Hell’s Bells (episode #1407)

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.

There is a wonderful new word making the rounds in linguistic circles these days, and it is rogeeing.

Rogeeeing, like the thesaurus fellow.

Exactly, with a capital R, R-O-G-E-T-I-N-G.

And it’s defined as disguising plagiarism by substituting synonyms one word at a time with no attempt to understand either the source or the target text.

Oh, yes, yes.

It’s wonderful.

It’s the creation of a guy named Chris Sadler, who’s a lecturer at Middlesex University, and he was left scratching his head over some student papers.

He teaches business information systems.

He came across, for example, a line in a student paper that went like this. Common mature musicians and recent liturgy providers are looking to satisfy Herculean personalized liturgies.

I don’t know. What do they mean?

Well, I mean, clearly they’re right-clicking and using their thesaurus.

Yeah, and just like popping any old word in without thinking about it.

Right. So for mature musicians, that was big players, and recent liturgy providers was new service providers.

My favorite, however, is the phrase sinister buttocks. Apparently that showed up in a student paper.

Oh, instead of, what was it, left behind?

Yes.

Yes.

And I’ve seen similar. There’s an anecdote that I don’t remember where I picked it up about the kid who’s talked about for the weekend that he corroded a pizza because he went to the dictionary and decided the word eat wasn’t fancy enough and corrode is a synonym of eat.

And then there’s an episode of Friends where Joey’s write a recommendation letter and Joey’s supposed to say they’re warm, nice people with big hearts, but instead he decides to fancy it up with a thesaurus.

And he writes, they’re human prepossessing homo sapiens with full-sized aortic pumps.

And this is a problem.

The misuse of the thesaurus is well known.

It is part of the beginning of advice for all writers, which is never use a word from a thesaurus unless you already know it.

Exactly.

The thesaurus should remind you of a word you know, not offer you a word you’ve never heard of.

Exactly. And of course, students shouldn’t be plagiarizing in the first place, but they might get caught if they use a thesaurus, right?

Well, unfortunately, it’s not just students. It happens in the business world as well.

Oh, that’s a good point. Yeah.

Well, this is the place to talk about all kinds of language.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Thank you, and so do you.

Thank you.

Hi, who is this?

Hi, my name’s Tom, and I’m out in UC San Diego.

Oh, hi, Tom. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s on your mind?

Well, what I’m confused about is the word next.

Like if I make a reference to the word like next Thursday.

I recently missed a meeting because of the ambiguous use of this phrase.

Oh, you did.

And so, yeah, so if I say on a Friday that I’d like to visit you next Thursday, I think it’s six days from now.

That’s clear.

If I say on a Wednesday, let’s meet next Thursday, okay, that’s fine.

That’s eight days from now.

Oh, is it?

I don’t know.

This is why I have you on the spot.

If I say on a Monday or Tuesday, though, I’m starting to get gray.

If I say, well, let’s meet next Thursday, then maybe I’m talking about nine or ten days from now, but this is where I start to get gray.

So help.

Tom, you missed a meeting. What happened?

Did you get in trouble?

Maybe that was a good thing.

I don’t know.

Actually, I showed up seven days early, so I just went to the meeting.

Oh!

I’ve all worked out okay in the end.

That’s the best kind of getting it wrong.

I think you’ve really done a great job of describing the problems here and how far out from the date you can get and still be certain or uncertain.

This is utterly context-dependent, and this is never fixed.

You never know what they mean by next Thursday unless you ask them.

You cannot assume.

I think you can certainly clarify it if you say not this Thursday, but next Thursday.

Here’s the thing about that.

If you read transcripts of people having natural conversations where they don’t know that linguists are going to be looking at it later to try to figure out what the heck is going on, people almost always renegotiate when this kind of usage is made.

They almost always seek clarity and ask for a restatement in different words to make sure they understand what day is being met.

This is how conversation goes.

And if you fail to do that, then you do show up seven days early.

And you can’t get the date wrong, or you show up late.

Okay, well, I thought you grammarians would have had this sorted out long ago, but I guess it’s just part of the negotiation of the conversation.

We are victims of this horrible creature called English, which is not clear and logical at all.

Well, I tell you, Tom, there are a couple of guys who have tried to solve this problem just in the past couple of months.

If you go to oxtweekend.com, that’s O-X-T-weekend.com, these two guys are proposing that we refer to that weekend after next as oxed, O-X-T.

They just sort of arbitrarily came up with this word in order to solve this kind of problem.

So let’s throw another word in there just to mess things up even more.

We can create more confusion.

That’s great.

But then there’s the question of the weekend, because Europeans and Americans think of a weekend as either the week is starting on the Sunday or starting on the Monday.

So maybe there’s further ambiguity that goes in even with that expression.

Oh, my gosh, you’re right.

Because some people will throw in all of Friday, and some people will throw in only part of Friday, right?

There you go.

And some people actually don’t include Sunday at all.

They’re like, no, Sunday’s that started.

Look at my calendar.

Right.

The week starts with Sunday.

All of my friends, the weekend starts Thursday night, so I don’t know.

Oh, academics.

I see.

That’s how it is in the college world.

Yeah, that’s little Friday.

There you go.

Little Friday, right, right.

Here’s the thing about this.

In the immortal words of Humpty Dumpty, the problem with this is when I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean, neither more nor less.

This is the problem.

In our minds, we know what we mean, but it’s not necessarily transmitted to the hearers.

That’s the problem.

Or in clearly.

Well, I like the description that a conversation is a negotiation.

It’s a give and take.

I mean, it’s not always perfectly clear.

That makes a lot of sense.

We repeat ourselves far more than we know until we look at transcripts of our own speech, in which we’re horrified and vow never to speak again.

Wonderful.

All right.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

We’re glad to muddy the waters, Tom.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

It’ll never be resolved, right?

Never.

Maybe we’ll help you sort out your language confusion.

Maybe we’ll add more to it.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

I know the year’s not over yet, but I am already thinking about words of the year.

Oh, yeah.

And a big one’s going to be on a lot of lists.

It’s I can’t even.

Oh, yeah.

As an expression of kind of like unbelief or surprise or doubt.

And then she said to me that I had to move out.

I can’t even.

Yeah.

And you just stop there.

Can’t even.

And then the companion for that is can you not?

It’s just that.

There’s no not can you not do something.

It’s just can you not, which means just quit being whatever you’re being because it’s not really suiting the situation.

Can you not?

Yeah.

Good stuff.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hello there.

Who’s this?

Well, this is Ruth Harvey from Hanover, New Hampshire.

Hi, Ruth.

Welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Well, I just do a lot of reading, and I have for many years used the expression boulder dash when somebody says something to me that I cannot really believe that was true, especially when my children come up with a long story about something, then I say balderdash.

I love the way you said that, Ruth, balderdash, with a lot of scorn in that first vowel.

Well, I just wonder where it came from. A lot of times you think about it as a big sailor, captain on the seas, or something like that. Wonder, well, what is it? Well, it comes from a teacher in New Hampshire. No, I’m kidding.

Oh, you’re kidding. He is kidding. That’s balderdash. I was trying to get you to say it, Ruth. That’s balderdash, yeah. Yeah, I can tell Grant’s totally charmed by the way you say that. But yes, etymologists are wondering where it comes from as well. It’s a tough one. It’s stumped a lot of researchers.

Oh, yeah. How many languages have they connected to? Oh, my gosh. Danish, Icelandic, German, Dutch, Welsh, Gaelic. Yeah, but not really with any good evidence. I mean, the best evidence that we have about the word is that the earliest recorded uses of it in the 16th and 17th century refer to a kind of frothy mixture, a frothy liquid, like a mixture of beer and wine or buttermilk and beer.

And isn’t one of the early ones referred to the barber’s cream as a balderdash? Oh, I think so. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, so some kind of mixture, which sort of makes sense. Yeah, so it’s messed up. It’s all kind of not clear what’s what. Well, I can see that if somebody’s going to give you a story about something that’s not exactly true.

So this term pops up in the late 1500s just kind of out of the blue, and then all this work done most of it 100 years ago to try to connect it to other words and other languages. And most of these connections are really tenuous. People look at the spelling or the pronunciation, and the meanings are kind of vaguely approximate. And it’s all not very good etymological work at all.

So right now, we would probably call this origin unknown, and it really needs to be looked at again. I mean, I’m waiting for the Oxford English Dictionary to get to balderdash and really just re-tackle this etymology and see what they come up with.

Well, it sounds wonderful. I’d like to know when you find it. Well, I think they’re scheduled to get to Bangladesh in 2040, so I’ll let you know. Well, darn, I don’t think I’ll be here. Oh, come now. Well, but it’s a fun word. And you know what? I’m really delighted to hear that it’s still in wide use and that somebody like you is teaching your students because it is one of these really expressive words that we should never discard. It’s glorious. I love it.

Oh, I love the word. And I, not long ago, read in the paper somebody had used the word as something that the editor of the paper allowed in the write-up. But I don’t remember where it was. Oh, I should hope so. Somebody in the sports pages, no doubt. They get away with so much. Or the opinion pages.

Ruth, thank you so much for giving us a call. All right? All righty. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Call us with your language questions. 877-929-9673 is the number to call. Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And guess what? We’re all over Facebook and Twitter. We were talking at the top of the show about the sources and reaching for words maybe beyond your reach. And it’s been interesting for me to look at some advice from writers about whether to use the sources.

And how, Irish novelist Roddy Doyle wrote in his Rules for Aspiring Writers this advice. He said, do keep a thesaurus, but in the shed at the back of the garden or behind the fridge, somewhere that demands travel or effort. Chances are the words that come into your head will do just fine.

Right. Maybe when you’re on the way to find the thesaurus. But I think that’s a really good principle. Just don’t let that be your default. Yeah, there’s an interesting thing that happens with the new writer. They don’t have the confidence in their skill and they don’t have the confidence in their vocabulary.

And they do read, just like you said. And it is probably the number one thing that writers need to have beaten out of them in whatever MFA class they’re going through. Because it is a mistake almost always. What do I usually say? Something along the lines of read above your level, but write right below it.

Yes. Write less than you were capable of writing because that’s going to be better. We’ll take your writing advice. What do you tell your children or your students or your grandchildren when you want them to write well and to be confident about it?

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org. A word, a phrase, and your grandparents’ old sayings right here 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 Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here he is, John Chaneski, our quiz assist. Hello, John. Hey, hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Hello, Mr. Chaneski. Now, do you guys, I don’t know if you guys heard this old joke that goes, if Ella Fitzgerald married Darth Vader, she’d be Ella Vader.

Yeah. Oh. But I was wondering what other romantic blendings might be possible. For example, if film actress Kendrick of Up in the Air married Texas Senator Phil and took his name, she would become the rearranging of one word’s letters to make another word. Anna Graham.

Yeah, Anna Graham. She would be Anna Graham. So Anna Kendrick and Phil Graham. Okay. That’s very good. Yeah, nicely done. So that’s how this quiz works. If actress Dunaway from Chinatown married talk show host Larry from CNN and took his name, she would become the act of pretending.

Faye King. Faye King. Very good. If TV comedian Newhart married TV comedian Betty and took her name, he would become a small bird. Bob White? Bob White? Very nice. If singer Astley of Never Gonna Give You Up married playwright George Bernard and took his name, he would become a human-powered conveyance.

Rick Shaw. Rick Shaw, yes. Very nice name, Rick Shaw. There’s a few Rick Shaws out there. Radio Rick Roll. Radio Rick Roll, there we go. If psychologist brothers married sci-fi icon Philip K. and took his name, she would become a video game controller.

Joystick! That’s very good! That’s very, very good! That’s right. Very good. A little fun with phonetics there, yeah. Nice. Joystick. If TV actress Stapleton of All in the Family married rock singer Vince of Motley Crue and took his name, she would become rather friendly and cheerful.

Genial. Genial, yes. Genial. If legendary actress Hayworth married Larry from the Three Stooges and took his name, she would become a word meaning to change what a word means. Redefine. Yes. Redefine. Very good. That’s awesome. These are really good.

They should have gotten together. They should get together. Seriously. The most beautiful, funniest kids you ever wanted to meet. Of course. They’re gorgeous and they’re hilarious. Okay. Finally, if former U.S. Vice President Gore married silent film comic Harold and took his name, he would become like two metals that are blended to obtain a desired property.

Alloyed. Alloyed. Alloyed, yes. Very nice. And I hope they are very happy alloyed in their wedded bliss. Al Gore and Harold Lloyd. Thank you so much, John. Thank you. Nice work, guys. All right.

And if you want to talk about any aspect of language with us, and that includes wordplay, call us 877-929-9673 or find us on Facebook and Twitter. Hi, you have A Way with Words. Hello, this is Bob Berner. I’m calling from Monticello, Florida, up here in the Big Bend area up at Tallahassee.

All right. Well, welcome to the show, Bob. How can we help you? My mama was, or mother, I should say, was raised up in Arkansas. Whenever you’d spill your milk or get a fishing hook cut in your thumb, she’d say, hell’s bells. And I never really heard anybody else use it, my mama. I was just wondering where that came from.

Oh, we’ve got a couple guesses on that. It’s a rhyming variation of hellfire. It’s a mild oath. And sometimes people thought hellfire was just a little too impolite to be said around other folks, so they’d rhyme it up with hell’s bells. There’s a whole variety. Hell’s britches, hell’s boots, hell’s fury. Hell’s teeth, hell’s smoke, and hell’s bells kind of stuck around a lot longer and is used more often just because it rhymes.

Yeah, that’s good to know. Anytime, anything, you have a flat tire, mostly spilling my milk is when I’d catch the devil.

We moved to the Virgin Islands, and me and my wife moved down there.

We’ve done there 13 years, and we started writing letters back and forth to Mama, back before cell phones.

And the first time she ever wrote me a letter, she wrote, I assume what she wrote was Hell’s bells, but her S’s looked like O’s, and we walked around for days trying to figure out what Hello Bello meant.

We finally figured it was Hell’s Bells.

Yeah, Hell’s Bells.

It’s a mild oath.

It’s about as impolite as some folks ever get.

We’ve got Hell’s Bells in the dictionaries back to the 1830s, so it’s been around for a while.

Yeah, I’ve heard plenty of people use it.

Yeah, her family was from Scotch Island and American Indian, Arkansas Indian or Oklahoma Indian.

I don’t know where she got it.

I’ve never really heard anybody else say it except my mother.

Bob, you are refreshing to talk to.

Thank you so much for calling us, all right?

Thank you very much.

All right, take care now.

Call us again sometime.

Okay, thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Sometimes Hell’s Bells is just shortened to bells, which is even more polite.

Oh, no kidding.

Bells, really?

Yeah, just bells.

Yeah, just bells said with a lot of oomph.

Oh, you think that’s what Poe was writing?

No.

Owl is thundering, bells, bells, bells.

Go on, try it again.

That’s from 1929.

Okay.

All right.

Well, call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Continuing our conversation about using a thesaurus, I was looking at a memoir that talked about this guy’s experience of going to a prep school in New England and feeling insecure.

And so he used a thesaurus when he was writing this paper.

And he wrote, it was a story about emotions.

And I was trying to find a unique way to describe tears running down my face.

My discussion of lacerates falling from my eyes did catch the teacher’s attention, but not in the way I had hoped.

So, of course, he wrote, he was looking for a synonym for tears.

And he looked up tear instead of tears.

Yeah. And you know who that was?

Who was it?

Former President George W. Bush.

He writes about that in his book, A Charge to Keep.

Yeah. He’s not alone, right?

So many of us that did that, always looking for, you feel like you’re not good enough when you write for other people.

Don’t you? Yeah. You always want to put on your best face and maybe, it’s like renting a tux.

You’re renting nicer clothes than you actually own when you take these words that you don’t really have in your vocabulary.

Yeah. That’s a good analogy. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. This is Diane Beckerhauser calling from Poway.

Hello from Poway, California. Yes, indeed. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

I was chatting with a friend and we were talking about dogs and kids and whatever. And I was saying that my dogs were rat thinking all over the house and it was driving me crazy.

And she said, rat thinking, what’s that? And I said, well, you know, it’s when the dogs are kind of going crazy all over the house and they’re playing and they’re carrying on and barking and having a good time.

And so she said, oh, I’ve never heard of that before. Does it apply to kids also?

I thought, probably. I don’t know. Yeah, if they’re chewing up the couch, sure.

Yeah, yeah. So I thought, you know, I started to think, well, where does it come from?

And, you know, I remember using fink in the 60s.

And, you know, as somebody was a snitch or, you know, a bad person or something.

But then I don’t know how it evolved into dogs and kids rat finking around the house.

Well, Diane, if you grew up in the 60s, then maybe you remember.

I remember those little rat fink, those little plastic rat finks that everybody had in elementary school.

I’ve never heard of them.

Well, that’s because you came along a little bit later, Grant.

But you know what I’m talking about, Diane?

I vaguely remember them.

What did you give them?

Cereal box?

Cracker Jacks?

Yeah, or little gumball machines.

Everybody had rat things.

They looked like a rat.

They looked like a little rat up on its hind legs and little flat ears.

And they were ugly, ugly, ugly.

What did you do with them?

You know, I didn’t have one.

Oh, you didn’t?

I didn’t.

There are listeners right now pounding the dashboard, remembering.

Did you have this instead of dolls?

This would explain a lot.

Yeah, I had a pocket full of rat finks.

Everybody had rat finks.

You traded them.

They’re a little hard plastic.

Well, they didn’t make it to the 70s in my childhood.

How important could they be?

We had rocks as pets, if you remember, in the 70s.

Oh, right, yeah.

A rat fink, well, it’s complicated.

It tends to be related to Fink, like you said, Diane, which is somebody, a scab or somebody who goes against the union or somebody who tattles or informs to the government, maybe a narc, that sort of thing.

Somebody, you know, who turns his friends in so that he’ll get off scot-free and not be convicted himself.

And at some point in the 1960s, around 1961, we know for sure rat Fink kind of became this set phrase, which is worse than a Fink.

But the weird thing is in there, right about that time, there was a comedian by the name of Jackie Cannon.

It’s K-A-N-N-O-N, who put out a couple comedy albums about rat finks.

And he opened up the Rat Fink Club in New York City.

And he describes it as not being particularly pejorative, kind of making fun of the catchphrase of the day.

And there was the people who wrote the play The Fantastics, if you remember this.

It ran for like a million years in New York.

They created a play that had Rat Fink in its name.

So at some point, Rat Fink wasn’t all that bad, but it kind of continued on.

And today, if you saw somebody Rat Fink, you just mean that they’re a despicable person.

But I’ve never heard of a dog Rat Fink.

No, me neither.

You know, I wonder if it’s just a family thing because we’ve used it for years, I think.

You know, it’s when the dogs are—well, we also use the word frapping, which is a frantic random activity period for dogs.

And they can go absolutely bonkers.

But rat thinking normally is at least two, you know, and they’re playing together and having just a marvelous time.

And that way the only dogs can.

Yeah, or cats, little kittens at 5 p.m., 5 or 6 p.m.

They’re awake.

Well, that’s the best that we can do right now.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if we find out that rat fink is used in a similar way somewhere else outside your family.

We’ll wait and see what other listeners say.

Yeah, we’ll hear about it.

I love it.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for calling.

Okay.

Bye, Diane.

Bye, Diane.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you know something about rat finking around, well, call us and rat fink with us, 877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I came across an expression the other day that really caught my fancy.

It has to do with describing when you’re speechless.

You’re so surprised that you’re speechless.

Okay.

And you say, I felt like the boy when the calf ran over him.

Have you heard this?

No, I haven’t.

That sounds terrible.

What happened?

I don’t know.

But I thought that this must be like a one-off.

But then I started looking for it.

And it appears again and again.

How far back does it go?

At least to the mid-1800s.

It makes me think of little kids, you know, when something really surprising happens and they just sort of stand there dumbfounded, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, having something unexpected, I don’t know.

But if you Google this, you come across a lot of uses of, like the boy when the calf ran over him, I had nothing to say.

Like the boy when the calf ran over him?

I wonder if there’s a connection there, some story that we don’t know about.

That’s what I was wondering, or a joke or a song?

A famous book or a passage in the Bible or something?

If I could overthink this for a minute, I wonder if it’s about misjudging the baby animal.

Oh, that could be it.

Because it’s a baby animal, you’re like, oh, it’s just a baby cow. It can’t hurt me. And yet, it’s still two or three times the size of a boy, even though it is just an infant itself. Maybe that’s it. And then, you know, you get knocked over and there’s really nothing more to say. No, you’re done. And the calf is capering in the fields.

Yeah. So I wonder if any of our listeners have heard their parents or grandparents use that term, or maybe you use it yourself. Like the boy who was run over by the calf. C-A-L-F, right? Like the boy when the calf ran over him. Like the boy when the calf ran over him. C-A-L-F. All right. Let us know. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

Hi.

Who’s this?

This is George Olson from Exeter, New Hampshire.

Hi, George. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Well, I’ve been blessed all my life, or most of my life, to be married to a wonderful woman from eastern Kentucky. And over the years, she and her mother have shared a number of terms that I, being a boy from Pennsylvania, struggled with. Things like redden up and out ginning and most recently when, W-E-N, words that I had never really understood before. But fortunately, I’ve been able to follow up on. But there’s one that just stumps me, and that’s Swarpy.

Swarpy?

Swarpy.

Swarpy, yep.

Okay, what’s Swarpy, and how do we use it?

Sure. Swarpy describes a piece of clothing that is ill-fitting, generally too large. In a sense, it would go like, oh, Mom, this coat’s Swarpy. And it’s always large. It doesn’t seem to apply to things that are too tight. And also, I’ve asked, people aren’t sworpy. Only clothing is sworpy.

Okay. This is interesting. There’s a couple things at play here. This is a distant use related to the more mainstream, as far as it goes, use of sworpy, which refers to clothing that is long and free-hanging and swinging. And it might actually even brush the ground or, like, kind of twirl out when you turn your body, that sort of thing. And it’s related to old Scots words having to do with very similar things. A branch might swap or wind might swap. So S-W-A-P.

Yeah. And you’ll find that all of these words are connected back into the darkness of English. Swoop and swarp and swap have lots of interchangeable meanings and senses. And in some cases, they lose their R or get their R depending on the local dialect of English that they’re speaking. So that we consider them all to be etymologically related in a very forceful way through multiple reinforcement paths.

This is really derogatory. Is that generally the case? It’s definitely a negative term.

Is it enough to cause a fight?

Well, no, they’re pretty peaceable people. So, no, I know I know some mother and daughter doing battle over Swarby, but it is used.

Okay. Yeah, I guess, I mean, because that would mean that you’re not well-dressed, right? Your clothes don’t fit you. There’s something wrong with that, right?

Right, right, yeah.

There’s one other thing I hesitate to mention because they sound like good people besides being peaceable people. But there is an old term which is called drinking and swarping. It kind of goes hand in hand. And if you were drinking and swarping, you were out drunk off your head causing a big ruckus. Raising hell out there, yeah.

Oh, huh.

And swarping around. And basically, I think it refers to literally being kind of loose-limbed and all over the place and not in control of your body and not in control of your actions. Drinking and swarping.

Drinking and swarping.

Sort of sounds like what it is.

My goodness, I should try that one day and see if I’m accused.

Yeah, you never know.

Yeah, see what your wife and mother-in-law think about that.

Yes, I’ll try that.

But it does sound like your family usage is a very specific kind of distant relation to the swarping that we already know. And so I think I can logically see that path. Can’t you, Martha?

Sure.

Sure, yeah.

Well, wonderful.

Yeah, George, thank you so much for calling.

All right, thank you, Martha.

Take care now.

Okay.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Her dress was swarping the floor is another variation on that.

Oh.

Or she wore a swarpy dress. She had to lift it up so that it wouldn’t brush against the floor.

Oh, that almost sounds like a variation on sweep, doesn’t it?

Yeah, yeah.

Swarping.

You can swap these words out.

Yeah, swap.

Well, we know your relatives talk funny. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, and dish on your mother-in-law all you want to words@waywordradio.org.

If you want to feel very left out of culture, go read books of old proverbs. And there’s this whole world of agriculture that we don’t live in anymore and all the proverbs that go with it. One that I came across recently, which I kind of love, it’s to say somebody is between hay and grass. And you’re suggesting that they’re weak or feeble.

Between hay and grass.

Yeah, because hay and grass, they bend easily. They’re easily stomped on, broken, knocked down, that sort of thing. Easy to cut, easy to manage. So they stand up straight, but with the slightest bit of opposition, they fall down or bend.

Oh, between hay and grass.

If he’s between hay and grass, it means he’s easily beaten or subdued.

Huh.

Yeah.

Interesting.

And it’s an old one. It goes back to 1700s.

Oh, good grief.

Yeah.

Well, yeah.

I would have had no idea.

Are we a proverb culture anymore? Do English speakers really fall back on any but the most common of proverbs?

You know, that’s a good question. I mean, all I can think of when you say that is it’s always something. You know, I think modern proverbs. Maybe we’ve just replaced them with catchphrases that we get from popular culture.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Think about the last time you ate in a restaurant. Now picture the menu. Did it use words like fresh or delicious or flaky? Or was it really specific like Monterey Bay squid and wild copper river salmon with rosemary thyme polenta? Chances are if the description of the food was that detailed, you were probably in a more expensive restaurant. And of course, there’s no surprise there. But now we have data to back that up.

Because there’s a linguist at Stanford named Dan Jurofsky, and he and his colleagues analyzed a database of 6,500 restaurant menus across the United States describing 650,000 dishes. And when they crunched all that data, they found that, quote, every increase of one letter in the average length of words describing a dish is associated with an increase of 69 cents in the price of that dish.

Whoa! Big words mean big money.

That’s right. Those are some expensive adjectives, right? So there really is such a thing as $5 words, right? And he and his colleagues report this in a new book that’s called The Language of Food, A Linguist Reads the Menu. And a couple other things they talk about include the fact that if you’re saying fresh and delicious on a menu, those are described as status anxiety words. If you’re in an expensive restaurant, you’re not going to have to say that, right? If you have to talk about it, if you have to say so.

Right. So if you say fresh, you probably are in the drive-thru at Wendy’s.

Yeah.

Yeah. And the other thing about it is that the more expensive restaurants are 15 times more likely to describe where the food comes from.

Very good. You know, if you want to get deep into how menus have changed over time, I recommend going to the New York Public Library’s menu database where they have 17,289 menus with more than 1,200,000 different dishes.

Yeah, it’s crazy.

Oh, my gosh.

So they’ve got stuff going way back, more than 100 years, including gentlemen’s clubs, some of the earliest Chinese-American restaurants, cruise line menus.

Oh, my gosh.

The stuff you might have been, you know, one of the big famous ships that crossed the Atlantic every week, that sort of stuff.

Oh, my gosh.

Really interesting stuff.

And a lot of it is Planes book. I mean, you would go to a fancy restaurant. It would be something like porterhouse with egg, you know, and you’re like, that’s it.

Yeah.

There’s no extra adjectives.

Yeah.

There’s no drizzled with a sauce.

It’s interesting because there may be a trend to go the other way among expensive restaurants now.

Some of them are getting so minimalist that they’re giving you the menu afterward as a souvenir.

So, you know, it’s just like you just sit back and say, okay, hit me, chef.

If you’ve seen something crazy on a menu, either just too elaborate or too funny or just completely wrong,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who is this?

My name is Jean, and I’m from northern Michigan.

Hi, Jean.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Jean.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Well, there’s a word that I used as a child growing up in the state of Maine, and it was the word spleeny.

And my question is, is it still in use?

And I will tell you the context in which it was used when I was a child.

And it would be when, like, my mother was taking a splinter out of my finger,

And I would be cringing and pulling away, and she would say to me,

Don’t be so spliny, meaning that I was overly sensitive to the action to my body, evidently.

And I just thought that this, you know, this was what everyone used.

Well, as a young married lady, I moved to Michigan.

And I remember getting a shot from the doctor, and I looked at him and said,

I’m going to have to turn away because I’m a bit spleeny.

And he looked at me as if I were speaking a foreign language.

And it was at that point I realized that not everyone used this word.

And also, is it ever used since then?

I don’t know.

I’ve not heard it.

You’re worried that you’re the last remaining splenie speaker.

You know, I think I am.

Well, this is fantastic, Jean, because your story fits exactly with the research that we have.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, it shows that the term splenie in the United States is chiefly heard in New England,

And it has to do with being overly sensitive to feelings of fear or pain or distaste or even hypochondriacal.

But spleeny has been around for centuries, just referring to…

200 years plus, right?

Yeah, in England, referring to somebody who’s sort of ill-humored.

And it goes back to the idea of the spleen affecting your mood.

So we used to ascribe some emotions to sourcing from the spleen, right?

The same way we still describe certain things as coming from the heart.

Yes, yes.

The spleen was thought to produce the bile that produced melancholy back in the day.

Yeah, but spleen, he doesn’t seem to have migrated south or east.

No, and it’s still not that common, right?

Yeah.

It’s kind of a showy word that fiction writers will use, and you, Jean.

Yeah, I was going to say, it didn’t migrate east, but it migrated west.

I think I was cured that day.

Not cured out of the word fence.

Yeah.

But your description dovetails perfectly with what we know about it.

It was in New England, and you took it west.

Okay.

Well, that’s very interesting,

And it’s interesting to see how it evolved from melancholy to hypochondria, really.

Yeah, a little squeamish.

That’s really interesting.

Nice.

I’ve never heard it used that way.

Okay.

Thank you so much, Jean.

Okay.

I appreciate you taking my call.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I have an entry for the least useful definition of all time, by the way.

Oh, great.

Let’s hear it.

So if you go to the Oxford English Dictionary, admittedly, some of their entries have not been updated since the 1880s, right?

Okay.

And you look up splenie, it defines it as splenetic or spleenful.

Not helpful, OED.

Not helpful.

OED fail.

Again, I don’t think it’s been updated in a long time, but still.

I’m being a little spleen-y, Grant.

A pitch.

A pitch.

A dite.

That’s what they say in Maine.

A dite, a little bit.

A dite-spleen-y, yes.

Yeah, a dite-spleen-y.

Well, we’d love to hear your questions.

You said something, people didn’t understand it, and now you want justice.

This is the place to go.

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

I was reading Clay Shirky, who writes about journalism and the future of news and so forth,

And he had a little black humor in there from the journalism world where everyone knows that

Newspapers are dying, but they’re kind of unwilling to admit it.

It turns out that in

Some newspapers, they don’t call it the obituary column anymore. In-house, they call it the

Subscriber countdown.

Let’s hear your jokes about your business or industry. 877-929-9673. Email

Words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Masha.

Hi, Masha.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Auburn, Alabama.

Auburn, Alabama. Welcome to the show.

I feel like I’m from New York, although I’ve lived in Alabama for a while.

Okay.

No one understands when I say, I’m all Wittershins.

And to me, it’s a usual expression.

But since no one understands it, I actually sort of, well, I don’t say it anymore.

What do you mean by it?

What do you mean when you say you’re all Wittershins?

A kind of confused state.

Okay.

But no, I’ve never heard anyone else use that word except for a friend of mine

Who named a cat Wittershins.

Oh, they named their cat Wittershins.

I wonder if they got that from Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I think there was a cat named Wittershins on that show.

Oh, no kidding.

Yeah, well, that sort of makes sense.

I haven’t heard people talk about themselves as being all Wittershins.

I mean, I usually think of that as simply counterclockwise.

But it does connect to the older idea that Wittershins meant unlucky

Because you were going counter to the laws of nature.

Originally, it was about the direction of the sun, right?

Well, Wittershins is against the direction of the sun, right?

Yeah.

East to west.

Yeah.

Or west-east.

Right, right.

If you look at the way a sundial works, it works in a clockwise fashion, at least in the northern hemisphere.

And that expression actually is expressive of how I would be feeling when I’m calling myself back.

Right, right.

You’re kind of going in the wrong direction.

Yeah.

Why did I do that?

And, Masha, I can give you a word for when things are going right as well.

The opposite of Wittershins.

Yeah, the opposite of Wittershins is diesel, D-E-A-S-I-L.

It’s related to the Latin word dexter meaning right.

It means going in the right direction.

I love having a new word.

It makes me feel rich.

You are, you are.

You are.

You can add that to your word hoard.

Wittershins, by the way, we should spell Wittershins.

Yes.

Because it’s W-I-D-D-E-R-S-H-I-N-S, Wittershins.

Yeah, sometimes it’s spelled with a T-H.

Withershins.

Yeah, withershins.

Do we have an etymology on that?

We think it’s a Germanic term that just goes back to words that mean against the direction.

Oh, okay.

Against the direction of the sun.

Cool.

Masha, thank you so much for your call today.

Well, thank you very much.

All right.

Take care.

We’ll enjoy it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Grant, did you know that recently in Bolivia, the head of the country changed the clock on the congressional building, the official clock,

So now it goes withershins.

Why?

It’s sort of an anti-colonial measure because apparently clockwise is associated with the northern hemisphere.

Why didn’t they just start using, I mean, if they really wanted to reject colonialism using the quipu, the knotted cords that the Inca used to record, right?

You know, just take it all the way.

You’ve got to have clocks, right, in this day and age.

So, yeah, I mean, if you can go online and see pictures of this clock that goes 12, 11, 10, 9, it keeps the time correctly.

Sure, right.

But it goes the other way.

Whatever floats your boat, man, or whatever turns your clock.

It’s pretty cool.

Give us a call with your language questions, 877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before about paraphrosdokians,

Those statements that go one way and then take a sharp right turn.

Yeah, it’s a reality TV show, right?

No.

It’s a statement that goes one way and then veers sharply.

Oh, that’s right.

It’s a tricky, jokey thing.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I have one that I thought I would share with you, Grant.

Before you insult a man, try walking a mile in his shoes.

That way, when you insult him, you’re a mile away.

And you have his shoes.

Words to live by.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sally Rice.

Hi, Sally.

Where are you calling from?

Bozeman, Montana.

Bozeman.

Well, welcome to the show, Sally.

What can we do for you?

Well, I recently got a Fitbit.

Oh.

And one of the things that the Fitbit does is tell you how well you sleep.

And so there’s a sidebar on the screen that you can pull up on your computer, and it says number of minutes of sleep, number of minutes restless, and number of times awoken.

And when I read that, I thought, that can’t be right.

So my question is, shouldn’t it be awakened? Number of times awoken.

Okay, so a Fitbit is something that monitors your health and your activities, right?

Are you walking and counting your paces?

Correct.

You put this on your wrist.

It sends data to your phone or your computer.

It collects things like number of steps you take.

What does it do?

Heart rate and temperature and sudden movements in the night when you’re supposed to be sleeping, that sort of thing.

That’s right.

Yeah.

While we’ve been talking here, I’ve been Googling this.

All of the screenshots, they have it say awakened.

Now, maybe they changed it.

Yeah, maybe.

Well, on my Fitbit dashboard, I checked this today because I wanted to be sure that I was telling you, you know, giving you the accurate information.

And it says, times awoken.

Awoken?

Awoken.

Wow.

I love it because that’s kind of unusual in modern English, right?

Yeah, I wonder if they just misspelled awakened.

Maybe they need to update their software.

I mean, Sally, the Fitbit is…

Maybe.

Yeah, it’s giving you all kinds of great affirmation, it sounds like.

But I want to give you some more affirmation, which is to congratulate you for calling about what has been described as the most vexing verb in the English language.

Wait a second.

Wait a second.

That’s not the most vexing verb, is it?

You don’t think so?

No, I thought versing somebody in a video game was the most vexing verb.

Vexing.

No, no, no.

In fact, I have a collection of things that language authorities, phrases they’ve used to describe wake and awake, those two verbs.

And they call it the most vexing, the messiest.

It’s a muddle.

It’s not yet settled down from its long and tangled history.

So it puzzles even the experts.

But there’s a lot of verbs.

So you can wake.

You can awake.

You can awaken.

Yep.

And then they all have past participles and past forms, and some of them are the same or similar, right?

Yes, and they can be transitive or intransitive.

Oh, messy.

You know, you can wake in the morning, you can wake someone.

The key is to sleep late and never awaken so that you don’t have to talk about the verbs.

Part of the reason that it’s so difficult is that in the case of both wake and awaken, there are blends of two older verbs, one of which is transitive and has regular principal parts and one of which is intransitive and has irregular principal parts.

And so it’s just a big mess.

And I can’t even tell you how I would describe what I did today when I stopped sleeping.

I really can’t.

Woke up.

But, yeah, I usually say woke up rather than I awakened.

But you wouldn’t have a problem with awoken?

That’s wrong, right?

That one sounds like a misspelling.

That’s somewhat awkward.

Yeah, I think it’s wrong as well.

Yeah, I think you could say awoken or you could say…

I was awakened 12 times, but not I was awoken 12 times.

Yeah, awoken is weird.

I think maybe that’s a bad translation or misspelling.

Or terrible typeface or something, misspelling, yeah.

Yeah, I think it’s time for you to give your Fitbit some feedback for a change.

There we go, yeah.

Okay.

Let us know what you find out.

Your linguistic performance is lacking, Fitbit.

I expect you to shape it up, sir.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

You have affirmed me grammatically and just as the Fitbit affirms me fitnessly.

Nice.

Fitnessly.

I like that.

Fitnessly.

We’re not averse to a coinage here and there.

Yeah.

Thank you so much for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Good luck with the program.

Take care now.

All right.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Google awakened versus awoken or awoke versus awake.

For a good time.

For a good time.

And you will find every grammar nerd nerding out to the best of their abilities for years.

It’s still a mess.

They’ve been talking about this since like the first minute of the internet.

So there’s tons out there to read.

Good luck with that.

And we’ll be here waiting at 877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I came across this great quotation about words the other day.

It’s from Ingrid Bergman.

It goes, a kiss is a lovely trick designed by nature to stop speech when words become superfluous.

Isn’t that the truth?

It is the truth, right?

Stop speaking.

Don’t speak.

No more words.

Finger to the lips.

Exactly.

Call us to talk about language.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Or you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s broadcast.

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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.

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

Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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.