Deviled Eggs (episode #1554)

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.

Nancy Gabriel wrote to us from Ithaca, New York, to say that her daughter was a precocious reader as a child.

When her little brother was two-ish and she was not quite six, she said that her brother was a Sonophagun.

Oh, oh, I got it.

Do you know what it is?

Yes, but tell me more about the story.

Okay, well, her parents were baffled.

Her daughter said that she called him a Sinophagon because he was being naughty.

She got it from one of her books, I bet.

It’s a word she learned from reading, I bet.

Yep, yep.

Do you know the word?

Son of a gun.

Yes.

She just put the stress in the wrong places.

Yeah, yeah.

Bless her heart.

Yeah, and then when Nancy’s daughter was in second grade, she and a couple of naughty classmates went into their little town’s corner store.

And the plan was for these two naughty kids to go into the store and swipe some candy, and Nancy’s daughter would stand watch outside.

Well, the little kids got caught, all of which Nancy found out because her daughter came home really upset and eventually confessed that she was worried that her friends were going to have her record.

She must have been a very precocious reader for sure.

That happens to all of us, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Synophagin.

What a synophagin of a story.

Thanks, Nancy.

Oh, I appreciate the kids’ stories.

You know, they keep coming every time we bring them up.

Every family has them.

The funny things that kids say, and they are a delight to read and to share on the air.

Share yours, 877-929-9673, or email them to words@waywordradio.org.

Or heck, share them with the world on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan Cobsey from Arvada, Colorado.

Hello, Megan. How are you doing?

I’m good. How are you guys?

All right. Welcome to the show.

What would you like to talk with us about?

I’m originally from Northwest Missouri.

My husband is from England, and sometimes, you know, we have, he says things, I say things, we’re like, what is that?

So I said something, yeah, and I said, crime and niddly.

And I started to think, what in the world does that even mean?

Is that something just my family says?

I tried to Google it.

How do you even spell that?

I have no clue. So I was wondering if you know the spelling, where it comes from, you know, anything like that.

What was happening when you said that? What was going on?

Everything related to the pandemic and quarantine. You know, who knows? I’ve got a four and a half year old son.

Probably he did something that frustrated me. Oh, crime and deadly. I wouldn’t say it to him.

But, you know.

Oh, so something unusual. It was kind of like a mild, a safe oath then.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, like I was annoyed at something.

So, yeah, oh, crime and niddly.

And then, you know, I’m almost 42.

It sounds like something that like an 85-year-old says.

You’re precocious.

You’re ahead of your age group.

Yes.

Megan, it’s interesting that you had difficulty spelling it.

It sounds like you’ve got a couple of Ds in there, right?

Ds in dog, crime and niddly.

Is that the way you’re saying it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that’s a new one on me because there are lots of different spellings of this term, but usually it has a T in it.

And there are lots of different versions of it, like crimenetly, crimenitly, crimenetly, crimenity.

And then your version, which is new to me, crimenidly.

But all of those, all of those are what we call a minced oath, which is a way of saying something without really saying it.

And in this case, it’s a way of saying Christ or Christ Almighty without really saying that.

And, you know, that’s really funny because I have been, you know, again, pandemic annoyances, etc.

I have been saying Christ Almighty a lot.

Really?

Yes.

And then one day I said crimenidly, and I thought, I wonder if that is a contraction of that.

So that really makes sense.

Yeah.

Is it throughout the Midwest?

Somebody said, oh, in Illinois, no, Indiana, we say that as well.

Well, another version, crimenly, is mainly found in the North and the North Midlands and the West.

Crimenly, you don’t hear it a lot in the South.

I know that much.

Yeah, even the American South tends to, even the minced oaths tend to be less common in the American South just through tradition of not swearing and even mild swears in polite company.

Oh, interesting.

I think I know 12 different spellings for this, maybe 13.

There are a lot, yeah.

There are a lot, yeah.

It’s transmitted ear to mouth and not usually on paper, so people don’t know how to spell it.

So when they do, it’s all over the place.

Yeah, did you know Megan’s with the D’s in there?

No, that one I don’t have.

I have to put that down.

I found it, though, in newspaper comics back to the 1920s.

That’s one of the first places I’ve seen it, the earliest places I’ve seen it.

Criminently.

Criminently, yeah.

So how would I spell it?

What would be a spelling that I could actually Google?

You could Google C-R-I-M-A-N-E-T-L-Y, Criminently.

You’ll find a lot if you just.

And then you’ll start going down the rabbit hole like we do.

You will find people say it as crime in Italy, like the country.

Oh, yeah, that’s another one.

So Google that, too.

I love that.

Thank you for your call.

Call us again sometime.

Thank you so much.

All right, take care.

Be well.

Thanks, Megan.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, bye.

You can talk with me and Martha at 877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

We read everything.

Or talk to us on Twitter.

You never know who you’ll get @wayword.

We got a voicemail from Ross, who lives in Hawaii, and wanted to talk about a situation that arose at work.

Hi, my name is Ross.

I’m in the Navy, and on our ships, we have a combat system that is called A-E-G-I-S.

And there are two parties in the Navy, some that pronounce it Aegis and some that pronounce it Aegis.

And I was wondering, what is the correct pronunciation?

Thank you very much.

Well, that’s a really good question.

Ross, the most common pronunciation of the word A-E-G-I-S is aegis, and that’s the oldest pronunciation too.

Martha, I think that you probably grew up saying aegis, right?

I did indeed, aegis.

Aegis, A-E-G-I-S, and that A-E sometimes is printed as a ligature where the A and E are combined into one typographic character.

And you can look back in old dictionaries as far back as 1940s, 1950s, old pronunciation guides for NBC and BBC, and you’ll find aegis.

But by the early 2000s, maybe the late 90s, you can find the aegis pronunciation show up in Oxford dictionaries and Merriam-Webster dictionaries listed as an American pronunciation, usually given as the second pronunciation, which means it’s still not the most common pronunciation.

Now, that means it’s acceptable, but if you have a choice, Aegis is still probably the best one, I would say.

Wouldn’t you, Martha?

I would say the best choice is whatever your commanding officer is using.

Yes, definitely.

Whatever the highest ranking person in the room uses, that’s what you say.

Yes.

When you’re in the Navy, that’s how it works.

That’s how it works.

Or in the workplace, whatever your supervisor says, that’s what you say.

That’s how you get promotions, raises, commendations.

Exactly.

And of course, we can’t pass up an opportunity to talk about the etymology of the word aegis.

It goes back to an ancient Greek word that means goatskin.

And in some stories, the aegis was this magical protective cloak that was made from a goat that suckled Zeus.

And so it has to do with protection and shielding.

That’s right.

And its meaning changed over time.

And there was some kind of grumbling along the way that it should always just mean shields, but it came to mean the mark of, say, a brand or a house or, let’s say, an old family.

And so if you operated under the aegis of a company or a family, it means you operated under their protection or according to their rules.

And that’s kind of how we think of it today.

I operate under the aegis, say, of the FDA, meaning I follow the FDA’s rules of food safety, right?

Right, right.

So, Ross, we hope that helps.

If you’ve got a question, you can always leave us a message, even if we’re not on the air.

877-929-9673.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Rick from New Bern, North Carolina.

What can we do for you, Rick?

Well, I had a question concerning a term I’ve heard my entire life around here, usually now just from older people.

Pure D or pure T.

And I’ve heard both, and I’ve asked people who use it. I said, what are you using, pure D or pure T, you know, as an intensifier? And I’ve heard explanations for both.

The pure D folks have said, well, the D is short for damn. We don’t want to say damn, so we say pure D. And I said, okay, what about the pure T folks? And they said, well, it means pure truth. And I was wondering if there’s any truth to either of those or where exactly that expression came from.

Yep, that’s pretty consistent with what we know. So how would you use it in a sentence?

That is pure D wonderful. Or she is pure D out of her mind.

Okay. All right. And how do you spell it?

In two words, P-U-R-E and then just the letter D. Because I don’t use the pure T one because it just didn’t make as much sense to me. And I was wondering if there was a foundation for this term somewhere or if I’m even on the right track.

You are absolutely on the right track, Rick, because as far as we can tell, the pure D, there is pure damn or pure damned. My mother, the Southern Baptist, would never say pure damned, but she would definitely say pure D all the time. So I grew up hearing that from my Southern Baptist Sunday school teacher mom.

So the original and the far more common version is pure D, and it goes back to the early 1900s or so. But you can see how it might also be altered to be pure T, and that people might understand it to be pure truth. But the pure D truth is that it’s pure D. And it’s spelled lots of different ways, the way you spelled it, or just all one word, P-U-R-E-D-E-E, or P-U-R-E hyphen D. There are different versions of it. But, yeah, it means exactly what you’re saying, and you’re right about its origin.

I have not heard it outside the South. I’m wondering, is it peculiar to the southern part of the United States?

Yes. I mean, is it used all over?

Pretty much the South and South Midland, you know, kind of all across.

Well, that’s interesting, Dan. I’m a teacher and I don’t hear young folks choose it, but sometimes their grandparents, I will hear that. It seems to be falling out of favor with the younger folks. But I was just wondering because I have always heard it from especially older people in the South.

Well, I purely thank you for the explanation.

All right. Thank you very much, Rick. We’re pure D. How do we have you?

Thank you.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

More about what we say, why we say it, and how we say it as A Way with Words continues. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. And joining us now is the one and only, sui generis, John Chaneski.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant. I can remember the early days of the internet when you could score a really simple web address like games.com because there were only three people with computers. I go back that far. Now, of course, a web address is more likely to be complex these days unless you’ve got the do-re-mi to buy just the perfect word.

Now, I’ll give you a web address, which is just a single word and a domain. Well, it’s just .com, really. And see if you can figure out what you’d find there, okay?

Oh, so you’re talking about domain media recs. So where the simple ones go to something more complex?

Pretty much, yeah, for some of them. Some of them are exactly what you would think is there, and some of them require a little more thought.

Okay. For example, if you go to space.com, you’ll find news about astronomy. But if you go to time.com, what would you find there?

How about a magazine?

Yeah, you’d find Time magazine, exactly. Appropriately, you’ll find the History Channel and all its history at history.com. But if you go to chemistry.com, what would you find there?

Is it a chemistry journal?

Sounds like a dating site.

It is an online dating site.

Oh, nice. That’s very good, Martha. Never been there. You’re clever.

Sure. I’m going to look up your profile. Now, though Northeast.com is an electronics firm in Connecticut, what do you find at Southwest.com?

Airline.

Airline, of course. Yeah. Now, don’t be sad if you find nothing of note at Downs.com. What can you do at Ups.com?

You can send packages.

Send packages. You can send packages. Ups is ups.com. Nothing.com is a site for an investment company, whatever. It’s what I feel about that. But everything.com takes you to a site where you can find what specific objects that can be about anything.

Specific objects that can be about anything. Well, a dictionary is about everything.

I was going to say, or encyclopedias or something.

It’s books.

Books. Everything.com takes you to the Simon & Schuster website.

Oh, smart. No kidding. That’s smart. Friends.com will take you to some generic site about making friends, hanging out with friends, and nothing about Chandler or Monica. But Family.com takes you to what squeaky clean entertainment company?

Is it ABC? Walmart? Disney.

It’s Disney, yeah. Disney owns Family.com. Finally, maybe you think this is fun. Concentration.com takes you to a company that makes machines that measure density. But what kind of operation would you find at Operation.com?

It’s not the board game, is it? Or the company that makes the board?

It is the company that makes the board game.

Who is it?

It’s Hasbro.

Hasbro. You can find board games at Operation.com.

Nice. Well, rock and roll, you guys. It’s time for me to head out. You guys did really well on that quiz. I’ll talk to you next week.

Party on, John. Party on, Martha.

Thanks, John. Party on.

Well, you know, this show is about puzzles and words and language and linguistics, slang, new words, things that your family says that you think are weird but you want to find out more about. Call us about that, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or chat us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amelia calling from Chicago.

Hey, Amelia, welcome to the show.

Okay, so I was talking to some co-workers the other day, and my one co-worker was telling us that she has a neighbor who’s a stand-up comedian. And this comedian was planning to perform a comedy show from her front lawn with the thinking that all the neighbors could, you know, watch from their own windows or lawns, you know, because we’re all staying at home, social distancing.

And we were all kind of laughing about this, you know, thinking it could be a really cringy situation because there’s truly nothing worse than watching a comedy show that doesn’t land. And another co-worker of mine said, oh, yeah, I get the moths in those kinds of situations. And none of us knew what that meant. And she explained that it’s a term she uses to mean that intense secondhand embarrassment where you’re burying your head in your hands and can’t bring yourself to look at the train wreck going on.

And I never heard that before, but I loved it because I definitely know that feeling. And I thought it could use a good descriptor word. So I thought of you guys immediately and wondered if this was just something that my coworker created on her own or if it was something you’d heard before.

You got the Mott’s.

Got the Mott’s. How old is your coworker? Tell us a little bit about your coworker. Who are they? Where are they from? Age and all that?

So my coworker and I are both from the Chicago area, the suburbs of Chicago. She’s in her mid-30s. I don’t know the expression to get the motts, to mean to be suffering from secondhand embarrassment or to feel cringey because of what someone else is doing or to be embarrassed for someone else. We know the feeling, though, for sure.

I know the feeling.

That’s the reason I can’t watch Curb Your Enthusiasm.

I can’t watch shows like that.

I don’t care how good it is.

I can’t watch it.

I recognize that it’s a quality program with great acting and writing.

Can’t watch it.

No, too much empathy, I guess. I don’t know.

However, however, I have something for you.

I got the Mott’s became a bit of a catchphrase because it was a Mott’s applesauce line from a commercial that started running in 1987.

Really?

Yeah, I got the Mott’s.

All right. In the commercial, a couple of kids are play acting at being spies or detectives or something like that.

And they’re looking for the Mott’s applesauce as if it’s a hard-to-find precious object.

And so there’s this moment in the commercial where this kid kind of dressed up like a, you know, a gruff detective says,

I got the Mott’s! Like that.

He says it in this way that just kind of gets in your brain.

Here we are with another commercial phrase becoming like this catchphrase for American culture that people pass on.

You know, commerce giving us something in the language.

But in the commercial, it’s not like an embarrassing situation.

No, although in itself it’s a little cringy because you’ve got to acknowledge that this commercial is trying to start a catchphrase, I think.

I think they were looking for the new, you know, where’s the beef?

I mean, this is the thing that advertising agencies try to do.

They try to start a catchphrase so that the name or brand goes along with the catchphrase and passes through the culture and becomes a thing.

But I got the motts sounds like gastrointestinal distress, doesn’t it?

A little bit.

I got the mods.

Yeah, it sounds like I got the heebie-jeebies or I got the willies, right?

I got the yips.

It sounds like that.

Huh.

Anyway, so by 1989, it starts showing up in high school yearbooks as a slang item.

This is one of my favorite places to find slang.

You can look in yearbooks on archive.org and you can find slang.

And so I find it in 89 and 90 and 91, 92, 93, 93, all the way up to 2005, variations on I got or you got the motts in student yearbooks is like their favorite phrase or something that they threw in their profile.

And so it was a thing.

Not a big thing, but it was something of a thing.

You got the motts or I got the motts or he’s got the motts.

Sometimes it’s contextless.

We don’t know what they mean, but all of them seem to be reflecting this commercial in some way.

It’s a little bit of a catchphrase.

Amelia, as you might expect, there is a German word for this feeling.

It’s like we have schadenfreude for taking joy in somebody else’s suffering.

And in German, the term is fremtscham, which sort of translates as foreign shame.

It’s that feeling embarrassment for somebody else.

Fremtscham.

I’m so glad to know there is a word for that.

Although I don’t know, Amelia, anyone else who uses Get the Mots to mean, you know, to get the cringes.

I don’t know anyone else who uses it that way.

But you know what?

This is a big show with a big audience.

Maybe other people will let us know.

I use Get the Mots that way or I Got the Mots that way.

No, I’ll have to follow up with her and ask if she’s seen that commercial ever.

I have no idea if it was just something that came up independently or got kind of adapted based on what she needed to work for.

Yeah, drop us a line and let us know.

Yeah, I’m betting it comes from the Mott’s applesauce commercial.

All right.

Bye, Amelia.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

You got a word or phrase you want to talk about?

We want to talk with you.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send the whole story and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Grant, it’s so good to talk to you guys.

This is Kim calling from just outside of Raleigh, North Carolina.

Hello, Kim.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was thinking the other day, I was talking to my mother and was thinking about as a child of the 70s and 80s, when we would gather as a family, we would all go to the den.

And then we moved houses when I was about 10.

And all of a sudden, we were all gathering in the family room.

And I don’t know why that change happened.

And I’ve not heard then in many, many, many years to describe that family gathering space.

We have a family room in my house and everybody I know has a family room, but nobody has a den anymore.

Huh. And Kim, where did you move to and from?

It was all in Charlotte, North Carolina, just from one side of town to the other.

Okay. In that area. My dad was from that area. They pronounced area with an A sound.

I’ve never heard that. Yeah. And I’m a North Carolinian. I’ve never heard area.

Just area.

Somebody’s going to back me up. Somebody’s going to call in and back me up.

Yeah. And I didn’t know if it was, I mean, I’m African-American. I didn’t know if it was a

Cultural thing? I don’t know. There is something fashionable about what we call the rooms in our

House, because there’s something fashionable about the way we build our houses. And there’s something

Fashionable about the way we market them if we’re real estate people, or redesign them or, you know,

Remodel them. There actually is a book about this very thing about that exact part of the country.

It’s called Lexical Change and Variation in the Southeastern United States by Ellen Johnson.

And she has a section of the book that is about that room, the room in the household where the family might spend time together.

And so she compares a list from 1930 of the names people called that room with a list from 1990.

So in descending order of popularity, Kim, the 1930 list was sitting room parlor, living room setting room, that’s S-E-T, and front room.

And in the 90s, the list in the descending order of popularity, the words were living room parlor den, sitting room.

Even though it’s on both lists in the 90s, living room was way out in front is the most popular term.

And parlor and sitting room had lost a lot of room by the 1990s.

Even though they do appear still in the 90s.

They’re just hard to use, and it was probably the much older generation.

So we can really see that change in those 60 years.

And so I think your observation about a den is probably true.

It probably had a heyday.

70s sounds right to me.

It sounds like you and I are probably roughly the same age.

And it’s kind of faded because people aren’t building dens in their houses anymore.

If they’re building dens, they’re not calling them dens. They’re calling them man caves or TV

Rooms or game rooms or something else. Right. And you know, the house that we were in originally was

A split level and you kind of had to go downstairs to go into the den. So I don’t know, maybe it’s

More like an animal den. Yeah. Yeah. Sometimes they had this recessed area, right? The furniture

Was around? Yes. Yes, absolutely. And now everything is a lot more open and light.

Yeah. Actually, what we had within the house was a family room. We never called it a den.

When I first heard somebody call it a den, they felt like they were more upscale than our family.

Oh, that’s so funny because I think the exact opposite.

Oh, do you?

When I think of den, I think, you know, maybe a step down than the family room.

I think of the family room as being the upper echelon.

That’s interesting.

You know, Kim, I’m looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English, and it does say that den is more of a southern.

It’s more commonly found in the south, den and den room, and that it was a new term for this space in the 40s.

Wow.

How about that?

And then we have a living room as well, which was always very formal.

You know, we could never play in the living room as children in either house.

And we had a living room in both homes.

The home with the den had a living room and the family room home had a living room.

But they were never accessible for just a regular everyday congregation. right

That was for company.

Yeah.

We call those the front room or the Pope’s room because that was if the Pope happened to drop by.

Really?

No, that was the joking name for it.

Because it’s like, what’s this room for with all this expensive furniture that nobody can use?

Why is this here?

This doesn’t make any sense.

And clearly it’s just because they didn’t want the kids there.

But this is the nicest room in the house.

Why does this exist?

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Okay, well, good.

Yeah, Kim, thank you so much for bringing up this subject.

I’m sure we’re going to hear a lot about it.

Yeah.

Thank you, Kim.

Take care now.

Yeah, thanks so much, guys.

Okay, bye, Kim.

Bye-bye.

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

And I know you want to talk about this on Twitter, what you call that important room in your house.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carla.

I’m from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Carla.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I wondered if whenever, taking the place for when, is a regional occurrence or is it a recent addition?

For example, whenever I introduced you to my family or whenever we got done, I hadn’t heard that until the last few years.

Okay, so you’re talking about somebody who says whenever I went to the store or something and they just mean one instance.

Is that it?

Right.

Exactly.

Where are these folks from?

I’ve mostly heard it on television shows, and the people were from somewhere in the south.

And where are you from?

Wisconsin.

Wisconsin, gotcha. And you don’t hear it in Wisconsin?

I don’t.

You’re observant, Carla. I think you’ve noticed a regional feature of English.

And it is indeed something that belongs to a certain set of Americans because of their heritage and how migration patterns happen. And let me explain what I mean.

This use of whenever refers to, instead of meaning each time, this whenever means this time.

So ordinarily we say, you know, when I go to the store, I always get the basket instead of the cart, right?

And instead, what we’re saying is, whenever I woke up this morning, I chipped on the cat, right?

And that sounds odd to people because most of us don’t use whenever in that way.

Whenever for us is about a recurring condition or a recurring case or a pattern.

But this whenever actually has a name.

It’s been studied by linguists, and it’s called the punctual whenever.

It’s a studied grammatical feature, not only in the United States, but in some of the dialects in the United Kingdom as well.

You’ll find it in North America, especially in the northern part of the American South, definitely in Appalachia, and in the Midwest, including Pittsburgh, all the way to parts of Missouri and places in between.

But, you know, it’s not completely unknown in the rest of North America.

You’ll find little pockets of it here and there.

So this punctual whenever is one of several traits in American English that shows up from the Ulster or Scots-Irish linguistic heritage.

It’s a holdover from 18th century immigration.

And as a matter of fact, as I understand it, you may sometimes still hear that punctual whenever in Northern Ireland and in neighboring parts of Scotland and England.

And even a few Australians may use it, though at this point it is largely just an American relic of older speech patterns.

Well, thank you.

That’s a lot, right?

How about that, Carla? I mean, that’s pretty cool, right?

Yeah, I’m partly Scotch-Irish and I’ve never heard it in my clan.

Yeah. So what happens is these features sometimes last and sometimes don’t.

So when they stick around, it’s an accident of history.

There’s no rhyme or reason.

But when they do stick around, they stick around in groups of people rather than individuals.

There is a really great academic paper with a fantastic name called, My Mother, Whenever She Passed Away, She Had Pneumonia, The History and Functions of Whenever.

Oh, my gosh.

It was in the Journal of English Linguistics.

It’s by Michael Montgomery and John Kirk, great linguists, published in 2001.

So, Carla, how great is that history right there in your ear?

Yeah.

It’s very interesting.

Thank you.

You’re welcome.

Thanks for being so observant.

And anytime you have other linguistic observations, bring them to us, and we’ll see if we can puzzle them out together, all right?

I will, thank you.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Thanks, Carla.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Stay tuned for more A Way with Words in just a minute, and you can always find all of our episodes online at 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.

For almost two years after her first book was published, poet and author Kate Angus couldn’t manage to write a single thing. Not an essay, not a chapter, not even one line of poetry.

And later, in an essay in the online magazine Literary Hub, she described that agonizing period like this. In the past, writing had felt like pushing over the first domino at the beginning of a long, intricate row. One word would tip forward, knocking another word down, and so on to the next. The words forming sentences all falling into place. And then I would resurface hours later with multiple drafts of poems or an essay written. Now that momentum was gone.

I’d type one or two words and stop and stare at the letters. Then I’d space my cursor backwards, deleting to start again, only to hit another wall. The open document on my computer felt like a white room I was locked inside. No matter how hard I pounded at the walls or how loudly I screamed, I was trapped.

Grant, I can totally relate to that. She ended up trying meditation and writing exercises, and she even took a writing fellowship overseas, but nothing worked. And by the second year, she simply gave up. And when people asked her how her second book was coming along, she changed the subject.

And then she writes, just as easily as a cloud obscuring the sun eventually drifts past, one morning I woke up with the first lines of a poem singing in my head. And she got out of bed and started writing and never stopped again. And she came to understand that for her, writer’s block was more like the crop rotation she grew up with in the Midwest. She says, if you grow the same plants in the same field for too many years in a row, the soil gradually loses certain nutrients. And your harvest is at risk of being wiped out by invading insects, microorganisms, or other aggressive plants.

And so she’s basically suggesting that, you know, if you’re struggling with writer’s block, maybe you just need to be kinder to yourself. That maybe you should just accept that you’re not blocked at all, but that resting might be a part of your process.

Right. Yeah, that reminds me of something I read years back about the differences between Japanese baseball and American baseball.

Really?

The Japanese baseball pitchers have shorter careers because they believe in harder training and they don’t let their pitchers rest as often. They play longer games. They practice harder. And so they just don’t last as long.

The American counterparts actually have more successful careers and go on to play better games and have better stats and all around longer lifespans in the business. And it’s pretty much what you’re saying about writing.

Yeah, that was not the direction I expected to go, but yeah, for sure. She also quotes a nature writer in that article who talks about how something that grows and reproduces unchecked is usually a parasite or say something cancerous. You know, you need that time to rest and replenish. And, you know, for writers in particular, you’re still working when you’re just staring out that window. I mean, there’s a balance, right? You also have to be disciplined. But I really appreciate her call to being kinder to yourself.

I agree. Yeah. During the pandemic, for example, people kept saying, oh, now’s the time I can get all of these things done. I can learn all these crafts and hobbies that I wanted to do, practice the language that I’ve been not working on. And other people pushed back and said, but wait, isn’t this the time that now that you’ve been denying yourself for yourself? Isn’t this the moment you’ve been waiting for all these years when you wanted open space to.

Be idle, to just enjoy being alive? Maybe you don’t replace lack of work with more work.

That’s a good point that she’s making, a very good point. Recharging the brain is you don’t recharge it with more work, do you, necessarily?

Not at all. You push back from that computer and you go outside.

I agree with that.

When you’re looking for those creative impulses that come from letting your brain wander, what do you do? How do you recharge?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. Hey, this is Lucas. I’m from Northeast Iowa.

What’s on your mind today, Lucas?

Well, when I hear the show, I always think I’m going to come up with these great ideas of what I’m going to ask you. But I always think of them when I’m not near a pen or anything. I never remember to write them down.

But the one that stuck with me over the years is something I’ve heard since I was a kid. And I don’t know if it’s just an upper Midwest thing. I guess a lot of people here have heard of it. But let’s say someone were to set a large plate of food in front of you of good eating, you’d say, good stuff, Maynard. Kind of a good old pat on the back, like, can’t go wrong with that.

And I always wondered, who is this Maynard fellow, and why does he get good stuff? Maynard with the full belly, huh?

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, well, this goes back to a commercial, or a series of commercials, actually, in the 1980s for Malto Meal. Did you ever have that?

Yeah, yep, that and cocoa wheats, too, yep.

Okay, yeah, yeah, it’s like a competitor to cream of wheat. And it’s a hot cereal. And there was this long series of commercials that featured a dad and son at breakfast, a young boy. And I think the first one of these involved the little boy pushing away his bowl of malt-o-meal. And his dad says, what are you doing? And he says, I’m giving my cereal to Maynard. And his dad says, who’s Maynard? And he says, my friend.

Of course, he’s pushing it in front of this empty place at the breakfast table. And so his dad addresses this imaginary friend and says, Maynard, you know you’re eating malto meal. And then he describes why it’s such a great thing to eat. It’s delicious and iron fortified. And then the dad goes back to reading his newspaper and says, good stuff, Maynard.

And at that point, the little boy pulls the bowl back in front of him and starts eating. And then his dad looks down from the newspaper again and says, where’s Maynard? And the little boy says, he went out to play.

So it’s just this goofy series of commercials involving somebody named Maynard. And that tagline, Good Stuff Maynard, really stuck. And you kind of couldn’t turn on the TV without seeing those commercials back in the 80s.

Yeah, as early as 1981, I think.

Yeah.

Do you remember seeing those?

Well, I do now, and Maynard was an imaginary friend then.

Yeah.

Right.

He’s not even a real person.

No, but apparently he has lots of good stuff.

Excellent.

Excellent.

Well, I’ll have to cook up a few more as I come along and see what else I can come up with.

Sounds great.

Good stuff.

Thanks, Chris.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

The Icelandic word for echo is bergmal, B-E-R-G-M-A-L. And it’s really quite picturesque because Bergmal literally means rock language or language of the mountain.

Isn’t that gorgeous, Grant?

Oh, yeah, sure.

When you talk to the mountains, they talk back with your own voice.

Exactly.

A version of your own voice.

That’s lovely.

So Berg means rock or mountain.

Exactly.

Okay, very good.

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Hello there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s good to talk to you. This is Gail from Minden, Nevada.

Welcome, Gail.

Well, I have a word. It’s pixelated. And my mother used to use it to describe someone who is inebriated. And I hadn’t heard it really used in many years. This was in the 50s when I heard it. And it just didn’t seem to be in common usage.

And lately with the computers and pixels in computers, I noticed pixel is EL and pixelated is IL. So my question is kind of twofold. What do you know about my pixelated word? And is pixelated with computers a word? And where does pixel come from?

Yeah, that distinction could be very significant, couldn’t it? Although I imagine the contexts are very different. Although I guess you could be pixelated at a computer conference and take on both meetings. I don’t know.

Well, I know it was kind of a funny play on words as far as I was concerned, but I didn’t know whether there was any backing to the play on words.

Yeah, did you run across it recently? What brought this to mind? You said your mother used it back in the day, but what about now?

It’s kind of an odd story. I like graveyards to me in an odd way. They’re kind of living history. And I was looking at a more recent headstone in a graveyard, and it had a computer-generated pixel image on the headstone embedded. And it wasn’t a good image. It was kind of very vague. And the word pixelated came to mind, and I thought, well, hopefully the deceased isn’t offended. But, you know, that kind of reminded me of the term. So anyway.

Okay.

Yeah, they are different words. And you’re right. They differ by one letter. So the computer term is P-I-X-E-L-A-T-E-D. And the other one that you said your mother used to mean drunk is P-I-X-I-L-A-T-E-D. And they are etymologically unrelated. It is a coincidence.

So let’s talk about the one your mother used, the P-I-X-I-L one. It is a variant of pixie-led, meaning led by pixies, those fairy-like supernatural beings. Pixies are said to be troublesome and mischievous. So if you’re pixie-led, you’re led astray or confused, the way that you might behave when you’re drunk. And it’s an Americanism. It’s kind of a corruption of a word that’s used in the UK. And a lot of people who love classic films might remember it from Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, a 1936 film. You’ll still find this on the list of people’s favorite films of all time.

In other words, you might say if someone’s pixelated, the pixies have got them. Maybe a modern synonym for some of the ways you can use pixelated with the second eye is the more modern flaky. So it’s not just drunk. So it’s pretty much kind of out of sorts, confused, not behaving normally, even distracted. All of these can mean like it’s as if a supernatural power has got a hold of them. They’re not behaving like a rational being.

Okay, very different.

Yeah.

And then the other word, pixel, is a modern word. It’s a P-I-X-E-L. It’s a combination of the word PIX, P-I-X, which was a common abbreviation in the tech business or the tech world for, and even in the movie industry, for picture, P-I-C. It’s a plural. And then the E-L from elements. So picture elements as a phrase goes back to the 1920s. And then pixels comes from the 1960s.

And so something’s pixelated. We say that means that the pixels are obvious instead of being invisible to the eye, which they should be. You shouldn’t be able to see the pixels. You should just see the picture. So pixelation is something you don’t want, usually, except if it’s digital art and you’re using that as a creative tool. And pixelated art can be wonderful, but often we don’t want to see the pixels. We just want to see the image.

What a wonderful match you made between these two words, walking in the graveyard.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, you know, they are like museums to me. I really enjoy them, especially when you have very old sections. They are, to me, a living history. Kind of like words.

Yeah, I like to think about the lives lived. I do. I really do. I think about the dates, for example. What was going on in that year that I see?

Exactly.

What does that name remind me of?

Yeah, certainly there was a life here. What did they do? How did they live? What were they like? Where are their descendants? What did they leave behind? It’s kind of wonderful to think about that.

Some of the stones really aren’t in themselves.

Absolutely.

Old friends you can go back to again and again, right?

Yeah, yeah, really.

Gail, thank you so much for sharing this.

Yeah, thank you for the thoughtful call.

I really appreciate it.

I enjoy your show so much.

Thank you.

Thank you, Gail.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have a wait with words.

Hi, this is Scott calling from Seattle.

Hi, Scott. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I’m calling with a question about an alternate name that I’ve heard for deviled eggs.

Both sides of my family are from southern Kentucky,

And I have an in-law who every year at Thanksgiving refers to the deviled eggs as dressed eggs.

I don’t know if it’s a regional thing.

She is from a different part of the state than my parents, and she’s also a member of a fairly conservative church.

I was curious to find out if dressed eggs is just kind of a regional term, or maybe that comes from her religion.

Well, how interesting.

You know, it could be both because the term dressed egg for deviled egg is regional for sure.

And definitely in Kentucky.

You mentioned southern Kentucky.

And is that the west or the eastern part of the state?

Very central.

Maybe two and a half hours in a straight line south of Lexington.

The reason I ask is because there’s a delightful little newspaper article from the Park City Daily News from 1952.

Now, Park City is down there near Mammoth Cave, southern Kentucky.

It’s a little report on the meeting of the Greenwood Homemakers Club No. 1.

This new member of the club had moved to Park City from New Mexico.

She was invited to the club and invited to bring dressed eggs.

And she had no idea what they were talking about.

And so she called one of the members and said, what are dressed eggs?

And one of the members explained that it’s pretty much like deviled eggs.

And so what this new member did was reported in the newspaper.

It was that big a deal, the difference, because the newspaper report says,

After preparing the stuffing and putting the eggs, which had been cut across the middle back together,

She put a little rabbit’s head on the top of each egg.

These heads were sewn to toothpicks and stuck into the eggs.

Then she cut a small hole in yellow paper doilies and slipped these over the eggs,

Giving each one a frilly yellow skirt.

And everybody agreed that they were too cute to eat.

So clearly this woman from New Mexico did not understand the term dressed eggs.

She literally dressed the eggs.

Yeah, she had a little fun with that.

Grant, I could see people wanting to euphemize that term, devil days.

Yeah, we have a lot of euphemisms for the devil throughout the history of the English language.

Lots of other names where people just avoid saying his name because if you said the devil,

You said that word or his name, that called him and could make him come according to the superstitions.

And so you would call him anything else.

And sometimes people just wanted to avoid even avoiding the word of hell, for example.

So, yeah, I could definitely see people calling them dress eggs to avoid saying deviled.

But also because they heard other people say it eventually.

Eventually they would just say because that’s the word for it.

And definitely it’s more common in the American South, not exclusive to Kentucky.

I can find it in newspapers and cookbooks going back to the mid-1800s, but I’m quite sure it’s much older than that.

But, you know, Martha, the idea of dressing food, now that’s centuries old, to use that verb to dress.

Sure.

Far back is what, the 1300s?

Mm—

Meaning to prepare or to cook or add seasoning or sauce.

Yeah, and same for deviling something, right?

You can devil all different kinds of foods to sort of spice it up.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

I appreciate that.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten,

And production assistant, Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

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Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.