Dust Bunnies (episodes #1393)

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.

Grant, you and I both listen to a lot of podcasts.

Oh, yeah.

Lately, I’ve been trying to mix things up for myself a little bit.

I’m not listening so much to other radio shows, but I’m listening to old Sherlock Holmes stories.

Oh, nice.

You know, the Conan Doyle.

I’m binge listening.

Binge listening.

But you know what? Sometimes I still feel when I’m listening to audiobooks that I’m, I don’t know, cheating somehow.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah. It feels a tiny bit transgressive, you know, like I’m not allowed to do it. Do you know what I mean?

I do know what you mean.

Oh, good. I’m really, really absorbed. I’m really loving listening this way. But then, you know, if I tell somebody that I read the book, then I still sort of—

You feel like a liar.

I do. And we’ve been talking about this on our Facebook page, and we’ve had some really thoughtful comments about this.

And I especially liked one from Tyler Connolly, who said that he learned to love reading by having his sister read to him when he was little.

He said, we read the Chronicles of Narnia, the Anne of Green Gables series, and all of the Laura Ingalls Wilders books, with her sitting in an easy chair reading and me lying on the floor listening.

It never occurred to me that I had only quote-unquote read those books until much later when people began to question my audiobook habit and my casually mentioning that I had read a book when I had only listened to it.

Yeah, you’re still getting the information.

As a matter of fact, you might be getting it better than you could read it because it comes from a professional actor, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Reading in a great voice, maybe doing accents and voices and the pausing and timing that makes it a little more dramatic maybe than what’s happening in your head.

Yeah, I feel like I just, I don’t know, I feel it more.

And I’ve been heartened by the comments from people noting that for most of recorded history, well, it wasn’t recorded.

It was just spoken orally, right?

Yep, that’s right.

We heard it.

We didn’t read it.

I’m with you, but I actually horrify people even more when I talk about my listening habits.

Because when I listen to books on tape, I play them at one and a half times speed.

Oh, of course you do.

Because it’s too slow otherwise.

Of course you do.

And people are like, that’s horrific.

You’re ruining the book and the acting talents of the voice, the person doing the voices.

Oh, my gosh.

So they’re at a higher pitch.

You have never experienced pleasure, by the way, until you’ve heard Ira Glass at one and a half times speed.

He sounds great.

But a lot younger.

He sounds like Jerry Lewis.

What are your thoughts about audiobooks?

Does it count as reading if you listen to a book on tape or a book on CD or a book on your iPod?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Christina and I’m calling from Phoenix, Arizona.

Hey, Christina, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, I was hoping you could help settle a debate that erupted on Facebook for me.

Oh, okay, sure.

Well, a friend of mine posted a status that said something along the lines of, “Attention, it is chai, not chai tea, that is all.”

And I chimed into that and I said, well, you know, I don’t think here in America that’s really necessarily true.

And I simply said that I think it’s a way of specifying the kind of tea you want because, you know, there’s Earl Grey and Camel and all kinds of tea.

And although the technical definition of chai is tea, that’s not necessarily how the word is used here.

And my friend replied to that saying, well, you don’t say Coke soda or steak beef.

And his argument was that it was redundant.

Now, a bunch of his friends chimed in, and a lot of this was taken up with them explaining, no, actually, chai in a lot of Asian countries, the meaning is tea, and it’s a specific kind of tea with spices.

And I kept saying, no, I have no qualm with the definition of chai being tea.

I totally agree with that.

I just don’t think that’s, you know, it’s not redundant because of how it’s used here in America.

So I was just hoping you could shed some light on that.

I think you’re right. I think you’re totally right.

Yeah, because it was like me against 10 people.

I know, but the thing is, this debate is so fierce.

Is chai tea redundant that there have been editing wars on Wikipedia, and they’ve literally taken over the chai page and redirected it to Masala chai?

Because the pedants there will not let this go.

They just will not let this go.

That’s what I said. I said, English is a beautiful language.

You’re all being, you know, I said, they all said you’re using it wrong.

And I said, why? Because I don’t want English to just be this stoic, you know, pedantic language.

Here’s the mistake that they’re making.

They’re not Chinese. They’re not Indian. They’re not Russian. They’re not Persian.

They’re American.

And we borrowed this word imperfectly, admittedly, but now it is what it is.

And chai means a spiced tea in this country.

And that’s that.

And you can say, oh, in India, it means something else.

Well, in India, fine.

Go speak Hindi and Urdu and go to India.

But in English, in the United States, right now, chai tea is a particular thing.

And it’s a real thing.

And chai is fine.

You can say chai, but just because it means only tea in another country doesn’t mean we’re beholden to it.

That is what we call the etymological fallacy.

It’s an etymological fallacy to think that a word must only have its original meaning and that’s it for all time.

It just doesn’t work that way.

So tell them to have a tuna fish sandwich with their chai tea.

Yeah, and they’re wrong about beefsteak.

We do say beefsteak because you also have porksteaks, at least where I’m from in St. Louis, right?

And the soda example is wrong, too.

People say soda pop.

That means soda soda or pop pop, depending where you’re from, right?

Oh, that’s true.

I hadn’t thought about that.

Yeah, there’s a ton of places where we specify like that.

So you’re basically saying, you know, there’s no redundancy there.

I mean, yes, chai is a specific kind of tea.

So by saying chai, you said tea.

But, you know, I mean, my whole thing was it was basically just a specification.

We have this thing in English called semantic differentiation, where we already had the word for T, right?

And then British soldiers in Asia encountered the word chai everywhere they went.

It was in Malaysia. It was in India. It was in what is now Iraq or now in Iran.

It was in China, which is where the word chai originally comes from.

And this word for T spread to all these countries.

They brought it back.

However, when they brought it back, they brought it back attached only to the spiced tea from a particular part of India.

Right.

And that is how we got that word.

So we already had a word for tea.

We didn’t need another word for tea.

We weren’t going to start calling tea chai.

So what we did is we said, oh, well, how about we just take this word chai and make it only mean this particular kind of spiced tea?

And this is ordinary.

We do this all the time in English.

The history of English is loaded.

For example, meat used to mean any food.

And then we decided, once we started encountering more French, we decided that meat would start to mean only the stuff that comes off of animals that’s made out of their muscles, right?

And we have a ton of these words where we started specializing and specifying that we’re going to restrict their meanings and narrow them down in order to avoid what is called semantic collision, where you have two words that mean exactly the same thing.

So even when we think that we have two words that are similar, we start to push them apart so that they start to not confuse us.

So anyway.

So, Christina, I think your linguistic loins are now girded, right?

Yes, I feel very validated because, really, people piled on.

I mean, there were people from all around the world, like, chiming into this.

They got up to 81 comments.

Oh, my goodness.

And there was just lonely little me saying, no, no.

Well, Christina, we appreciate your calling.

Well, thank you so much for your time.

I really appreciate it, especially since I was right.

That helps.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eddie Haynes, and I’m calling from Glover, Vermont.

Glover, Vermont. Welcome to the show, Eddie. What’s going on?

Yes, thank you.

Well, I’m calling from Vermont, but my question is really more Texas-based, actually, which is where my family’s from.

So I was just curious about nicknames in the South and if there’s any other traditions that has such a colorful group of names.

And I have a list of my family here, which is pretty good.

Oh, yeah. Let’s have the list.

The most traditional, which would be Granny and Granddaddy Alan.

But then we have Mama Sue, whose real name was Lulabelle, which she hated.

And she was married to Daddy B.

And all the ants, we say ain’t.

Not ant, we say ain’t.

We have Ain’t Tommy, which is an ain’t skinny, ain’t baby.

We have Aunt Skeeter, who was married to Uncle Son, and that’s Uncle S-O-N.

A sister named Zolly, who went by the name Tate.

We have Mama Nix and Daddy Nix and Susie and Shorty.

Nana and Papa, whose names were Ada Ruth, and she was called Rusty because of her red hair.

And Johnny Lee.

And my mom was Sandra Sue because her hair was red, and my grandmother, Rusty, wanted to be able to call her Sandy.

And we have Dee and Bubba.

And I have an uncle named Buzzy Boudreau from Louisiana.

And I just thought they’re such amazing names and such an incredible thing.

And I was wondering if there’s any other traditions that have such a colorful way of naming their family members.

Hey, my dad was named Henley Hewix Barnette.

That was his name.

Henley Hewix Barnette.

Yes.

Holy moly.

He was born in a log cabin at the foot of a mountain.

And I asked him, where did you get that name?

And he said, I don’t know.

They probably saw it in the newspaper or something.

But I’ve never been able to find the source of that.

And his sister was Aunt Maiso.

Aunt Maiso.

Wilma Maiso.

This has been studied, or at least it has been written about, in the journal American Speech and a few other linguistic and language journals.

And in American Speech, there was a great language researcher by the name of Louise Pound.

And she worked at a variety of universities around the country.

And really, the American Dialect Society considers her to be one of the core historical members.

She wrote about this, and she kept lists of names from her students in Nebraska and some other places as well.

And a lot of them sound like the names that you just reported.

She particularly loved, as you pointed out, the two names.

And so a lot of times they give people two names, but they combine them into one.

So Lucy Bell isn’t two names.

It’s your first name, Lucy Bell.

And there’s no space in there.

So you’d have Lucy Bell and Lynette and Bethine and Armina and Berdine and really interesting names.

But one of the names that she recorded, which I think H.L. Minkin in turn reports in his book, The American Language, this is a whole name found on a tombstone near Montgomery, Alabama.

And it is Henry Ritter, Emma Ritter, Derma Ritter, Sweet Potato, Cream of Tartar, Caroline Bostic.

Wow.

That is an entire name.

Was that male or female?

Well, Henry’s the first name, so I think it’s probably male.

But there’s some female things in there.

There are indeed.

Maybe it’s like the French tradition of putting Jean-Marie.

That’s right.

All the language authorities would agree with you, Eddie, that there is a tradition in the South of longer names, more ornate names, names with character and flavor.

And yet we do find throughout the United States that a tendency to kind of leave the old traditional names aside has grown.

And there’s a site called Proofreader.com, and they actually intentionally misspelled Proofreader with two Fs.

Proofreader.com did a really nice analysis of the Social Security Administration data.

And they show that starting in about 2000, we reached this period of maximum naming diversity.

So we’re getting more names to fewer people.

And it’s not just the Southern tradition or the African-American tradition.

There are some exceptional names in the Northeast of the United States.

And some of them have a French resonance.

And some of them have a call back to favorite literature or just whatever happened that day.

Like the young woman named Vest.

Because when she was born, her father kept her warm in his vest.

Oh, my goodness. Really?

Wow, that’s amazing.

It’s wonderful that people have such interesting names.

I think it’s fantastic.

It just makes me feel like also with my family, like I have such a good connection,

Even with the ones I’ve never met and whose names I don’t understand.

It’s just sort of there’s a uniqueness to it that I think is really beautiful.

Well, Eddie, I’ve got to thank you for this really interesting call.

Your family sounds like a great bunch of people.

I’d love to go to this, hear those names being tossed around.

And I also know that you’ve probably opened the floodgates to a lot more people reporting the interesting names in their families, and we welcome them.

Thank you so much for calling, Eddie.

Thank you very much.

Take care now.

All right. Bye-bye.

You too. Bye.

If you’ve got some weird family names, like to have Olsi, Hasey, Koba, Bleiba, Onza, Ritha, Otella, and Latrina, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Stay put. We’ll be back to untangle the web of English.

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 on the line by, who is this masked man?

It’s John Chaneski. Hello, John.

It’s John Chaneski. Hi, guys. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

I have a quiz for you.

Now, if you guys have a smartphone, you know how quickly the apps add up?

Oh, boy.

Yeah.

I have a friend, I swear to you, he has no fewer than 10 apps just for the weather.

I don’t know why.

I need an app to manage my apps.

This is true.

Now, I’ve decided that as a word person, I just stick to apps that double the sound app.

Okay.

For example, if I need the lyrics to songs by Dr. Dre or Eminem, I’ll just use my…

Rap app?

My rap app.

Nice.

That’s very good.

I’ll describe the app.

You tell me what it’s called.

Got it.

Now, I’m at the airport and I need help with my luggage.

What should I use?

A Skycap app?

The Skycap app, yes.

I need to find a convenient route across the Alps from Austria to Switzerland.

A Von Trapp app?

I need the Von Trapp app, yeah.

That’ll get me there.

Nice.

Hey, you know, I’m needed on stage at a Chicago theater for my scathing rock guitar solo,

But I’m lost backstage.

Think of a band that got lost backstage at a Chicago theater.

What?

That happened?

I don’t know.

In a famous movie.

Oh, Spinal Tap app.

Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, gosh.

That’s my Spinal Tap app.

Hello, Cleveland!

Sorry.

Now, they say if you build a better one of these,

People will be the path to your Kickstarter campaign.

Mousetrap app.

Your Mousetrap app, yes.

You know, I don’t go in for all that fancy bottled water.

I’m happy just to locate the nearest faucet.

The Tap app.

Tap app.

The Tap app.

Yeah, simple one.

When I’m stressed, I enjoy the sensation of popping the air trapped in all kinds of cushioning materials.

This exists.

The bubble wrap app.

This does exist.

It does exist.

The bubble wrap app.

I’m at the track now, and I want to determine which horses are most likely to win, place, and show.

The something I’m forgetting app.

Oh, gosh.

What do the guys at the track do to figure out which horse?

Handicap app.

Yes, they use the handicap app.

I’m sure actually that one exists too.

I’m sure.

No doubt.

It’s late, but I think one more little drink before bed will be okay.

Where can I find a place that’s open late?

The Nightcap app.

The Nightcap app, yes.

And please drink responsibly.

Now, break a break, good buddy.

I don’t want to get any tickets while I’m driving down the highway.

Where’s Smokey hiding out?

The Speed Trap app.

The Speed Trap app.

Those exist too.

I’m sure they do.

And please drive safely.

You know what?

You guys did fantastic on the app quiz.

Congratulations.

Thanks, John.

That’s super wonderful.

Thank you.

We’ll talk to you next week.

So something great, right?

Yes, of course.

All right.

Give our best to your family.

You too.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about language or a story to tell us about something that happened related to language, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email the whole details to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Hamida from San Antonio, Texas.

Hamida?

Yes.

Nice to meet you.

What can we do for you?

I wanted to know where the word kamarband originated from.

I have a theory because it sounds like a word in my language that I speak, Urdu from India.

And it sounds like two words put together from that language.

So the word kamar means waste and the word band means to tie or to close.

And when you talk about cummerbund, you’re talking about the thing that men wear around the waist with a thinner jacket or tuxedo or something.

Yeah, and that’s exactly right.

It does come from what is now Pakistan and India, from the Urdu and Hindi languages.

And we got it into English from the British experience in the subcontinent.

So you are exactly right, Hamida.

That is exactly where it comes from.

Your instincts are good.

And the story of how it became a part of formal attire is interesting and worth hearing, if you’ve got a second.

Do you want to hear this?

Yeah.

In the late 1800s, there was a fellow by the name of Julius Jeffries, and he was a doctor.

And I’m getting this information from a book by Bernard Cohn called Colonialism and Its Forms of Knowledge.

So Dr. Jeffries had this theory that the British, the Europeans who were in the subcontinent should wear flannel and that it would protect them from diseases like cholera.

And he suggested that even in the heat, their entire outfit should be made out of flannel.

And he himself wore a flannel suit for seven years and never caught anything as far as he ever reported to anybody.

And so he passed this on to the powers that be, which then kind of made it a policy to wear flannel.

And now what happened is over the years it got reduced.

So maybe you were only flannel pants or a flannel suit, or maybe you just wore a flannel sash around your midsection.

So by the 1880s, nothing was left of this flannel except the cummerbund.

So you would just wear your uniform.

And as part of that, you would have this formal piece of flannel around your midsection that was supposed to ward off the diseases of that part of the world.

And they called it the cholera belt.

That was their name for it.

Is that right?

Because it was supposed to stop cholera.

And so before you know it, this got kind of added to the formal uniform of soldiers.

And because it was part of the formal uniform, would be adopted into other kinds of formal outerwear.

And then past many decades, and here we are in the United States, if you’re 17 going to your senior prom, you’re probably wearing this belt around your midsection because of what happened with the British in India that long ago.

Wow, I did hear about the collar belt. I didn’t know that this was connected to that. That’s really interesting.

What’s really interesting is that they started to think about it almost magically and stopped thinking about it as a barrier that would stop illnesses from touching the skin and just kind of started treating the flannel as if it had magical powers.

Just the presence of the flannel would ward off evil or ward off disease.

And so it was almost a token.

It’s kind of like, you ever seen like a six-year-old wash his hands?

He just kind of gets them wet and doesn’t really wash them.

It’s kind of like that.

It doesn’t actually do any job anymore, but you still feel like, well, I’ve gone through the motions.

Here it is.

Yes, that’s my son.

You’re talking about my son.

Yes, mine too.

I was thinking of my own son, but yes.

So anyway, so that’s how Kamar Bunn, it does come from that part of the world, Hindi and Urdu, and that’s how it ended up in the attire of Americans who go to formal gatherings.

Wow, that is so crazy.

You guys are awesome.

I love your show.

Thank you very much.

Well, we’re glad to hear from you, Hamida.

If anything else occurs to you, because we don’t know anything about Urdu, let us know.

We’d be glad to hear from you again, all right?

Thank you.

You guys have a great day.

Cheers.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your stories about language.

The number is 877-929-9673, or you can send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Sometimes when we talk about language on the show, I really have a mission, and that is just to get something on the record that I think people need to be aware of, just so for all time, I’ve got one.

Okay.

It’s the term rage quit, which I’ve known for years and which I’ve never talked about.

So rage quit, let’s say you’re on Facebook and Facebook does like a redesign and just kind of ruins your news feed.

And it’s not the Facebook that it used to be.

And you’re like, I’m out of here.

This is terrible.

And you quit Facebook and cancel your account and close everything.

That’s a rage quit.

Yes, it is.

Or the classic example is the kid who takes his ball and goes home because the game’s not going his way.

He’s losing or he didn’t get picked for the side that he wanted.

That sort of thing.

That’s a rage quit, just to quit something in anger and stalk off.

As soon as you said it, I was thinking about quitting a job, you know, leaning out the window and yelling, I’m mad as hell, I’m not going to take it anymore.

Yeah, yeah, and just dropping your gun and your badge on the desk and turning around, right?

So rage quit, on the record for all time.

Okay, and what do you want to get on the record?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant.

This is Clark calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Clark. Welcome to the program.

Hello, Clark. What can we do for you?

Hi, Martha.

Hi.

I got to comparing some Greek symbols or letters that we use here in all our math and engineering firm I’m associated with.

And usually I can translate from Greek to English equivalent and vice versa.

But I noticed that the order of these alphabets is considerably different.

Why is the order of the letters so different in one than in the other?

You know, Clark, I would say that they’re not really that different.

I know the appearance of the letters is really quite different, but, you know, there’s actually a skeleton that they hang on.

You know, the first two letters are alpha and beta in Greek, which, of course, give us the word alphabet, right?

And then in the middle you have the sounds for K-L-M-N-O-P, and shortly after that the S and the T sound.

So I think once you get familiar with the letters, you can see a resemblance there, which makes perfect sense since most, actually the vast majority of alphabets in the world sprang from a common ancestor.

Greek ends in omega.

Right.

Zeta.

Right.

Right.

Yeah, there are a few differences, and in English we tacked on a few extra letters, particularly at the end there.

But what I’m saying is that there’s this basic framework, which is actually pretty miraculous.

Grant, I love the story of how the alphabet came to be.

Right. We’re talking about 1500, 1600 B.C.

We’ve got the first written records of this particular script.

We know roughly how it was pronounced.

We can see the letter forms and then we can follow the transformation of these letter forms in the written record up to today, to this very minute.

And see how they changed bit by bit in the hands of different scribes.

Sometimes the alphabet changed according to the language that it was being borrowed into.

Well, yeah, and that’s what’s really crazy, is that it seems to have started by Semitic people living in Egypt.

They couldn’t read hieroglyphics, which was representing words by symbols.

And so you’d have to learn hundreds and hundreds of symbols of hieroglyphics.

But the genius that these people had was to come up with symbols that symbolized the sounds in their language, not individual words.

And so that was transferred to, for example, the Phoenicians living on the coast of Lebanon and part of Syria.

What I’m saying is that it’s so mind-blowing that, for example, the Greeks looked at the Phoenicians who had a completely different language, a Semitic language,

And they thought, wow, we can use those symbols for sounds in our language, our language, which is completely different from yours.

And so, again.

So there’s a little bit of transposition, a little bit of altering every time it was borrowed, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, but from language to language, that’s what’s so dazzling about it.

And some of the letters have not changed all that much.

They really haven’t.

So you can see the differences, Clark, but we’re focusing on the similarities between these different generations of characters.

Yeah, and Clark, I will tell you there’s a really helpful website.

It’s by Professor Robert Fradkin at the University of Maryland.

If you go to his website, he’s got these fantastic representations of slides of an early alphabet,

And then you see it morphing into later alphabets.

It’s really fascinating.

That used to be the first page of the Encyclopedia Britannica, I think I did as a child,

That always showed the evolution of the individual letters.

Oh, I loved that page in dictionaries.

I still do.

It’s still one of my favorite things.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure.

Thank you, sir.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got questions about language or something to share,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, how do you feel about adjectives?

Love them.

Yeah?

They’re great.

They’re excellent.

They’re good.

They’re wonderful.

I get it.

You know, a lot of writers advise against them.

Yeah, I’ve seen that.

Yeah, there’s been a lot.

Where are you headed with this?

Because I have opinions.

Okay.

Let me just throw out a few things that writers have said about them.

Clifton Paul Fadiman said,

The adjective is the banana peel of the parts of speech.

That’s a good line.

Yeah, isn’t that good? And the road to hell is paved with adjectives. That’s what Stephen King said.

I think they’re being a little extreme, though.

Yeah.

Don’t you think?

Well, it would be a mistake to read that, as some people have done, to say that you shouldn’t have any adjectives at all.

Right.

What they’re all suggesting is very judicious use.

Right. Exactly. And that’s exactly what Mark Twain advised.

And I think this is my favorite piece of advice about adjectives ever.

He wrote,

When you catch an adjective, kill it.

No, I don’t mean that utterly, but kill the most of them.

Then the rest will be valuable.

They weaken when they’re close together.

They give strength when they’re wide apart.

An adjective habit or a wordy, diffuse, or flowery habit,

Once fastened upon a person, is as hard to get rid of as any other vice.

I think that makes sense.

That’s wonderful.

That’s it.

Because you can’t do without them completely.

Correct.

But if you’re stacking them up because you can’t think of a strong verb

Or you’re stacking them up because you don’t know the right word for a thing.

Right, or you’re going to the thesaurus and just pulling out a bunch of them.

Which is always dangerous.

Yes, yes, very dangerous.

We’ve talked about the young boy that I was told about

Who was trying to sound fancy for a school paper about what he did.

And he wanted to write that he ate pizza, but he wrote, I corroded pizza.

Corroded, oh.

Because he went to the thesaurus and a synonym of to eat is corrode.

Word to the wise.

Share your words of wisdom and your stories about language with us at 877-929-9673

Or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jan.

I’m calling from Indiana.

Well, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I am wondering where the term skin flint came from.

I know what it means to me and my family.

I remember my parents talking about someone being a skinflint.

And in our understanding, it was someone stingy or tight-fisted.

And I just hadn’t even thought about it until recently I was listening to A Way with Words.

And something happened.

I started to say something about someone, and that term came to mind.

And I thought, there’s a good one for A Way with Words.

I know what a flint is, but I don’t know how in the world that evolved.

Absolutely. It’s a great one.

Yeah, yeah, it’s really good, and it’s pretty straightforward.

You said you know what a flint is.

I mean, it’s a very, very hard stone.

And so somebody who’s really, really, really stingy would actually skin a flint, somehow manage with great effort to skin a flint, which would be really hard to do.

Right.

Because it’s so hard.

And they would skin it the way you might skin an animal and to sell the pelt, right?

Yeah.

Well, interesting that you mentioned that because the expression to skin a flint, which means to go to extreme lengths to do something, goes all the way back to the 17th century.

And there’s also another expression from that time that goes, to skin a flea for its hide and tallow, which is really, really—

Wow.

That’s incredibly parsimonious.

So if you’re skinning a flint, you think there’s some value in taking the skin off of a stone and trying to sell it for money.

Yeah.

Because you’re so stingy, you’ll get every nickel out of everything you possibly can.

Exactly.

Wow.

So it began as a term for taking one more layer off the stone.

Yes.

It’s a great way to put it.

Just getting the tiniest little bit.

I’m thinking of a word in ancient Greek for the same thing, which translates as cumin splitter.

You know how cumin, the spice, is really, really tiny.

And if you split it, then you’re similarly parsimonious.

What language is that?

Ancient Greek.

Ancient Greek, nice.

Cuminopristes.

I’m not splitting any cumin.

It’s really hard.

I’ve tried.

So I love this.

So embedded in this history is this old idea of stinginess, but we don’t think about skinning anything much anymore.

Yeah, we think about pinching pennies or that kind of thing.

Right.

So there you go.

Okay.

Thanks for calling, Jan.

I appreciate your help.

Sure.

Take care now.

Okay.

Take care.

Okay.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, what do you call the soft rolls of dust that collect on the floor under the bed?

Dust bunnies.

I do too.

Yeah.

I thought everybody called it that.

No?

But no.

Oh, I knew there were other ones.

I didn’t realize that there were so many other versions of that.

Like what?

Like dust kitties and dust kittens.

And in Alabama particularly, I’ve never heard the term house moss.

House moss.

Yeah.

M-O-S-S.

Ooh, nice.

That’s good though.

I like it.

Because it accumulates in this unknown way.

You don’t see moss growing.

There’s no budding and flowering.

It’s just there.

Right.

One day, it’s just there.

And then you look under the bed, you’re like, what is this?

How did this get here?

I didn’t put this here.

Yeah, exactly.

What do you call those things under the bed?

Let us know.

877-929-9673.

Or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

More stories about what we say and how we say it.

Stay with us.

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.

You ever notice how often they’ll announce the Nobel Prize winner for literature,

Some of the greatest literature in the world, and you’ll think, who the heck is that?

I mean, if you’re like most Americans, you might not even know how to pronounce their names, much less be familiar with their work.

And of all the books published in this country every year, it turns out that a tiny, tiny percentage of those works are translated from other languages,

Which means that the Franz Kafka’s and the Leo Tolstoy’s of today’s generation, the great South American and African writers of today, probably won’t be discovered until long after they’re dead.

Because the translation is not happening.

Yeah.

And so this audience can’t read them.

And we are one of the biggest book-buying audiences in the world.

Yeah.

And that’s partly because there’s not that much incentive for translations.

It’s not the kind of thing that’s rewarded so much in the academic world.

And, of course, there’s the extra expense of hiring a translator.

I mean, if you get a great translation, you’re really, really fortunate.

But I can’t help but wonder what I’m missing out on.

I feel the same way.

And yet, having worked in book publishing, I know that altruism can’t really come into it.

You can’t just translate and publish an author just because they’re the best in their time and place.

There has to be a market for the product.

Right.

But I do feel that sometimes it’s a little inverted that they’re not ever going to have the market unless they start translating the books and taking a chance again and again and again to build up that history of great translations of great world authors.

I think one thing that is helpful is the fact that there’s the magazine Words Without Borders, which you can find at wordswithoutborders.org, which publishes a lot of new literature in translation.

In fact, they just published a bunch of graphic novels translated from other languages, which might be a great place to start.

Yeah, that sounds really great. I’ve checked that out and I’ve added a few things to my reading list.

And it’s really rewarding if you can find the time for it.

If you’ve read a book in translation that you think is really, really great and we should know about it, call us 877-929-9673 or tell us about it in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Bill Dowlin.

I live in Moortown, Vermont.

I grew up in the Boston area.

My father, who’s now 93, occasionally would use the expression saucered and blowed.

It was usually at the end of some lengthy process that he wanted to announce was finished.

So let’s say the kids are going out to the school bus and they have to get their snowsuits on and they have to get their breakfast and they get their lunch money.

My mother would say, are they ready?

And he’d say, yep, they’re all saucer and blowed.

And with some questioning, it turns out this was an expression of his Uncle Pat, who was a chicken farmer from the suburbs of Boston.

And people used to saucer and blow their beverages in their soup.

Yeah, absolutely.

Right. Or their coffee.

He used the example of somebody enjoying their cup of coffee, and somebody else would say, gee, I’d love a cup, but I’m in a hurry.

And they say, well, you can have mine. It’s already saucered and blowed.

But I really can’t use it without people thinking I’m kind of, you know, odd.

Are you?

Yes.

Own it.

Own it, baby.

Own it.

You are a perceptive.

We’re going to connect you to a larger world of people who use this term.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s a long tradition of it.

And it’s exactly what you said.

It’s that tradition of, it’s sort of a rustic tradition.

And particularly with boiled coffee or boiled tea that you cool it off by pouring out a little bit into your saucer and slurping it up from there.

That was at one time in this country considered perfectly hospitable in rustic areas at least.

My grandma, Winnie, used to do that with grapefruit juice actually.

But it doesn’t need to be cooled.

No, no, but she didn’t think anything of eating half a grapefruit and then squeezing it out onto the saucer and slurping it up.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah.

So the whole idea is you get larger surface area on the saucer.

It’s a thin layer of hot liquid that cools really fast, and then you can drink it without having to wait for the whole cup to cool, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Bill, would it make you feel any better to know that Bill Clinton has used that expression?

A lot better.

Oh, he has.

Oh, yes.

Yes, yes.

He actually used it years ago.

I remember reading an account that included a description of an election that he knew he was going to lose, and he described it as being all saucered and blowed already.

There was a writer named Harry Marlin who wrote for the Brownsworth Bulletin in Central Texas who wrote about this in one of his newspaper columns.

And he has this great line where he says, drinking coffee from a saucer involved a lot of slurping, which the older men had developed a knack for.

I never seemed to get the hang of it.

I could drink water out of a stock tank without getting my elbows muddy, but the coffee slurping had me stymied.

And that’s how I think about it.

It’s a particular type of, it’s a place in time, rural, rustic, maybe the cowboy tradition.

I don’t even know, right?

Yeah.

But we do find mentions of people slurping their coffee this way or their tea back into at least the 1850s.

But there was no harm in it.

It wasn’t considered crass or vulgar.

Oh, exactly.

That’s just what you did.

Yeah.

There’s some story attributed to George Washington referring to that practice.

Yeah.

I do like, one thing I like about this term, Bill, is the fact that we’ve turned the noun saucer into a verb.

We’ve saucered and bloat.

And also bloat is a little, like, non-standard of the past.

But it’s really separated from its original metaphor.

Saucered and bloat.

Yeah.

How are you feeling now, Bill?

Way better.

Not so lonesome?

I’ve yet to find anybody who responds.

You know, if I use it, you know, to anybody except my family members, they think I’m speaking some foreign language.

But, yeah, the Bill Clinton connection is definitely a validation.

Well, being a role model for others is always a lonesome job, Bill.

Thanks for your call.

I really appreciate it.

I’m sure you’ve helped, Bill.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Send us a message on Twitter to the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Here’s a food word that I came across.

Do you know what a sport pepper is?

A what kind?

A sport pepper.

Sport?

Yeah, sport.

S-P-O-R-T.

No clue.

I imagined in my mind that I had racing stripes or I had like flames on the front, like it would be a hot pepper and it would look like it was on fire.

But it’s a kind of a piquant pepper.

It’s a spicy pepper.

It’s just the name for it, sport pepper.

I think they’re small.

Maybe they’re used as garnishes and they’re not like a part of your primary dish.

It’s really interesting.

Sport pepper.

Google that.

Check out the pepper world because the pepper world is loaded with crazy language.

Just bite into one.

Well, I know there’s one called Pili Pili Ho Ho.

But I was a little disappointed.

It didn’t have wheels.

There were no…

I wanted like an airfoil and like an air scoop on the hood.

Yeah, great shape.

Yeah.

I was imagining like a sports car looking pepper, but no.

No fun.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Cindy.

How are you?

Hi, Cindy. Doing well. Where are you calling us from?

Bethesda, Maryland.

Bethesda.

Well, welcome to the show, Cindy. How can we help?

All through my working career, I’ve had issues with proofreading.

And I had been thinking about some mistakes that I had missed the week prior with some materials that we have to provide to our board of trustees.

And it’s a muscle that I just have never had training in exercising.

And I really am kind of desperately asking, how can you train yourself to be a better proofreader for both content and grammar?

I didn’t learn in school how to proofread.

It just was assumed that you could proofread.

And my boss says that you either have it or you don’t.

Oh, really?

That’s what she says, which I find discouraging.

Oh, dear.

I want to prove her wrong.

Cindy, how are you going about proofreading now?

Well, of course, I look on the screen.

And then whenever I do my content on the screen, I look at it.

And then I print it out.

Oh, that’s good.

Do you read it aloud?

I don’t read it aloud.

I’m in a cube farm with all of my colleagues.

So I have never done that.

If I did do that, I would need to go to another room so I didn’t disrupt all of my other colleagues.

I could try, definitely.

There’s a couple things here, too.

It sounds like you’re doing more than proofreading.

I just want to be clear here.

It sounds like you’re actually doing copy editing as well as rewriting as well as proofreading.

So these are three different kinds of skills.

So I would not feel bad that you don’t naturally have this skill.

This is a learned skill.

Anybody who can be educated at a university level can totally learn to do proofreading, copy editing, and rewriting.

Anybody can learn to do it.

I agree. It’s a skill.

Some of us will be better than others, but we can all learn to do it.

That said, I would go to your boss and say, look, there are some copy editing certificate programs online.

And, for example, the University of California, San Diego has one.

Actually, my wife teaches there is how I know about it.

But there are others as well that you can find at copyediting.com where they’ll list these courses.

They do cost some money.

I would go to your boss and say, look, we both recognize that I need some help here.

Will you fund my certificate so that I can actually become a professional copy editor and go through a program with people who do this for a living and who can step by step teach me the procedures that I need to know?

Because it sounds a little bit like you are, you’ve got some of the picture, but you need all the pieces coming together so that you have all the different methods.

So reading aloud is one.

Actually line reading, where you take a ruler or a blank sheet of paper and you move it down the page line by line and check every line as it is revealed.

There’s also other standard tricks like changing the type size so it’s really big, like 18 point and putting it in, making it a serif font if it was originally a sans serif or vice versa.

But there are a lot of different things here that you can be taught.

But the biggest thing is practice and time.

Do you have big blocks of time? Are they giving you enough time to do this?

No, and I think that that’s where a lot of the issue happens.

It seems like whenever some of the mistakes happen, it’s usually on a rush, you know, the 11th hour kind of thing, which I know is typical, and I think that she realizes that that is going to happen as well.

There isn’t always a lot of time between turn around.

I have recently been doing things and turning the paper upside down, and then I’ll wait, you know, like half an hour or sometimes a little bit longer and then turn it back over and then I’ll go through it again so it’s not fresh in my mind.

That is a great piece of advice that a lot of people recommend.

The most amount of time that you can leave that document aside, do it, even if it’s a day or a week, because you really do need those fresh eyes, and that is so important.

And Cindy, I think you’re going to have to get a pay raise, too, for spending all this extra time.

Can you suggest that to your boss?

I know these are all things that require the consent of your supervisors and the company as a whole, but copy editing is not something to be treated lightly.

It’s not a passing thing that you just do at the last minute or at the end of the day or whenever you have an opportunity.

It’s like it has to be built into the structure of deadlines, and maybe that’s part of the problem.

Right. I really appreciate your advice.

So you said to look for copyediting courses online.

Yeah. Copyediting.com has a nice journal, but they also have a list of courses, some which they provide and some which they just simply have mentions of, and I’ll link back to them.

I know there’s a really good course that is highly recommended by my copyediting colleagues at the University of California, San Diego, and there are others.

Just make sure that it’s a reputable program.

Make sure that you are able to get testimonials and talk to people because they can be expensive.

And some of them are multi-level courses that involve three or four kind of series of work.

All right.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate you taking my call.

Sure, Cindy.

Good luck.

And let us know how it turns out.

Will you, Cindy?

Yeah, let us know how it goes.

I will indeed.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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

We were talking on our Facebook page about audiobooks and how we feel about them.

And I wanted to mention that we got a great recommendation from one of our listeners, Natalie J. Stewart-Smith, who recommended the book A History of Reading.

Have you ever read that, Grant?

No, I don’t think I have.

I don’t know if there’s an audio version or not, but it’s by Alberto Manguel.

It’s this fantastic history of reading that I’m dying to get into.

I noticed that one of the things it mentions there is that St. Augustine was considered weird because he read silently.

Oh, right. Yeah, I have heard of that before.

Yeah, you read aloud for the longest time.

Scribes who were reading through their work would read aloud.

Yeah, and so reading silently was this really strange thing.

Who would have thought?

Yeah, it was culturally weird.

I have to admit that when my son started to learn to read silently, I thought he was faking.

Are you serious?

I did. I started to quiz him about the books that he was supposedly reading.

It turns out he’s actually reading them.

Is that right?

But he went so quickly from reading aloud, which all children begin with, to reading silently that I just was suspicious.

Oh, that’s fascinating.

But apparently he’s as bright as I thought he was.

Of course.

Well, that book is A History of Reading by Alberto Mangel.

Sounds great.

I can’t wait to dig into it.

Me too.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mike from Tyler, Texas.

Hello, Mike.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, Mike.

What’s going on?

Oh, no, Mike.

I’m calling in response to your call for favorite words.

Oh, yes, please.

One of my favorite words on the top five list, I suppose, would be a susurrus, describing a sort of a whispering or rustling sound.

And where did you come across this word?

Come across it here and there.

It’s pretty rarely used, usually in some sort of fiction novel or short story or something like that.

I mean, it’s not something that people use in a news report.

Unless they’re talking about that kind of sound, huh?

Yeah, indeed.

And I don’t think there’s too many news reports about rustling or whispering sounds.

So spelling that, it’s S-U…

I always spell this incorrectly.

S-U-R-R-O-U-S?

Yes.

Sousurus.

And it is absolutely onomatopoeia.

I think of the rustling pines when I hear that word.

Yes, yes.

When I talk to people and they give me quizzical looks, I’ll think of the drapes with a quiet air conditioning sort of blowing them,

And they’re making a sort of a whooshing sound.

You know, you can’t hear the air.

You can hear the curtains.

Exactly.

Nice.

Exactly.

Yeah, and it goes back to a Latin word that means to whisper, which is also onomatopoetic.

Oh, nice.

Susurrare.

And, in fact, in Spanish, susurro is the word for whisper.

Well, Mike, that’s a great one.

I think maybe it won’t show up just in literary uses from here on out, right?

Maybe people pick it up.

Oh, excellent. Outstanding. I hope people use more.

As a secondary word, another one is quotidian is another good word,

But you guys may have probably already talked about that one already.

We haven’t. Why do you like it?

Just because it means daily, but do you like the sound of it?

Because it’s not what it describes.

Okay.

Okay, well, I’ll let you guys get back to your show.

Oh, I’m loving these words.

It’s a good mic.

Yeah.

Thanks, buddy.

Give us a call with some more later, all right?

Sure thing.

Take care now.

So quotidian doesn’t actually mean daily.

It means kind of ordinary, like you might just do it as any day of the week.

Well, yeah.

Yeah.

It’s roots.

Roots are in Latin, meaning, you know, every day.

Every day.

And same thing in Spanish, cotidiano.

Oh, nice.

It’s a good word.

Well, Mike had the right idea.

If you’ve got a word that you just love and you think people should use more, tell us.

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

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait till next week.

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The show is directed this week by Mark Kirchner and edited by Tim Felten.

We have production help from James Ramsey.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

We’re coming to you this week from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

Sayonara.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing up.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.