I have seen enough anecdotal evidence of people in New York, Connecticut, New England, even as far south as Pennsylvania, reporting that they say it is two syllables, not three.

They don’t say museum, but they say museum and like that.

So to my ear, that’s a little different than what you’re saying.

But I think that there’s room to suggest that because your vowels, even though your vowel is a little different, it’s still part and parcel of that same two-syllable pronunciation of the word.

Yeah, I definitely agree that it sounds like it should be two syllables to me.

So my rebuttal would be is that you aren’t alone in pronouncing the word differently than most people pronounce it.

It doesn’t necessarily make you wrong, but it does make you different.

And so that’s your task.

Your task, Taryn, is how long can you stand up under the pressure of living in a big museum town like D.C. and constantly find yourself having this battle?

I think I can hold my own.

Okay.

All right.

Bring down the New England vibe.

Yep.

Okay.

Do you have a sense of whether there might be other words that have that, like, S-E-U-M that could be pronounced as just one syllable with a XAM?

There aren’t many anglicized or nativized words that end with S-E-U-M.

The only one I can think of is C-O-L-I-S-E-U-M.

How would you say that?

The Coliseum.

Coliseum.

All right.

So you would pronounce the N like most people say museum.

Okay, interesting.

You know, there’s another word I want to toss at you, which is ideolect.

Ideolect is the language that you yourself speak.

And each one of us, no matter who we are or how we grew up, or even if we were a twin or a triplet and grew up our whole lives with close contact, just a handful of people, we each speak just a little differently than anyone else in the world.

And it sounds like you have company.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it sounds like I might have some other people speaking that part of my language and maybe my own variations as well.

Yeah, your own linguistic tribe.

That’s awesome.

Well, Taryn, thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Take care. Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

Taryn’s experience with having a word that they say differently isn’t a rare one.

We know that you’ve had this too.

Call us and tell us about it.

We’ll explore it. We’ll figure it out together.

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

We got an email from Johanna Bogater, who lives in Mucening, Michigan.

And she was writing about a childhood confusion that she had.

She said that when she was growing up, one of her neighbors was named Eldon.

And one day she was playing nearby while her parents had a conversation with Eldon.

And at one point, Johanna piped up with a comment.

She writes, I addressed him as Eldon.

My dad quickly shushed me and said not to call him that.

From that point on, I thought the name Eldon was a dirty word.

I couldn’t understand why someone would name their child a naughty word.

It was much later that I realized that my dad shushed me because I should have called him Mr. Begley and not referred to him by his first name.

And I love that story because it reminds me of that kind of liminal period when you’re a kid and you’re learning words and learning language, but there are a few that are just out of reach.

They don’t quite come in the packaging that would tell you exactly when and where.

Yeah, and so all that time she thought Eldon was a dirty word.

Oh, you know why? He’s passed away now.

But I had an Uncle Bud whose real name was Eldon, and he did not like being called Eldon.

So that’s where I thought you were going with the story.

But he was a rascal and a character, a truck driver, and he would have loved that story you just told.

Well, thanks, Johanna.

We love getting your stories about language, so send them to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, hi, this is Rick Malone in San Antonio.

Hi, Rick. Welcome. What can we do for you?

I had a quandary with a friend who’s a musical person. She teaches piano. Her father was a jazz musician in the 40s and 50s. And somebody had told her that they were going to the beach and she should bring her axe.

And she said, are we chopping wood? And I thought, that’s really funny for her to say that with her father that was a jazz musician.

But I’ve called my horn when I played, that was my axe, and I started thinking, well, where did this term come from?

Well, now, Rick, what kind of instrument did your friend have?

Well, she plays piano. The people that told her that, they played various instruments, guitars and basses and stuff like that. I played the saxophone.

Okay. Gotcha. And you’re looking for a background on axe to refer to somebody’s musical instrument.

Yeah, to refer to a musical instrument.

All right.

And when I was growing up in the bands I played in, it didn’t matter what you played. Your horn was your axe.

Yeah, yeah.

That conforms to what I know as well.

So let me get this straight.

People were asking her to bring her piano to the beach?

Well, I think it was more a joke than anything.

Maybe she’d bring a keytar or something like that.

Yeah.

Well, it’s got a long history.

A lot of people listening are probably going to be surprised that an axe originally did mean a brass instrument and not a guitar.

Because these days, most, at least casual musicians, would probably think of a guitar first.

And the earliest that I’ve seen it is 1946 in Billboard magazine, but I would not be surprised if it’s older than that.

So, yeah, you can find people referring to trombones and saxophones.

Later, even by the 1960s and 70s, people start to refer to things like their typewriter as their axe.

Or even in the 80s, the 90s, people start referring to their computer.

It’s whatever you use primarily as your means of getting money, whatever your primary instrument is.

And so it doesn’t even have to look like an axe anymore.

Now, the origin story is really interesting.

As far as I understand it, the best theory out there is that it comes from this term.

Let me see if you know this one.

Woodshedding.

Do you know this term?

I had thought of that.

And do you know what it means?

Well, it’s intense practice.

By yourself usually, right?

Yes, by yourself.

Or not in public in any case.

Yeah, so woodshedding, because it refers to kind of going out to the woodshed to practice your instrument, dates to the 1920s.

And so it’s decades earlier than axe referring to the musical instrument.

So it is believed that there’s two things contributing here.

One, the idea is what would you take out to the woodshed?

Well, if you’re really chopping wood, you’d bring your axe.

But if you’re only out there to keep your squawking and your noise away from everyone else, you’re bringing your musical instrument.

But the second thing is a guitar and many other instruments have this long wooden handle that looks kind of like an axe handle, right?

Interesting.

I was familiar with the term woodshedding.

And then I thought about big band musician Woody Herman.

And one of his signature tunes was Woodchopper’s Ball.

Oh, is that right?

What year was that? Do you know?

Oh, I don’t know. It was mid to late 40s, sometime in the 40s.

Yeah.

Yeah, so I’ve heard chopping as well, and wood chopping to refer to really shredding on a guitar.

Is it used also for brass instruments?

Shredding, yes, I’m familiar with, particularly with modern rock guitarists.

Right.

But I’ve never heard it used with any other instruments, but I haven’t played in 30 or 40 years.

Oh, okay, it’s been a while.

Okay.

Well, Rick, I’ve got to tell you, this is a great question.

I was happy to come up with an answer for you.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate it.

This is a surprise of a lot of people, I think.

Yeah.

Call us again sometime, all right?

I will.

I will.

Take care now.

Have a good day.

Thanks, Rick.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

We know you’ve got hobbies or a weird profession or something you have to do in your spare time.

You don’t call a hobby, but it’s actually a hobby.

And it’s got words.

It’s got a lingo.

It’s got a glossary, a lexicon.

We want that.

877-929-9673.

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

We got an email from David Spencer in Portland, Oregon, who writes,

In Supergreen Sustainable Renewable Portland, I’ve been observing a new behavior that needs a name.

Many cafeterias and fast food establishments now request that you sort your refuse into one of several containers,

Including items destined for landfill, recycling, or composting.

Often there’s a chart or a diagram explaining which items go where.

There’s a characteristic pause and look of befuddlement as people hold their discards and try to figure out which bin to use.

That look of puzzlement needs a name.

I know that feeling.

When you’re sorting your own rubbish between two different kinds of recycling and the trash.

Yes, and do the bottles go here or does the paper go there or what?

I just had this very experience in Portland.

Anyway, David suggests that these individuals look discomposted.

Discomposted.

Discomposted, sort of like discombobulated, but combining compost with it.

Compost, yeah.

I like that. Discomposted.

I’ve been there myself. I know that feeling, particularly when you still have liquid left in something.

And like your paper cup, I could recycle it, but there’s no place for me to pour the liquid.

So do I just pour it on top of the trash and then recycle the cup? How does that work?

That’s a good question.

Like if you’re in the coffee shop and they don’t give you enough room for cream.

Oh, you have to pour some off the top, right? And there’s no basin to catch it. No tray.

Well, or there’s a garbage bag that somebody’s got to empty, and what if it gets poked, you know?

Right, and it reminds me of the way they would empty the trash cans in the subway of New York City

Where they just drag it down the platform, and you can see that smear for weeks.

Oh, God.

What are you thinking about in terms of language?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Ed Brumley, and I’m calling from Florence, South Carolina,

But I’m here on business, and I live in Lawrenceville, Illinois.

But I have a question concerning the word ish.

It’s a word that I heard often when I was stationed in Grand Forks, Air Force Base, North Dakota.

It was a word that kind of, what I understand, it was kind of gross or nasty.

I’d hear it even on the radio where they would say, today’s going to be an ishy day.

The first time I heard that, I thought, did he say ish?

But no, it’s ish, I-S-H.

And I know a lot of my friends from Minnesota, they had a way of speaking that, too.

And, you know, if it was something that they just didn’t like, they would say ish.

And is this a foreign word from another country?

Yeah.

You just incorporate it to the, it is.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

So you’ve nailed, like, whole big parts of the story of ish.

Okay.

It’s used mainly in North Dakota, Minnesota, Wisconsin, and a few other places.

And it comes from the Scandinavian heritage there, probably from the Swedish and Norwegian settlers.

And both of those languages, and possibly Danish as well, they have an interjection or an utterance that’s kind of ish,

That you use to kind of express disgust or horror or revulsion or just dissatisfaction.

And it was borrowed directly into English from those languages.

So that is a foreign word that’s commonly used in Scandinavia?

Well, yeah, exactly.

It’s commonly used in Sweden and in Norway.

And now it’s been anglicized.

It is fully an English word in that part of the United States now.

Yeah, definitely that part of it.

I travel around the country, and I don’t hear it anywhere else.

It’s just definitely North Dakota, Minnesota.

And they definitely have a different language.

Another common thing was y’all sure you bet.

Y’all sure you bet.

Yeah.

Yeah, Minnesota, Wisconsin.

And I’ve heard it described as, the word ish described as the sound you make when you step barefoot on a banana.

On a peeled banana.

It’s ish.

I mean, I can see why it has some staying power because it sort of sounds like a combination of squishy and icky.

Yeah.

But it has Scandinavian roots.

Some word historians have theorized that the ick in English is related back in the mists of time to this very word in these Scandinavian languages.

Well, fantastic.

Like I said, it’s amazing.

I’m 60 years old, and I’ve traveled all over the country, and I’ve never heard it anywhere else but there.

And like I said, for it to be commonly used even on the radio, I thought that was pretty amazing.

We’re one country, but boy, we speak a lot of different Englishes, don’t we?

Yeah, truly, truly.

Yeah, call us again sometime with another report from the road.

Very good.

Well, thank you so much.

Have a great time.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Twitter.

Our handle is WayWord.

Want more Way With Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org,

Or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open,

So leave us a message at 877-929-9673,

And we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org,

Or hit us up on Twitter @wayword,

And look for us on Facebook.

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.

Thank you.