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Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paints, anyway? Martha and Grant ponder that mystery. They also explain why those annoying emails go by the name spam. And Grant explains the difference between being "adorbs" and "bobo."
This episode first aired October 24, 2009. Listen here:
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Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paint, anyway? Must be the same people who get paid to give names like Love Child, Sellout, and Apocalypse to shades of lipstick. Martha and Grant discuss wacky color names.
Hurly-burly, helter-skelter, zigzag, shilly-shally — the hosts dish out some claptrap about words like these, otherwise known as reduplications or rhyming jingles.
If someone's naked as a needle, just how naked are they? Why "needle"?
Grant and Martha discuss more goofy names for lipstick. Mauvelous Memories, anyone?
Quiz Guy John Chaneski's latest puzzle requires players to guess the last word in a two-line verse. For example: "He's seven feet tall and big as a tank, The meanest Marine that you've ever BLANK." (Stumped? Take a letter out of "seven.")
An Episcopal priest in Toledo worries that her sermons are cluttered with dashes. This works just fine when she's preaching, but when the same text appears on her church's website, it looks like a messy tangle of words and punctuation. The hosts discuss the differences between text written for oral delivery, and text written to be read silently.
Why is that annoying stuff in your email box called spam? Grant has the answer. Here's the Monty Python skit that inspired it.
Can a first-time event ever be called "The First Annual" Such-and-Such? Members of a Cedar Rapids group planning a social mixer disagree.
Is that snazzy new car adorbs or bobo? Grant talks about adorbs, bobo, and a few other slang terms collected by Professor Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Theories about how Latin Americans came to use the term gringo as a disparaging word for foreigners. We can easily rule out the one about the song "Green Grow the Lilacs," but what about the rest?
An insurance fraud investigator in Milwaukee wonders if he's correct to use a semicolon immediately after the word "however." Grant suggests that the word and the punctuation mark should do a do-si-do.
Many of us learned the rule about using the preposition between when talking about two items, but among when talking about more than two. In reality, though, the rule is a little more complicated.
Someone who's extremely busy may be said to be busier than a cranberry merchant. What is it that keeps cranberry merchants so busy, anyway?
COLORS:
1. Some companies used to name colors in a way that was clever but still identifiable. The examples I remember are "Zane grey" and "tuckered-out plum."
2. An old story tells of a husband and wife getting ready for a yard sale.
She suggested they print up fliers in an attention-getting color like "sunflower."
"Why do you have to give it a fancy name?" he replied irritably. "Just call it 'yellow'."
When they get to the copy center, he took control and spoke up first: "We want 20 copies of this on YELLOW paper."
To which the clerk responded, "Did you mean 'marigold'?"
"first annual" - At work, our publications style guide tells us to use "inaugural" instead. From dictionary.com, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, definition includes "To cause to begin, especially officially or formally." So this might be an alternative that avoids the argument.
When I was in high school 20 years ago we all wore bobos and they were shoes. They were the plain white shoes (similar to Keds) but were not marked, and very inexpensive, usually only worn a few times then replaced. Being the 80s we of course wore them with wildly colored socks too!
I went to school in Tampa Florida
My daughter is 17 in Atlanta and she uses bobo to describe something that is cheap or poorly made รขโฌโ a rickety chair would be รขโฌลall boboรขโฌย, or a sloppy project board (like a science project) is รขโฌลboboรขโฌย which is why they got a bad grade.
Just thought I'd share.
Love your show!!
Tracy Stegall
johng423 said:
COLORS:
1. Some companies used to name colors in a way that was clever but still identifiable. The examples I remember are "Zane grey" and "tuckered-out plum."
2. An old story tells of a husband and wife getting ready for a yard sale.
She suggested they print up fliers in an attention-getting color like "sunflower."
"Why do you have to give it a fancy name?" he replied irritably. "Just call it 'yellow'."
When they get to the copy center, he took control and spoke up first: "We want 20 copies of this on YELLOW paper."
To which the clerk responded, "Did you mean 'marigold'?"
The short-lived Apple //c computer came in what the company insisted was "snow beige". The rest of the world thought it just looked "white".
Also short-lived was an early 70s sitcom based on Thorne Smith's "Turnabout" in which a couple (John Schuck and Sharon Gless) got their minds swapped into each other's bodies by a mischievous magical statue. While trying to live his wife's life as an executive for a cosmetics company, the husband was told that the main thing to remember was that you needed to come up each year with twenty new words for "red".
In listening to the bit about cranberries in odd places, I remembered a trip I did to Washington state a number of years ago. I was driving up the west coast, stopping wherever something looked interesting. I ran across a cranberry research station in the southwest corner of the state and decided to check it out. They had a brochure stand out by the main plots for a self-guided tour.
One of the things I learned there is that not all cranberries are harvested by flooding the plot so the berries will float. Dry-harvested berries are used in cranberry sauce and juice. Wet-harvested berries are sold fresh. I assume because the berries get more beat-up by the dry process and look/last better if they're wet harvested.
ArteNow
I heard the discussion about the word "gringo". The story I have always read is that during the Mexican American war, the US troops marching through the country sang a popular song: "Green goes the grass as they go". The term has been used ever since as a derogatory term for Americans of Anglo ancestry. It is definitely an ethnic slur.
T-tom - 'gringo' isn't necessarily a slur, although it certainly can be, depending on where you are. I think in Mexico it's much more of a slur than in some other places.
I've spent a fair amount of time in El Salvador over the years and (at least among the people I'm interacting with) 'gringo' is used as a simple descriptor and sometimes a term of affection. One time, a group I was with was traveling with the Bishop and one of our party overheard him referring to us as 'gringitos' with an affectionate smile on his face. He was a very kind man and would not have used any form of the word if he'd considered it a slur.
The 2009 Ig Nobel Prize winners were awarded at the 19th First Annual ceremony on October 1.
Concerning translating spoken language into written, Emma Hardman gave a good description of what is involved in recording parliamentary proceedings in Australia on an ABC (Australia) programme Lingua Franca. She makes it clear that a verbatim transcript would not clearly represent what was said.
I was raised using the word bobo to mean someone that is stupid. Someone could be a bobo, or a bobo-head. We also use the word stupid to refer to something that is cheap. Like if I got a toy that was just a cheaply made item, or a little trinket, we would have said it was a stupid little toy.
It would just make sense then, if bobo=stupid=cheap.
TStegall said:
When I was in high school 20 years ago we all wore bobos and they were shoes. They were the plain white shoes (similar to Keds) but were not marked, and very inexpensive, usually only worn a few times then replaced. Being the 80s we of course wore them with wildly colored socks too!
I went to school in Tampa Florida
In elementary and middle school in the eighties I remember singing about those shoes:
"bobos--they make your feet feel fine--bobos--they coss a dollar ninetey nine!"
This was in Elkton, MD
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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