Jumped Up Bald-Headed (episode #1381)

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.

Remember the first time that you saw a sign for the chain of toy stores called Toys R Us?

Toys R Us, yeah.

Do you remember that, Grant?

The backward R.

Yeah, the backward R, the misspelling, the…

Colorful letters, yeah, the kids kind of printing.

Ungrammatical.

Do you remember what you felt?

I remember feeling, what’s wrong here?

I was a kid, I wanted to go in, and I wanted toys.

Oh, it attracted you.

Yes.

They had stomper trucks in there.

I wanted them so badly.

I’ve been thinking about this.

Sometimes it’s called sensational spelling or divergent spelling when companies specifically misspell something on purpose.

And I guess it’s to get your attention.

But I’m just thinking more and more about how it makes me feel.

And I think it makes me feel usually jarred and annoyed.

But some terms bother me more than others, like Blu-ray.

B-L-U-ray.

That bothers you because it’s missing the E.

It doesn’t bother me so much.

I feel like they know more than I do or something.

Things like Cheez Whiz, that bothers me.

How do they spell Cheez Whiz?

With a Z instead of S-E.

Oh, Cheez Whiz.

I never noticed that.

I don’t buy Cheez Whiz.

Oh, well, I don’t either, but I see it in the stores.

Sure, it’s got some in your bag.

Yeah.

She squirts it into her mouth in between the calls.

Eat it with my finger.

But the thing that really bothers me is I’ve decided that it’s things that look like they’re misspelled in order to look uneducated, you know, like country kitchen with two Ks.

That’s right. So it’s the false, like, I’m just a down home guy just like you.

I’m a regional and you should come because we’re just alike.

Yeah. Or here’s our little, you know, school for it’s a preschool and it’s spelled with a K.

Right.

I don’t know. Do you?

I agree with that.

Yeah, that’s the worst reason to misspell.

And yet there are really good reasons to misspell a brand or a company name.

For example, if the name that you want is already taken.

You misspell it and kind of just move forward and do the thing that you want to do.

Certainly, N-I-T-E used to bother me a lot instead of N-I-G-H-T.

It really bothered you?

Yeah, it did.

It bothered me when I was younger, kind of before I was really language dude, you know.

It bothered me because I was like, well, no, there’s a better spelling and I like it.

I just liked the G-H-T more.

It’s an aesthetic thing for me.

So same thing with light then, light beer.

But you do stuff in your own emails that you send out casually to me and other people related to the show.

You will spell words like you spell thought, T-H-O-T.

I do.

But you find originality in that, right?

It’s just easier.

There are certain words, thought, should.

And cool, K-E-W-L.

But I love that one because it represents kule, which is the way some people in California say cool.

Right, a pronunciation.

Yeah.

So I don’t know.

I’ve been thinking about that.

And I’m really curious to know which of those intentional misspellings, those sensational spellings, bother our listeners.

Or delight them.

Or delight them.

Yeah, because there are some spellings like, oh, yeah, that’s good.

That’s a keeper.

Exactly.

I remember being confused at first when Flickr, the name of Flickr, came out.

And they leave off the E in Flickr.

Yeah, where’s the E?

And I was like, oh, that’s a really logical solution to their problem, which is the Flickr domain with E-R was taken.

Yeah.

I loved it.

I didn’t realize that.

I didn’t realize that.

It’s kind of like, okay, let’s drop the E and, you know, we’re online only.

It’s not that hard.

Right.

That’s better than pH instead of.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I like that.

Huh.

Yeah.

Well, I would be really interested to know what people think.

And I decided that Krispy Kreme gets a pass no matter what.

Just because of the product.

Just because it’s so good.

But you can let us know by calling us at 877-929-9673.

Send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

You can find us on Facebook and Twitter and our website, waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary from Indianapolis.

Well, hello, Mary. How are you doing?

Just fine, thank you.

What can we help you with, Mary?

Well, my question is based on a childhood memory.

I remember when my mother was making pies, she would trim the pastry and give me the trimmings,

Let me roll them out, sprinkle them with cinnamon and sugar, roll them up, and we’d bake them.

And she called this Ratsukuka.

Now, I just accepted that was the name for it and never really thought much about it.

And later on, I asked a few people, nobody had ever heard that term before for those.

Now, I know my mother didn’t make it up.

I think she had gotten it probably from somewhere.

I have no idea how it’s spelled.

But it’s just come to mind lately, and I was wondering where could that have come from?

So it’s leftover pie dough, right?

Yes.

My mother did it, and I loved it, and it was the best thing ever.

The trimmings around the edge, and she would put a little butter on it and then the cinnamon sugar

And bake it for just a couple minutes, and it would come out, and it was almost better than the pie.

Really, it was that amazing.

And because she would, like, hand it to you hot off the pan.

And I actually got to do it, so it was sort of my part.

Yeah.

Right, you helped.

And you’re in the kitchen having a snack.

It feels illicit because it’s not like after a meal.

And she called it Ratzakuka.

Ratzakuka.

Ratzakuka.

If I had to spell it fanatically, I’d say R-A-T-Z-A-K-U-K-A.

Now, I was talking with one lady, and she said that German words,

There was a kuchen or something for bread.

And I don’t know any German.

My mother did not speak German, though her grandparents came from Germany.

Well, I think that might be the key.

The closest thing I can think of is Reste Kuchen.

Reste in German means leftovers.

The rest.

Okay.

The remainder.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So you might call it, yeah, in English, I guess, you know, leftover cake.

Yeah.

And it might be sort of a corruption from, you know, what she heard when she was little

And she didn’t quite get the full sound of it.

So that could be it.

So cooking can mean cake, right?

And some other things as well.

Right, right.

But this kind of particular cake is made out of leftover ingredients that you have,

Like maybe after the Christmas baking season, you have a bunch of raisins,

You have a bunch of almonds or coconuts or something like that.

And so they’re different every time when you make them.

And what is that word, restakookin?

Restakookin.

That sounds very close.

That sounds like a winner to me.

I would ring a bell if I had one.

Yeah, R-E-S-T-E Kuchen.

K-U-C-A-T-E-N.

Now, in English cookbooks that have German recipes,

We often take the word kuchen and do other things with it, right?

There’s like a kuchen dough, and there’s kuchen pastries, and kuchen cakes, right?

And so we’ve kind of generalized this term away from the original German.

I wonder if she got that from her grandparents.

Wouldn’t that be lovely to find out that your mother taught you a word that she learned from her grandparents?

So that’s, what is that?

How many?

That’s four generations.

That’s great.

Yes, yes.

And, of course, my kids don’t remember it, but I think I will, with my grandchildren,

Re-insist on it again.

There we go.

That’s perfect.

Sounds great.

I love the continuity of it, right?

Yeah, now I have the correct.

It’s rest instead of rats.

It’s rats.

Yeah.

Yeah, you can look it up online.

There are lots of pictures of rest a cookie.

Oh, great.

Okay, well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

All right.

If you make some, we want some.

Definitely.

Oh, okay.

They might be a little cold by the time they get there.

I think we need you to come out here to California and make them for us so that we can have them.

They’re not very good for you either, I might add.

Well, that’s okay.

At least an Instagram of them, right?

Yeah, at least an Instagram.

Mary, thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

All right, take care now.

Bye-bye.

We love talking about food on this show.

Call us and talk about food words, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

There’s somebody with a Twitter feed called Anagrammatron.

Have you seen this one?

Oh, yes.

Is this the one where they come up with the two anagrams of people’s tweets?

Yes.

They find real tweets that are anagrams of each other?

Well, I don’t know.

I don’t know if they’re real tweets or not.

No.

Well, whoever’s doing this came up with a couple of really good ones.

Annoying kids all around me.

Anagrams to, I sound like an angry old man.

Yes.

Yes, and I plugged that into Internet Anagrams server and also came up with a smoking landlady reunion.

All those landladies, it was smoking.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Kate. How are you?

Hi, Kate. I’m doing well. How are you? And where are you?

I’m in San Antonio, Texas.

Oh, welcome to the show. How can we help?

My father-in-law has an expression that he uses that I love because it’s so colorful, but I’ve just never heard it from anybody else and wondered where it came from.

So the expression is boy dog, B-O-Y-D-O-G.

Boy dog.

Boy dog.

And he uses it when something needs to be turned up to the nth degree, like put that pot on boy dog and get the water boiling, or turn the music down.

You don’t need to have it on boy dog.

So it’s the highest level?

Is that what you’re saying?

It’s the highest level.

It’s like 11.

A boy dog.

Wow.

Yeah, like 11.

Yeah, turning up to 11.

He’s from Beaumont, Texas, so I thought maybe that was part of the expression.

Why, did I speak funny in Beaumont?

Well, yeah.

I mean, they’re kind of close to Louisiana, and they’re close to Galveston, so a lot of immigrant population in the turn of the century.

So I wondered if it was from somewhere else.

But I’ve asked several friends that we have from Louisiana, one from Lafayette and one from Houma, and they both looked at me like I was crazy.

They said, we don’t say that in Louisiana.

I’ve never seen it before in my life, nor heard of it.

Boy dog.

Really?

No.

Now, it reminds me of boy howdy.

Yeah, it reminds me of boy howdy.

But boy dog, do you know something about this, Martha?

The only place I’ve ever seen boy dog is in Indiana.

It is sometimes used to mean mosquito, like a big mosquito.

Yeah, but that’s…

Like a big one.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s a boy dog.

A boy dog, yeah.

But it’s not the same thing.

That’s rare to begin with, and it’s far away, and it’s very different in terms of denotation.

That’s the only, only thing I’ve ever seen like that.

It reminds me of boy dog.

It reminds me just of boy as an exclamation of surprise or amazement.

Boy, that’s a big whatever.

Boy dog.

Well, and it’s the opposite of a girl dog.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

I don’t know if it’s a euphemism.

Kate, I’ve got to tell you, this could be original to your father.

It really could be.

That would be great.

He’d love that.

But the thing is, when you talk about something like this on national radio, there’s two things that happen.

One, you get a lot of email and phone calls from people saying, oh, no, I know that.

You know, we use that.

Or you also spread the term.

Well, I’m a fan of spreading language all over the place.

There we go.

I do it every day.

Okay.

So we’re going to put the word out, Kate, and see if other people know about boy dog being used this way to mean the highest level.

Say, turn the stove up to boy dog means up to 11 or turn the music up.

I’ve heard it most often with cooking.

Cooking, okay. We’ll find out what our callers have to say, and we’ll get back to you.

Oh, that’s great. Thanks so much.

Yeah, sure. Take care of that.

Pleasure to talk to you. I’m a huge fan of the show.

Oh, yay. Thanks.

Thank you, Kate.

Bye, Kate.

Bye. Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

If you know something about boy dog used as an exclamation or in an exclamatory way, let us know, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Find us on Facebook and groups and pages, or try us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Here’s an expression I ran across recently, to throw a wobbly.

To throw a wobbly. Sounds British.

Yes, it is indeed.

It means to lose one’s self-control in a fit of nerves, panic, temperament, annoyance, or the like, or to act in an unexpected way, causing surprise or consternation.

To throw a fit. Spit the dummy.

That sort of thing.

Yeah, yeah, that kind of thing.

To throw a wobbly.

Throw a wobbly.

I like it.

Yeah, yeah, don’t bother him.

He might throw a wobbly.

Right, sure.

Okay.

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.

And joining us now from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, Grant and Martha.

It’s me again.

Hey, buddy.

How are you doing?

You know, I work at the Museum of Mathematics.

Yes.

And we’ve just learned that the New York museums have a softball league.

Yeah, we just learned about this.

So we’re gearing up for next year.

Now, of course, our primary focus at the Museum of Mathematics, MoMath, as we call it, is finding out a great team name.

Apparently, the staff at the Whitney Museum fields a team called the Houstons.

Yes.

Okay, okay.

The Whitney Houstons, yes.

And the Museum of Natural History has the Raptors and stuff like that.

That’s perfectly right.

So now I found that weekend sports teams can be very clever with their names.

So I’ve tracked down some classic team names.

I’ll give you some clues and I’ll see if you can guess them.

Okay.

Okay.

Shoot.

Great.

Now there are several great names by teams in cities that begin with Santa.

Okay.

Now there’s a great team name for a team from Santa Ana that references a character made famous by comedian Gilda Radner.

Care to take a swing at it?

It’s the Rosanna Rosanna Danas.

The Santa Ana Rosanna Danas.

Yes.

I’m wonderfully done, Santa Ana.

What’s all this I hear?

How about a team in Santa Cruz that references a piece of military hardware?

Santa Cruz missiles?

The Santa Cruz missiles, yes.

How about a team in Santa Monica?

Sometimes they can be a little saucy, these team names.

I know where you’re going.

Yeah, we got it.

Okay.

Already you’ve got it.

I don’t even know.

I’ll just sit back.

The Santa Monica blue dresses.

Oh, you’re close.

A team in Santa Monica that references a 1990s scandal.

Yeah.

The Santa Monica Lewinsky’s?

The Santa Monica Lewinsky’s, yes.

Here she’s doing very well.

Good for her.

Everyone should do well.

Now, some of the best names are for teams that are located in a state capital.

This is going to be the most trivial-wise of what we’re doing here, okay?

A team in the capital of Arkansas references a famous party song by the B-52s.

Little Rock Lobsters?

The Little Rock Lobsters, yeah.

Here they come.

How about a team in the capital of Montana that references a phrase meaning to deteriorate badly?

Or to go badly.

It’s Helena, right?

Helena Handbaskets.

Yes, the Helena Handbaskets.

Again, not so much a softball or baseball or a basketball name.

That’s really my favorite so far.

Yeah, we got to go with that.

Some teams are located in specific states.

A team from a Great Lakes state references a 1970s funk band famous for Love Rollercoaster.

Ooh, wow.

Rollercoaster.

Oh, the Ohio Players.

The Ohio Players.

Ooh, nice.

Which makes perfect sense, yeah, in a lot of different ways.

The Ohio Players.

All right, here are a few more.

These are for cities, okay, cities.

A team from a northwestern Pennsylvania city with the same name as a Great Lakes references a phrase meaning a strange synchronicity.

Eerie coincidences?

Yes, the eerie coincidences.

Nice.

How about a team from the largest city in Alabama, named for a city in the United Kingdom, that references a lunchtime treat on two pieces of bread?

Birmingham and rye?

Close.

Birmingham and cheese?

Birmingham sandwich.

The Birmingham sandwiches.

Birmingham sandwiches.

Yes, I don’t know how they can play softball while they’re laughing so hard.

I don’t know.

Let’s get literary.

A team from an affluent beach community in northwestern Los Angeles references a character from the novel To Kill a Mockingbird.

Malibu Radleys.

The Malibu Radleys, yes.

Martha, you’re really good at this sports quiz here.

You’re doing very well.

I’m really good at absurd names, yeah.

Yeah.

Here’s the last one.

How about one from a Manhattan neighborhood?

A team located near Washington Square Park, which is near a former Bohemian enclave, references a term for a local fool.

A local Greenwich…

Yeah.

Village idiots.

The Greenwich Village idiots, yes.

Very good.

Anyway, that’s the sports quiz, guys.

We don’t often bring sports here, but it’s good to have some.

It’s as close as we want to come.

Thank you, John.

You guys are fantastic.

Great fun.

Very entertaining.

Really appreciate all the hard work.

Thank you, guys.

I appreciate it.

A plus plus and a gold star.

Thanks, John.

Thank you.

Home run.

Home run.

If you want to talk about any aspect of language at all, call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and comments and stories about language in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tricia.

I’m calling from Chula Vista, California.

Hi, Chula Vista, right south of San Diego.

Welcome.

And the reason that I’m calling is I’m an ELD teacher, which is what California calls ESL or English as a Second Language. And I teach in a public high school about five miles north of the Mexican border. And so kids are always asking me questions about, you know, why is everything pronounced so oddly in English? There’s no patterns and all of that. And I do my very best to explain all that, the word from French and all that. But last week, the kids were asking me, why don’t we say the S in island? Or, you know, all the words like aisle in the grocery store and all of that. And I didn’t have an answer for them.

So that’s why I’m calling.

I want to know why we don’t pronounce the S in island.

Wow, this is great.

This is fantastic because there’s an answer and actually connects three words.

It connects island, I-S-L-A-N-D, aisle, A-I-S-L-E, and aisle, I-S-L-E.

And what happened was that all three of these words come from different origins.

Island comes from an Old English word, which meant island.

Isle actually originally came from a word meaning wing.

And actually, neither of these had an S in them.

Yeah, it’s like Allah in Spanish.

That’s right.

For wing.

Exactly.

And then Isle, I-S-L-E, came from a word meaning island and also did not originally have an S in it.

But then the Renaissance happened.

And when the Renaissance happened, there was a second major wave of these Latin-influenced words and spellings that arrived in French and arrived in a variety of the European languages.

And people saw that the root word here, insula, which means island, had an S in it.

And so they started adding this S into these words that they believed came from that Latin word, even though they didn’t.

So isle, I-L-E, did indeed come from insula.

But isle, A-I-S-L-E, and island, I-S-L-A-N-D, did not come from the Latin word insula, but they added the S anyway.

And so they retained the pronunciation as if they didn’t have the S.

But the newly added S in the spelling persisted.

And so it was just silent because it was added?

Yes, exactly.

They added it so they could conform to what they believed the etymology to be.

And only in one of the words were they correct.

Oh, all right.

Well, as you’re talking, I’m thinking about in French, the Ile de la Cite, because the ILE means island there, doesn’t it?

Exactly.

And that’s where we get I-S-L-E, exactly from the French.

And we don’t actually use the S.

Originally, we didn’t use the S and the French don’t use the S.

Well, that’s great.

I would never have guessed that it would be such an elaborate examination.

I thought it was going to be something very simple.

Well, that is relatively simple.

It goes to show you what can happen when we make assumptions about language and try to conform language to a kind of logic that we believe is there.

They saw a logic that didn’t exist, and they tried to constrain language into this form of Latin because they felt that Latin was purer or more perfect.

And they were typically wrong about that.

Now, that’s not to say that we didn’t get a ton of really great scientific words or words related to religion that we absolutely needed and still use today.

We got those from Latin and we couldn’t have done without them.

We would have had to invent our own from the Anglo-Saxon.

But that saying, they still made a lot of assumptions that have since proven to be wrong.

Wow.

Well, my students are going to be thrilled because they knew that I was asking a question from their class, and they can’t wait to hear the answer.

So I really appreciate you choosing to answer my question.

Can I ask you one more question before you go, Tricia?

Yes, sir.

Where are you from?

I’m from Michigan.

I should have asked you if you could guess.

Yeah, I was trying to figure.

I was going to pick a state, but I decided that might be offensive if I said the wrong one.

That’s where I was going, Michigan.

I knew it wasn’t Oklahoma.

No, because everybody says I have a Michigan A.

Yeah, you’ve got Michigan.

I know an Argentine priest who asked me, oh, where are you from?

Where are you from?

Are you from Michigan?

I’m like, how can you know that?

You’re from Argentina.

It’s not just your A’s.

Your vowels, Tricia.

All of your vowels have Michigan stamped on the back.

Okay, well, that’s me born and bred.

That’s all right.

We love it.

It’s refreshing.

Thanks for calling, Tricia.

And good luck with those kids, all right?

Oh, thank you.

I appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

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Grant, I’ve been making a collection recently of things that photographers say to get people to smile.

Like in this country, we say…

Cheese.

Right, cheese.

I remember many times in Argentina being told to say whiskey.

In Estonia, it’s hernesoup, which means pea soup.

Okay.

And the reason that I came across these is I was reading about marmosets, and it turns out that the French word for marmoset is sometimes used in France.

What’s the word?

It’s huittiti.

Okay.

Isn’t that sweet?

Yeah, that’s nice.

I like it.

Yeah, so I’m sure there are all kinds of different terms like this around the world.

I would love to hear from our listeners to see what they use.

877-929-9673 is the number to call and share your terms like that, or you can send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you just can’t wait, go to our Facebook page.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys. This is Brian Russell from Peoria, Illinois.

Hi, Brian. How are you doing?

Just fine, Grant. How are you guys?

Okay, great.

That’s just a stone’s throw from where I was raised in Missouri.

Yeah, yeah.

We get down to the St. Louis area every once in a while, but not much farther in Missouri than that.

Brian, what’s on your mind?

I’ve got questions about kid games, actually.

I found out from a co-worker of mine several years ago that, according to him and according to everything I’ve been able to find out since, the game Duck, Duck, Goose, that I know it, is called Duck, Duck, Gray Duck in Minnesota, but Minnesota only.

I was born in Minnesota, and we were talking about where we were from.

And he asked if I had called it Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.

I moved to Texas when I was a kid, and so I called it Duck, Duck, Goose.

But most of my family is from Minnesota.

When I asked around, they all confirmed that, well, yes, it’s Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.

-huh.

You know, that seems odd to me, and I wanted to know where the name came from and how it got trapped in Minnesota.

It’s for young kids, right?

And you are sitting in a circle, and one kid runs around, taps the other kids on the head and says, Duck, Duck, Duck, and then when they tap somebody and say goose, then that person has to chase them around the circle, right?

Exactly.

And that’s pretty much how I would describe it to people I was asking.

So I was trying not to buy his answers or anything.

Yeah, it is an odd one because Minnesota seems to be the main place where you play duck, duck, gray duck.

There are a couple of other variations around the country, like duck, duck, drake.

But we talked about this about five years ago on the show.

Somebody from Minnesota, I believe, called us to say, you know, I use this expression with other people and they don’t know what I’m talking about.

Yeah, so the deepest heart of Duck, Duck, Gray Duck is Minnesota, but it spreads outward from there to the surrounding states.

So you’ll find pockets in Iowa and Illinois and the Dakotas and Wisconsin, even in Michigan.

Yeah.

And why that is, I don’t know.

We really don’t know, but if you go to Duluth, man, if you go to Duluth, that’s what they say, Duck, Duck, Gray Duck.

That’s it. It’s crazy how very site-specific this term is.

Yeah, so maybe we need people…

I didn’t know whether it was the north or south of the state thing. Most of my family is from the Twin Cities area. So it goes as far north as Duluth.

I have a theory, and it’s a useless theory with no information to back it up. But hey, here it is in a way. Goose is mildly pejorative. And maybe there was a curriculum in Minnesota, you know, a workbook for kids or a book that was published locally or an article in the newspaper or a particular educator who decided just to change it because they didn’t want to be calling kids geese.

Well, gray duck is just different, right, from regular duck.

You’ve got a white duck, a white duck, and a gray duck.

I would think that could be…

Oh, so you think white ducks. I don’t. I think mallards.

Well, yeah, I was…

That’s what’s difficult for me about this.

Interesting.

I don’t think of a duck that’s all that different from the other ducks.

If I say gray duck, a goose is a different animal, very clearly different.

Or maybe with all that snow, you see the gray duck more clearly.

I don’t know.

We’re overthinking this.

Yeah, we may be overthinking this in our theories.

But yeah, Minnesota, hey, you guys got something cool going on.

What is going on with you people in Minnesota?

No, we like it.

Well, maybe they can call us and explain why they say it.

And then they’ll all talk about bubbler, but let’s not talk about that right now.

Or booyah.

But cool, thanks for calling, dude.

Yeah, thank you for the input.

All right, take care now.

Great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, Brian was right in that we do love talking about childhood games and all the variations thereof.

Right.

And we have some scientific reasons for that, academic reasons, because these are where the patterns are laid down.

Yes.

That we still hold to when we add new words as adults.

Indeed.

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

My new favorite term is malware reunion.

Malware reunion?

Have you seen this?

No.

You will totally appreciate this.

This is when somebody’s email account or their Facebook account gets hijacked, and you get an email from them that you know is not from them, right?

And so you email them, and maybe it’s somebody that you haven’t seen in years.

And you say, hey, I just wanted you to know somebody’s hijacked your email account.

Oh, and by the way, how have you been?

That’s a malware reunion.

So malware is the software that’s doing bad deeds.

Yeah.

And then the reunion is getting together because of it.

Yeah.

Haven’t you had that experience?

Yeah, a couple times.

Sometimes it’s people that I actually don’t want to hear from.

Right.

There’s a reason that you all haven’t communicated, right?

But then you have to because of the malware reunion.

Malware reunion.

Good.

Where’d you pick that up?

Someplace on the internet.

Around places.

Bathroom wall.

You never know.

777-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is KK from L.A.

KK?

Yes.

Okay.

It’s my initials.

Oh, it’s your initials.

Okay, KK.

Well, it’s great to have you.

What would you like to talk about?

Well, the other day, my co-worker was telling a funny story, and he ended, he wrapped up his story with, and they were all in stitches.

And so I heard that. I was like, huh, I know what it means, but I wonder where it came from.

So I’m asking you guys.

This is a really good one.

Do you run marathons?

No, but I do run.

Okay.

I tell you what, I had an experience the other day.

There were two chihuahuas loose in my neighborhood here in San Diego, and a bunch of other people tried to chase them down, and we did not catch those little guys.

They were euphoric and happy and running at top speed.

But as I was running, I got a stitch in my side.

And the stitch that we talk about when you laugh, you laugh so hard that you get stitches, it’s that same feeling, that feeling that a muscle has tightened or something has kind of poked you there in your belly.

And you’re like, oh, yeah, I’ve got a spasm.

That’s a stitch in your side.

And that’s the stitch we’re talking about.

Like, yeah, they were in stitches.

It was so funny.

It’s exactly the same stitch.

And there’s another interesting thing part that I love about this.

It is directly connected to the stitch in sewing.

It’s the same stitch.

But it used to be that the stitch meant the poking of the sharp tool and not actually the thread that’s left after you poked the sharp tool.

And this word goes back with basically the same kind of meaning to the year 1000.

This is a really old English word.

It’s one of those English words that is just kind of like lasted and lasted.

And so at some point in history, it could mean the feeling that you get or the experience of having a sharp spear or arrow poke you.

It could be anything, a thorn, a horn, a knife, what have you.

So it went from meaning a poke, like something that pokes through, into a pain.

Yep.

And then now we just use it to say, oh, they were in stitches.

They were laughing really hard.

But you can still get stitches.

If you run marathons and you’re not prepared, if you’re not warmed up, you will get a cramp in your side.

And that is called a stitch.

It’s a stitch in your side.

Yeah.

Even Shakespeare used it that way, right?

You’ll laugh yourself into stitches.

Interesting.

Thank you.

That sounds like a fun place to work.

We appreciate your calling.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, sure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

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

Kat emailed us and called us about a phrase that she likes that she wanted us to talk about.

So here we are, Kat, talking about someone whose teeth are spaced so widely that they’re able to eat corn off the cob through a picket fence.

Oh, yeah. I’ve heard that one.

You know, you’ve got a big gap there.

And it’s not very nice, but it is very colorful and very expressive.

Like David Letterman, right?

You can eat corn on the cob through a picket fence.

You can eat one kernel, yeah. One row at a time.

So there you go, Kat. We talked about it.

If you’ve got something you’d like us to talk about, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, 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.

You might assume that someone who uses the pronoun I a whole lot is maybe the person in a group who has the higher status, or they’re the leader, or maybe they’re just narcissistic.

You’d think that, but you might be wrong, at least according to some new research by James Pennebaker.

He’s a psychologist. We’ve talked about his work on the show. He’s the author of a book called The Secret Life of Pronouns, which he wrote based on all this crunching of linguistic data.

And he’s come up with some interesting stuff.

Recently, he analyzed the written communications of people in a lot of different situations.

And again and again, what he found was that people of lower status, people who are more unsure of themselves, were the ones who used the pronoun I more.

And I thought that was really interesting.

In one of the studies, he paired off college students, so two people were working on a complex series of problems, online only, so he could record all their language.

And then he interviewed them afterward.

And what tended to happen was that the people who were higher status, the ones that they regarded as sort of the leader of the two of them, were the ones who did not use the word I very much.

Isn’t that curious?

And does he have an explanation for that?

He thinks that it has to do with the fact that if you’re higher status, then you’re looking out at people and you’re thinking what they can do, what they’re supposed to do.

And if you’re lower status, then maybe you’re more self-conscious.

You’re thinking about what you should do.

It’s really curious.

And another interesting bit of research that he’s done lately has to do with lying.

And apparently, if you’re lying, then you tend to use the word I less.

And in this particular study, what he did was analyze the tweets of the Boston Marathon bombing suspect.

And the closer it got to the date that they had planned to do this, the fewer uses of I he used in the tweets that he was…

Oh, that’s really interesting.

Yeah.

It’s kind of a small sample size.

Yeah, right.

I would wonder if you could generalize that to a larger body and figure out if it holds true.

Yeah.

Well, I’m curious about all this research being generalized because who knows?

Well, we leave evidence in our writing.

And since we live in a text-based world now.

Yeah, where we can crunch all that data.

Well, not only can we crunch it, but it exists in a way that didn’t exist 20 or 30 years ago.

Yeah.

Now we have astounding things that we can learn about ourselves that maybe we didn’t know we were leaving behind.

Exactly.

Little data trails.

Yeah.

So it’s really interesting.

I would be curious to know if our listeners have somebody in the office who’s of higher status than everybody else and if they use I less.

And I wonder if it can be inverted.

Is this one of those things if I stop using the pronoun I, then I’ll start to feel more confident about myself at the office?

-huh.

That could be an implication of it.

Interesting.

We’d love to hear your comments, questions, anything at all.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or try us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Deya Zavala.

I’m in San Antonio.

Hi, Deya. Welcome to the show.

Hi. I’m so excited. Sorry.

Deya. That’s a great name. How do you spell that?

It’s D-E-Y-A.

D-E-Y-A. Okay.

Well, welcome.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

So, I have a little debate going on around the office.

I work for a nonprofit organization based in San Antonio, and we’re a national organization.

And we have a fellowship program, which typically we graduate every single year.

So we’re in our third year, and our graduating class is actually coming up.

And so I’m not sure how to address them.

So my question for you is related to alumni, alum, and alumni with an N-I or is it N-A-E?

Mm-Okay.

So you were addressing one group of people who used to attend the university,

And you need to address them all together as a body of people.

Correct.

Okay.

Okay. And so your question is, do you want alumni with an I or alumni with an AE at the end?

Is that your question?

Yes. And it’s a mixed gender class.

Okay.

And so we had a little bit of a debate whether one is for females, is one for males, or who are we addressing?

Or should we just go with the typical alum, A-L-U-M?

Yeah, a lot of people get confused with these words.

And the problem is that they’re both adopted into English.

They come from the Latin word alumnus, which means student.

Originally, it meant somebody who is nourished.

So it comes from the Latin word for nourish.

And so your alma mater is your nourishing mother.

And in English, alumni with the I at the end refers to male graduates or a mixture of male and female graduates.

So that’s the one you’re going to want.

If they’re only female graduates, then you want the feminine ending, which is A-E and is pronounced alumni.

Alumni, not alumnae, right?

Right.

Because people do say alumnae.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s mainly alumnae.

And it gets even more confusing because these pronunciations are exactly the opposite in Latin.

And so if you know Latin, then it gets confusing.

But that’s the traditional rule.

So for your group of male and female graduates, you’re going to want alumni.

That’s the plural.

It gets complicated in modern times because we have a sensitivity to sexism and discrimination.

For example, my school, Vassar, now has an office of alumni affairs, but they spell it A-L-U-M-N-A-E slash I.

Oh, okay.

Isn’t that funny?

And some people call it alumni.

But what you want is alumni with an I for that mixed group.

Let me ask you, Martha, where would Deya be if she just wanted to be a little more informal and say alums?

Is that too informal for reaching out to past graduates?

Well, I think it depends on the context.

It is regarded as more informal.

So it depends on the situation, alums.

Alums.

Yeah.

Do you use alums, Deya?

I use alums because it’s easier,

And I don’t have to figure out,

Am I using it correctly or incorrectly?

And I guess I also have the added layer of being a Spanish speaker.

Right.

I like to either figure out if it’s a male or female, you know, the interchangeable language.

So that adds another little layer to a whole complex debate on it.

Yeah, and the traditional rule is like Spanish in that if you have one male in that graduating class of 100, it’s still alumni, right?

It’s still the masculine ending.

I think I might stick with alum.

Oh, really? You’re going to stick with alum? Okay.

But, yeah, I guess it does depend on the context if it’s more of an informal.

Because we are kind of an informal group of people, but if I guess we’re addressing them in the context of like a funder or in front of a large panel.

Yeah, you’re certainly safe that way.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling. I hope it all works out.

It does. Thank you so much.

Okay, great. Take care now. Bye-bye.

Thanks. Bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call with your language questions or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jeff from Chino Hills, California.

Hey, Jeff, what’s up?

Well, I’m from the Los Angeles area, and I grew up a Dodgers fan and listening to the legendary Vin Scully.

And on one of the broadcasts, he was talking about a player trying to bunt.

And then he got into this thing saying, well, gee, no one can tell me where the origin of bunt came from.

And he speculated that it was because of baby bunting around a crib.

And so since a bunt is like a baby hit, he said, well, he speculated, well, maybe that’s where the term came from.

Oh, my, that is real speculation.

Yeah, it’s a real speculation.

And the NPR program station where I’m from used to have on these pocket programs,

Things like A Moment of Science and stuff.

And so one of the programs was Word for the Wise.

And so I wrote in to Kathleen Taylor, who is the host of Word for the Wise.

And so she actually put my question on the air, and she said,

Actually, the word bunt preceded bunting, so it couldn’t have been a derivative from that.

And so she said her researchers kind of looked around,

And they really couldn’t figure out where the derivation came from,

But they speculated that maybe it came from the—it’s a derivation of the word butt.

So like, you know, two rams butting each other or something.

Yeah, yeah. The word butt and bunt have both been used for hundreds of years to mean strike or push.

And interchangeably as well.

There’s something about that UT that invites nasalization,

Which kind of you might see the word butt but pronounce the word bunt.

Yeah.

Well, that’s interesting. So that speculation is probably correct then.

Yeah, as far as we know.

It’s a really solid history.

When did you hear Vin Scully come up with this specious etymology?

How long ago was that?

Oh, it was probably 15, 20 years ago or so.

Okay, that would explain, because I think most newscasters these days in the baseball field have a copy of Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary, which is very reliable and has an excellent entry on bunt.

And not only talks about this etymology of it, but the history of the usage of the term and how bunts used to be considered a kind of thing that only terrible players did and so on and so forth.

Yeah, and in fact, that dictionary includes speculation that it may have come from railroading.

Do you remember that part, Grant?

It says it may have come from the term bunt in railroading, which is when you push an uncoupled car to get it going.

Bunt, in that case.

Well, not come from, but related to the same use of bunt in railroading, right.

Right.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much for your program.

Jeff, you’re a gem.

We appreciate having you here.

You can call us again sometime, all right?

Okay.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye, Jeff.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org and find us on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, my sister-in-law has brown kitties.

Do you know what brown kitties means?

It’s a dialectal word for…

Is it, daspanis?

No.

But that’s a good guess.

Is it the socks that fall behind the dryer?

Mmm, boy.

In the ho zone, right?

No.

No, what is it?

Brown kitties.

My sister-in-law has brown kitties.

She has bronchitis.

Oh, yes.

It’s a dialectal term.

Yes, I know that one.

She got the brown kitties.

She got the brown kitties.

877-929-9673.

Or send your terms to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori calling from upstate New York.

All right. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, you know, I grew up in the middle of the state of Maine, and my father used to always use a term when he was either frustrated or vexed or just mad.

He would say, holy old jumping up, bald-headed.

Sometimes he’d just say, oh, jumping, because we knew what he meant.

But it was always kind of funny in our family, and I just never knew where it came from or what it meant.

Holy old jumping up, bald-headed headed.

Wow.

Conjures an image, doesn’t it?

It does.

It conjures an image of Grant.

Because I’m holy or bald-headed?

Because you’re jumping up, you know?

Lori, tell me a little bit about your father.

How old were you when you remember him saying this?

How old was he?

Probably all of my life, I remember him saying it.

He was born in 1935.

He grew up in Connecticut.

He was also in the service.

I don’t know.

Where he just always said it.

And he said it when he was frustrated about something?

Or surprised or just generally vexed.

It would be something that would be kind of funny, but he could also be mad when he said it.

So I don’t really know.

Holy old jumping up bald-headed.

Holy old jumping up bald-headed.

I’m hearing three things in there.

What he’s done is he’s combined three mild oaths, or maybe just called them minced oaths, and put them together in one long string.

And he may not have been the only person to do that.

So the first one, the holy, usually Jesus is in there when people use this.

And actually Jesus is also connected to jumping.

So people say jumping Jesus, or it’s also related to jumping Jehoshaphat.

Or they’ll say jumped up Jesus.

And then they’ll say bald-headed Jesus.

So jumped up Jesus goes back at least 100 years.

Oh.

Yeah, you can find it listed in a variety of slang dictionaries, and you can look in old books and old newspapers and find a pretty solid history of it.

Now, the other interesting thing here is sometimes people say Jesus Palomino.

Ooh, what does that mean?

It’s another one of these kind of like just funny to say, kind of mild oaths.

And the reason I’m bringing this up, I’ll tell you in a second, okay?

Just hang on to that thought.

And then bald-headed Jesus goes back to at least the 1960s.

Again, these are all used in exactly the same way that your father used them.

When you’re frustrated or angry, but not terribly so, and you’re kind of throwing a little humor into a wry situation where maybe you look the fool or something’s broken that shouldn’t have broken or something broke at the wrong time, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

The reason I brought these all three together in this way is that it was used by a character played by Gary Busey in a 1985 movie called Silver Bullet.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, if you go on YouTube, you can find exactly that.

Only what he says is, holy jumped up bald headed Jesus Palomino.

He combines them all together.

And it may also have been used in the movie 1941, which was released in 1979.

If you remember, this was kind of a, I don’t know, boondog was not the word, but a terrible movie.

Did not do very well at the box office.

Had Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Ned Beatty.

But anyway, there’s a novelization of that movie 1941 that includes a version of this longer form, just like your father used it.

So that’s why I wanted to know, did your father, do you remember him saying it before, say, 1979?

Oh, absolutely.

I was born in 65, so I remember it my whole life.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

I mean, there’s no doubt that it was out there floating in the ether somewhere.

He doesn’t have to have picked it up from a movie, but you never know.

I’m curious.

Did he use profanity?

No, not a lot.

And that does make sense when you say that because we’re a devout Catholic family and five children, and they didn’t really swear a lot around us children, so that would have been a healthy alternative.

Yeah, that would have been a way to do it.

Because that’s the kind of person that he was, so it makes perfect sense.

Well, there you go, Lori.

Well, I thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

You should look up that clip on YouTube.

Just Google Holy Jumped Up Bald-Headed Jesus Palomino, and you’ll go right to it.

Well, I’m going to.

Thanks for calling, Lori.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you for your time.

Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Mince those, smile those, or no oaths at all.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

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And our Twitter handle is W-A-Y-W-O-R-D, and you can find us all over Facebook.

We talked about sacapuntos. You remember that?

Yeah.

This is the fake curse word that somebody used.

It actually means pencil sharpener, but they would just blurt it out instead of a normal English swear word, right?

Right.

It’s in Spanish, right? Sacapuntas.

Well, Angela sent us a note that that is actually used in a, I just call it an idiom in Spanish as well.

Sacapuntas en huevos, which means a sharpened egg, more or less.

And what it refers to is this person who is so meticulous and so careful that they could take an egg and put a point on the end of it.

And I love that.

Right?

It’s nice.

Yeah.

He’s so picky, he’d try to sharpen an egg.

You could just fit that naturally in English, couldn’t you?

I was just going to say, it sounds like it would be great in English.

Sacapuntas, still a good fake swear word.

Yeah, yeah, I use it.

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Things have come to a pretty past.

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

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The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Burnett.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Ciao.