Howling Fantods (episode #1513)

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. The funniest Twitter thread I’ve read in ages was started by Shannon Proudfoot. She’s a writer in Ottawa. And she asked the world, what’s the most mundane but thunderous epiphany you’ve ever had? Something so ridiculously dull or elementary that still bowled you over when you figured it out. Oh boy. And there were a lot of really useful things like the fact that on a lot of dashboards of cars, it has the little picture of the gas tank and there’s a little arrow showing you which side the opening is on. See, I knew you would know this already.

And did you know that a lot of elevators ding once if they’re going up and twice if they’re going down? Oh, I love it. I didn’t believe it, but I ran out to the elevator in my building and and sure enough, that elevator did that.

Now, I’m bringing this up because there are also a lot of things that involve language. Yeah, people confess that when they were young and heard about guerrilla warfare, they thought it was actually big hairy beasts. Guerrillas fighting in the jungle.

Yeah.

And somebody wrote, my sister was about 22 when she realized that the AM radio stations work afternoon. Oh. She thought AM was about morning time only, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And somebody else wrote, I thought money laundering was physically washing the money and hanging it out to dry to get the cocaine off of it.

I thought that too.

I’m not going to tell you what things I went into that.

No, now you have to.

You brought it up.

Oh, do I?

Oh.

How about if I tell you that one later in the show?

Okay.

Because it’s really embarrassing.

So misunderstandings about language is something we all go through.

It’s a safe space, Martha.

Okay.

You’ll be fine.

I’ll share it later.

I’ll only laugh a little bit.

Okay.

And if you have some linguistic misunderstandings that got corrected kind of late in life when you should have known better, boy, do we want to hear about them. Please share, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter, @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m calling from Grove City, Pennsylvania.

Hello, Sarah.

Hi.

What can we do for you?

I was hoping you could help me. I am a newlywed. We just celebrated our first year anniversary.

Congratulations.

I grew up in Texas. I live in Pennsylvania. My husband is from western Pennsylvania. So there’s a lot of things that I say that he’s never heard before. The other day we were driving in the car, and as newlyweds, I was feeling all lovey and dovey, and I reached over to hug him and give him a big squeeze, and I said to him, I just want to make over you. And he was puzzled. And he said, what do you mean? I said, make over you. I want to make over you. And he said, I have no idea what you’re talking about. And I said, it means to love on you. He said, well, you can love on me, but don’t use that phrase. It’s such a strange phrase.

Dude, she’s going to be sweet with you. Just shush, shush.

He said I could love on him, but that was a weird phrase. So he said, maybe that’s because you’re from Texas. And I said, no, I’ve heard other people say it. And then he said, it has to be from your family. And I swear, I have heard other people use it other than my family. So I tried to Google it, and I really can’t find anything about it. Am I the only person that uses this phrase?

No.

Not at all.

Martha has a very nice look on her face. She’s nodding in agreement. She’s got a look of surprise. I’m just, I’m shocked that nobody’s heard of that. She’s put on her word rescue cape. She’s going to swing in here and save the day for you.

I hope my husband has to eat crow after this.

And I have no idea where that phrase comes from, but I do know what it means.

Or do his own making of, right?

Yeah, you can make up after you make over and make out. Who knew prepositions could be so hot, right?

I know.

But Martha, you know this expression, to make of someone, to make a fuss over, to be sweet with, or be lovey to.

Well, sure. This is one of these situations where I’m thinking, why is she even, you know, why would anybody even ask that question?

Right.

Because I grew up with that. You know, grandparents making over you, making a fuss over you, or spoiling a child. But I’m looking in the Dictionary of American Regional English, and it’s kind of scattered.

Yeah, it’s sprinkled all over Missouri, Texas, Kentucky, Arkansas. Maybe slightly more common in the South, but not that many reports of it. But it is out there.

I’m shocked.

You can find it in literature. It’s got hundreds of years of history, depending on how we want to connect it back. There are a couple of entries in very dense and comprehensive dictionaries that talk about to make of or to make on. And the meaning is to value highly or to treat with great consideration. And I think that there’s probably a relationship here between what you’re talking about, to make of someone, and this to treat with consideration. I think there’s probably a relationship there.

Although, as Martha is saying, the thing is, when you add that preposition, you kind of throw away all the etymological history and you kind of start over because prepositional compounds like that are difficult. Verb phrases, they just don’t. The preposition immediately changes and it can become something else. Anyway, you’re not the only one who does it. It’s common enough to be recorded in dialect dictionaries and regular dictionaries, and you can find it in the best literature.

Oh, I’m so glad. And it kind of makes sense. I grew up in Texas, and both, I was born in Indiana, so I’m a huser growing up in Texas, but both of my mom and my dad’s people are from Kentucky and Louisiana. So maybe it is more of a Southern thing than something he would not have heard necessarily in Western Pennsylvania.

So just to be clear, there’s nothing missing from this phrase. People might think, oh, the word fuss is missing or to-do. It should be make a to-do over or make a fuss over. It’s not missing. This is the actual phrase, to make over someone. And it doesn’t mean to put makeup on them. And it’s not directly related, etymologically or historically, to make out at all.

Oh, good. So it has nothing. It didn’t morph into that.

No, no. It’s its own thing. It looks like it’s got its own history, its own tributary of English that it’s lived for a very long time.

Oh, that’s so cool. I’m so glad. I can’t wait for him to hear the show.

I’ll bet.

All right. Thank you so much for your help.

Thank you, and thanks for calling. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on a year of marriage.

Yeah, mazel tov.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

That’s funny, right?

Yes, it is.

He has some explaining to do. First of all, she’s leaning over to be sweet with him, and he’s like, whoa, that language. What? No.

No.

Make a mental note, dude, and handle that later if it needs to be handled at all.

Well, I think we better quit while we’re ahead. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And talk to us about what your partner’s been up to on Twitter @wayword.

If you’re watching the new movie First Man with Ryan Gosling, you may be surprised at the way that they pronounce the name of the space program. The one that’s spelled G-E-M-I-N-I. How do you say it? Most people say Gemini. If your sun sign is a Gemini, that’s what you say. But in the space program, they pronounce it Gemini, which confuses people.

They do.

Yeah, and apparently in 1965, UPI, which was the wire service back then, ran an article that said, regardless of what the dictionary says, the Federal Space Agency’s official pronunciation for its new man-in-space program, Gemini is Jiminy, as in Jiminy Cricket.

Yeah, that became their standard. They were aware of the difference. They were aware that the other pronunciation was out there, but they settled on Gemini and stuck with it, and it’s become kind of a watchword inside the space program.

If you say Gemini, then people know that you’re at least a little bit of an insider.

Right, right.

Somebody described it as sort of a shibboleth if you say it, Gemini.

But of course it was named Gemini because it was a two-person space capsule.

That’s right. And Gemini is the twins.

Right. And this relative of the Spanish word, gemelos, meaning twins.

Nice connection there.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is James Howitt. I’m in San Diego.

Hi, James. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

I had called in with a question about a strange verb, sploot, that I’ve heard used in reference to the position that corgis or other dogs take.

It looks like Superman lying on the floor.

And I wanted to know the origin, derivation of this word, sploot.

And James, how are you spelling sploot?

S-P-L-O-O-T.

Okay.

And when you say they’re in a Superman pose, what do you mean exactly?

I mean with their forelimbs and back legs that was spread out, stretched out forwards and backwards, lying on the floor.

Often on cold tile or a cool surface.

Where did you find sploot? Where did you run across it?

I’ve heard it used, and then I remember a friend of ours who was a corgi owner used it in a sentence, and that this was the name or the word for this pose.

So they’re on their bellies and their legs are back behind them, sort of like frog legs, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, and actually frog legs is one of the terms that families often use for their pets when they take this pose.

Yeah, or frog dog.

Frog dog or frogging.

There’s a whole bunch of terms for it.

But in around 2010, 2011, sploot kind of came onto the scene and kind of has really showed up in all that cutesy animal language.

The origins are murky.

James, I don’t think I’m going to be able to give you an origin story for it.

I believe it has reference to something that looks like it went splat in order to get there, like a soft tomato when you put it down, right?

It spreads out.

Okay.

So that’s the best guess that I have of the origins.

But all the other, it’s weird that it kind of pushed these other terms out.

I know it from the sploot subreddit.

I don’t know if you’ve been there.

Plenty of cute animals.

It’s particularly associated with corgis, like you mentioned.

It comes up earliest and first and most often with corgis, and then eventually spreads to other breeds of dog and other kinds of animals.

So I thought the splut, the SPL part, I thought of splay, like kind of splaying it, splaying out.

The splat I can also see.

The oot part, I didn’t have a particular good explanation in my own head, except to sort of verbify it.

And it rhymes with cute.

Oh, certainly.

Other terms for it, drumsticks are turkey legs, chicken legs, furry turkey, supermanning, pancaking.

Flying squirrel was a common one for a long time before it kind of got pushed out by sploot.

Any corgi owner knows what we’re talking about.

They sploot.

They lie down with their little fuzzy butts up and their paws out and they’re adorable.

Yeah.

Cats, too.

Yeah.

Plenty of cats splooting.

Particularly when I’ve seen squirrel pictures of squirrels that are splooting.

Bunny splooting.

Bunny splooting, yeah.

So, James, that’s the most that we know.

Thanks for the question.

I really appreciate a chance to think about cute animals.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Take care.

All right.

Thanks, James.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

More about what we say and why we say it as A Way with Words continues.

Guitar solo.

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, the fabulous quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hey.

Hey.

You know, guys, I’m so busy these days.

I’m out and about.

I’m doing things, seeing people.

I don’t even have time to check my weather app or even look out the window.

So I’m going to ask you guys, how’s the weather before I leave the house?

Each of the following will clue you into a word that contains a weather word.

You can tell me the answer word, you can tell me the weather word in the word so I know the weather.

For example, I have to go to the store to get some stuff.

Nothing in particular, just various objects that are too small and unimportant to mention separately.

How’s the weather?

The answer word is sundries, and the weather word is sun.

There you go.

You can tell me the weather, or you can tell me whatever it is I’m supposed to be doing.

Okay.

Okay?

Let’s see how it works.

I have to go to class now.

I’ve got a huge test on the composition, structure, and behavior of molecular compounds as they undergo reactions with other compounds.

How’s the weather?

Something chemistry.

What’s the weather word in there?

Mist.

Yeah, mist.

Oh.

There’s a little mist.

Okay, I’ll dress appropriately.

Thank you.

Oh, my cab is on its way.

I’m off on vacation.

My itinerary is Lampang, Pakkret, Phuket City, and of course, Bangkok.

Oh, how’s the weather?

In Thailand, right?

Yes.

How about hail?

Hail, yes.

This one’s not phonetic.

It’s orthographic.

Martha’s writing them out.

That’s the trick.

Very good.

Always smart.

If you can, write them out.

Hey, you guys know my wife is a poet, right?

Yeah.

Well, tonight she’s taking me to a poetry reading.

It’s not a living poet.

It’s a tribute to a guy who won a bunch of Pulitzer Prizes.

Now, look, I’ve got miles to go before we get to the public library, so how’s the weather?

It’s frost.

Robert Frost.

There’s a little frost.

I’ll wear a jacket.

Oh, I’m in trouble.

My mom wants me to come by, and I know she’s going to really lay into me for some stuff I did.

She’s going to really read me the riot act.

How’s the weather?

Cold.

Oh, why is it cold?

Because she’s scolding you.

Because she’s scolding, yes.

I’m heading to the bookstore.

I’m doing research on whistleblowers, especially controversial ones, especially ex-CIA employees, those who have sought asylum in other countries.

How’s the weather?

Ex-CIA employees.

Yes.

Who’ve sought asylum in other countries?

Who are…

Oh, snow.

Yes, it’s snow.

Snow.

I’ll bring a shovel.

Finally, right now I’m going to help out at my neighborhood garden.

I can see it from here.

I’ll be helping the beekeepers with the beehives.

Oh, boy.

It looks like they need help.

All the bees are flying around madly.

How’s the weather?

Warm.

Because they’re swarming.

Yes, excellent.

You know what?

I think I’m just going to stay inside today.

Just like every other day.

Yeah, every other day.

John, that was fun.

Thanks, dude.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

I’ll talk to you next week.

See you then.

This show’s about words and language and goofing around, puns, jokes, riddles, laughter, quizzes, that sort of thing.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Corey calling from Newark, Ohio.

Hi, Corey.

Welcome.

What can we do for you?

Hi. So I’ve got a question about a word that I heard in South Africa.

Long story short, my wife and I adopted our son the beginning of this year, and he’s from Johannesburg, South Africa, and we were there for about six weeks.

And obviously, you know, with them speaking English, there were some interesting words that were being used, and one that we just couldn’t quite get to the bottom of the meaning of was shot, like S-H-O-T.

Obviously a word that we use in American English also, but certainly not in the same way.

I just didn’t know if you guys had any background on that.

How was it used?

How did this come up? How did shot come up?

Shot was kind of like a southern bless your heart a little bit.

Kind of like, oh, you know, that’s so sweet, that kind of thing.

But more like empathetic, like, oh, sure.

Actually, we thought that they were saying sure for the longest time.

But then as time went on and we were there for so long, we actually asked somebody who we were spending some time with while we were there, like, what are you saying?

Like, what is that word?

Like, write it down.

And sure enough, shot.

S-H-O-T.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

That’s super cool.

There are a variety of uses of shot that this brings to mind, but I don’t know this exact expression.

In Australia, they might say that’s the shot to mean well done or approval for something that’s happened.

There’s a general use of shot in South Africa, at least according to my slang dictionaries, to show approval or express agreement.

There’s also outside of North American English, mostly in the UK and Australia and South Africa, you get a shot that refers to, they say O-shot, S-H-O-T.

And you use it in sports when someone has done something particularly well, like a good hit or strike or whatever, a goal, that sort of thing.

Interesting.

And there’s one particular usage in boxing, I guess you’d say, when they deliver an effective punch.

You know, a shot as a punch is fairly standard English.

But they say, oh, shot.

They don’t say that was a good shot.

It’s just like you blurt the word out.

You know, you just say shot.

Interesting.

And so I’m wondering if you said this bless your heart thing, and for the listeners who aren’t clued into that,

You have the positive bless your heart where you generally mean bless her heart.

You know, she deserves love and affection.

And you have the kind of negative one where somebody does something really daffy or dim-witted,

And you say bless your heart, basically saying the unspoken part is bless your heart.

They can’t help it.

Right, right.

Well, we do have a lot of listeners of South African heritage.

Absolutely.

It’s your time to stand up, everyone, from South Africa and be heard and tell us a little bit about this particular use of shot.

Corey, thank you very much.

We really appreciate your call, and we’ll let you know what we come up with.

All right.

Of course.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye.

Thanks, Corey.

Bye-bye.

So, South Africans, tell us about that use of the word shot.

Is it kind of approval or disapproval?

Is it an expression of regret or sympathy?

What is happening with that, and where do you think it comes from?

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

We were talking earlier about that Twitter thread where people were confessing things that they learned a little bit later in life that everybody else knew.

And I guess I promised to tell you the thing.

You did?

Yeah.

All right.

It’s not languagey, but shall I?

Do you need me to hold your hand on this, Martha?

Yes, please.

I thought beer came from horses.

Because why?

My non-drinking Southern Baptist mother, whenever we would see beer commercials on TV, she would say, why don’t they put it back in the horse?

And so I’m sitting there in my health class.

I am.

I’m sitting there in my health class.

I am 16 years old.

And the class is really dull and boring.

And I just thought, you know, I will try to help out my teacher because she was trying to engage the class in a discussion.

And she said, who can tell us where beer comes from?

And so I raised my hand.

And I said, it comes from horses, doesn’t it?

And the entire class laughed at me.

It didn’t bother me because I learned something new that day.

What your mom was doing was comparing it to horse pee, right?

Yeah, I thought that’s why it’s so manly to drink beer, because it comes from horses.

So anyway, that’s my story.

I don’t know if I can go on.

All right, tell us yours.

Martha shared now.

You have to share too.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, Martha.

Hey, Grant.

This is Rebecca calling from San Diego.

Hi, Rebecca.

Hi, how you doing?

Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Thank you. I’m so excited to be on your show.

Well, great. What would you like to talk with us about, Rebecca?

I have a question. I’d like to know the origins, the creation story for kind of a kooky word that I honestly don’t hear very often, but I use occasionally.

And here’s the scoop.

A few weeks ago, my boyfriend and I were hanging out at home, and I had made a couple of nice salads for dinner.

And we’re both a big fan of blue cheese dressing.

And I hand him the dressing, and he begins to kind of layer his salad.

And then he’s still layering.

And a few seconds later, I have to jump in and say, you know, dude, don’t Bogart the dressing.

Meaning?

Well, meaning, you know, hey, buddy, we’re sharing here.

Don’t monopolize, you know, the dressing.

Don’t hog it all up.

And he says, Bogart? You know, I haven’t heard that word from or since the 70s or something.

And I said, well, you know, I probably haven’t either, yet here we are.

That is not the story I thought you were going to tell.

You thought it was going to be a trip to Canada or Colorado?

I’m a huge music nerd, and I don’t know if you all are familiar with a southern rock band called Little Feet.

Sure.

Yeah, they kind of have that Louisiana, swamp, Cajun, southern rock style.

And they were popular in the 70s, probably through the 90s.

And when I was much younger, I was listening to one of their albums that was literally titled Don’t Bogart that joint.

It literally like went something like, don’t Bogart that joint, my friend, pass it over again.

And then rinse and repeat.

So I just assumed that Bogart meant, you know, if you’re sharing something or an item, you know, one person can lose track and all of a sudden it’s gone.

Yeah, it’s definitely about hogging all of something. And it has an interesting history. Everyone who hears it immediately thinks of Humphrey Bogart, which is ding, ding, ding, the source of it. Absolutely. But it’s how it got to modern slang that’s interesting to me.

If you go back and watch Bogie’s old films, they’re fantastic.

They still hold up almost all of them.

But in a lot of them, he’s a tough guy.

And he bullies his way around.

He’s a mischief maker.

He’s a criminal.

That’s the characters that he plays.

And there’s violence, at least violence for the day, not the kind of violence that we put in film now.

And so a lot of the early uses of the verb to Bogart aren’t about hogging something.

They’re about being violent or about forcing your way into a situation.

And then later they become about taking more than your share, often through violence or confiscating something or stealing something in a violent way or in a very aggressive way.

And so it’s not just a lot of people say, oh, well, Bogie smokes cigars.

It’s got something to do with cigars.

But no, we have lots of contextual uses that aren’t about cigars.

They’re not about smoking at all, cigarettes or anything like that.

They’re about the violence of the characters that he played in the films.

And they pop up in the mid-1960s, and they’re fully a part of slang by the 1970s, and it’s fading a little bit today.

That’s so interesting. I thought it might be tied to the actor Humphrey Bogart, but I didn’t think that it was kind of introduced into pop culture until maybe the 70s or the 60s. I didn’t realize it was much older than that.

Yeah, well, the term itself doesn’t pop up until the 1960s, but the films that he was in predate that by some decades.

Yeah, and I always picture a cigarette dangling from his lips.

Right, a lot of people do.

There’s two interesting things here also worth sharing. One is it really took off. The slang term really starts to populate the popular lexicon in 1969 with the film Easy Rider, where it’s used in the film between characters. And that film was hugely popular, especially with the young people.

Another interesting fact is there’s a small number of people in this country who think that to bogart something, to bogart a joint or bogart a cigarette or a cigar, means to leave it too long on your lips, like to get too much saliva on it, to lip it a little bit.

And you can see Bogie in his films, sometimes the cigarette’s just dangling and it’s like stuck through the mechanics of the wetness of the saliva and the lip and just not going anywhere.

And so we have these three main kind of slangy uses of tobogart. One is about to be violent to get your way. One is to hog something. And one is to use too much moisture or saliva on a cigarette, cigar, or joint.

Or salad dressing on whatever you’re…

Exactly.

I’ve been down to get violent over Bob’s big boy, Blue Cheese.

Cool.

That is so interesting.

Thank you so much for taking my call and for what y’all do.

Thank you for calling, Rebecca.

We really appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Masha Harris.

I’m calling from Vergennes, Vermont.

Hi, Masha.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

My question concerns the word ilk.

I’m 33 years old, so I grew up in the 80s and 90s, and my family always used the word ilk, which means kind or type.

So you might say, what ilk of tree is that?

Oh, it’s a maple.

And as I grew older, I found that no one I knew used this word, and eventually, out of frustration, I looked it up, and the Internet told me that it’s archaic and no longer in use.

And so my question is twofold.

First, do people really not use the word ilk?

And second, if it is archaic, do you have any ideas of where my family might have picked it up?

My parents are very well versed in Shakespeare, and I wondered if it was a Shakespearean word.

Yeah, that would make a lot of sense to me.

I think it’s used in several Shakespeare plays.

It’s definitely of that period.

Of that ilk.

Of that ilk.

It’s not archaic.

It’s still used, but it’s used in kind of one set of construction now where we say so-and-so and his ilk, meaning the people like him.

But the older meaning of it was different.

It comes from Scott.

And in Scott’s English, you might say MacDougal of that ilk, meaning MacDougal of the place called MacDougal, kind of like eponymously, you know.

So he was not only named MacDougal, but the place that he’s from is also called MacDougal.

And so you’ll find that again and again in the older text, but through a misunderstanding, it came to mean of the same sort or of the same kind or of the same variety.

And that’s more or less how it was used for hundreds and hundreds of years until it kind of became kind of set in this one particular expression now where we use ilk, not even just to mean kind or type, but negative kind or type.

Increasingly, the use of it is meaning people of bad intentions or bad will or bad behavior.

Oh, wow, because we never used it like that.

It was just a synonym for a kinder type.

Yeah, the kinder type is out there.

It’s just not as common anymore.

Certainly, it comes up in rarefied prose where somebody who has a lot of erudition and education might throw it in there, and it’s part of a larger fabric of using the full array of English.

They’re not really showing off.

It’s just part of the way that they write, and in that context, it makes sense.

But in the everyday use that you’re talking about, it’s so interesting.

I haven’t run across somebody just to say, you know, an oak tree of that ilk.

Is that how you use it?

Well, it would more be a question.

What ilk of tree is that?

What ilk of radio show is A Way with Words?

Oh, my goodness.

Really?

Now, I haven’t heard it that way.

Definitely the way that Grant is describing.

But it’s always ilk of, or you might say of what ilk, you know.

And was it just your family or was it your friends?

I think just my family, we’ve got some pretty weird turns of phrase, but we’re all word nerds.

And this was one that we’ve always used, you know, since childhood.

Fascinating.

Certainly you can find it to mean kinder type out there in writing.

But like I said, it’s usually elevated writing and elevated speech and not everyday speech.

But if you come from a highly educated background and your household is one filled with learning and books and science.

Future librarians.

Yeah, I’m not surprised at all to find that a word like this meaning that most people don’t know would stand out and be important to you.

This makes perfect sense to me.

Great.

Well, thank you so much for your help.

This is fascinating.

Yeah, we’re happy to help.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye, Masha.

Bye-bye.

Well, what’s the word that’s been bouncing around in your head?

Let us know.

877-929-9673 or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can also find us on Twitter at WayWord.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know that feeling when you get to the end of a really great book and you just don’t want it to end and you have to close it?

And you go to the library website and see if there’s another book in the series.

Yeah, by the same author.

Or you go to Goodreads and say, what else have they written? I need it all now.

Grant, I’m at that moment. And I think you’ll appreciate this.

I just had that experience with the book Heartland.

It’s subtitled, A Memoir of Working Hard and Being Broke in the Richest Country on Earth.

It’s by Sarah Smarsh, and she comes from a long line of Kansas wheat farmers on her paternal side and a long line of teen mothers on her maternal side.

And the book is a beautifully written meditation on class, identity, and living below the poverty line in the heartland of this country.

One of the things that she writes about in the book is her experience of language and learning words.

And she talks about the word august.

And she had the experience that we’ve talked about before on the show.

Both she and her mother were the ones who read books in the family.

And she writes, people where I’m from don’t use adjectives like august.

They don’t use many adjectives at all.

They speak a firm sort of poetry made of things and actions.

Once I learned what august means, it was quite a few more years before I knew how to pronounce it.

Like so much of my vocabulary, I learned it alone with a book, but didn’t hear it spoken aloud.

In my head, I said it like the month.

It would be unwise for me to claim I know how much growing up in a poor family shaped my words.

My mother’s strong vocabulary, itself learned alone from books, probably has more to do with my language than any college degree I got.

And in fact, she went on to college and became a professor of creative writing and journalism.

And on her Twitter feed, she gave some writing advice, which I really related to, and I think you will too.

She wrote, reliable writing advice is to read, read, read. I agree.

And yet, I come from a culture not big on books.

My mom and I were outliers as readers.

What I did even more was listen, listen, listen.

And I thought that was such a great bit of advice.

I agree, yeah.

And that book again was?

That book again is Heartland by Sarah Smarsh.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sharon calling from Karkana, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show, Sharon.

Yeah, well, the story is that when my sister and I were a lot younger, she’s just a year younger than I am, and when we were like four and five years old, my father tended to talk to us.

And when he would say things, he would say them fast so that some of the things that he said sounded like it was one word.

Like if we asked why we should do something, he’d say, just do it for the heck of it.

So for the longest time, we thought heck of it was a word.

We didn’t know what it meant.

It just meant we were supposed to do it regardless.

And if we were squirmy and he wanted us to stand still or hold still, he’d say, just hold still a minute now.

You’re like a fart in a mitten.

And for our whole lives, we thought fart in a mitten was some word from some other language, maybe German or whatever.

But we did not know what it meant until we were way older, like maybe in high school, and we were talking about it, and my father had passed away by then, and we were talking about it.

And we just looked at each other like it was fart in a mitten.

And he would say, I would like, oh, it works for that.

Oh, if we were really squirmy, if it was a fart in a mitten, it would just disperse everywhere.

It would never be just in one spot.

And so that, I just wondered if anybody’s ever heard it or if it’s something he made up.

Oh, he didn’t make it up.

It’s been around for a while.

Yeah, at least 50 years, probably more than that.

I know it’s from the 1960s at least, but I have no doubt that it’s older.

Similes using fart as a comparison are abundance in English.

Yeah, you’ve got in a blender, in a colander, in a hot skillet.

In a jacuzzi.

And a spaceship, a submarine, a phone box, an elevator.

Oh, that’s funny.

Well, this would have been like probably 1960 or 59 that he would have said it to us along with the other things.

But that one had an actual, different than heck of it or fun of it, that had an actual thing.

So we weren’t sure if he was clever enough to come up with that thought by himself or if it was something that he heard at the time.

He must have heard it from other folks because it’s been around for a while.

Yeah, it’s been floating around.

But that doesn’t take anything away from the experience that you had.

No, I love it.

And he was quite a bit like that.

And he spent a lot of time in the Fin and Feather Tavern in Winnie County at the time.

Or Tige’s Tavern in Winnicotton at the time.

So I think he probably heard that from some of the cohorts that he sat by on the bar stool, too.

And so we knew what he meant, though.

It meant for us to stop squirming around.

So I really liked the saying, and I appreciate it now even more.

And I do love your program.

I want you to know I’ve wanted to call in a hundred different times for a lot of different reasons.

And my license plate is I-L-V-W-R-D-S.

Oh, how nice is that?

I always feel a little bit guilty because I think you guys should have some license plate like that rather than me.

I totally love your program.

Oh, Sharon, you have to call us again.

Yeah, you’re a delight.

I really appreciate you sharing this story about your father.

This is wonderful.

Thank you, and thank you for letting me share it.

All right, take care now.

Yeah, you have a great day.

All righty, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Getting back to that Twitter thread where people were confessing things they didn’t learn for a while when they were growing up.

One person said, I thought a medical dressing involved pouring salad dressing on a wound because I was once in the school nurse’s office and saw a bottle of Thousand Island in her fridge.

It didn’t occur to me until years later that it was just her lunch, not medical supplies.

Boy, you didn’t want to put that down a cast.

Right?

But you can understand how you get these ideas and they’re fossilized in your head and you just kind of go along.

And you don’t have a reason to challenge them until much later, right?

It’s not something you’re constantly revising.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Shane.

Hi, Shane.

I’m calling from Dallas.

Well, welcome to the show.

Hi, Shane.

Hey, how’s it going?

Going well. What’s going on?

What can we do for you?

Well, thanks. I appreciate the time.

I’m actually calling.

It was a unique situation.

I’m in and have hosted a book club where I’m at in Dallas for the better part of six years.

And we tackle a lot of interesting classics as well as sometimes unique and interesting new things.

But we finally have put it off for long enough, and we’ve finally gotten around to tackling Infinite Jeff by David Foster Wallace.

And I’m not sure how familiar you are with all of his work, but there were several things that have come up in the course of reading just the first half of it so far, and I wanted to pose to you both an interesting set of questions as it relates to some of his describers and things that he does.

Oh, right. Let’s hear it.

The one that most recently I think did a really good job of describing something without necessarily saying exactly what it was, was the words, nose, poor, close.

In fact, he was referencing it as a part of a meeting that was happening, and instead of saying he just sat at the front of the room, he said he was nose, poor, close.

And I thought that was just a fun way of describing something that’s littered throughout his writing.

And I wanted to know if you all had any sort of favorites as it relates to a description that doesn’t necessarily say exactly what it is, but it gives you a really good idea of what they’re talking about.

I don’t have anything that comes to mind, but I did have the good fortune to work with David on a writer’s thesaurus, Oxford American writer’s thesaurus.

This is a number of years ago.

In the first edition, I know for sure in the Oxford American Writers Thesaurus, you can find usage notes that he wrote in his particular fashion.

And they have such flavor and character about them that I think that anybody who’s read DFW’s work would probably recognize the tone, the quality, and the precision that’s there.

It’s one of those secrets that people are surprised to hear about.

If you go onto a Macintosh computer and you open up the Thesaurus or the dictionary and there’s a usage note, there may be initials at the end of it.

You may find his initials, and that’s something that he wrote.

And you might have it on your computer giving you advice on how to be a better writer, which I think is a perfect, great use of his talent and skill to be there kind of suddenly and silently waiting until called upon.

And then there he is at the moment of rescue.

Excellent. Yeah, that’s good to know.

In fact, I didn’t know that you had worked with him.

And I’m curious, do you all get questions about his writing and or his descriptions or his verbiage often?

A lot of listeners and writers we know really love his work.

I love the idea of somebody being within nose-pore range.

If you’re that close to somebody, then you’re seeing the pores, right, in their nose.

Have you gotten to the part where he talks about the howling fantods?

Oh, I don’t know if I’ve gotten there yet.

That sounds interesting as well, though.

Yeah, fantods is a word that’s been around for a long time.

That sort of means, you know, upset or, you know, that gives me the fantods.

It makes me jittery or upset.

And he’s used the term the howling fantods.

And even if you don’t know what that term means, you can kind of get the idea.

In that book, I think he’s got a line about roaches give him the howling fantods.

And you just know from the context what it is.

Because it’s like the heebie-jeebies, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, there’s a couple of other ones I thought were somewhat interesting.

At least as it relates to visually, he called something toad belly white, which I thought was, it gave me a very clear sense of what the color he was looking for, as well as the part where he’s talked about a Cerberus horned dilemma as it relates to sort of a triple bind.

And, you know, I really hadn’t even thought about it like that, you know, where, you know, you’re familiar with the Cerberus, but I had not thought about it in terms of any other context of it, just it being what it is, right?

But he was able to sort of relate it to something that was, you know, like an executive issue, like we’ve got three big problems, and yet he found a way to pull something from history that I thought was pretty cool as a describer.

Syveris, the three-headed dog, right? Or monster, right?

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, the Hound of Hades, I think they referenced as.

Yeah, and there’s something about that that just catches your eye and your ear, right?

I mean, he could have said it was as white as a toad’s belly, but instead he said toad belly white.

That sort of compression is poetry itself, right?

Yeah, I totally agree.

But as it relates to you, Martha, had you had, since it sounds like you read it, were there any phrases like that that you felt besides the howling fantods that really stood out to you and gave you something maybe that you’ve used since then in your regular day-to-day speech?

Well, I did like his use of the term greebles. Have you gotten to that part yet?

If I have, I probably missed that one. But greebles, is that what you said?

Yeah, he talks about rubbing around a light switch with a Kleenex, like a dirty area, rubbing with a wet Kleenex until it disintegrates into greebles. And again, you don’t know necessarily what the word is, but you can kind of figure it out.

Greebles. So this is the wet particles of the tissue as it’s disintegrated?

Yeah. Isn’t that great?

Yeah, that’s fantastic. Shane, I know that we’ll have a bunch of listeners to respond to this. You know, I’m glad to hear Infinite Jest in particular being discussed and read as a literary work. Now it’s about 20 years old.

Because for a while there, it was just kind of the joke book that people had and didn’t read. And I think it deserves more attention than that. Props to you all for pushing through that. And thanks for sharing your thoughts about this. We really appreciate it.

Yeah, maybe check back in with us after you finish.

Oh, yeah, absolutely. It’ll probably be March of next year.

Okay, sounds good. Bye-bye.

All right, thank you all. All right, bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your favorite quotes or extracts or passages from books that you’re reading in your book club or something that you hold dear, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Regarding our ongoing quest to find a good salutation for opening a letter,

We heard from Mary Gordon, who lives in Austin, Texas,

And she called us and left a message in which she said,

I just think we ought to harken back to the word hark.

So whether you’re writing the IRS or the DPS or whatever S you’re writing,

You could just start your letter with, hark!

I actually think that’s a great suggestion.

Just hark.

877-929-9673.

Email words at wewordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maribel Scott from Montgomery, Alabama.

Hi, Maribel. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Maribel.

Hi.

What’s up?

Well, I was talking to somebody about a crossword puzzle clue recently.

I thought it disparaged my great state of Alabama.

And then I said, and it was only a three-letter word, to boot.

And I got to thinking, where did that come from?

Why do we say to boot when we mean additionally?

So I thought maybe you guys might have some insight on that.

Oh, yeah, we do.

But I’m curious about this crossword puzzle clue.

The clue was assistance in Alabama.

Assistance in Alabama.

Yes.

Oh.

Huh.

And it was how many letters?

Three.

And you figured it out?

I did.

I did.

Are you ready?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The word is hep.

That’s what I thought.

I wasn’t going to say it, though.

Really?

You know, there are other clues you could have said for hep, like a hep cat.

Right, exactly.

But they dumped on my state.

Oh.

Oh, that’s not nice.

Yeah.

No.

Yeah.

And so the expression to boot came up as well, right?

Yeah.

It was an insult to Alabama, and it was just not much of a word to boot.

Okay.

To boot meaning something extra, right?

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with the boots that you wear on your feet.

This is a totally different kind of boot.

Okay.

The word boot in that sense, something extra, comes from an old English word, boat, B-O-T, that means advantage or remedy.

And so if something’s to boot, it’s something that’s added or extra.

It’s actually related to the English word better, a little bit more.

Okay.

That is very good.

And is that, that’s a term I’ve used, I guess, since I’ve been talking just about.

Is that a pretty common term to boot?

You know, I use it and kind of get cocked eyebrows every once in a while when people think it’s either affected or rare, but I think of it as ordinary.

But you sound like you’re like me, Maribel.

You’re probably reading everything all over the place and doing crossword puzzles every day, and you just pick stuff up, right?

Yeah, learn lots of cool stuff that way.

But Maribel, it has been a delight to talk with you,

And you call us some other time when you’ve got a complaint about the crossword, all right?

I will do that.

Martha and Grant, it was great talking again to you guys.

It was my pleasure.

Great talking with you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Mirabelle.

Bye.

Language, it’s a crazy thing.

We know you’ve got ideas and opinions.

You can share those with us, 877-929-9673, or spill it all, spill the beans to us, and

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Want more Way With Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show on any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten,

Director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski, and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.