Dessert Stomach (episode #1498)

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.

When young children are first beginning to use language to describe the world, they come up with some wonderful metaphors.

And we had an example of that on our Facebook group from Donna Apter, who lives in West Hartford, Connecticut.

She wrote, at around the age of three, my dad had traveled to the U.S. with his family on a long journey by sea from Europe during the large wave of immigration at the turn of the 20th century.

Having been born and raised on his father’s dairy farm in what was Austria-Hungary at the time, he had once shared with me how he had felt such wonder and amazement upon discovering at that tender age that in this new world there were cows in the middle of the ocean.

What? He’s been gone 25 years now, and it still warms my heart every time I think of this precious image of my father as a three-year-old, assuming that the recurrent sound of the ship’s foghorn had offered him the opportunity to hold on to a piece of his old world, cows mooing, as he transitioned to the whole new life that awaited him in America.

Oh, that’s adorable.

Isn’t that gorgeous? Cows on the ocean.

I was thinking, maybe sea cows. Maybe they were manatees.

But no.

I know. I was completely confused.

How adorable is that? But the power of metaphor, right? That kids see that sometimes escapes us.

Yeah, it’s true.

We’d love to hear the stories that you tell in your family about the things that somebody said that you still remember and you still all talk about.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Michael in San Diego, California.

Hi, Michael. Welcome to the show.

I’m calling about a game that I played as a child that made its way back into my life a few months ago while I was going for a walk with my three-year-old daughter.

Oh, cool.

So we were walking around the neighborhood, and we came across a small metal disc in the sidewalk.

And without even thinking about it, I pointed it out to her, and I poked her on the side, and I said, bozo button.

And it’s kind of slug bug-esque, where if you come across one of these little silver discs in the sidewalk, we would, well, when we were rowdier teenagers, it was a little more slug bug-like.

But, you know, with my daughter, we just kind of poked her, kind of tickled her on the side, yelled bozo button, and she just gave me this look like, what was that?

But as we continued our walk, we, you know, every 20 feet or so would come across a new one, and so it became a really fun game to play.

I’m fairly certain I learned it from my mom.

However, when I mentioned it to her, she said, oh, we called those monkey buttons.

And I don’t know where else I would have heard it.

I definitely remember playing it as a kid with our friends in the neighborhood.

And I thought for sure it had come from her.

But when she mentioned that she had a different name for it, I was, you know, a little thrown off.

And I was like, well, I’m not sure where I got bozo button from.

And so, yeah.

Huh. And so these are pieces of metal, round pieces of metal that are embedded in the sidewalk?

They are, yes. I posted a photo on the Facebook page and a few people mentioned that they are property markers.

Right. From surveys, right, where you measure the boundaries of a property.

Okay. So about what size are they?

A little, maybe the size of a nickel, smaller than a quarter.

Okay. Well, the only bozo button I know is the bozo button that was offered as a consolation prize on the old Bozo the Clown shows for children back in the 60s.

Oh, interesting.

And bozo button kind of became not just a consolation prize, but it’s the thing you get when you think you deserve an award, but nobody wants to give one.

All right. You’re like, I finished the dishes. They’re like, oh, here’s your bozo button. Thanks for that.

Like, you don’t really get a prize at all.

Right, and it’s a button that you wear that has a picture of Bozo the Clown on it.

And so it’s like not such a great prize.

Yeah, it’s the participation trophy of the year.

Okay.

But I don’t know the game either.

I grew up mostly in the country, and our boundaries were marked by, you know, kind of punched into the ground with wooden stakes.

The survey would come out once in a while when the property was being sold.

This may be the kind of thing that we have to crowdsource even further and see what other people.

Yeah, turn on the flashing lights.

Yeah, turn that on, Grant.

And let everyone know, if you know what Michael is talking about, did you play this game, bozo button or monkey button, when you saw the metal discs on the sidewalk?

Did you punch the person next to you after shouting out the word?

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

And we’ll get to the bottom of this.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for sharing. Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Have a great day.

All right. Bye-bye.

I came across a useful Japanese word, betsubara.

Literally, it means other stomach.

What’s that? Is that your dessert stomach?

Yes. Is that a thing? Dessert stomach?

Yes, absolutely.

Oh, I didn’t know there was a term.

Children in particular have a very pronounced dessert stomach.

When the regular food, they’re all full of it, the dessert stomach still has room for the brownies or the cake or the ice cream.

I did not know that was an English term.

But, yes, betsubara is the term that you use in Japanese when you happen to find a little more space.

A little more space for the special thing, right?

Right.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Jan, and I’m calling from Ketchikan, Alaska.

Ketchikan, Alaska. Welcome to the show, Jan.

Hi, Jan. How can we help?

I had a question about a word that I heard about 35 years ago when I worked in a hospital in down east Maine.

And mostly it was just older people that said it, but they used the word spleeny to describe someone with a low pain threshold, particularly around the hospital.

Somebody wouldn’t get out of bed after surgery, things like that.

They’d say, oh, he’s just being spleeny.

I didn’t know if you guys had any insight to that.

You know, the heart is for affection and you feel fear in the pit of your stomach if the spleen is the organ of cowardice or what that means.

Oh, interesting question.

Yeah.

Yeah, so you don’t hear it there in Alaska.

No, no.

It was just in Maine.

It was a Maine term.

Pretty much by the older people.

Spleeny? S-P-L-E-E-N-Y?

Spleeny? I have no idea how they spell it.

I never saw it written.

Yeah, so it’s that organ that’s a blood filter, basically.

And the term spleeny, meaning hypochondriacal or complaining or fussy or…

Malingering.

Malingering, squeamish, that kind of thing.

You do hear that particularly in the Northeast, particularly New England.

Or down east if you’re in Alaska.

Yeah, or down east Maine, yeah.

We think of spleen, I mean, there’s the expression to vent your spleen, which is to vent the bad temper, that kind of thing.

But yeah, that’s pretty localized to New England.

And a couple hundred years, right?

Yeah, yeah, it has a long history.

And it just has to do with the spleen, actually the organ, the spleen.

Yeah, interestingly enough, the word spleen comes from a similar sounding Greek word that in ancient Greek is sort of the equivalent of the heart.

You know, the metaphorical equivalent of the heart.

So if you’re well-spleened, then it means that you’re good-hearted or compassionate.

Well, that’s interesting.

I love that you hung on to it for 35 years.

35 years.

Okay, appreciate the information.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha, how are you?

This is Christopher DeMezo.

I’m calling from Rome, New York.

Well, welcome, Christopher.

What can we do for you?

So, given that I’m from Rome, New York, which is obviously named for Rome, Italy, we have a very large Italian-American population.

And so we have a few of these funny words that are not quite Italian, but they’re not quite American, and they’re somewhere in the middle.

And one of those words is mapine. It describes a dishcloth. And so everybody in Rome, you know, they have a mapine drawer. They have, you know, a pile of mapines stacked out on their counters. It’s always been an interesting and fascinating word for me, knowing that there’s no real Italian meaning to it or no real American meaning to it.

Mapine, can you spell that? We usually go with M-A-P-P-I-N-E. Okay, yeah, that sounds right. It turns out that the word mapina, M-A-P-P-I-N-A, means dish towel or dishcloth or cloth or rag in a couple of different dialects spoken in Italy.

Really? Yeah, and the Piedmont region and the Neapolitan region for sure, and possibly a couple of others. Oh, wow. Well, I guess that would certainly give some claim to the words in our little corner of Rome, New York.

Yeah, and there’s, of course, the plural pronunciation, but there’s also a thing that has happened to Italian words in the mouths of Italian-Americans where a lot of times that final syllable or that final vowel disappears through a process called lanition. So what might be mapina becomes mapin, because the A is just kind of not really fully said. And then it’s transmitted from generation to generation.

Then you do get weird spellings like M-O-P-E-E-N, which is one that I saw. Sure, yeah, we certainly have a way of taking the elegance out of our words and giving them a little bit of a New York spin, I think. It’s a continuation of the heritage, at least. You get lots of points for continuing some of those old words, right? Absolutely.

Yeah, there’s quite a few of these. Do you say caguts? Do you prefer to kind of summer squash? Yep, we say caguts for somebody that may be acting a little goofy. Oh, yeah. So it’s used for zucchini or summer squash, but it does have the other meaning as well.

But I want to go back to mapin for dish towel. That also has another meaning. It refers to somebody who is either filthy or disreputable or spineless. If you think like of the limpness or the filthiness of a dishcloth after it’s been used a while, that can also be figuratively applied to a person.

Wow, how about that? I love it. I love it all. It’s very good. Thank you for sharing this with us. And do call us again sometime if something else occurs to you, all right? Sure. Thanks for taking the time. Yeah, sure. Take care. Thanks. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Well, we love those linguistic heirlooms, and we’d love to talk with you about the ones handed down in your family. So give us a call, 877-929-9673. Send your stories and email to words@waywordradio.org and find us on Twitter at Wayword.

A couple of weeks ago we were talking about plogging, which is running along, jogging, and also picking up trash. And the idea of trasher-cise, which is when people get together and they exercise and pick up trash. And that reminded Jeanne Perry of Port Wing, Wisconsin, of something that her mother and her friends used to talk about, which was the bean diet, B-E-A-N. And she wondered what the bean diet was.

And apparently what you do is you get a bag of dried beans, toss them up in the air, and then bend over to pick them all up. Oh, you take them out of the bag and you scatter them to the far wind. So it’s 500 bean pickup. 500, exactly. It could take a while. Yeah, either bending at the waist or better yet, doing squats, right? Right. Well, weeding a garden serves the same purpose. Right. And then you get beans later. You get beans later.

877-929-9673. This show’s about language examined through family, history, and culture. Stick around. Thank you. 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 our quiz guy, John Chaneski. Hi, John. Hey, Grant. Hi, Martha. Hi, John.

Hey, guess what? You know what? Awards season is here. Or it’s just around the corner. Or we just passed it or whatever. I don’t know. People are always giving away awards. It’s always awards season. Right and left. It’s awards. I’m fascinated by the names people give awards. You know, there’s the Webby’s for excellence on the Internet. That’s named for the World Wide Web. The Grammys, of course, were named for the gramophone in music. The Emmys were actually named for the Image Orthicon Tube, which was once a key piece of TV technology. Originally, they were the Emmys, and they changed it to the Emmys.

Now, let’s give out a few awards of our own. Why not? Here we go. For example, if the nominees were Double Bubble, Juicy Fruit, Dentine, Orbit, and Trident, they would be up for what award? The gummies? The gummies, yes, the gummies. I was sure if it was more complicated than that, but okay. It’s pretty simple. The chewies.

Well, see, that’s the thing. Gummies themselves are not actually gum. They’re a different kind of chewable, but we’ve never let that stop us from a decent puzzle. That’s right. I’ll give you the nominees, and you tell me what award they’re up for. There might be a small clue in the intro now. For example, I’ll wager you can tell me this answer. War and Peace, Sense and Sensibility, To Kill a Mockingbird, A Tale of Two Cities, Infinite Jest are the nominees. For what award? The biggies, the longies, the saga-ies. The more simple than that. Tonies. Bookies? The bookies, right. Oh, the bookies. I’ll wager you can give me that answer. Very good.

Put on your sexiest lingerie and tell me. The nominees are Danson, Nugent, Koppel, Turner, and Kennedy. The Teddies. Teddies. Very nice. You’ll get a charge out of this one. The nominees are Ted Williams, Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, Ty Cobb, and Rod Carew. The baddies? Let’s stretch it out a little bit. The batteries? The batteries. I think that’s my longest one there, yeah. That’s good.

Okay, now, hop to it. Here we go. The nominees are ice cream, traffic, pine, nose, and retinal. Conies. The conies, yes. Whoa, good one, Grant. Hop to it is because a conie is a rabbit. Of course. Yeah. Now, with every precinct heard from, the nominees are Dracula, Fleet, Dooku, Chocula, and Von Zeppelin. The counties. The counties, yes. Oh, let me tell you, it’s a magical night. The nominees are Scarborough, Lilith, Vanity, Fantasia, and Renaissance. The fairies. The fairies, yes. Well, we’ve reached that age. The nominees are Knox, Benning, Wayne, Sumter, and Bragg. The 40s? The 40s, yes. What’s this all about, eh? Fuji, Shasta, Everest, Etna, and Pinatubo. The Mounties. The Mounties, yes.

Finally, this is just making me thirsty. The nominees are Silk, Ice, Riverstones, Marble, Baby’s Bottom. Baby’s Bum. The Smoothies? The Smoothies, yes. Well done. Well done to you guys, too. Thanks, John. Really appreciate it. We’ll do another quiz next week, yeah? Talk to you then. All right, bye.

And we want to talk to you, so call us with your language questions and stories, 877-929-9673, or send them to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter, at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Emily. I’m calling from San Diego. Hey, Emily, what’s going on? What’s up? So my friend got a cat recently, and I’ve been kind of vicariously living through him because it’s really his first cat. And so he sent me a picture the other day of the cat, and he had left his tongue stuck out, like, after washing himself. They forget to put it away, and it’s really goofy. And I was like, oh, my God, that’s his first blep. And he’s like, what? You haven’t heard of bleps?

Bleps are the Internet name for when a cat, usually it kind of counts with dogs, but they do it all the time, leaves their tongue out and it’s just kind of the like comic book caption for this expression or action of theirs blip blep right a blep yeah blep and it’s kind of the same family the more like commonly known one is a boop when whether you touch an animal’s nose and you go boop or they touch something else with their nose I feel like that has started yeah I’ve seen it more in the real world you know booping yeah you boop a snoot yeah it’s not that it makes the sound boop but it’s kind of the action itself.

And so blep is the name for the tongue being left out. If you Google these things, you’ll see them all kind of associated.

So are these onomatopoeia? Is that what they would count as? Some of them maybe. Certainly the melm, M-L-E-M, when they do kind of a gentle licking, right?

Yeah, the licking, the melm-ing, that’s the third trio of these siblings of animals. Like if a cat has food on his whiskers and he does the little gentle lick to get off, that’s a melm-ing.

How are you spelling that? M-L-E-M? M-L-E-M, yeah. It’s hard to say. I usually see it in writing. Mlem, mlem, and then blep. I love all those.

In my house, we agree that all dog snoots must be booped. If they’ll let you boop them, you have to boop a snoot. The boop.

So how long before these are in the dictionary? What’s the barrier they cross over? I don’t think it’ll be long in the scheme of language, maybe 10 years or so if they last.

I first noticed this kind of cutesy language becoming a little more regularized. Because let’s face it, we all have cutesy language with our animals.

We have all these words that we use in the house for our relationships with our pets. And sometimes we have our, you know, some pets in some houses have like 10 or 15 nicknames.

And they’re all kind of cutesy and fun and that sort of thing. But the regularization of this kind of language first came to my attention for what it’s worth in 2005 with the Cute Overload website.

Do you remember this website? Oh, yeah, yeah. I love that website. It’s still up, but they stopped posting new content a couple of years ago, and it’s cute animals.

And they had all kinds of language. One of my favorite was the talking about tocks, the short for buttocks. So the tocks of a little animal.

It’s cute little fuzzy behind, right? And I think that’s where I first learned toe beans for the little pink. Oh, yeah, the peas.

The bottoms of little cats’ feet. Yeah, and if you go to the Cute Overload website, they still have a glossary there that has a lot of this really adorable language, like all the different ways you can go aww and spell it.

So all these different spelling, like A-H-N, for example. There’s another vector that other people have discovered, and I think they’re right, as a source of really, really popularizing this language.

And that vector is the Dogspotting Facebook group. And so there’s something like 800,000 members to this group.

And basically what they do is post pictures of animals that they’ve come across or had an interaction with or their own pets. And a lot of the languages are just adorable.

And then the other vector is the We Rate Dogs Twitter feed. Oh, yeah. Where every dog is rated on a scale of 1 to 10.

And they’re always like 13 out of 10. You would pets. And 12 out of 10 is super adorable. Emily, you sound like you go to all these websites.

Yeah, yeah. These are all pretty classic internet spaces. It’s funny, because it feels like everyone kind of came to these same conclusions independently.

Like, the amount of people I know who call their pets bean, which I think probably did come from the little toe beans, it’s all part of the same, you know, colloquial phrase for a cute little thing as a bean.

And, you know, the blooping and the blooming and the blepping. Like, I saw it from so many different corners of the Internet, kind of like independently gaining traction and all these different types of people.

They just seem right. Yeah, it’s sort of like the Internet is the dog park for people with cats, right? Well, that’s not just cats.

It’s dogs and birds. Burbs. Not birds. Burbs. But burbs, yeah. Dogs and burbs and squirbs. That’s squirrels in my house.

And any Q&A will really… The linguist Gretchen McCulloch, she runs a cool podcast called Lingthusiasm, where they talk about linguistic things from an even wonkier linguistic perspective than this show.

And she has done a couple of interviews here and there, including with NPR in 2017, where she’s talked about all this kind of language.

She’s kind of focusing on doggo and pupper and pupperino and things like that. So look for this 2017 NPR article. Just look for the word doggo on the NPR website and you’ll find it.

And there’s a ton more information about this kind of language. Oh, that’s so exciting. Emily, it’s great to talk with you.

All right. Well, I hope you guys have a great rest of your day. You too. Take care now. Bye-bye.

Boop. Boop. Boop. See you. Boop. Bye-bye.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org. We asked a while back for the term you could use when your favorite restaurant closes.

You know, it’s so disappointing, right? And we heard from Kelly Fleury, who suggested the word melancholy. Melancholy. I’m feeling melancholy.

It just closed. We had dinner plans to go to that place. Yeah, and that is the worst when you don’t know that it’s closed.

Yes. And of course it’s still going to be open, so why would you check? Why would you call in advance? Right.

You’ve talked it up to your out-of-town guest, and there you all are. Yeah, you’ve planned your week around going to this restaurant.

And you pull up, and it looks like it’s about to be bulldozed. 877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words. Hello, this is Jason from Evansville, Indiana. Hi, Jason. Welcome to the program.

Thanks. What’s going on there? I was calling about something I see. I work at an architecture firm, and when I’m out in the field, I see temporary heaters on job sites, and they refer to them as salamander heaters.

And I looked it up to see if it was like a brand name type of thing that’s just being used generally. But I didn’t really find anything on that.

And I wondered why they were referred to as salamanders. Salamander heaters? These are small devices, appliances that give off heat?

Usually they’re bigger, kind of like a torpedo heater. They run off of propane and they’ll heat like a job site for temporary heat during a cold month.

When they’re building a building and it doesn’t have a full heating system yet. So what are we talking, like as big as an oil barrel or smaller?

For bigger jobs, yeah. If it’s more like a residential project, they might be kind of the size of a small trash can, kind of turned on its side, and then they have an element in the middle.

They make a lot of noise, too, kind of like they have a fan or something. Gotcha. Right.

There is so much cool history behind this word, Jason, because in ancient lore, a salamander was this mythical beast that could live in fire.

It actually thrived in fire. It loved being in fire. And it could put fires out if it wanted to. And this is a really, really old word.

And then the word from Greek and Latin came into English and got applied to all kinds of things that have to do with heat. You’ll see salamander ovens in kitchens.

You know, like when you go and get a slice of pizza heated up, a lot of times those ovens are called salamander ovens. There is also in the mid-18th century, there was a kind of device called a salamander, which looked like a big iron flat spoon.

It was about two feet long. And people would stick that in the fire and then put it over like a pudding or a roast or something to kind of brown it with the heat there.

And so they’re all different kinds of devices that have that name salamander because salamander mythical beast was something that lived in fire.

And what’s really curious is that it was only later that what we think of as a salamander, the animal, got that name as well. But it really doesn’t have anything to do.

So the mythical salamander predated the salamander animal that we know today, the lizard-like creature. Yes, and the lizard-like creature today, of course, has nothing to do with fire.

And it took its name from the mythical creature. That’s cool. And the term for heaters predates using it for the creature?

It depends because there’s so many different kind of heaters that have been called salamander. There’s these little braziers that have hot coals in them.

There’s different parts of blacksmithy furnaces have sometimes been called salamanders, including the lumps of metal, waste metal that are inside.

Asbestos itself has been called a salamander.

Fire-eating jugglers have been called salamanders.

Soldiers who bravely face enemy fire, not like fire with flames, but fires and gunfire, they were sometimes called salamanders.

Yeah, because they’re invincible.

And women who remain chaste despite temptation were also once called salamanders.

So in the heat of the moment, they could stand the pressure of their passion.

I never knew it was such a versatile term.

Right?

Yeah.

It’s really cool.

I love it.

Well, thank you.

That’s very interesting.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for that question.

There’s so much history behind such a simple word.

Jason, thank you. Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I’m betting that a lot of our listeners know salamander as this removable plate from the top of an old-fashioned stove that heats up.

And you can do with it, like you said, you can brown things, but you can also use it to heat up water really fast or put it in a container and then put it in your bed to keep the bed warm.

Or it’s the plate that you lift up to put more whatever wood or whatever in your stove.

Right, just something that can stand the fire.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Benjamin calling from beautiful rainy Seattle, Washington.

Well, hello, Benjamin. Welcome.

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

My awesome partner, Erin, noticed what she sees as an irregularity in my pronunciation of a particular word.

And I’d never noticed this about myself, but it’s the word bolt.

I literally had never noticed this about myself.

I’m originally from Northern California, but apparently I say it as though it had an L in it, like both.

And I guess she’s been tracking this since her friend moved.

She’s from the Midwest, and her friend moved to Michigan and came back saying it that way.

And she’s had trouble sort of tracking down geographically where that pronunciation is from.

And I’ve been trying to help with this project.

I have the difficulty that I still sometimes think that I hear people saying it that way just because that’s the way I kind of expect them to say it.

Because to me, that’s just normal pronunciation of the word.

Yeah, and you didn’t notice it until she pointed it out, correct?

No, literally.

And now I notice that my mom says it, and even after me pointing it out to her, she can’t hear it.

Really?

Yeah, that’s very typical.

A lot of things that we do with our speech, we just don’t know it.

Partly it comes from an awareness of how the word is written, and we feel like we’re properly representing the written language.

Right, yeah.

So it’s interesting that you and your mother both say it, and you’re from Northern California.

There’s not a strong regionality to this.

It does approximately appear to be a little more common in the northeast, not all the way up in New England, but a little south of there.

You do find it scattered throughout the country.

And the reason that I know this is besides a study that was done by the linguist Brian Gick,

I also have had a survey up about this pronunciation since 2010.

And so we have collected eight years of data.

2,300 people have replied to our survey about both with an L versus both without the L sound to it.

And by far and away, most people think that they say both without an L sound.

But as we just discovered, self-reported data can be wrong.

10% of people or so do admit that they say it with an L sound.

Another 1% say they say it more than one way.

And like I said, you can find people who say this everywhere.

What’s happening is something with the tongue is a little different.

So you can try it.

Make an O sound.

Then you’ll feel your tongue at the bottom of your mouth.

So O, right?

Your tongue is kind of resting between your lower teeth.

The tip is probably touching your bottom teeth.

Now say bow, B-O-W-L, and hold the sound, bow.

And your tongue is up a little bit, kind of exaggerated.

And so the tip of your tongue now is probably up and away from the bottom of your teeth,

From your bottom teeth, just kind of hovering there in the middle of your mouth,

Giving you the shape of that L sound.

So bow, right, versus bow.

You can hear the difference there.

So it’s your tongue on the way to touching your top teeth to make that th sound, that unvoiced th,

Is stopping in the middle of your mouth for a moment while the voice is still happening and creating that L sound there.

So it’s a natural physical thing that is happening in your mouth because your tongue is moving a little early before the voicing of the previous vowel has stopped.

Huh. That’s really interesting. Is there any connection between that and like B-O, like both?

Like people who say it like with an F at the end?

No, that’s a different phenomenon as well.

Totally different phenomenon.

But the T-H sounding like a B-F, or sounding like an F,

Is common in a variety of different dialects, both in the U.S. and the U.K.

Huh. Well, that’s really interesting.

Well, thank you so much.

It was great to talk to you, and thanks for helping to clear up some things around that.

Sure. Glad to do it.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to hear what you’ve observed in terms of language

And hear your stories about words, so give us a call.

877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

At the Literary Festival and Writers’ Conference in San Miguel de Allende this year,

I heard a luminous reading by the poet Sandra Cisneros, who’s a Mexican-American writer,

And I gathered up a bunch of her books and brought them home with me,

And I’ve been reading a lot of her poetry, and I wanted to share a poem with you.

It’s about peaches, and it’s called Peaches, Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo.

If peaches had arms, surely they would hold one another in their peach sleep.

And if peaches had feet, it is sure they would nudge one another with their soft peachy feet.

And if peaches could, they would sleep with their dimpled head on the others each to each.

Like you and me.

And sleep.

And sleep.

And that’s it.

And one of the things I love about this poem is that she does so much with a bowl of fruit, just like William Carlos Williams and the plums.

And the other thing that I love about it is that it makes me smile.

Literally, it has all those E sounds like peaches and me and sleep and feet.

And I can’t help but smile when I read it.

You think that the E sound is stretching your face into a smile?

Yes, yes.

You just continue on with the real smile.

Yes, it’s not an easy poem to read, but when I finish, my cheeks are sore.

Interesting.

As brief as it is.

Yeah.

Sandra Cisneros, and it’s called again?

It’s called Peaches, Six in a Tin Bowl, Sarajevo.

And it’s from the collection My Wicked, Wicked Ways by Sandra Cisneros,

Published by Vintage Books and used with the author’s permission.

All rights reserved.

Thank you, Martha.

That was wonderful.

If you’ve got a poem you’d like to share, give us a call.

877-929-9673

Or email us

Words at

Waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have

A Way with Words.

Hey gang,

This is Eben Atwater

And I’m from

Lummi Bay, Washington.

Hi, Eben,

Welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

Hey, thanks very much.

What got me calling you

Is an interesting thing.

My wife and I

Have a food blog

And we were

Researching a recipe.

It was for

A Norwegian sugar cookie

And the recipe

Was apparently European

And it called

For caster sugar.

Now, Monica

I didn’t know what that was.

I do.

I’ve heard it before.

But she asked me, you know, why do they call it castor sugar?

And I had to admit I had not a clue.

And I looked it up, and I found both iterations of castor sugar and castor sugar.

And even a reference to a sugar castor, it was a fancy little, you know, shaker, I guess.

But it really didn’t leave me at all to where that came from and why, to me, castor is like

Castor oil.

That was a funky iteration for me.

I was really thrown for a loop where that came from.

So C-A-S-T-O-R or C-A-S-T-E-R?

Yeah, the first one was the one that we saw most, and you still see that castor sugar.

Over here it’s called baker’s sugar.

It’s just real fine.

But there were some, and we found recipes, too.

They would call it castor C-A-S-T-O-R.

So this kind of sugar is not as fine as powdered sugar, but it’s more fine than regular granulated sugar.

Is that right?

Exactly.

And that’s what I like for this recipe.

It’s perfect because you get a little thin sugar cookie that you put in a cute little metal form.

And you do them that way and then fill them for a fill of good things.

So you need a finer sugar to do it right.

Yeah, that’s where the castor came in.

I see.

Makes it a little more light and fluffy or something like that?

Actually, a little bit more cookie-like.

They come out almost crisp.

Oh, nice.

I see.

Yeah, and then you put, what we do is put like fresh berries and creme fraiche in there.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah.

They’re pretty good.

Well, you know, you were getting very close to the origin of this term, caster sugar, because it does have to do with a caster, which is a little container for sugar that has little holes on top that are especially used for sprinkling sugar or pepper or something like that.

It’s called a caster.

You’re casting it just like you might cast seeds to the wind or you might broadcast a radio show, right?

Right, exactly.

It has to do with tossing your sugar, basically.

And so it’s sugar that comes out of something with holes that size.

Interesting.

So I wonder if they had salt casters at the same time.

Good question.

I don’t know.

That’s a good question.

So do you want our address so you can send us some cookies?

Hey, we will definitely hook you up on that.

But hey, let me ask, though, where would the castor come from?

Castor, like castor oil, has to do, I think, with castor beans.

I think the word castor in Latin means beaver.

And I’m not, do you know the connection, Greg?

No, the spelling for this particular device to shake the sugar is just a simply a variant of the agentive suffix.

You can use E-R or O-R, kind of like advisor or advisor.

They both mean one who does something or a thing that does something.

So in this case, it is a thing that casts.

Right.

So it has nothing to do with the nasty tasting oil.

Okay.

That is so cool.

That makes perfect sense.

Yeah, don’t mix those up.

I once as a kid thought that corn syrup was the same thing as corn oil, and I made some divinity and gave it to my dad and said, I know it’s brown and not white, but it’s really good, and he tasted it, and he had to run outside and wash his mouth out with a hose.

I’m not kidding.

And she hasn’t cooked again.

Pretty much.

It’s pretty much the story.

But I do want to read your food blog, so what’s the address?

Oh, it’s Urban Monique, so U-R-B-A-N-M-O-N-I-Q-U-E.com.

Urban Monique.

And it’s because I’m Eben, and my friends call me Urban.

Okay.

And Monica is, it’s called Monique.

So Herb and Monique.

Gotcha.

Oh, that’s nice.

I thought it was sharp and everybody else just kind of nods their head and says, okay.

It’s different.

Well, we’re going to go to urbanmonique.com and find those cookie recipes.

Yeah.

Evan, thank you for the question and thanks for sharing.

All right.

Oh, you bet.

Thanks, guys.

It was wonderful.

Take care.

Take care, Evan.

Bye-bye.

And the other thing which I’ve learned, powdered sugar is different from caster sugar because it has a little bit of something else in it to stop it from clotting.

What?

A little bit of cornstarch.

Is that right?

Yeah, people don’t realize that.

But yeah, there’s just a little bit of cornstarch and powdered sugar.

Otherwise, it’d be a clumpy mess.

I did not realize that.

Who knew?

Ooh.

So I wonder which has more calories.

Who cares?

Who cares?

Off to eat the caster cookies.

We will be watching for those cookies in the mail.

You can contact us by sending your email to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Do you remember our conversation about gram weenies?

Yeah, these are people who minimize the amount of weight that they’re carrying when they’re hiking.

Yes, yes, ultralight hikers.

So like trim the edges of their pill packets and things like that.

Yes, yes, gram weenies.

That prompted an email from Mark Hastings, who lives in Philadelphia, and he’s a bicyclist, and he said that bicyclists talk about weight weenies, which is sort of the same thing.

They’re always trying to figure out how to make their bicycles lighter.

The main way to do that is to somehow make your wheels lighter.

And so you can find whole discussion boards talking about being a weight weenie.

But the other cool terms that he shared with me, which I found really fascinating, were sticky bottle.

Do you know the term sticky bottle in bicycle racing?

I don’t. What is that?

You’re not supposed to do this, but when a crew will be riding alongside its bicyclists, they can reach out from the car and work on the bike or help them a little bit.

Oh, yeah, while you’re still in motion.

Yeah. So here they are driving along next to the bicyclists, and they’ll hand off, say, a water bottle.

But they’ll take a while to hand off the water bottle.

Oh, so they’re holding him steady.

Yeah, well, they’ll pull him along.

Oh, that’s cheating.

Yeah, that’s called a sticky bottle.

And there’s also something called the magic spanner, a spanner being a wrench that you would use to make a little adjustment.

You can take your time making an adjustment as the bicyclist is moving along and just kind of help them along.

You’re not supposed to do this.

But sticky bottle and magic spanner.

And I thought it was all about drugs and blood packing.

Right.

There are other ways.

Well, we know there’s lingo inside the hobbies that you have and the pastimes that you do.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Paul Hummel from Lake Geneva, Wisconsin.

Well, hello, Paul.

What can we do for you?

Hi, Paul.

Welcome.

I have a quandary.

Something is mystifying me.

It has to do with pronunciation, or I would suggest a mispronunciation.

I occasionally hear people put an H between an S and a T in words.

So, for example, they’d say, instead of start, they would say start.

What’s behind that? Why do people do that?

Where do you hear it?

I don’t hear it very often, but most recently, there is a talk show host on a Chicago radio station, and I listen to him often enough that it’s starting to, well, almost annoy me.

Okay.

I read someplace online, somebody said that even Michelle Obama does this.

Yeah.

I don’t hear it often, but I just occasionally hear it.

So it’s words like street, sounds like street?

Exactly.

Okay.

Yeah, this is, I guess, well chronicled.

And certainly we get a fair amount of email every year about this.

And it’s something that has come up in language circles for at least 30 years, if you can believe that.

It’s one of those things that Americans do that isn’t regional.

It’s not a particular part of the country.

And it doesn’t seem to be particularly attached to a certain generation or age of speaker.

So what’s happening here is the R in the word is doing something to the consonants in front of it.

All right?

Okay.

So, for example, “tr,” just “tr” alone without the “s” will often sound like “chuh,” “chuh,” “chuh,” right?

Okay.

So a word like “true,” “t-r-u-e,” sounds like “true,” “ch-r-u-e.”

This is called palatalization.

What’s happening is the tongue is moving forward on the palate.

The tongue is involved in changing this sound.

So it happens in words like straight or destruction or strip, straw, string, instruct and other STR words.

They start to sound like strip and straw and string and instruct, right?

Exactly.

What’s interesting to me is it doesn’t seem to be attached, like I said, to region or age or level of education.

It just simply looks like it’s one of those things that happens in the mouths of some speakers without it being a major phenomenal change that we’re all going to be doing someday.

So right now it doesn’t look like it’s going to be a pronunciation wave that is going to sweep over us so that in a couple hundred years we’re all saying street and straight.

I did read on one website, someone suggested that it was actually the start of that, the start of a morphine into a change in pronunciation.

But I had trouble buying that.

Yeah, it’s possible.

We’re going to need more data, and we’re going to need it over the coming 50 to 100 years.

And we’ll all be taking dirt naps by then before it’s finally resolved.

But it is happening, and a lot of people do notice it.

And I wouldn’t call it a mispronunciation.

I would call it a variant pronunciation.

And I have a reputation maybe as being a little permissive on this stuff.

It is interesting, and I will do my best to be much more tolerant.

Yeah.

That’s a good plan.

But the cool thing is that what you’ve done is you’ve gathered evidence, you sought information about it, and now you’re going to sit back and probably accumulate more evidence.

And you can say, oh, yeah, it’s not just this one guy in Chicago.

I’m hearing it at the post office.

I’m hearing it in line at the grocery store.

I’ve got a cousin who says it.

And then you start to realize, oh, it’s a broad swath of people from all different backgrounds at a variety of different educational levels.

And some of these people are very conscientious about their speech.

This can’t just be laziness.

It can’t be.

Paul, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thank you for taking my call.

I’ve really enjoyed talking to you.

My wife and I just love your program.

Thank you, Paul.

Wonderful.

Have her call us sometime.

Take care.

Okay.

Will do.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

What pronunciation feature have you noticed where you live?

Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before on the show about misunderstanding song lyrics, and we heard from Sandy Cohen of New York City who wrote to say that she had a similar problem with a phrase in the song Ladies Who Lunch from the Broadway show Company, the Stephen Sondheim show.

The lyrics go, another long, exhausting day, another thousand dollars, a matinee, a pinter play, perhaps a piece of Mahler’s.

I’ll drink to that and one for Mahler.

And she didn’t know of the Austrian composer Gustav Mahler, so she thought Mahler was some baker who made terrific cakes.

And so a piece of Mahler would have been, you know, a piece of Mahler’s.

Yeah, but she was heartened to learn that somebody else had that same misunderstanding, and that was Elaine Stritch, the actor who memorably sang that song on Broadway.

In her one-woman show years later, she said that she had that same misunderstanding.

Before she did the role or while she was performing it?

I think while she was performing it.

That’s interesting. It just kind of becomes a batch of sounds, right?

Yeah, and you just kind of assume.

That’s wonderful.

A piece of Mahler’s.

Mondegreens, that’s the word for those, right?

Yes.

Mondegreens.

Yes.

Where we misunderstand a phrase as something else that kind of makes some sense.

Right, like, excuse me while I kiss this guy.

The classic one.

Yes.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

This is Tammy.

I’m calling from Jacksonville, Florida, actually.

Hi, Tammy.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Tammy.

What’s going on?

My sister contacted me a while back about this and talking about A Way with Words, I guess.

-huh.

And her father, my stepfather, he was a World War II vet, actually.

And he used to tell a lot of funny stories.

And he would always talk about how somebody would end up in the hoose cow.

And at that time, I was fairly young.

I didn’t really know what that was, you know.

And, of course, over time.

But he would always just, it was just a funny word to me, you know.

And he would say, oh, every time we got short leave, oh, Bill, he would end up in the hoose cow or, you know, something like that.

And he always had a lot of funny stories to tell.

-huh.

So what is a hoose gal?

So a hoose gal is, I guess, the same as ending up in the jail.

Mm—

So I guess on the ship, he was stationed on a battleship, and I guess they had the brig on the battleship.

They had the brig there at the jail for the sailors.

Mm—

But I guess when you’re on shore, it’s in the hoose gal.

Yeah.

So you didn’t want to end up there.

So your question is, what kind of word is hoose gal?

Where did that come from?

Yeah, sort of what is the origin of that? I don’t know.

Well, it’s a very interesting origin because it goes back to a Spanish word that means to judge.

Juzgar means to judge in Spanish.

And the word for a court in Spanish is juzgado.

And in Mexican Spanish, it sounds like juzgal.

And so it’s a word that we borrowed from Spanish.

Oh, okay. Oh, that’s interesting. Yeah.

Yeah.

So it had a pretty long history then.

Yeah, a very long history.

And now in English, it’s kind of a jokey word in a way.

I mean, exactly the way that you’ve been describing it.

It’s spelled H-O-O-S-E-G-O-W, hoosegow.

And I do associate it with kind of rambunctious, jokey talk about being in jail.

Right, right.

Imagine a courtroom that had like a cell in the corner of where the people who are being judged would be put.

Okay.

Right, right.

Yeah.

So there you go.

So Husqa, we’re spelling H-O-O-S-E-G-O-W, right?

And then Husqado, the Spanish is J-U-Z-G-A-D-O, right?

Husqado?

Mm—

But in some Spanish dialects, like you said, the D is not pronounced, so it sounds like Husqao.

Right.

Correct.

Right.

If I had to try to write that, I would not even have been close to either one of them.

Oh, is that right?

So stay out of the hoose gal.

Yeah, Tammy.

Yeah, that’s it.

Learn your spelling and stay out of the hoose gal.

That’s your tip for the day.

Thanks, Tammy.

Take care now.

All right.

Thanks, guys.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Thanks for calling.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Want more A 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.