Hang a Salami (episode #1398)

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.

A palindrome is a word or a sentence that can be read forwards and backwards, like race car, for example. Spelled the same way both ways.

Do you have a favorite palindrome?

No, but there used to be a Twitter account called Palindrome Tweet. They stopped tweeting in 2010, but it’s still a load of palindromic sentences they have. They’re like, cigar, toss it in a can. It is so tragic. And that whole sentence is a palindrome.

That’s fantastic.

Wonton on salad?

Alas, no, not now.

Those are good.

Yeah, they are. I think my all-time favorite used to be sit on a pan, Otis. But I have some new favorites now.

Oh, I see. And these are from a contest run by one of the world’s top palindrome writers, Mark Saltvite.

How do we get that job?

I don’t know.

Oh, wait, I have to actually be interested in palindrome.

Yeah, well, you can read his magazine, which is called The Palindromist. And every year he offers the Oscars of palindromes. And there are a whole lot of categories this year, but I wanted to share a couple of them. These are from the short palindromes category. And I think you’ll appreciate these.

One thing that I like about these is that they all have titles. It’s not just the palindrome, but a title to sort of help you understand. So here’s one of the winners. It’s Espresso Rescue. That’s the title. Had a tonic? Cup of cappuccino. Ta-da! That works.

It’s true. That’s totally what happens with espresso, right? You’re like, suddenly I’m alive!

Totally, for me. But here’s my favorite. This one is called election dilemma.

Okay.

No one to vote no on.

No one to vote no on.

Right? Yeah, how many elections has that absolutely been true?

Every election. I don’t want to vote yes. I want to vote you suckers out. Let’s leave the chair empty for a while.

Well, I have lots more palindromes to share, but I will do that later in the show. And in the meantime, we’d love to hear your stories and thoughts and comments about language. Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. It’s Adriana Glover calling from Chula Vista, California.

Welcome to the show. How are you doing there?

Yeah, what’s going on in Chula Vista?

So a little bit of background. I’m Mexican, fluent in English and Spanish. My husband is Creole, and I sort of not very diligently am attempting to raise my daughter bilingual. So I didn’t really expose her to, you know, 100% Spanish like some parents do. She was around it, but not 100%. So now she’s in dual immersion school. And recently I kind of had a moment where I’m like, oh, my gosh, I think she actually might start being bilingual.

And so what happened was, you know, usually when somebody, you know, thinks in English, they’ll like hurt themselves or drop something and they’ll say, oh, or they’ll say, and so my daughter dropped something and she said, ay. And I’m like, that’s what I say when I’m thinking in Spanish. So I didn’t know if there was something to that to say ay and e when you drop something or make a mistake versus oh and which is what I guess somebody would say in English.

We could probably kind of predict the future for your daughter if she continues in this school. She probably will never be perfectly bilingual in both languages unless she gets complete immersion in both languages for long periods of time. So it’s cool. She’s going to continue to do what she just did when she dropped something on her foot or whatever it was that she did. She’s going to keep borrowing from the most memorable parts, at least as far as her education and her life goes, from these different languages and using the term or expression that fits the circumstances and first pops into her head. And sometimes there’s no rhyme or reason to that. And she’ll slowly find that behavior modified by what you do and your husband does and what her classmates and her teachers do. And so she’s going to develop this little kind of bilingual idiolect of her own, where her bilingualism is going to be a little different than the person next to her, because there’s no such thing as like exact bilingualism, where two people share exactly the same level of bilingualism unless they’re in exactly the same circumstances.

Right.

And even for me, I mean, English is still my strongest, but I still have a pretty darn good level of Spanish.

Yeah. If you want to really get her bilingualism to be strong, take her for a couple months in the summer to Mexico and just dump her right into the environment with family and friends.

That’s what they did to me.

Exactly.

Yeah, there we go.

That worked, huh?

It’s a great model. I highly recommend it. But the same also holds true for the English. If you want her to have that really strong English, she needs to spend a couple months each year in a completely English language situation with friends and family, people that she loves. And this kind of off and on of these two languages will keep reinforcing month in and month out.

And your question was, was that moment when she said, ay, rather than oh or something, was that a sign of her emerging?

Yeah, I would think so.

It is a little bit, yeah.

Or thinking in Spanish.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, that was my experience when I lived with an Argentinian for many years. I would start to do things like that and without thinking.

You would adopt the behavior of the people around you, right?

Yeah.

Is it true incipient bilingualism if you’re using an interjection?

I don’t know. We do know that interjections are taught. They’re not actually instinctive. You don’t come out of the womb with these interjections. You learn them like you learn words. And so she learned this interjection from somebody who speaks Spanish. It could have been you.

Oh, yeah. It was me. I’m the queen of I and E.

There we go.

The queen of I and E. I also thought it was interesting that, number one, they’re both vowels. And number two, like, why do you say O and U in English and I and E in Spanish?

I don’t know if you guys have that information or if it’s just, I don’t know, more comments.

There’s a lot been written on this, and we could spend way too long talking about it. But Charles Darwin actually was one of the people who wrote about this, and he talked about the natural fear response, for example, shapes the muscles of the face in such a way most humans will make the same fear response face that if they’re issuing a sound from their mouth, it is likely to sound similar no matter where they are, what languages they speak. And this is oversimplifying, but generally that’s true. So the fear response sounds do kind of tend to be the same in all the languages. The surprise response sound tends to be the same in all the languages. But they’re modified by the lexical inventory that the person has at their disposal. And they’re modified again by what they learn and hear from the people around them.

Yeah, she’s hearing her mom do that.

So she’s not, so I isn’t some kind of gut instinct kind of thing that popped out of the lizard part of her brain. You know, it’s nothing like that.

I wouldn’t say lizard. I was thinking Mexican, but okay.

No, I was just talking about that primitive part of us, that part that’s still worried about the wolves, you know?

Yeah, yeah. I just thought it was, I mean, I was very pleased with it. I was very excited that she was, you know, because you have a split second to make a sound like that when something doesn’t go your way. So I was very happy to see that it wasn’t just, oh, mommy wants me to translate red into rojo now.

Exactly. And that’s a really nice moment. I mean, it reminds me of the moment when they first learned to read. My son went through this, and the utter delight my wife and I had when my son just started reading because he wanted to. And you’re like, oh, yes, it’s working, it’s working.

Right. Well, thank you so much. I love the show. Keep doing what you’re doing.

And I always have a question when I hear the show, but I guess I’ll have to pace myself.

Well, Adriana, thank you for calling, and keep us up to date on how she’s doing in the bilingual school, all right? Awesome.

I will. Thank you so much. Take care now. Thanks for calling. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

We’d love to hear your stories about your experiences with language and learning them. Call us 877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, I’m Nell Bedsow from Alabama. And being raised in southeast Alabama most of my life, I heard my mother and other women refer to children that were misbehaving as having hissy fits. But it was usually just with the females. I don’t ever remember they saying, you know, the girl would be crying and just stubborn and everything, and I just wondered where that saying came from.

Nell, is it from Alabama? Yes. Where in Alabama are you? I’m in Abbeville, A-B-B-E-V-I-L-L-E. Well, Abbeville, welcome to the show, Nell. Thank you. I used this when I was growing up, Hissy Fit. Martha, I was raised in Missouri. You knew this in Kentucky then, Martha. Oh, it’s just not southern, huh? Oh, well, it is mostly southern, actually. Yeah, and Missouri is kind of a half-and-half state. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, I was raised in Kentucky, but I guess that’s north of Alabama. I guess I’m sort of like a—do I sound like a Yankee to you? Yeah, a little. But I heard you were from Kentucky. Yeah. Get her tipsy and it really comes out.

Now, now. Yeah, so you’re wondering about why anybody would say hissy fit or don’t have a hissy fit or she had a hissy fit, that kind of thing. Mm-yes. We suspect that maybe it’s a form of hysterical. Oh. So a hysterical fit. Yeah. Crying and ranting. And the women always have that, don’t they? The women? It’s very gendered, it’s true. Oh, yeah, the word hysterical actually goes back to the Greek word for uterus. Oh. Yeah, and Freud associated it with them. Right. The assumption was that somehow women were prone to these fits because their uterus made them so. Something like that. Yeah.

So most likely it’s connected to hysterical and it has that hissing sound to it as well. So you can see how hysterical fit could turn into hysteric fit. And if you didn’t quite understand it or know the word hysteric, it might sound a little bit like hissy. Well, I listen to the radio a lot, and on one of the talk radio shows that I listen to, they are advertising in a town about 30 miles away from me, a town a lot larger than what I live, and they called it the Hissy Fit Boutique. They used, they didn’t, it was just one word, and it’s a boutique down there. And I thought, well, I’ve got to call, you know. You know, here it is popping out all over, and I want to know how and everything. But I did, when Mother would say she’s having a hissy fit, I’d look, and of course it was a she. And the boys, they could fight and everything, but the girls just screaming, you know.

Isn’t that interesting? And did you sense that it was sort of a funny word or sort of? Yeah. Yeah. Like not necessarily that serious. Yeah. In other words, you know, don’t pay any attention to it. She’s just having a hissy fit. Right, merely a hissy fit. Some folks, by the way, will just say hissy. She’s having a hissy without adding the fit. Oh, well, I’m glad we’re not the only ones that do that down here. It’s pretty widespread. It’s mainly southern. The first uses pop up in Texas in the 1930s, although it’s certainly older than that. Yeah. So what do Yankees call it, I wonder? Well, you might pitch a fit. Pitch a fit. Throw a fit, yeah, without the hissy in there. I like the hissing sound in there. Yes.

Nell, you are a delight. We appreciate your calling. Thank you. Thank y’all, and keep the good work up. I enjoy it. Oh, it’s our pleasure. Bye-bye now. Okay.

Well, if you’re like Nell, and there’s something you came across that just will not leave your brain, come drop it on us, 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org. We were talking earlier about palindromes, and they’re also word unit palindromes. What’s that? A word unit? That’s when all the words read back and forth rather than just the letters. I see. For example, here’s one called cold feet at the altar. Say I do? What do I do? What do I say? I see. If you read that backward word by word, it works the same way.

We talk about more than palindromes on this show. Anything related to language and linguistics, speaking and writing, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org. How is the language that your family uses connected to the larger history of English? Find out as A Way with Words continues. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. And joining us on the line from New York City is our quiz guide, John Chaneski. Hello. Hey, John. Hello, Grant and Martha. What’s up, buddy?

Here in New York City. Did you guys see Frozen? Yes, I did. No, I haven’t seen it yet. Oh, you should see it. Yeah, I really liked it a lot. It was great. The music was fantastic. I actually met the composers, Bobby Lopez and Kristen Anderson Lopez, the other day. Yeah, they’re super great. I liked the song Fixer Upper. Do you remember that song, Grant? No, how does it go? He’s a bit of a fixer upper. It’s when the trolls are trying to fix up Anna and Kristoff because they’re sort of his parents and they extol his bad virtues. Because they’re trolls. What the trolls say, they say how he smells and how he looks to this and to that. And they say, well, maybe the way to fix him is to fix him up with you, which is great. It’s just a sweet song.

Now, it occurred to me that maybe they might have better luck if they had stressed other kinds of things that Christoph could have been. That’s sort of going around a ways to find a concept for a puzzle, but here it is. Instead of a fixer-upper, maybe he’s played a key defensive position on the kingdom of Arendelle’s baseball team. You know, he’s a bit of a center fielder. You know, maybe that would have worked better. Okay. Two words. Each one ends in E-R. Okay. That’s what I need to hear. Yeah. There we go. That’s why I went all out and called this puzzle Blanker Blanker. Okay. Not fixer-upper, but Blanker Blanker.

Okay. Here’s our first one. You know, maybe Anna wants children and would be impressed to hear that Christoph is a state-certified caregiver who takes minors into his home. He’s a bit of a… Foster father. Yes, he’s a bit of a foster father. Very good. Okay, this one will work. Maybe Anna is concerned about radiation. It might come in handy that Christoph begins to click whenever there’s radiation about. A Geiger counter. He’s a bit of a Geiger counter. He’s a bit of a Geiger counter. You want that guy around, yeah. Look, we’re open-minded. Maybe she likes a guy who rebels against typical male-female societal roles. Gender bender? Yeah, he’s a bit of a gender bender. Why not?

Anna probably wants a guy who’s employable, right? Well, Kristoff can write code. He knows Java, C++, Perl, and Visual Basic. He can get an IT job easy. He’s a bit of a… He’s a bit of a computer programmer. Yes, very good. He’s a bit of a computer programmer, so good for him. Maybe Anna wants a guy who’s at the center of everything. He may not be the queen of Arendelle, but he’s the guy who divides up all the political influence among the ruling class. Gee whiz. Oh. What’s another word for influence? Power broker. Yes, he’s a bit of a power broker. Nice.

Now, government work is very secure. Kristoff is really good with that sled. Maybe he can make sure the mail gets through on time every day. Oh, by the way, not all of these are two-syllable words. Something deliverer? No. This is what my dad was for 40 years. Letter carrier. Oh, letter carrier. He’s a bit of a letter carrier. Good. Now, maybe what’s most important to Anna is his attitude.

Maybe she will like that Christoph is always up for anything and totally throws himself into anything she suggests.

Sort of like an animal with a strong work ethic.

Eager beaver.

Yes.

He’s a bit of an eager beaver.

Hey, look.

When times get really hard, when winter hits and they can’t grow crops, someone has to go out and get food somehow.

Kristoff still has all those primitive skills.

He’ll keep them fed.

Hunter-gatherer.

Yes, he’s a bit of a hunter-gatherer.

Now, let’s face facts.

You never know when that sister of hers will make it snow.

It may win Anna over to know that Kristoff is particularly skilled at meteorology.

Weather forecaster.

Yes, he’s a weather forecaster.

Now, you know what?

I hate to do this, but maybe Anna should find another guy.

It seems that Kristoff is not what he seems.

He seems strong and powerful, but in the end, he can’t stand up to a challenge.

Let’s see.

These are harder than I thought.

Yeah, really.

It’s a very lighthearted quiz, but there’s a pretty strong.

Something quitter?

Was he?

No, this is a phrase that means here.

Let’s see, a phrase that means someone who seems very powerful and can fight, but in the end, it just crumples.

Oh, Paper Tiger.

Oh, very good.

Yes, very good.

He’s a bit of a paper tiger.

And that is our Blanker Blanker quiz.

Go see Frozen, Martha.

I’m an eager beaver.

It’s one of the better Disney movies in a long time.

Some really great performances musically.

It’s got an ending, which is outside the usual Disney kind of paradigm.

A little bit of the same stuff.

Love will save the day, but still a good movie.

Okay, I’ll see you guys next time.

Okay, great.

Thanks a lot, John.

We’d love to hear your stories about language.

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

And if you just can’t wait, find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello, who’s this?

This is Rabia.

Hi, Rabia. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Oh, well, I’ve been thinking of this word, and I thought I would give you guys a call about it.

So my question is about the word Google.

And I wanted to know that if this word existed the pre-internet era.

And if so, what was the meaning of this word at that time?

And, you know, I did Google the word Google.

And I could not really find a clear-cut answer about this.

So I just thought I’d give you guys a call.

You know, it involves a couple of different stories.

First of all, it involves a professor at Columbia named Edward Kastner, who back in the 1940s wrote a book called Mathematics and the Imagination.

It’s a book that is written for a lay audience.

And in fact, it was so popular that it became a bestseller.

And yeah, and it’s a fun book.

It’s actually easy to read and it’s got a lot of humor in it.

But one of the things that he mentions in that book is that he was trying to think of a name for a really big number,

Like 10 to the 100th power, which is one with 100 zeros behind it.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

He was trying to come up with a word for this really big number.

And so he turned to his nephew, who was about eight or nine years old, his nephew Milton, and said,

What should I call this number?

And the little boy thought for a little bit, and then he said, call it Google.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

But he spelled it G-O-O-G-O-L, which I think is a great word for a number with all those zeros.

So then fast forward to 1997 and the guys at Stanford University who had just come up with this great search engine that they were developing further.

They were trying to come up with a name for that.

And the original name for it was Backrub, if you can believe it.

Really?

Backrub.

Backrub?

Yeah, that was the original name for this search engine because they had this great idea of using backlinks from websites to rank the websites.

And so they were calling it Backrub, and they thought, no, we need a better name for this.

And so mathematicians had adopted the word Google and also used the word Googleplex, which is an infinitely, almost infinitely.

So that’s Google to the power of Google?

Ten to the power of Google.

Oh, ten to the power of Google.

Which is just this insanely large number.

So one of them suggests the number Googleplex, and they said,

Eh, it’s pretty good, but then they shortened it to Google

And apparently misspelled it when they were registering the domain name.

But it stuck.

Yeah.

Now, there is one other Google, though, right?

You mean googly eyes?

Barney Google?

Well, I’m thinking of the cricket Google.

The cricket Google.

Yeah.

I don’t know the cricket Google.

Well, the cricket Googly.

Oh, the Googly.

Yes, I’m aware of that.

Yeah, so you follow cricket?

I’m aware of the googly in cricket because I do watch cricket.

Oh, I thought he meant the insect.

No, no.

But you mean the game.

Okay, of course.

Yeah, so to throw a googly is to Google.

And they’re unrelated, but I thought it worth mentioning here.

So can you tell us what a googly is in cricket?

Yes, please explain it.

So, you know, you play cricket with a bat and a ball.

So it’s a specific type of way you throw the ball towards a bat.

So it’s a style of bowling, basically.

And so the ball breaks in a certain way, right?

It kind of does this little dip or something?

It’s hard to describe, but let me tell you this.

This style of bowling was invented by a bowler from Pakistan, and I’m from there.

So that’s how I know about it.

Very good.

I thought it was worth mentioning this other googly.

And so if somebody throws a googly, they are a Googler, but it’s not related.

Yeah, different Google.

Different Google.

So complicated history here.

Yeah.

Interesting.

The short version is that Google, spelled G-O-O-G-O-L, is the name of a huge number.

And the search engine is spelled a little bit differently.

Yeah.

So how about that?

Well, it sounds good.

So now I know.

Thank you.

We’re really glad you called, Ravia.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

I think that there’s a whole world of questions that we can answer about English, Martha.

Indeed.

We’ll just Google it.

Maybe we should give people our phone number so they can call with their questions.

Oh, that’s a good idea.

Let’s see.

How about 877-929-9673?

That’s the number to call to talk with us on the air.

Or you can send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

And we are all over Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s another winning palindrome from the contest run by The Palindromist.

The Palindromist.

The magazine at palindromist.org.

And this one also has a title and it’s a word unit palindrome.

It’s called The Difference Between My Boss and My Therapist.

Doors open to forward maneuvering.

Past my inbox.

Remember to work, she says.

Now focus.

Focus now, says she.

Work to remember.

Box in my past, maneuvering forward to open doors.

Whoa, that is totally great.

Isn’t that beautiful?

So I assume that they come up with the title after they come up with the palindrome.

I think so, yeah, to kind of explain it.

Do you have a favorite palindrome?

Maybe like, go hang a salami, I’m a lasagna hog?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

My name’s Ken.

I’m calling from the bucolic quiet corner of Connecticut, Ashford, Connecticut.

The quiet bucolic corner of Connecticut.

Which corner is that? The northeast, northwest?

The official quiet corner is the northeast.

It’s also the last green valley where from space you cannot see any lights from like just south of Worcester to just down to about Mystic, Connecticut.

Wow, that does sound bucolic. I’m surprised as close as Connecticut is to the metropolis.

No light pollution, huh?

It’s a rural area.

There’s like 4,000 people, 4,500 people in the town.

Okay, not much to do.

So you called us, huh?

Well, for quite a long time now, I’ve had some angst about the use of the word persons

When the word people would seem to be the more appropriate choice.

So, you know, for example, I’ve always wondered why Barbara Streisand then didn’t sing persons.

Persons who need persons are the luckiest persons in the world, you know, if that were correct.

Good point.

I’ve spent a lot of time in, like, church settings.

I work for a major deity here in Northeast Connecticut.

A major deity, did you say?

Yeah.

She’s an ordained minister, so she spent a lot of time in church.

What?

You’re an ordained minister, or you work for an insurance company?

Which is it?

I do both.

Oh, okay.

All right.

Historically, I worked for, I’ve been ordained since 1980.

Okay.

But I ran away from the church about seven years ago.

I was on my way back recently, but, you know, I’m sort of a missionary to the insurance company.

As a minister, you were talking about persons versus people.

Well, yeah.

And so in the church, you know, they were, like, in the 70s, they were sort of being hip, and they’d say folk.

They’d talk about the folk, the church folk.

And then they got a little in the 80s and into the 90s and right up to now.

They’re using things like persons.

Would the persons who are going to be baptized come forward?

Oh, really?

Would the persons who are going to join the Church, please come forward?

And in liturgy and in writing, I’ve seen this frequently, and every time I see it or hear it, it’s like nails on a chalkboard to me.

Mm—

And so about 10 years ago, I wrote to Gina Bureka, who is a professor of English at the University of Connecticut, and a neat person and a personality, and she has a little column in the great metropolitan newspaper here in Archer.

And I said to her, Gina, what’s up with this persons versus people thing?

And all she did was write back saying, if persons were correct, the Constitution would begin, we the persons.

And so, but that didn’t answer my question.

And so I thought maybe since you folks had A Way with Words, you could help me.

That’s so interesting.

I hadn’t heard it used in connection with the church.

I’m surprised, really, given what we know about persons typically being corporate and kind of legalese.

Yeah, legalese.

Kind of official sounding, kind of authority based.

Well, church.

I mean, yeah, I guess you could.

Not in elevators, you know.

Yeah.

This elevator holds 13 persons.

Right. Elevators. That’s a good example. And persons is a bit more formal. And as Grant said, specialized. You know, you think about the missing persons bureau and that kind of thing. But otherwise, people is a much more natural use, I think.

There was a quote-unquote rule that was floating around for a while that said that if you could count the number of people in the group, then you should use persons if it’s a really small number.

You know, like there are five persons at the bus stop.

But that was a manufactured rule that was rarely embraced and probably never really caught on.

Yeah, it’s one of those things that has to do with just the native ear and the feel.

And I’m completely with you on this, Ken.

The adaptation of the legalese, I think, is a piece of it, as I’ve come to understand it.

But another thing, to me, it just sounds snooty.

I don’t know.

It just sounds a little stuffy.

Yeah, yeah, a little bit too lofty for the context.

So, Ken, I think that you should stand up in the middle of a service and just say, you know what?

Moses didn’t say, let my persons go.

Right?

I think that would work.

Let my persons go.

Into this bucolic valley that you’ve just been around.

Ken, thank you so much for calling.

Well, it was fun talking to you.

Have a great day.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Do you have a linguistic bee in your bonnet?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have some slang for you.

Do you know what a Hollywood entrance is?

Is this where you do like Kramer on Seinfeld and slam open the door and stand there for a second to make sure everyone’s looking?

That’s a good guess, and it’s not Jennifer Lawrence going up the stairs.

A Hollywood entrance is something that squeeze freaks would talk about.

Does that help?

Squeeze freaks?

Nope, that makes it even more mysterious.

Okay.

No idea.

These two bits of slang are from a fantastic article by Burkhard Bilger on extreme cavers.

That’s a made-up name, right?

No, no.

I’ve met him before.

Okay.

Extreme cavers.

Yes.

He’s a writer for The New Yorker, and there is an absolutely fantastic article, and you can read it online.

And a Hollywood entrance is the kind of entrance to a cave that looks like something like maybe from the King Kong movie.

Mammoth Cave in Kentucky has a Hollywood entrance.

It’s really big, as opposed to a little bitty one someplace.

Right, like a cleft that you almost can’t find.

Right, right, covered with brush and all that.

A Hollywood entrance.

And squeeze freaks are extreme cavers who really like going through those narrow, narrow passages.

Oh, wow.

Isn’t that great?

I did that once when I was in college in Missouri, and I don’t think I ever want to repeat it again.

It’s scary, right?

I don’t think I could, given my new girth.

I thought maybe once you explained that it was related to caving, the first thing that came to mind that maybe it was this, a bunch of people abseiling down all at once down and descending down to a cave, just like rapidly descending together.

Oh, a whole bunch of them.

Just like they do in movies.

It’s always like the team is in perfect sync and they all come down and they leap off the rope and the guns are at the ready and they go after the bad guy.

No, it’s just the cave itself.

It’s like the stereotypical cave entrance, like you might see in a cartoon.

Yeah, like the Flintstones or something.

But I highly, highly, highly recommend this article.

The article again is?

It’s in The New Yorker online.

And the author is?

Burkhard Bilger.

Bilger, B-I-L-G-U-R?

G-E-R.

G-E-R, great.

I’ll look for that.

Yeah, it’s one of the best articles I’ve read in a while.

I’ve got a lot of slang in it that I need to get, right?

Yes, yes, absolutely.

We’d love to hear about the weird slang from your hobby or profession and the thing you do when you’re not at work.

877-929-9673 or email us, words at waybirdradio.org.

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

Stay tuned.

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.

Every once in a while, we have a call that just opens the floodgates, and we get all kinds of emails in response to it, all kinds of—

What did I do now? What was it?

No, no, no. You can rest assured that it wasn’t you this time, Grant.

It was a call that we had from a guy who was a little bit uncomfortable with using the word proud.

Do you remember that?

Yes, I do remember that. He had a problem with saying that he was proud of somebody else for their achievements.

Right.

As if it was condescending or he was stealing their thunder.

Yeah, he wasn’t quite sure if that fit.

Right.

Should he be saying that about other people or did it like divert the power dynamic to him and away from them?

And boy, we heard from all kinds of listeners about this.

Celia Morris wrote to say, the man who called in about having difficulty saying, I’m proud of you is my new hero.

I know exactly what he means.

I can’t bring myself to say I’m proud of you either.

It seems to make the situation about me rather than you.

And Julianne Sands wrote, I was taught that saying I’m proud of you was almost impolite.

It insinuates that I am judge and jury.

The correct delivery would be you should be very proud of yourself.

And Pat Colston from Danbury, Connecticut, wrote to say that maybe we should say something like, I’m so thrilled that you and your work are recognized or you have every right to feel proud of what you’ve accomplished.

Right. She turns the pride back onto the person who did the thing.

Yeah.

Very good.

So now I’m thinking, I mean, it always felt a little strange to me, but so many people responded to that.

And did they all tend to go in that direction?

They all kind of concurred that saying that you were proud of somebody, there was something wrong with that? Not everybody, but I would say the majority of people did.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, we’ll still take your calls and your emails about whether or not you can actually say you’re proud of someone without sounding condescending. Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

And, you know, we talk about all things related to language here. Call us or email with those, too. Words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Vince from Dallas.

Hey, Vince.

Hey, what’s up?

How y’all doing?

Good enough.

Good enough.

You?

Doing well.

Well, I had this roommate who was Chinese, and, you know, I’d always hear him talking on the phone with his mom, and, you know, they spoke Mandarin. And I also had this guy that lived across the hall from us. He spoke Cantonese. When they spoke to each other, you know, they spoke in English. So I was, you know, I have different people about that. And, you know, they’re saying it’s different dialects of Chinese or whatever. So what’s the difference between a dialect and like a completely different language?

When we talk about Chinese, it’s actually kind of a mistake. We talk about it as if it’s one language. And really what you’ve got is a lot of languages and dialects in the same geographic region, some which are completely not mutually intelligible. They just do not, speakers of them do not understand each other. And others where there’s some mutual intelligibility because they’re adjacent to each other and they haven’t changed that much over time. But they share a writing system. The writing system was kind of foisted upon these languages throughout the country. So even languages that aren’t all that well suited to the Chinese script use it. And this is the problem when we talk about Chinese dialects. Some of them are utterly different. They’re systematically, syntactically, morphologically different. And some of them are very similar. They’ll have 30, 40% shared vocabulary, same kind of syntax, da-da-da-da-da. And that would explain why your friend and the guy across the hall didn’t understand each other.

Oh, okay.

So here’s where we get into the explanation of dialects versus languages. A language, well, there’s the old joke, which we have to talk about. Max Weinreich said that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. So a lot of the reason that a language is called a language is because it belongs, it is officially endorsed by government or the organized body that runs a country. And so it has nationalism at the base of it. It has geopolitical power or boundaries to it. And it’s things that have nothing whatsoever to do with linguistics. It’s about the social forces which promote that particular variety, which might be a better term than dialect, promote that language variety to the fore so that it’s taught in the schools, used in government discourse, in the government papers. And that’s what makes it a language. The language is in many ways a political term and not so much a linguistic term or a technical term.

Yeah. I mean, think about English. You have American English, Australian English, Irish English. And yet some people might argue that English is really just a dialect of German.

Right. And maybe it’s just kind of got too big for its britches because it now belongs to these other countries. A really big dialect. And so a lot of it is about your perspective. It’s kind of like talking about when does the day end and the night begin?

That’s a great analogy.

What does dusk look like? I mean, dusk is indefinable. I can’t really put the, I know that I’m in the middle of dusk, but I couldn’t tell you when it started or when it ended. Is it when the stars come out that it ends? Or does it begin when the sun goes below the horizon? It’s kind of hard to say.

So a language versus dialect. What is the great age? How much intelligibility does there need to be between two varieties so that they can be called dialects? And if they are dialects, which one’s the superior dialect? Which one is the parent? What do you think about that?

That’s a lot more thorough explanation than I’ve ever been given. Let me recommend a resource to you that will explain this in kind of academic terms, but you seem like you probably get it. There’s this website we refer to often on the show called Language Log.

It’s where a lot of really top linguists from around the world contribute their thoughts on current language development and current study that they’re doing and their peers are doing.

And there’s a fellow by the name of Victor Mayr, M-A-I-R, who is perfectly, he studies, he knows a great deal about Asian languages and about English, and even thinks some German.

And he often writes on LanguageLong about these very issues, about the politics of Chinese and the way Chinese people speak English and English people speak Chinese and translating back and forth and the different kind of problems that you encounter.

Look for his name, Victor Mayr, M-A-I-R, on LanguageLong, and just kind of browse his post on Chinese, and I think you’ll really start to understand some of what we were talking about here today.

Thank you all so much. You all did a great job.

Our pleasure, Vince.

Thank you for a really interesting question.

Yeah, it’s a great question.

The answers only come when somebody asks us something really kind of revealing about language as a whole.

Say hi to your roommate.

Okay.

All right, take care.

Thanks, Vince.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

We want to hear your thoughts and stories about language.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

One theory of language suggests that there should be a word for every concept.

We’ll never get there.

Right.

But I found a word or phrase for a concept.

If you take an 8 1⁄2 by 11 sheet of paper and fold it in half and then fold it in half again.

Do you know what it’s called?

Folded piece of paper.

Well, a quarter fold maybe.

But it’s also called a French fold, which I did not know.

A French fold.

Yeah, and I don’t know why.

Oh, I thought that would be how you make your bed or something.

A French fold.

Well, French, usually in English, when we have terms with the word French, it’s usually naughty, except for French dry cleaning.

Right, right.

Other people’s, yeah.

Yeah, other people’s, yeah.

But it’s called a French fold.

I wonder why.

So that’s a quarter-folded sheet of paper.

Who knew?

Yeah, who knew that?

What did you just learn that you want to share with everybody?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susan from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Susan.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Susan.

What’s cooking?

Hello.

How are you doing?

Good.

What can we help you with?

So I am a chemistry professor, and I frequently encounter a compound called phthalate, which is spelled P-H-T-H-A-L-A-T-E.

And it has a lot of related compounds, things like phthalic acid, phenylsaline, and naphthalene.

And this is the first time I’d encountered a word that has P-H-T-H right next to each other.

So I was wondering if you could tell me where that came from or if there are other words that have that combination.

Yes, there sure are.

I mean, part of what you’re dealing with there is that so many words in chemistry come from ancient Greek, right?

There are actually several words, a handful of words in English that have that same PHTH combination.

I don’t know if you wear glasses, but if you did, you got them from your ophthalmologist, right?

That’s true, yeah.

Yeah, it’s just not that uncommon in ancient Greek to have the PHTH right next to each other.

It’s the letters phi or phi, like in phi, beta, kappa, and theta, which is, you know, the oval with the line across it, phi and theta.

You have an English ophthalmologist.

You have, actually, the Greek word for leather is diphthera, which gave us the word diphtheria.

Diphtheria is the way you pronounce it because part of the characteristics of that disease is that you get sort of a leathery membrane in your throat.

So diphtheria comes from the Greek word for leather.

And then in linguistics, we have diphthong, which is from Greek words that mean two voices.

Voices. Yeah. So, Susan, what words are you encountering it in? There’s a class of compounds that are called phthalates.

Phthalates, okay. It’s kind of at the beginning of the word.

What are they known for? What are their primary properties? What would we know about them as non-specialists? My guess is that the original name that it came from was napsaline. And napsaline is a compound that you can isolate from oil and gas, but it’s the compound that’s in mothballs.

Sure, yeah, that’s where people might know it from. Yeah, yeah, so that puts us on another path. We know that naphtha’s got some roots in a variety of ancient languages related to tar, bitumen, things like that, black sticky substances, and goes back probably as far back as the written record goes.

Right, yep, yeah, way back. Wait, wait, because it was one of those things that was recorded. And remember that the first writing isn’t love letters, it’s inventories in between some, like, supplies.

So it goes way, way back there. And that’s pretty cool that we’ve got this root in modern English words that goes back thousands of years.

Thousands, yes.

Now, one of the questions our students often have is how you pronounce that because sometimes people just abbreviate the PH as a P. So they would say naphthalene as opposed to naphthalene.

Yeah, I could see people easily leaving out that H.

Yeah. Just like an amphitheater instead of amphitheater.

Yeah, that one’s gaining ground, so I wouldn’t be too much of a stickler about it.

All right, cool, Susan. Drop us a line sometime, all right?

Thank you.

Helium, neon, and argon walk into a bar, and the bartender says, “Hey, we don’t serve noble gases here.” They show no reaction.

Terrible stuff.

Oh, terrible. Terrible.

I’m sure there’s more. You look like you have more.

A neutron walks into a bar, orders a gin and tonic, and asks the bartender how much. The bartender replies, “For you, no charge.”

Oh, gosh.

Terrible stuff.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another palindrome. This is a word unit palindrome, meaning it’s word by word rather than the letters going back and forth. This was a winner from last year’s palindrome contest. And I should say that you can find all these winners at palindromist.org.

This one is untitled, and it’s a word unit palindrome. You swallow pills for anxious days and nights, and days anxious for pills swallow you.

Ooh.

Ooh, right?

Yeah, that’s some serious stuff there.

That’s vivid.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning, this is Brian Moore. I’m calling from Fairview, Texas.

Hi, Brian. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Well, I’ve got an expression that my dad used to use, and I don’t know where it came from or to whom it refers, but the expression was when he was adamantly opposed to something, he would say something to the effect of, “I don’t care if it hairlips the queen.”

I don’t care if it hair lips the queen?

Exactly.

And so this is a defiant statement, right?

Yes.

Interesting.

There’s a lot to be said about this.

Yeah.

Two questions for you, though, Brian. One, did you ever ask him where he got it, what he meant, what he was up to when he was saying that?

I did not.

Did he kind of have that wink or that glistening eye, the twinkle that showed that he was being funny or ironic?

More so than adamantly opposed.

Okay, very good.

So it’s not like he standing in front of a judge in a court saying, “I protest your honor.”

No, as a matter of fact, my dad was an attorney.

There we go.

Okay, all right.

Well, this particular expression, the best part of it, when we get to digging out kind of the whole story here, is the verb, to hair lip. And in case people aren’t really familiar, because it’s apparently less common than it used to be, a hair lip on a person is when you were born with this congenital defect of the upper lip, usually around the philtrum. That’s that little divot between the two sides of your upper lip, like under the nostrils. There’s a split there.

And usually it’s corrected very early on in someone’s life now with surgery. And if there’s a scar at all, it’s almost invisible. But it looks just like the split lip of the hair, the animal, you know, the little bunny-like creature with the long ears and the fluffy tail that eats grass.

Right. So it’s H-A-R-E rather than…

H-A-I-R.

I’ve never actually connected that congenital defect with an actual animal’s lip.

Yeah.

And the story about why they call it a hair lip, besides it looks like that, well, not the story, but part of the thing is there used to be a superstition in Ireland and some other countries that if a woman who was pregnant saw a hair out and about, that she was more likely to have a child with a hair lip. And in some places, if a woman saw any kind of animal, her child was likely to be born looking like that animal.

So stay away from the horses, I guess.

And so what we find then that this is associated with also a little bit with the devil and some other superstitions. The hare was known as an animal that brought bad fortune. And it’s kind of the opposite of the lucky rabbit’s foot, which is really interesting to me.

And so over time, the hare has just generally taken on this kind of negative aspect. So when you talk about hare-lipping somebody, you are wishing them ill will. You’re wishing that they have this physical defect on their body.

But it’s not just the queen who got this message. I mean, I’ve got a whole, I mean, you can dig this out for yourself, but hair lips the president, hair lips every dog in Texas, hair lips every cow in Texas, hair lips the state of Texas, hair lips the pope, hair lips the nation, hair lips the governor, hair lips all of Arkansas, hair lips the whole county, hair lips the south, hair lips everybody from here to Georgia, and hair lips all the cats in Grimes County, wherever that is. And Charles Augustus Lindbergh and Franklin Delano Roosevelt. And I don’t care if it hair lips the world.

There we go.

There’s another one I’ve seen. So this is a notion of defiance, which I’m going to do this regardless of what the consequences for other people or somebody important or somebody august. And you’ll notice here that in the list that we read out, there’s definitely a southern kind of, I don’t know, a southern notion to this. It’s very much a southern American term. This is not the kind of thing that is all that common in the North.

Well, we should point out, too, that many dictionaries will tell you that the term hair lip itself is offensive or somewhat offensive.

Yeah, exactly.

Right.

Well, I’ve got to tell you, Brian, that’s everything I’ve got on hair lips whoever, Brian. As Martha noted, though, it’s really, it’s not the most sensitive of expressions because this is, we try to be fair and nice about such things.

Obviously.

Be careful with this.

And I don’t think he ever used it with any animus at all. I think it was just a funny expression that was part of his background.

Very colorful.

Brian, thank you so much for calling.

Well, thank you all so much. I really enjoy your show, and I’m glad to see that someone has picked up the gauntlet after John Chiardi’s absence from NPR.

Oh, he was my inspiration back in the day. I loved listening to him.

Mine as well.

Thanks, Brian.

Well, Brian, good words to you.

I’m John Chiardi.

Thanks, and you too.

Great success.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we love those colorful expressions from the South, don’t we, Grant?

We love colorful expressions from anywhere.

That’s true.

Well, we’d love to hear yours. Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait till next week to chat with us on Facebook and Twitter. And you can find us on iTunes or SoundCloud. Check out our website, too, at waywordradio.org, where you’ll find a dictionary, a newsletter, mobile apps, and a discussion forum.

And you can listen to hundreds of past episodes for free. You can leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673. Share your family’s stories about language, or ask us to resolve language disputes at home, work, or in school.

You can email us, too. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine. The show is directed and edited this week 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.

This show is coming to you from the Track Recording Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. So long.

Bye-bye.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

And oh.