Ding-Ding Man (episode #1509)

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.

Imagine that all the punctuation marks gave a party.

What would that look like?

Rachel Herbert asked that.

On Twitter, she’s an editor in Seattle, Washington.

She wrote, sometimes I imagine punctuation marks as people at a party.

Comma.

-huh.

-huh.

Okay.

Then what happened?

And the colon makes intense eye contact and says, now look.

And a semicolon, hand you their drink and plate so that they can gesture more freely.

And the period abruptly says, we’re done.

Let’s go.

And I’ve been thinking about that.

Like, what would an asterisk be like at a party?

I think it’s a person who’s constantly surprised.

I don’t know.

It’s a person who walks in on their own surprise party.

Right.

Or they’re like, hold on.

I’ll be right back.

Yeah.

And then I was thinking a tilde would just sit there in the corner going, yeah, yeah,

Yeah, yeah.

Right.

In parentheses, there are two people leaning toward each other, talking intently, ignoring everyone else, right?

Yeah.

The dash is making a run for the bathroom.

Right.

And maybe the slash is, I don’t know, looking over somebody’s plate.

Right.

Or they’re listing to port because they’ve been drinking.

Right.

I don’t know.

Just one of these things that I think about while driving.

If you have more contributions on what each kind of punctuation would do at a party, hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

And you can call us and email us with your language questions or just to discuss cool things that you read.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katrina calling from Williamsburg, Virginia.

Hi, Katrina. Welcome.

What can we do for you?

I am calling to find out if using said to describe something that was previously spoken about is proper.

For instance, if I told you I was going to the farmer’s market to buy vegetables,

I could send you a picture of the vegetables with the caption said vegetables.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

Said vegetables.

You said in this way to refer to, like you said, something that was spoken about in the past.

Is this a construction that you’re likely to use?

Well, I’m kind of new to social media and I see it everywhere.

Like my sister posts stuff or I’ll send stuff to her about things that we’ve, you know, pictures or something that we’ve spoken about before.

And she’ll say said vegetables, but I don’t want to do it and sound crazy.

So I was just calling to find out, can I use it or is it just something that’s like occurring right now?

Well, it’s certainly a legitimate usage.

The usage of said to mean the aforementioned thing or the aforesaid thing goes back about 700 years in English.

Wow.

It’s really, really, really old.

I’m not really aware of it being used in terms of something casual like that, though.

Yeah, it’s usually more formal.

You definitely will see it in legal documents, particularly when there’s a discourse or discussion where, you know, somebody was mentioned in a previous part of the legal document.

The other part of it is I could see somebody doing it ironically.

And certainly the Internet abounds in people doing things ironically that we wouldn’t otherwise do.

Right. Yeah, that was my sense of it.

I mean, are you trying to be funny when you do it?

I don’t know. It’s kind of just like a way to describe, like instead of saying these are the vegetables I told you about earlier, you could just say said vegetables.

So I didn’t know if it was proper to use it that way.

I like it. It sounds ironic.

Yeah, it sounds like it’s a tone mismatch is what it is.

And that’s a little bit of comedy that we often throw into language where in an informal situation, we use formal speech.

And we all kind of get a little, I don’t know, a hormone jolt or something

Because we realize that there’s a match.

It makes sense, but the match isn’t there.

Right. Okay.

So I wouldn’t feel bad about it.

In fact, I think it’s pretty clever.

Yeah.

Okay.

I love the fact that you’re new to social media and you’re like,

Whoa, what are these people doing here?

I was like, can you do that?

I don’t know if you can do that.

Yes.

Martha and Grant say you can.

Yes.

Yeah.

And you need to put an asterisk on every post that says that.

That’s right.

Proved by MBGB.

That’s right.

I’m Grant and Martha, and we approve this message.

Katrina, thanks for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right, bye-bye.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So it’s a synonym for the aforementioned.

And sometimes it takes the article the, and sometimes it doesn’t.

Here are the said vegetables.

You might also say, here are said vegetables.

I love that it’s just vegetables.

That’s our example, is vegetables.

Okay.

Homemade soap.

Said homemade soap.

The 1300s. We have it in archaic forms of English from the 1300s. That’s interesting.

Yeah, I love that she’s reviving it in social media.

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

I was reading a text about film appreciation and came across a word I didn’t know, which is diegetic.

D-I-E-G-E-T-I-C.

I don’t know what that is.

Yeah, it was news to me.

It comes from a Greek word that means narrative.

And diegetic refers to something that occurs within the story itself.

So, for example, if you’re watching the Casablanca and the guy is playing the piano in the bar, that’s a diegetic experience.

Experience, whereas narration or external music is non-diegetic. So when Rocky Balboa is running

Up the steps in Philadelphia and there’s that music blaring, you know, that’s not really

Happening in real life. Right. So that’s non-diegetic and diegetic. Perfect. I love having a word for

That. I know, right? Yeah. Talk to us, words, at waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with

Words.

Hi, my name is Brad Andrews. How are you guys doing today? All right. Where are you calling

From, Brad? I’m calling from Allen, Texas. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Originally, I’m from Mississippi, and I moved to Texas about 10, 12 years ago. And when I first

Moved here, I would hear a term all the time that I’m not really used to. It’s called T. Jones.

I’ve heard people refer to it as a grandmother or mother. I just want to know a little bit about

The phrase, what exactly does it mean, and where did it come from? So T. Jones, like T as in Thomas

Jones? Correct. Where did you hear it? Where did you learn T. Jones?

Originally, when I moved to Texas, I’m from Mississippi originally. When I moved here,

I would hear it all over Houston. A lot of people said it in Houston. And after that,

I moved to Dallas. And again, the phrase, I’ve heard it all over Texas, but nowhere else.

Yeah, that’s what I know about it as well. T. Jones, usually spelled as the letter T and the

Name Jones to mean mother, sometimes father, very rarely father, sometimes both parents together.

Is very specific to Texas and usually centered around Dallas.

Most people report it from Dallas.

And it’s African-American usually as well.

Sometimes it pops up in collections of street slang or youth slang.

But it’s been around since the early 1970s.

And it’s a kind of big fat origin unknown, unfortunately.

We don’t know.

And I have seen no theories at all on the origins.

Was it named after a particular person?

You know, was T the initial of a matriarch of a clan or something?

Nobody really seems to know at all.

But it’s interesting.

There’s two interesting things about what you’re telling me.

One is, boy, people in Dallas are going to be surprised that you heard it in Houston.

Because everything that I’ve read on this, both in casual speech and in slang dictionaries, firmly associates it with the Dallas region and not Houston.

Okay.

And the other thing which kind of surprises me is that it’s still got so much life in it.

It’s still out there being used because I thought it was waning and kind of fading in its use.

But you’re saying that you still wear it?

Absolutely, all over the place.

Brad, I’m wondering what kind of context you hear it in.

Is it a particularly affectionate term or would you just use it in passing?

It’s always used as an affectionate manner.

For example, I’m going to my T. Jones house.

She’s cooking today.

And again, I don’t know when it necessarily means grandmother or mother.

It’s just used kind of sparingly between the two of them.

And I’m very interested.

You guys have no idea where this thing came from.

Yeah, it happens a lot, actually.

Particularly with slang, because slang kind of comes up from different communities that we might not be a part of.

And the histories don’t travel with the words as the words themselves start being used by more people.

Oh, I’m glad I was able to stump you guys.

I feel good about that.

Congratulations, Brad.

The nice thing about this show, Brad, is now that we’ve talked about T. Jones, meaning mother or other things,

We may get emails and calls from people saying, look, I have a source for this from the 1950s,

Or my grandfather used this in the 1940s.

You never know what we’ll uncover.

Sometimes we get great information, and I’m hoping that’ll happen this time.

Yeah, so keep listening.

Thank you so much.

I love the show, guys.

Keep it up.

Thank you.

Appreciate the call.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

T. Jones.

T. Jones.

Sometimes it’s spelled T-E-E, Jones, but almost always it’s the capital letter T.

Or the lowercase t in a space, and then Jones either capitalized or not capitalized.

Fascinating that it’s so localized.

Right? Well, we don’t all speak alike, right?

There’s this illusion about the monolith of American English where there’s one American English,

But there has never been one American English, and we’re not merging either.

Right.

We’re growing increasingly unlike each other in certain ways when we speak.

Well, if you know something about T. Jones, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

And we welcome your emails about anything regarding language.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

The term that seems to be having growing usefulness these days is wish cycling.

Do you know wish cycling?

Recycling? All right, can I make some guesses?

Sure.

So not related to bicycles?

No.

Okay, related to recycling, kind of?

Yes.

Is this where it’s like a chain of wishes, where I grant your wish, you grant somebody else’s, and we just keep the chain of wish-granting going?

Oh, that’s lovely.

No, it’s not that.

But that’s not the answer.

Watch it be something terrible.

It’s not so good.

This is when you’re standing in front of your recycling bin, and you’ve got something that you’re not quite sure of.

Maybe it’s a beverage cap or the tinfoil lid from a yogurt.

And it doesn’t have the recycling triangle to tell you.

Right.

And you’re thinking, well, it probably can be recycled.

But you just know if you get it wrong, there’s somebody back at the sorting center going, oh, when will they learn?

Yes, yes.

If you get it wrong, there are consequences.

And it costs the recycling companies.

And it just messes everything up.

It’s not a good thing to do.

It’s really, really counterproductive.

Is it better to go on the side of throwing it away and then on the side of recycling it, if you’re not sure?

That’s apparently what they’re saying in the recycling industry,

Because all of your recyclables are processed at a materials recovery facility, which is called a MRF.

Giant piles of things and lots of conveyor belts.

Right, right.

But the thing is that no two MRFs are the same.

And so it really depends on your locality.

And apparently a recycler in Minnesota came up with the term wish cycling,

Which is when people just sort of make assumptions, and they shouldn’t,

Because it really gums up the machinery, or they turn things into a slurry,

But if there’s all this bad stuff, like a greasy pizza box.

Yeah, you want the whole pizza, but you can’t because it has food residue,

And you can’t get the residue out, or jars that haven’t been cleaned out.

Wish cycling, I wish I could recycle it, but I can’t.

Right?

Yes, that is the way that we should think about it.

There’s more about language.

We know you’ve got something for us.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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

Stay with us.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hello.

Hi.

You know, in Alice in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll introduced this rather weird, unanswerable question

That’s a classic riddle.

How is a raven like a writing desk?

Now, do either of you know an answer to that?

You’ve heard it before, I’m sure, right?

Yeah, but I don’t know a good answer except dumb ones.

Yeah, they’re only dumb ones, actually.

They’re both English words.

They’re both English words.

Sam Lloyd once said, Poe wrote on both.

Oh, nice.

Carol himself said, both can produce a few notes, though they’re very flat.

Yeah.

But in any case, it was meant to be a sort of a nonsense question.

In any case, I have another question for you.

How is a popular song like a butterfly net?

It’s catchy?

Yes, it’s catchy.

Very good.

So the following questions follow the same pattern.

One thing is describable by an adjective that ends in Y.

The other can be too, but in a different way.

Okay.

All right.

I think you’ve got it.

Yeah, they’re both catchy.

Now, this one’s kind of classic.

How is scotch tape like a walking cane?

They’re both sticky.

They’re both sticky, yes.

How is the Four Seasons Hotel like a grade school teacher?

Classy.

Oh, classy.

Classy, yes, very good.

How is an old-fashioned car like a mean old man?

Both cranky.

Cranky, yes, good.

I’m so glad you guys are getting right into the sum of this.

How is a thick stew like a gift shop in February?

Hearty.

Hearty, yes.

Very nice.

Very nice.

How is a lumberjack like the Dow Jones Industrial Average?

Choppy?

Seesaws.

Plaid.

Stocky?

Yes, stocky.

Nicely done.

How is a poorly washed window like a naked jogger?

Exactly.

Exactly.

That’s right.

How are they?

I watched windows like a naked jogger.

They’re streaky.

Streaky.

Streaky, yes.

Finally, how is a rundown hotel like a garden supply store?

Shifty, reaky, something like that.

Rundown hotel.

Seedy.

Yes, they’re both seedy.

Very good.

Well, you guys were fantastic.

That was great.

Congratulations.

Thanks, John.

Appreciate the quiz every week.

We’ll talk to you next time.

Thank you.

See you then.

All right.

Take care.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

How are you?

I am Cara DeFrius, and I am in San Diego, California.

Cara, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

I am so happy to be here.

In college, I was an English and theater major, and I always found something curious.

In theater, you have monologues.

If it’s just one person talking.

And for two or more, it’s called a dialogue.

But then there’s unicycles for something with one wheel

And bicycles for two.

And in classes, it’s a mashup of mono and bi

With monocle and bifocals.

So why aren’t they monocycles and diicycles?

And why is there this mono-dia-uni-bi situation?

Mono-dia-uni-bi situation.

Okay.

The world is complicated.

Thanks for calling.

Let’s get to the heart of this.

First, the dia in dialogue isn’t from di-affix, the di prefix meaning to.

Instead, it comes from a word meaning through.

Because there actually is a word, duologue, which is a conversation between two people, which is the companion to monologue.

So it may be misunderstood.

And if in theater they only mean it for two people, fine.

That’s fine, a conversation for two people.

But in the larger world outside of theater, dialogue can be any number of people.

It’s not specifically just two people.

Right. It’s from Greek for through, like diagonal.

Yeah, exactly. Or diameter.

So that solves that.

The other thing is, I think the larger question, if I can rephrase what you’re asking here, is why do we have all these prefixes that mean the same thing?

Why do we have di and duo and by?

And it’s because our language is a mutt.

Heinz 57 English, basically, is what it is.

We get so many of our words.

Some of them were created directly in the modern era from Greek and Latin.

Some of them came to us inherited through French or German.

Some of the ones that we have now look like they came to us directly from Greek and Latin,

But they actually traveled through like three other languages to get to us,

And they still retained their prefixes and their suffixes and so forth.

So every single word has its own story.

You can kind of glom them all together and say, oh, well, here’s the reason that some words have die and some have bye.

But there’s no one universal rule for all of them.

A lot of it is caprice, really.

The whimsy and the caprice of the people who coined scientific words, for example, is just whatever they felt was superior.

Fascinating.

Yeah.

But monocycle instead of unicycle, maybe.

Maybe.

I think that’s an old word for it.

Yeah, it probably was.

I have actually ridden a six-foot unicycle.

I had to be lifted up to a basketball hoop to put it under me.

I was holding onto the basketball hoop.

For a second there, I wasn’t thinking measurements.

I was thinking like appendages when you said six-foot unicycle.

I’m like, how does that work?

Six legs and one wheel?

That’s strange.

Oh, that’s super interesting.

Thank you for all that.

I was like, this is just weird, right?

But I guess English language is weird.

You’re exactly right.

It is, but I will tell you, I’ve shared this resource on the show before, but I totally think you’re the person for this and probably a lot of our other listeners, too.

There’s a website called affixes.org.

You know, the prefix and the suffix plus the infix, those three together, their category is affix, A-F-F-I-X-E-S.org.

What?

Michael Quinian in the U.K. put it together.

His work is fantastic.

And he explains each of these prefixes and suffixes and so forth in detail and talks about where they come from, why we use them, and some words that have them.

I think what I’m hearing is—

Well, there goes my evening.

I was going to say there goes your weekend, right?

I can hear that in your voice, Kara.

All right, Kara, thank you for your call.

I really appreciate it.

As always, you are always stellar.

Thank you so much for answering that for me.

Get some sleep now.

Don’t stay up all night.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

You know, I’m looking in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Monocycle is a word.

Is this rare?

Yeah.

It was rare back to 1869 at least.

Yeah.

Same thing.

Unicycle.

It just wins.

Sometimes when there’s more than one word for a single item or a single category, one prevails, and it becomes the ensconced term.

That’s right.

English words arm wrestling.

877-929-9673.

A word you’re probably going to be hearing more and more of in the coming years is solastalgia.

Oh, I’ve heard this.

I’m not sure I remember what it meant, though.

I saw it in your double-tongued dictionary on our website.

What does it mean?

Nostalgia, S-O-L-A-S-T-A-L-G-I-A, refers to a form of psychic or existential distress that’s caused by environmental change or a change to a place that you know well and have taken comfort in.

It was coined by Australian philosopher Glenn Albrecht in 2003.

It’s like nostalgia, but it also combines the words solace and desolate.

And the idea is that, say, your town was destroyed by a wildfire or your home in Appalachia was destroyed by strip mining.

Or you see an environmental situation that’s getting worse and worse, maybe the Arctic melting or something like that.

Solastalgia is the term that more and more people in the field of philosophy and psychology are using.

So it’s the loss of something that you want solace in?

Yes, exactly.

Gotcha. And so it’s the feeling that you get when these things start to disappear.

Yeah, particularly in your environment.

I guess it could be like, you know, you go back to your old neighborhood and the buildings are gone.

Right, right. What’s an empty lot there now or another Starbucks?

Yeah, solastalgia.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Monica. I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Monica. Welcome to the show.

Thanks. I’m excited to be here.

Yay.

So recently I was reading bedtime stories to my kids and, you know, we check out a lot of books from the library and I make an effort to check out books that represent a lot of different cultures because I want to expose them to a lot of different kinds of people. And, you know, as I was reading, this book called Flossy and the Fox, it got me thinking about how does one read in dialect that is not your own dialect. The book is about a little girl and her family, and they are black. I am white, as is the rest of my family. And the book is written in, very deliberately, in rural southern black dialect. There’s even an author note that she wrote about how the language is key to the story, and it’s sort of from her, the way her grandfather or told her stories when she was a kid.

So it just got me thinking, you know, how do I read these words? When I read them in my own voice, it sounds kind of goofy, kind of like when you hear people who don’t speak Spanish read Spanish words with no accent, you know, like, hola, como esta.

But then to read it with any sort of put-on accent feels a little bit performative and almost disrespectful.

So I just wanted some input about what you guys think about that.

Boy, what a good question.

How old are your kids, Monica?

Sarah is almost seven, and Henry is five and a half.

Okay, so they’re just old enough to maybe be doing a little reading on their own, but perhaps you’re reading books to them that are a little beyond their level, and that’s the way that you can expose them to new material that they wouldn’t read for themselves, right?

Yeah, that’s true.

Well, you know, we encountered this in my house as well.

I wanted to read Tom Sawyer to my son, besides the use of the N-word throughout, which I figured I would handle by replacing it with another word.

It’s also loaded with three or four different kinds of Missouri old-fashioned dialects.

And I had this problem.

We didn’t really make it through the first chapter because I couldn’t find something that worked where he didn’t look at me funny, my son looked at me funny, and where, just like you, I didn’t feel like I was making a really big mistake by demonstrating something that outside of this circumstance, this context wouldn’t be okay. It would be not okay for me to imitate the language of a Black American in any other context. So how could I permit myself to do it here? Right. And the thing is, you know, like one friend of mine said, well, if you’re reading Shakespeare, you could put on an English accent and that wouldn’t be weird. But I feel like it’s so different when you’re reading something where the dialect is from a historically disadvantaged demographic, and I’m from a majority culture, you know, I really want to be deliberate about how I make that choice and not make a choice that’s accidentally disrespectful. It sounds like part of the solution is to talk with your children about it in advance, right? And how do you do that? You know, I did actually, as I was reading, I realized how much of the book was in language that I don’t usually, you know, in a way that I don’t usually speak. So I did try to sort of address that a little bit, but it felt, I mean, I don’t know, it just kind of on the fly.

I don’t think I came up with the best words.

You know, we are trying to be very deliberate about talking about race because studies show that the earlier you talk about it, the more open-minded your kids will be and the less they’ll take on racist attitudes.

But, yeah, I wasn’t really sure how to kind of address it just on the fly while reading.

I don’t know. Do you guys have any phraseology you would use or language you would recommend?

There’s another element we haven’t talked about, which is even if it’s an accent where there isn’t this racial difference, you know, this minority versus majority difference either.

Let’s say that it’s a deep south white person’s accent.

The question is, are you as a reader good at performing that accent or doing that accent?

Can you even pull it off without sounding foolish and without giving your kid the wrong idea of what that person probably really would sound like if they were standing there in the room?

Right.

So there’s just another part where it’s just like, can’t you even do it?

Like the English accent, could I do an accent for Shakespeare?

No.

Yeah, or Harry Potter.

Or Harry Potter.

No, I can’t do that.

However, one of the things that you’re talking about here is outside the context of reading books to your kids.

You are talking about cultural encounters.

And this is one of many cultural encounters that we as parents have to explain to our children.

And so I think you can lump this experience in with what is it like being in a neighborhood where nobody looks like you?

What is it like going to a school where people speak languages that you don’t know?

What is it like traveling in a country where they have a different religion than you?

Or they speak English differently.

Or they speak English differently.

So maybe that’s your path to explaining this.

Talk about those other circumstances where you and your family encounter new ideas, new cultures, new languages, new people.

And just put it as part of that whole package.

Right. That’s a great idea.

And since it is something that we have been talking about,

I think that would be easy to kind of, you know,

Loop that into the larger context.

Yeah. But I appreciate that you’re thinking about this.

The kid isn’t really who we’re worried about judging us, though, right?

It’s how we judge ourselves for mishandling or poorly handling the material.

Well, and a lot of it is, you know,

If you mess up and your kids say something disrespectful later,

How other parents are going to judge you as parents, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But good for you for reading the material in the first place.

What I might do for a particular text,

If the one you’re talking about seems really fraught

Because it has a lot of different dialect passages in it,

I might set it aside for later, too,

Until the child is ready to read it for him or herself.

Right, right.

Awesome.

Well, thank you guys so much for your input.

I really appreciate it.

Monica, thank you for calling.

Thank you.

And let us know if you come up with a different decision,

If there’s something we can share with the rest of our listeners, all right?

Yeah, definitely.

Thank you so much, and I love the show.

Thank you.

Give our best to your kids.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Have a good one.

Bye.

Thanks, too.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Gerald Johnson from San Diego.

Hi, Gerald.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Gerald.

What’s up?

My mom’s from North Carolina, older generation.

So she used to say a lot of crazy things when we were young.

Like, hey, mom, can we have our allowance early or something like that?

She would say, well, your room hasn’t been cleaned since Sookie was a calf.

And it was like, well, mom, who’s Sookie and what are you talking about?

And so I’d always have that phrase stuck in my head since Sookie was a calf.

And I’m assuming that Suki grew up at some point, and so she was a calf a long time ago.

That was just my understanding, but I’m not sure.

So Suki, who’s Suki?

I have no idea.

Apparently she’s a cow.

Well, you’re right.

Yeah, Suki is a term that has been used for a couple of centuries now, at least, to call a calf or call a cow.

Suki, Suki.

Or Sookie.

Oh.

And, yeah, it goes all the way back to England.

And so the name also got applied to the animal itself.

And I have heard…

Oh, okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So you might call a cow or a calf Sookie.

So that’s its name as well as the noise that you make to beckon them to the stall.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, Sookie, Sookie.

Although I haven’t heard that phrase, it sort of falls in line with a lot of other phrases

Like Since Hector Was a Pup.

Have you heard that one?

No, haven’t heard of that one yet.

Yeah, or Since Christ Left Chicago

Or Since Pluto Was a Pup.

The idea is that it’s been a very long time,

And clearly it was a long time since you’d cleaned your room.

Yeah, exactly.

We kind of figured it out over time.

Like, okay, well, it must be something as far as, like,

A long time ago, because I’m pretty sure Sookie is just grown up now

And she’s a grandma or who knows where Sookie’s at.

Put out the pasture.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I hope we were able to help you, Gerald, and you’re satisfied with our answer.

Awesome. Yeah, that makes sense. I like it. Thank you.

And I’m probably going to call back as soon as I figure out some more stuff, because she said a lot of things.

She had a lot of phrases.

Absolutely. We welcome those. We’re looking forward to it.

Thank you, guys.

All right, take care.

Okay, take care, Gerald.

Bye.

All right, bye.

So call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

More of language seen through history, culture, and family 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.

Born in London in 1772, Luke Howard was a shy chemist who was also really fascinated by weather,

And particularly by clouds. He wanted to organize how we understand and observe those ever-changing

Formations up in the sky, and he wanted to do it in a way that was scientific. And in 1803,

He self-published a pamphlet that he called On the Modifications of Clouds, etc. In it,

He proposed a classification system for clouds, and he drew on his schoolboy Latin and came up

With the main categories, which were cirrus, stratus, and cumulus. Now cirrus comes from the

Latin for hair or tendril. Stratus comes from the Latin for layer, and cumulus is like a pile,

You know, like accumulate. And this new way of looking at clouds and these new names and this

Whole new language for talking about something that everybody had always seen but never really

Classified that way, it hit a nerve in the popular imagination, and Luke Howard became this reluctant

Scientific celebrity. His nomenclature was championed by some of the greatest minds of his time,

Especially the influential German poet Goethe. Goethe went so far as to write poems based on

Those names. And some people criticized Howard for using Latin rather than everyday spoken English,

And Goethe wrote a passionate response on Howard’s behalf.

And he argued that those Latin cloud names should be accepted in all languages.

They should not be translated because in that way,

The first intention of the inventor and founder of them is destroyed.

And he even went on to send Howard gushing fan mail,

Which is kind of hard to imagine today.

The story of all of this is told by historian Richard Hamblin in the book

The Invention of Clouds, How an Amateur Meteorologist

Forged the language of the skies.

And in fact, if you go to his home in London,

There’s a historical marker that says,

Luke Howard, namer of clouds, lived and died here.

Oh, that’s so nice.

Namer of clouds.

This is what we all dream of when we come up with a word.

We want acclaim, recognition, acknowledgement.

Right.

We want to be a part of history.

Right.

And he got that.

Goethe is your fan?

Yeah, I know, right?

I’m imagining him dotting his eyes with hearts as he sends letters to Howard.

Yeah, forget the umlauts.

Yeah, I never knew that story.

I just thought some scientist came up with these names, but we still use them today.

Yeah, absolutely.

And they’re not intact in other languages, right?

They are modified to fit the different languages that they’ve been borrowed into, right?

Actually, I don’t know.

There’s a pretty clear system of classification of clouds, and I don’t know.

So I like how it plugs in, too, in the development of meteorology as a science,

Where we started to realize that some of those old saws about the red sky or whatever had a little bit of truth,

And we could look at the sky to see what was going to happen a little later with our weather.

Exactly. Trace the sky with a painter’s brush. The winds around you soon will rush.

Talking about cirrus clouds.

Yeah, and what I also love about this is that it was a way of using language to impose order on something that didn’t seem to have any order.

It seems that Luke Howard was someone who saw differences in clouds and saw patterns and indeed began meteorology that way.

I have often thought that if there were another species on this planet that had the same kind of active intelligence as humans,

That they might actually call us a word that means the classifiers, because that is so much of what humans do.

We sort, we organize, we classify.

And if you were to think about our primary behavior, a lot of it has to do with the things that we say, the things that we produce, how we organize ourselves and our communities.

It’s about setting these boundaries and saying this is a box and all of things of this type go in that box.

Oh, you’re right.

Right.

The classifiers.

I really like that.

And, of course, language is key to that, right?

Making sense of the world.

We love language.

And if you come across a passage that talks about language in a way that you really enjoy, we want to know and we want to share it with our other listeners.

Send it along. Email is words@waywordradio.org, and you can link to it on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

Doing great. How are you, and who is this?

This is Rod Gray. I’m from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Rod. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Rod.

My family has some cute little sayings, but my favorite aunt, she’s from California, born and raised in Arkansas.

And she used to say this thing every time something was like weird or not right or whatever, like an accident on the road or like a tree limb fall off of a tree or whatever.

She said, don’t that just frost you?

And I’ve always wondered where on earth it came from because she died.

I never got to ask her where she got started with it, but I’ve heard it all my life.

What other kinds of things?

Like a car accident or someone would pull out in front of my uncle.

She never drove because she backed into the garage wall and got out of the car and says, I’ll never drive again.

Don’t that just prostrate?

So it’s just the way she always threw it into a sentence if something just wasn’t quite right.

Okay.

Yeah.

And I got a lot of cousins and I got a lot of aunts and uncles, but none of them ever knew where she got it from or if she made it up or what.

But it sounds like something somebody would use, you know.

Don’t that just frost you?

You know, why did that happen, you know, or something?

Yeah, and indeed that’s the case.

It seems to go back to perhaps college slang in the U.S. from the late 19th century.

But not the full phrase, just the verb to frost someone.

Right.

That full phrase of doesn’t that just X you is kind of a template for a whole bunch of other verbs that will fill in that X.

Yeah, but frost in the sense of shock or irritate you or just kind of take you aback.

Because there’s two old meanings of it.

One is to anger somebody, to frost them is to anger them.

The other one is to surprise or shock them.

And they’re both just about the same age.

And there are naughtier versions.

I don’t know if she ever used that.

Oh, no. This is a woman who had a Bible under her arm 24-7.

Oh, okay.

She was very Baptist, so I think she probably used that word, if there used to be one nasty, she switched it to frost, I guess. I don’t know.

Got it.

Because there’s an expression, doesn’t that just chap your behind? I’ll use the word behind.

And there’s a similar version for frost. Doesn’t that just frost your behind? I’ll say behind.

Yeah, or various other parts of your anatomy.

Okay, well, that’s very rewarding to know that, you know, there is a real meaning behind it.

Absolutely.

Rod, thanks so much for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Call again sometime with some of her expressions, all right?

Okay, thank you so much.

Have a great day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Rod.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

And it seems like you would be more likely to say don’t that rather than doesn’t that.

Right.

I think it needs to sound super informal in order to have the efficacy.

Yes.

Don’t that frost you.

Don’t that frost you.

Giblets. 877-929-9673. We were talking earlier about Luke Howard, the Englishman who founded modern meteorology by starting to classify clouds with different kinds of language, with Latin words.

And his influence extended not only to Goethe, the poet, as I said, but to the painter John Constable and Percy Shelley, the poet. All of these people were inspired by this whole idea of classifying clouds.

And Percy Shelley wrote a poem called The Cloud, and it’s long, so I’m not going to read the whole thing. But I’m going to read the first stanza, which will give you a taste of it.

I bring fresh showers for the thirsting flowers from the seas and streams. I bear light shade for the leaves when laid in their noonday dreams. For my wings are shaken, the dews that waken, the sweet buds every one. When rocked to rest on their mother’s breast as she dances about the sun.

I wield the flail of the lashing hail and whiten the green plains under. And then again I dissolve it in rain and laugh as I pass in thunder.

And it’s so beautiful and rhythmic and so much imagery and should be a poem that’s taught when you’re talking about personification in English class. It’s really a lovely poem that goes on and on.

And that’s Percy Bysshe Shelley, and the poem is called? The Cloud.

The Cloud. Thanks, Martha. That was beautiful.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike.

Hi, Mike.

From Green Bay. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you? I was just talking a few days ago with my dad. You were talking about kind of some drinking colloquialism that we’ve both grown up with throughout the generations. And one that we found that we both knew was Radke’s. And it’s a term that we’ve both known in our friend groups for unfinished beers that you find at a party.

You pick a can up and it’s only half full and you say, well, who left the Radke here? Why aren’t you’re finishing your beers?

And he had traced it back to his college friend, whose last name was Radke. And he was telling me, you know, that’s all over the country. And that, you know, he’s been to California, Nashville. He’s been in Florida.

And he’s heard people using this term that was started in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

Oh, has he really?

Sure he wasn’t pulling your leg?

No.

And it’s something that I had heard.

And I thought maybe it was just something that my friends and I had done picked up off of him.

But my friends said that I was never the first one to have introduced them to the word.

And I’ve met other people that have said that they recognize it as well.

So Radkey meaning an unfinished beer your father claims to have coined based on the name of a friend?

Yep. It was his friend group that he’s claiming to have started it based on the last name of one of his college friends.

I’ve got to tell you, I’ve never heard of it, Mike.

And it doesn’t come up in any slang dictionaries or any Google searches.

Heck, even for looking around Wisconsin, I don’t even see it.

So, Mike, was this guy known for leaving half a line in Kugel there or drinking everybody else’s?

Yeah, I think it was he was just drinking to be a part of the group but not really liking and enjoying the beer itself.

And so he’d crack one open and just kind of leave it and forget about it and move on.

And grab another one when he felt it was time to maybe try again.

Now, I know a couple other terms for this.

Wounded soldier is one and grenade is another,

But that one I’ve never heard of.

I’ve never heard a half-finished beer called a Radke.

But you know what?

Our show is heard around the country,

And if people are using it elsewhere,

I encourage them to call so we can get the data on this

And figure out if Radke is used elsewhere.

Yeah, and maybe Mr. Radke will call in.

Maybe.

All right.

We’ll throw that out, and if we hear more about it, we’ll let you know.

If you meet the guy Radke and he has something to say about this, have him reach out to us, all right?

Absolutely.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Yep.

You’re welcome.

Happy to be here.

Take care.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I’m sorry to be so skeptical. It’s just so often when people say that they coined a word and now everyone’s using it, there are a couple different ways it can go, but almost never when somebody says they coined a word, did they?

Right.

Or were they the first?

Right.

Or it’s the other thing is they say that everyone’s using the word. I’m like, I don’t see it. I’ve got some resources, you know, that other people don’t have to look this stuff up or to search for it or contact people. And I just don’t see it for Radke.

Yeah.

Chances are they didn’t coin it.

Yeah.

It could be the Wisconsin diaspora, though, right? It could be people from this other group have spread out to other parts of the country and maybe they are using it. Drinking lots of beer. You never know.

877-929-9673 or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rachel. I’m calling from College Park, Maryland.

Hi, Rachel. Welcome to the show. Also, I recently moved to Maryland for grad school, and my housemates and I were just sitting around, and we heard the sound of the ice cream truck coming down the street. And without really thinking, I just said, we should get some ice cream from the Ding Bean Man. And needless to say, they all kind of looked at each other and were like, what? And I realized it was kind of a juvenile term, but I hadn’t really thought about it because it’s just kind of what we said.

So I’m originally from Omaha, Nebraska. Ding-ding man. That’s what we say, yeah. This is the truck that drives around with the music and serves you ice cream from a little window on the side.

Right.

Yeah, it’s funny that you describe it as ding-ding because I was just talking to Grant the other day about how we had ding-ding in our family as a family word. We referred to our belly buttons as ding-dings. Different. You know, they’re like doorbells, right? How can you resist?

Yeah.

So your friends are laughing at you, huh? So in Maryland, they don’t say ding-ding man, but in Nebraska they do?

Apparently.

My roommates are from Ohio and Florida.

Okay.

So they hadn’t heard it there. And I’ve done a little bit of fooling around campus from people that I’ve met asking if they’d ever heard of it. And none of them had.

Yeah.

But people in Nebraska that I’ve asked earlier, oh, yeah, the ding-ding man. It’s such a funny term.

Yeah, that’s really funny. It seems to be localized now pretty much to Nebraska.

And Omaha in specific.

Yeah, and Omaha. Do you remember specifically what kind of truck that was and what kind of bell? What did it sound like?

Yeah, like growing up, I think I remember it being more of a like ding, ding, ding, ding kind of sound. But then like going to college, which was also in Nebraska and Lincoln instead of Omaha, then I remember hearing the sound because I was confused why there was a music like Christmas music play in the summer.

Yeah, right.

But I remember that being odd, but then I didn’t really make the connection between it not having a ding, ding sound. They’ll call it the ding, ding.

Oh, so this is an important distinction. In Omaha, they just have the bell. They don’t play like Turkey and the Straw or Jingle Bells, right?

That’s what I was going to say. Turkey and the Straw is the one that I heard in Kentucky. It was really annoying, too. But, yeah, all these other public domain songs like that.

Yeah.

But, yeah, Turkey and the Straw for sure. Yeah, Mr. Softy in New York. I can still hum that song in my sleep.

Well, Martha and I both understand that this term is still used in Omaha and parts of Nebraska. It used to be more widespread. You can find mentions of the ding-ding back as far as the early 1900s. Often, though, it was a conductor of a trolley car and not, again, ringing a bell. But again, here and there in St. Joseph, Missouri, which isn’t that far from Omaha, Springfield, Missouri, which is a little further, central Ohio, as far back as 1917. And in Illinois, I can find uses in newspapers of people calling the ice cream truck of a ding-ding man. But now it’s just mostly in Nebraska.

Yeah, as far as we know, it is exclusive to Nebraska and mostly in Omaha.

Yeah, it’s kind of an Omaha thing. That’s so funny. So you can take that back to your friends. You’re not the only one.

Yeah, that’s good to hear. They thought I was ding dong.

No, you’re very nice. We like you. Rachel, thanks so much for calling.

Thanks, Rachel. Thanks for talking with me.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I remember calling that person the good humor man back in the day. Brands of ice cream. It’s still out there, I think. And that’s in New York, Mr. Softy is like a brand of truck and ice cream. But the Christmas music throughout the year, that’s the signature of a lot of these vehicles, right?

Yeah. And I remember some kind of classical music too that they played, which sounded ridiculous on one of those trucks. I did hear one doing the Star Wars theme driving down the street in New York when they were trying to make a name for themselves.

Yeah, I think I remember hearing J. Sue Joy of man’s desiring or something like that. What do they call the ice cream truck or the person who operates it out your way?

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

We heard from Tracy Bullington in northern Idaho. She left us a voicemail talking about a family term. She went shopping with her second son when he was very small, and she bought some eggnog. And she didn’t think anything of it. She said, I’m getting some eggnog. Later in the day, he said, Mommy, can I have some chicken milk? And so, of course, ever after, her family is referred to eggnog as chicken milk.

Oh, I love these. I can never tire of the cute things the kids say. There’s no end to it. It’s an endless supply of fun little cuteness.

Send yours to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Want more A Way with Words? Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show on 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. you