Kissed Her on the Stairs

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

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.

If you’re a regular listener, you’ve heard us talk often about how the English language is evolving all the time.

And sometimes words fall out of favor and they get replaced.

What you might not know is that the same thing happens with sign language.

And in the U.K., that’s been demonstrated dramatically by something called the British Sign Language Corpus.

This is a collection of data by researchers who filmed almost 250 deaf people across the U.K. Using sign language.

And, Grant, they found some really interesting changes in recent years about the way that they indicate certain terms, particularly those for nationality.

They’ve been replacing some of the signs that are now considered offensive.

For example, it used to be in the U.K. That to refer to France, you’d mime twirling a mustache, which is kind of stereotypical.

But younger people who sign in the U.K. Now indicate France by making the sign for a rooster’s comb because a rooster is sort of the unofficial symbol of France.

And the old sign for India was a finger pointing to an imaginary spot in the middle of your forehead.

Now they use a sign that suggests a triangular shape like the subcontinent of India.

It’s fascinating to me because a lot of these changes happened really fast with the advent of the Internet

And deaf people being able to see people in other parts of the world.

Because if you’re just signing, then you’re signing to the person who’s right in front of you.

And so these international ways of communicating now are changing the language really quickly.

And it’s changing naturally. These aren’t changes imposed by some body of experts.

Exactly.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah.

And I guess this happens in all the other sign languages, right, in the U.S. And wherever.

Yes, I think so.

We know it’s hard to talk about sign language on the air, but if you happen to be bilingual,

We’d love to hear about the changes that you’ve noticed in your sign language.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Elaine Lewis.

I’m calling from Redlands, California,

And I’m curious about the explanation for these two words, commode and toilet.

I married a Yankee, and I’m from East Tennessee,

And I had always and only ever used the word commode for the fixture in the bathroom where you sit.

And my husband, being from Ohio, only used the word toilet.

But to us, a toilet was an outhouse.

So I had a very difficult time making the transition to using the word toilet.

Well, no way.

Why did he win?

Well, I was a little embarrassed because he had been around the country more than I had been,

And I thought maybe I’ve been misusing it all these years.

So I deferred to what he calls it.

No, you’re fine using commode for this.

Well, if you’re in the South, you are.

Yeah.

I called my brother who travels the world, and I said,

Have you ever heard the word commode used outside the southeast part of the United States?

And he said, no, he always refers to it as the toilet when he travels.

Oh, really? Oh, that’s interesting.

And everyone knows what he’s talking about.

Right.

Does he use it for the piece, the fixture itself and the room?

Well, he just refers to the room, but my husband only referred to it, I guess, the room and the fixture.

Oh, this is really interesting stuff.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, there’s some stuff falling into place here.

Like, it’s a puzzle going together in my mind.

Indeed.

I would love to know the origin of the word.

I mean, I’m sure it’s actually called a commode in some parts of the world and the United States,

But I don’t know where the real difference is.

Yeah, we used commode growing up in Kentucky.

And what was really funny was that the term commode in other parts of the country often refers to a kind of cabinet or dresser.

And I remember my mother bought us a piece of furniture.

It was about two feet high and it was an octagonal table and it had little shelves.

And it was called by the furniture manufacturer a commode.

And this caused no end of hilarity in our house.

How old were you?

About 12.

Okay, okay.

I would come home and say, Mom, I got my report card, and I would say, I left it in the commode, and everybody would go, !

It’s so funny.

Well, for sure, you didn’t want to refer to going to the toilet, because in the South, everybody thought you went to the outhouse, and no one wanted to be accused of going to the outhouse, especially when indoor bathrooms came into being.

Right, right.

That is true. Yeah, in some parts of the South, the outhouse is the toilet building.

I didn’t know that. I had family with outhouses well into the 80s, and I don’t remember what they called it, but I don’t think it was toilet.

I think we called it an outhouse. I mean, my father’s people in the hills of North Carolina.

Yeah, outdoor toilet and outhouse were synonymous.

But the history of commode, how do you go, Martha, from the piece of furniture to the piece of porcelain?

Well, the piece of furniture got transferred to the idea of putting something around the place where all the business gets done, the chamber pot.

And, of course, this caused no end of hilarity a few years ago when we had our representative, Randy Cunningham,

Who purchased two commodes for a cost of $7,200.

Which commode?

Well, you would think it would be this gold-plated throne, you know, in the bathroom, but it was the other kind of commode.

They’re a little like an armoire, right?

You mean…

The commode, the wooden thing, not the porcelain thing.

Yeah, yeah, very small, but it’s a place for the chamber pot originally.

So you could have a piece of furniture called a commode with or without the chamber pot.

Some of them had the chamber pot.

Once you’ve got a bathroom in the house, moved into that room, right, which the room itself was called the toilet.

Yeah.

The toilet then applied to the…

Yeah, moving on up in the world with a commode.

Complicated.

So you’re fine calling it a commode.

Okay, I’ll go back to that.

You know, it’s funny.

There are people in Ohio and some of the eastern states who say commode as well.

It’s mostly southern, but there are little sprinkles of people around the rest of the country who also say commode.

No pun intended.

Oh, we can’t have this conversation with a straight face, can we?

Well, you can imagine that was not the only word we had to decode the language on.

Oh, I bet.

A lot of arm wrestling in your house, huh?

Elaine, you’ll have to call again with those.

I will.

Thank you so much.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Elaine.

Okay.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Dani from Carlsbad, California.

So I have a quick question.

I was wondering where we get our pause or thinking words from, such as or

My teacher, when I was taking a Japanese class, mentioned that in English we use

When we need to pause or think however in Japanese when they speak, they use eto instead.

And she said in order to think properly in Japanese, you had to use their thinking word.

I was wondering where that comes from and why is it so universal for a language.

The deal is that we need them to fill in those gaps where we still want to keep our turn in a conversation,

But we don’t have anything to say quite yet.

For example, you have an incomplete thought.

But the thing is, these discourse particles, they’re also called filler words,

These discourse particles are transmitted exactly like other language.

We learn them from each other.

That’s it.

We just learn them from our parents and our peers and from the media,

And we pick them up and we borrow them.

That’s why you do get trends and fads of certain kind of fillers being a little more prominent than others.

And different filler words in different languages, as you said.

Eto and ano in Japanese and in Spanish.

It’s este.

For the longest time, you know, that means this.

Este means this in Spanish.

And for the long time, I thought somebody was saying this.

And then I finally realized they were hanging on to their place in the conversation.

And in French, I learned that it’s a bah, bah, bah.

They have a bunch in French, but that’s the one that I learned, bah.

So everything is just passed down basically from generation to generation of parents,

And then we have trends that come out of that.

Yeah, and they’re transmitted laterally as well.

It’s not necessarily through the years so much it could even be just from your contemporaries.

These filler words tend to be similar to each other in languages that are similar to each other.

So in languages that kind of have a Latin base or a romance language base,

They tend to be similar, or Germanic, they tend to be similar.

So from here in America, at least in the Californian coast,

It’s pretty much our, is it similar to us in Britain or on the East Coast,

Or would it differentiate between subcultures like that?

I can’t say for certain, but I do know, for example,

One term that has fallen out of usage,

Which I believe still is a little more used in the UK, is

In the US, we don’t tend to say anymore if we ever did.

In the UK, they’re more likely to say it.

That’s interesting.

You see it in print, but you don’t see.

This kind of stuff is really hard to study because you have to record a lot of speakers who don’t know they’re being recorded,

Then get their permission to use the recording, then transcribe every single thing that’s said by part of speech,

Then study that with these complex programs, and then come up with an answer.

And so you’re talking lots of money and lots of years and lots of grad students.

Grad students are cheap, but the rest of it’s hard to come by.

Do we have record of any previous filler words, or what was the other term that you had used?

Discourse particles.

Discourse particles in previous generations or previous years have these words, at least for our dialect, been pretty consistent.

I don’t have an answer.

That’s a great question.

Not a great question.

You know what, Danny?

You’re just knocking them out of the park today.

If I find out, I’ll let you know, and I’ll post it to the website, all right?

Thank you very much.

It’s my pleasure.

Well, thank you guys for answering my questions, and I hope you have a fantastic day.

Take care now.

Thanks, Danny.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And I should say that one of the really interesting things, and we’ve talked about him before, Michael Arard.

Yes.

He’s written at length on these kinds of words.

And he makes a point, and I think we should repeat it here, of saying you are probably peeved out when you hear people use these a lot.

But that is a modern phenomenon that we did not, as English speakers, start to be annoyed by filler words until the era of recordings.

Until the phonograph and the radio and the telephone.

How interesting.

When we begin to have our own speech played back to us.

Well, it sounds weird if you don’t have them, really.

And it turns out that if you don’t have discourse particles, if you don’t have these moments of pausing, you are harder to understand and less believable.

Less believable.

Less believable.

People are more likely to believe you if you have natural sounding pauses with or without discourse particles.

The particles are almost always part of it.

If you just talk straight through at a rapid pace with no space in between, I don’t know anybody who does that.

It might be me.

People don’t believe you as much.

I believe you.

And there’s entire books written on these.

Oh, my gosh, yeah.

I think we could have talked to Danny all day.

But we’ll have to link to this in Wikipedia, which is kind of a grab bag of true and false.

But they have a really good entry on these filler words in a variety of languages.

Very good.

And Michael Arard wrote a whole book about it, right?

And we’ll link to that as well.

Okay.

877-929-9673 is the number to call.

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

We were talking about how words evolve and sign language evolves too.

And one of my favorite examples of that is the sign for telephone.

You know, it’s commonly made with the pinky and the thumb extended and held up to your ear.

But it used to be that the sign for telephone was to put one fist to your ear and the other in front of your mouth, you know, like the old-fashioned candlestick phone.

That’s funny.

Like Andy Griffith.

But even now, that’s not exactly right.

I know.

I was going to say, in the future, it’ll probably be holding out your palm and tapping it, right, to make a phone call?

And that reminds me, you do improv.

And improv, isn’t it a sign of an amateur when they do the phone that way?

Instead of miming like they’re actually holding a phone in their hand?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, right.

We’d love to hear from you.

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

A language puzzle and more about sign language.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, that man of a thousand facts, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, John.

That’s me. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

What’s up, buddy?

It’s great to be back.

What is up? As you know, I do love games and game shows and puzzles.

That’s why I have a little game today that’s sort of based on a game show.

Okay.

Okay.

You’re familiar with the $10,000 pyramid or the $25,000 pyramid or the $100,000 pyramid, all the pyramids?

Mm—

Yeah.

Good.

This is very similar to that.

I’m thinking of three things.

They all have something in common, which is that they are things you break.

Now, their initials are R, L, and S.

Can you deliver the goods?

Can you guess what these three things are that you break?

Break.

R, L, S.

You break records.

Right.

That’s the first one.

Break a leg.

Right.

And you break.

Silence.

Silence.

Oh, nice.

That’s pretty good.

Break silence.

Sweat.

Break a sweat.

Yes, a sweat.

I have a common three-word phrase, break a sweat.

You got all three.

That’s perfect.

Now, I’m going to give you the category as if both of you are cluing into the listeners on Pyramid,

But I’ll also give you the specific letters that begin the words I’m thinking of, okay?

Okay.

All right.

Let’s see how it goes.

Here we go.

Let’s try this out.

See how it works.

Here are things you make.

B, C, F.

We’re going to look for phrases that have the construction make a blank.

Okay.

So you make a friend?

Sure.

I was looking for make a face, but that’s fine.

Oh, okay.

It’s a little more idiomatic.

Okay.

Right.

Make a change.

Okay.

I was looking for make a case, but that’s make a change is good too.

Make a change, make a case.

What about a B?

Make a baby.

That’s pretty good because I had make a bed.

Oh, okay.

You’d probably have to make the bed eventually.

And then lie in it.

Right.

As you can see, there are multiple correct answers to these.

That’s just fine in this case.

How about three things you throw?

K, P, and P.

K, P, and P.

Throw a party.

Throw a party, yes.

It’s one of mine.

Oh, we’re throwing?

Okay.

Throw a party.

Throw a…

It’s not throw a knife, is it?

No.

Something a little more…

It might be the very, very first step towards making a baby.

Throw a pass?

No.

No, I was thinking of the K.

Throw a kiss.

Oh, throw a kiss.

Throw a kiss is right.

Oh, hello.

That’s what we do.

All right.

And then on the other end of the spectrum, if you’re mad at someone.

Throw a…

I was looking for throw a punch.

Oh, good.

Oh, throw a punch.

Okay.

Good.

You guys are doing all right.

How about three things you hold?

C, G, T.

C, G, T.

Three things we hold.

Hold.

Hold a coat.

I’ll take it.

Hold a time?

No.

These are harder than you think.

Hold a grudge.

Hold a grudge is right.

That’s my second one.

Hold a train.

Hold a train is pretty good, I think.

Hold a…

Think about unrequited love.

Hold a torch?

Hold a torch, yeah.

And hold a candle.

And hold a candle, yes.

If you don’t like them that much, hold a candle.

Hold a tiny torch.

I can do better.

Here’s the last one.

Things you raise.

Things you raise.

Raise a EOS.

EOS.

Raise a E is the first one?

Raise an E?

Yeah.

The first one is what you do if you’re skeptical.

Eyebrow.

Raise an eyebrow.

Yes, raise an eyebrow.

Second one is if you’re in court.

Raise an objection.

Yes.

And the last one is if you’re a rabble rouser.

Raise a stink.

Raise a stink is right.

Okay. Guess what? It’s over.

You did it.

Thanks, John. It was wonderful. We’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks, Grant. Thanks, Martha. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, this is a show about words and language, although sometimes you can’t tell it.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Maria. I am calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

And what’s on your mind?

I work at an office, and my coworkers and I use a term that is called File 13,

And we use it whenever we have paperwork that we don’t want to process.

So, for example, we’ll say, I’m sending this to File 13, or I’m going to File 13 this paperwork.

Wow. So all your paperwork is optional?

No, we actually use the term when we want to throw it away.

Oh, I see.

So this is just expressing a wish.

Exactly.

So I didn’t know exactly what file 13 was

And why it meant that we wanted to throw away the paperwork.

Really good question.

Where did you pick it up?

Do you know?

I just picked it up from hearing my coworkers say it.

Oh, you didn’t know it before you started working there?

No, I never did.

Oh, okay.

And they never call it the round file?

Or the circular file?

No, maybe it’s an Indiana thing, but we have to say File 13.

Oh, it’s bigger than Indiana.

Yeah.

It dates back to the 1940s, and it came up during the time of World War II.

And for a long time, File 13 was only used by people in the military

To refer to exactly what you’re talking about,

Anything that you would just put in the trash, put in the rubbish bin, the dustbin, what have you.

And some people, however, have used file 17 in the same way.

There’s a theory on Wikipedia that’s very specious that I encourage people not to put much credence in.

Just put it in file 13.

Yeah.

Well, I would go edit the entry, but if you edited everything that was wrong on Wikipedia, it’d take quite a while.

But their theory is that there was some particular chapter 13 in a regulation about the dismissal of military personnel that had something to do with that.

And I can find, and that other people who do what I do, researching the history of words,

Have found zero evidence that this theory has any credibility whatsoever.

So it’s a big origin unknown, except for the fact that it starts to pop up in the early 1940s during World War II.

And somewhere by the late 1960s, it was thoroughly outside of the military world and in civilian life

And started to pop up in environments.

By the 1970s, when I started going to school, I had teachers who would use it.

Don’t you think it’s just as plausible that it has to do with 13 being unlucky and unwanted?

Maybe, but why 17?

Skipping the 13 floor.

Well, as a variation on file 13.

Maybe.

It’s a bigger file.

Yeah.

Maybe.

It’s for worse stuff.

Yeah.

Paperwork you really don’t want to do.

And that’s the best theory, that it has something to do with the unlucky 13.

Yeah.

And then circular file is, of course, your trash can.

Right.

The military brought it with them after the war.

Yeah.

I’ve mentioned this before, but it bears repeating that any time we have a large military effort in the United States,

You bring these people from a wide variety of lives, different neighborhoods and countries and states and occupations together,

In this really intense situation, and language is transmitted the same way that viruses are transmitted.

It all comes in, and it all goes back out.

And so it’s a very vigorous creation of new words takes place during wartime.

Yeah, any time you get a bunch of people together all doing one thing together, they make new language.

Sometimes they make babies too, but lots of language.

So Maria good luck with your paperwork

Thank you

I will try not to say it too loudly

Yeah not too loudly

The manager is walking by

Thanks Maria

Okay tell everyone in the office hi

Thank you very much

Okay bye bye

Bye

Is there a word in your workplace that has you scratching your head

You can give us a call about it

The number is 877-929-9673

Or send it an email to

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi.

This is Mike Salpeter from Atlanta.

Welcome to the show, Mike.

How can we help?

Hi, Mike.

Thank you for taking my call.

When I was a child, I was a huge fan of I Love Lucy.

And there’s a few really cute expressions that have stood out in my mind all these years,

One of which that I wanted to call and ask you about.

It’s the expression, charmed, I’m sure, which is basically as it sounds like when you’re meeting somebody,

You shake their hand and you say, charmed, I’m sure.

And in the particular context of the episode, I don’t remember it in great detail,

But I remember that Lucy and Ethel were meeting somebody that Ethel was very dubious about.

She had a very suspicious expression on her face, and she puts out her hand and says, charmed, I’m sure.

So clearly she wasn’t charmed.

But I was just wondering your impression of that expression, where it comes from, and is it ever still used anymore?

I have the sense that charmed, I’m sure, used to be a lovely expression, sort of like French enchanté.

And charm had a different sense back in those days.

And before that, I mean, my mother went to charm school.

Can you believe that?

She was going to send me to charm school when I was old enough, but then I think charm school is disbanded or something.

But I think charm had a different sense back in the earlier part of the century.

This sounds like one of those things that we’ve talked about before on the show, Grant, the sugar-coated snark.

Like bless your heart, where you say exactly the opposite of what you mean.

Follow it up with something snarky, you know.

Exactly.

Bless her heart, you know, something, right?

Yeah.

But I haven’t heard anybody use that.

No, it would be affected now.

It might appear in a period drama on PBS.

I didn’t even think then.

The difficult part of charmed, I’m sure, is why the I’m sure.

It just seems awkward.

Even if you mean it genuinely, why do you have to say I’m sure?

Yeah.

Right, exactly.

It’s sort of like, I like your dress.

No, really.

I also find it really interesting that if you look in the historical record,

It goes back to the 1850s, by the way,

It starts out fairly genuine, like Martha said,

But it grows ironic and even sarcastic pretty quickly.

And it comes up again and again in these circumstances

Where manners and custom require that you shake someone’s hand and say hello,

Even if you don’t like them.

Even if they’re incredibly disagreeable, you still have to say something.

And so I’m sure, I don’t know, maybe that’s a way of saying exactly the opposite of what you’re thinking.

It seems like a real, I don’t know, peek into the future,

Because people say that this decade is, we’re kind of in an ironic age where we say things like that.

But something like the 1950s, it would seem like that wouldn’t be something that they would say, even if they weren’t charmed.

Oh, yeah.

Charmed and leave it at that.

That’s why I’m kind of surprised by the I’m sure.

We modern folk don’t have any kind of claim on being the most snarky or sarcastic people.

By no means.

No, not at all.

What if a Mertz was sort of a hipster, don’t you think?

Yeah.

Of our age.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

Really enjoy your show.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Charmed.

Bye-bye.

I’m so sure we can give you an answer if you call us 877-929-9673 or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Our conversation earlier about how English sounds to other people reminded me of one of my favorite passages from the book Hunger of Memory, The Education of Richard Rodriguez, which is his memoir of growing up as an immigrant from Mexico.

And he talks about when he was very young and Spanish was the language of home and English was the language of the world outside and Spanish was softer and warmer and all that.

But he has a great passage describing hearing what he calls the high nasal notes of middle-class American speech.

He says,

The air stirred with sound.

Sometimes, even now, when I’ve been traveling abroad for several weeks, I will hear what I heard as a boy.

In hotel lobbies or airports, in Turkey or Brazil, some Americans will pass,

And suddenly I will hear it again, the high sound of American voices.

For a few seconds, I will hear it with pleasure.

For it is now the sound of my society, a reminder of home.

But inevitably, already on the flight headed for home, the sound fades with repetition.

I will be unable to hear it anymore.

That’s beautiful.

You know that feeling when you’re traveling abroad and you hear English all of a sudden,

And then when you’re coming back, then it just kind of melts into the background and you don’t notice it anymore.

I thought that was a great description.

I was never perfectly fluent in French, but French is like that for me sometimes,

Because I don’t hear it often in Southern California.

And when I do hear it, it’s always a surprise and I have to do a double take.

Yeah.

And sometimes I physically do a double take and then people give me the eye like, why are you looking at me?

And I’m like, sorry, we’re speaking French.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Leanne McKellway.

I am in Richmond, Virginia.

All right.

Well, welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, I heard a phrase about 25 years ago.

I’ve only heard it the one time, and I am really all of a sudden very curious as to what it might mean and where it comes from.

In the Social Security office here in Richmond, Virginia, I had gone to get my name changed 25 years ago after I got married.

And so we were all sitting around the lobby waiting, you know, to be helped.

And two of the people who were sitting with me were talking to each other, and they were talking about one of the employees there.

I guess I was eavesdropping, but all of a sudden one of them said to the other,

She is sitting high and looking low.

And I have never heard that phrase before or since.

And I took it to mean that the woman who was supposed to be helping them

Was being very patronizing and feeling superior to them.

I don’t really know.

What do you think?

It’s possible.

Do you mind, was she African-American, the woman who said that?

Yes.

All right.

That would make a lot of sense.

Because this expression is almost exclusively used in an African-American community.

And a lot of times it comes up in context of God and religion

And judging other people and judging oneself.

And it’s got a lot of different nuances.

As far back as the 1970s, it’s probably older than that,

But that’s as far back as I know,

You can find it being used to talk about God sitting high and looking low.

And what that means is that he is in a position of power,

And yet he takes care of the small things,

The people who are weak and helpless and innocent.

But you’ll also find it used in a more negative sense

To describe somebody who is in a position of authority

And uses that authority to ignore the people who don’t have power,

Who are helpless, who need help.

And that sounds like the context that you heard it in,

Sitting high and looking low.

Yeah, that is exactly what was going on in that waiting room.

So, yes, it’s perfect.

I don’t know where it came from.

I would not be surprised if it were in some writing from the 60s and 70s.

Certainly by the time the 80s and 90s rolled around,

It’s so well entrenched that it starts to appear in books about religion and family and self-help

And the writings of Maya Angelou.

I believe she used it in 2004 even at the Democratic National Convention.

And so at this point, it’s a well-established phrase.

Well, I guess it’s more common than I thought it was.

So thank you for helping me.

Well, I’m impressed at your 25-year-old memory that this particular circumstance should sit with you for so long.

Well, it was just like this phrase out of the blue that I had never heard before.

So I guess it stuck with me.

You must have quite an ear then, Leanne.

It’s a very evocative phrase.

You can just picture it, can’t you?

Yes.

Up there in the sky down here considering the lilies.

It’s great.

Outside of religion, it’s almost always used in a negative way to describe somebody who has power but doesn’t use it on behalf of the people who really need it.

I think I’m going to look for situations where I can throw it out in conversation now.

Please do.

Very good.

Please do, and let us know how it goes.

Thanks, Leanne.

We appreciate your calling.

Thank you for your help.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

If you have a question like Leanne’s, you can call us 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Over the years on this show, since my son was born, I have shared some of the progress he’s been making with the English language.

Yes.

One of his big accomplishments recently, I was very proud.

He’s able to phonetically write some words now.

Oh, I know.

You’ve been failing about that.

But as his language is improving, those little cute things that he says that aren’t quite right,

But we don’t want him to correct, they’re disappearing.

Oh, yeah.

So he used to say callipitter instead of caterpillar.

And that’s a common one.

He stopped saying that.

Callipitter.

I love it.

But he still says, instead of saying T-Rex, as in Tyrannosaurus Rex, he says Team Rex.

Oh, that’s nice.

Yeah, so my wife always jokes.

Yeah, we’re on Team Rex.

That’s nice.

And it’s so hard to know whether you should correct it or not.

And the same thing happens with speakers of foreign languages.

I have a friend who confused piece of cake with cup of tea.

She would say, oh, that was a cup of tea.

That’s not my piece of cake.

Yeah, they’re cute.

They’re very adorable.

With my son, my wife and I just kind of like smile at each other and let it go because we know the school will fix it.

And he’ll automatically correct it and it will go away after a while.

So if there’s anything egregious by the time he reaches his teens, we’ll correct it then.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

More word lost as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words,

The show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, you might think that if I used American Sign Language, then I could communicate easily with, say, a deaf person in Bolivia who uses sign language.

But that’s not true.

As you know, the signs aren’t universal by any means.

And in fact, if I used American Sign Language and you used British Sign Language, we still wouldn’t be able to communicate because those systems are completely different.

American Sign Language is based on the French system that was imported to this country in the early 19th century by Thomas Gallaudet,

Who recruited a top sign language teacher in his day, a guy named Clerc, who happened to be based in Paris.

ASL, or American Sign Language, is almost 60% the same as French Sign Language, and it’s unintelligible to users of British Sign Language.

This was news to me.

That’s very interesting, right?

Yeah.

And the British, does they have a homegrown system, or does it come from somewhere else?

They have a homegrown system, and what happened was that there was a great critical mass of deaf people in France.

It’s a smaller country, and Paris was, of course, a great population center.

Deaf people in this country were more spread out.

And so they had a long time of developing their sign language system before we ever got around to it.

That’s really interesting stuff.

Yeah.

It’s important to say that when we talk about sign language, it’s just not another language transposed.

Right.

American Sign Language, and you’ve just kind of pointed this out, but I want to say this a different way.

American Sign Language isn’t American English in hand symbols.

It is its own language with its own grammar and its own syntax and its own vocabulary.

Exactly.

Yeah, it’s not word for word.

So we can’t use the same words and communicate with the British that way.

I’d love to hear from you.

Do you sign?

Do you sign in more than one variety of sign language?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Evita Sawyers.

I’m so happy to be on the show with you guys.

Evita.

Hi, Evita. Welcome to the show.

Welcome. Where are you calling from?

Thank you so much.

I’m actually calling from Los Angeles, but I live in Chula Vista, California.

Excellent. What can we do for you?

I’m calling today because I was sitting around with a friend of mine, Angela, and her boyfriend, Rick.

And we were talking about, you know, just our childhood and stuff like that.

And I used the word sadiddy, and he stopped me and said, sadiddy, what is that?

I’ve never heard of that.

And I said, oh, you know, it’s a term that we use to mean someone is uppity or they think they’re better than everyone else.

And he was floored because he had never heard it, and he asked me how I spelled it.

And I said, to be honest, I don’t know.

I’ve never read it anywhere or anything like that.

It’s just a term that, you know, we kind of always used growing up in my house and, you know, my family members and stuff like that.

And so it kind of got me curious as to where this word came from.

Was it regional?

Because I actually grew up in a Jersey City, New Jersey.

I’m a Jersey girl.

So I was just curious about the origin of this term and, you know, why a lot of people never heard of it.

Because I really haven’t heard it outside of, you know, the community that I grew up in.

-huh.

Well, let me ask you, is your friend African-American?

No, he’s not.

He’s a white guy.

And you are African-American.

I am, yes.

The thing about sediti, this is a term that I like to use when I’m giving speeches and public presentations to a variety of audiences.

It is almost exclusively an African-American term.

And when I ask a room who’s heard of this word, none of the white hands go up.

Ever.

That’s so funny.

And most of the African-American hands do.

And not just black, because Caribbean blacks don’t have it, but African-American in particular.

And so you picked it up from your community of people, from your ethnic group, because it totally belongs to you all.

It has a variety of spellings, S-E-D-I-T-T-Y, S-A-D-D-I-T-T-Y, all variations on that same theme.

And it goes back to at least the 1940s when it starts to pop up in some of the conversational newspaper columns of the African-American community.

You can find these in various online news archives.

We don’t know the origin of sadidity exactly, but there are two prevailing theories.

One is that it’s a dialect pronunciation of Saturday.

You may have heard people in the African-American community or even just white Southerners say Saturday, right, instead of Saturday.

Yeah, Saturday.

There’s one theory is that a woman is all dolled up to go out.

It’s almost always about a woman, not a man, right?

Oh, wow, I didn’t know that.

I mean, have you ever heard the term applied to a man?

You know, to be honest, now that you mention it, I can honestly say no, that, you know, we would use it to explain a female generally who kind of thinks she’s better than everyone else.

I’ve never heard it used, actually, to indicate that, you know, they’re talking about a male.

Sometimes about a family, like you can say a family is sedity.

Right.

You know, never an actual guy.

It’s usually about like a female or a group of individuals.

Yeah, exactly right.

So it’s the image of a woman all dressed up on Saturday night.

Right.

That’s one theory. The other theory is that it’s a corruption of the word sedate, S-E-D-A-T-E,

That it’s like a fake Latin pronunciation of that word, as if the vowels were a little different.

Neither theory has much evidence behind it, but it’s the best that we can do.

I’m so excited to hear you still use this term, because I was worried that it was on its way out,

And I think it’s got a really interesting history, and I continue to love to tell the story about it.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, another term, the more popular one that I think I hear nowadays for people using it is bougie.

Bougie, right.

And it’s kind of the same meaning, but I always thought that that came off of like bourgeois.

Exactly.

I don’t know how to pronounce it, so they say bougie.

But that’s what mostly people say nowadays is bougie.

But I’m kind of an old soul, so, you know.

Yeah, bougie does come from bourgeois, and it does mean, at least in the way that we’re using it here,

That you are trying to act like you’re better than you actually are.

You’re putting on airs.

Yeah, and there are always going to be people like that,

So we’ll always have sedity or bougie or something, right?

Well, cool. Thanks, Avita, for the call. I hope we helped.

Thank you so much. And I love, love, love this show.

I’m a total word nerd, and so I’m in love with you guys.

Oh, thank you. We love you, too.

Right on.

Thanks for calling, Avita.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye, Avita.

Bye-bye.

The sedate origin is really interesting because in one of the newspaper columns,

They have the word upsidate, and then they re-spell it immediately right after as upsidity.

Oh, really?

So if you’re upsidate, it means I think you’re calm and collected and very classy looking.

Yeah, yeah, probably.

But it’s all really hard to puzzle out.

You know, these words that, as she just said, she didn’t know how to spell it because it’s transmitted orally.

Yeah, yeah.

And oral transmission means that the history tends not to go with it.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Foster. I’m the executive director with Wesselman Nature Society here in Evansville, Indiana.

What can we help you with, John?

Well, I’m here to help you and tell you an interesting story.

Oh, do tell.

Once long, long ago in the mountains of southwest Virginia, I was a starry-eyed young undergraduate doing a research project with this cute little lizard called an eastern fence swift.

Pretty common guy, maybe, you know, a big one is about seven inches long.

And I was doing some work with a population that was found at an abandoned coal mine

Out near Blacksburg, Virginia, at Virginia Tech.

And it was out in the sticks.

And I was there about three to four times a week, parking my car on the side of the road,

And, you know, in the minds of some of the local folks, possibly up to no good back there.

And so one of my concerns was to make sure that people would know who I was and what I was doing so that I wouldn’t be greeted by anybody with a firearm.

So I figured the best strategy, because my grandfather was from a rural area, and the little general stores are usually just the hub for information and communication.

Oh, yeah.

So my first week in doing this, I went to the little general store, stopped, got a drink, and I’m shooting the breeze with the guys.

And I pointed out my car and said, I’m working down the road,

And I’m doing a research project on the lizards that run around up there in the coal mine.

And the guy just sort of gave me a look and shook his head, and that was that.

And I had been doing this, like I say, three times a week for a couple of months.

And I went in one day, and the guy looked at me, and he went,

I finally figured out what the heck you’re talking about.

You said you were working with lizards.

Yes, sir, I am.

You’re not working with no lizards.

You’re working with them scorpions.

Oh.

And what I had come to discover amongst the local population,

That any lizard was referenced as a scorpion.

I have no idea as to why they were referenced as scorpions.

And this is where exactly?

Southwest Virginia.

This was in Blacksburg, Virginia.

Okay.

Out, you know, extreme southwest Virginia. And there are no scorpions there.

So they’re, you know, what I consider a scorpion, the little eight-legged thing that will sting you.

Right.

They don’t exist out there.

Well, let me ask you about this eastern fence swift that you were studying.

Is that poisonous?

No, not at all.

Okay.

The males have really bright iridescent blue patches under their throats and under their bellies.

And when they’re showing off to girls or trying to intimidate boys, they do push-ups to flash these brightly colored patches.

Right, right, right.

And, you know, the only thing I can think is, you know, in general in the animal world, often a brightly colored patch is a warning sign that something might be poisonous.

So that’s the only thing I could think as to why they would be called scorpions.

That’s interesting because the lizard that I’m familiar with that’s referred to as a scorpion in that area is the five-lined skink.

Skink, yep, with the blue tail.

Yeah, with that really electric blue tail, right?

Yes.

I think in general, all lizards are scorpions.

No kidding.

At least amongst the population at that point in time.

That’s really interesting because I know that that five-lined skink with the bright, bright, bright blue tail that can sometimes break off, right?

I know it’s not venomous, but it is toxic, right?

I’ve heard of cats eating those tails when they come off and dying.

Yeah.

Well, not dying, but I’ve heard about them puking them back up.

Oh, wow.

I’m sitting here listening to this thinking to myself,

This totally underscores why we have Latin names for teenagers.

Latin binomials.

That is a take-home message.

Latin binomials are good.

That’s great.

Well, we appreciate your sharing that story.

That is really something.

Yeah, you know, we’re going to dig a little more on this and see if we can present some of this on the website

So people can find out a little bit more about where people use this different language.

I could see how it would cause lots of confusion if you were an outsider.

Well, I think that they thought I was an idiot for the longest time.

Well, no wonder you need to study these things.

You’re a horrible-minded boy.

Running around chasing scorpions.

Thanks, John. This is great.

That is great stuff.

Well, thank you so much, and I appreciate the opportunity.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, we’d love to hear your language story, so call us, 877-929-9673.

Frida Lockhart from Dallas wants to know, why do we say we’re headed to the Poles?

What is Poles all about?

P-O-L-L-S?

And it’s a great story.

P-O-L in Middle English meant head.

And so a pole is essentially a head count,

And the poles are the places where the heads are counted.

And the cool thing about this is that the Middle English word pole, meaning head,

Is also in a couple of other familiar words.

Poliwag, which is a wiggling head, literally.

The wog is from an old word that means wiggle.

So, you know, a poliwag being a really, really young frog that doesn’t have the legs yet

Is a little wiggle head, and it’s also in the word tadpole, a little toad that’s a head.

Oh, very nice.

So it’s all related to the poles and going to the poles.

Very good.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lori.

Hi, Lori. Where are you calling us from?

I’m calling from Fairfax, Virginia.

Welcome to the show, Lori.

How can we help you?

Well, I have a question.

Last spring, around the time that everybody’s going to the prom, I almost lost my mind listening to people talk about going to prom.

And I just wondered, what has happened to the article, The?

And you hear it more and more.

I listen to public radio, and the local guy here talks about being in studio.

He’s in studio, and then people are in hospital.

Now, that, I think, is more a British term.

Maybe I’m wrong.

But what’s happened to the?

And why do people talk about going to prom?

What happened to the the?

There’s a shortage.

A shortage of the?

That’s so sad.

It is.

It sounds so wrong on my ears.

It’s an austerity measure.

No.

The answer is a little more complicated than that.

The answer is actually really interesting, Lori.

You’ve been in a collision.

No, a collision.

Tell me about it, man.

Yeah, you’ve been in a dialect collision

Where your dialect has encountered other dialects

Where they have more of what are called anarthrist nouns.

And that fancy word means that they do not have an article in front of them.

And it just depends where you’re from.

In parts of this country, we say, I’m going to prom, right?

And other parts of the country say, I’m going to the prom.

And whether or not you have the article just depends on what people around you say.

And any attempt to find rhyme or reason to this usually is defeated.

But one thing that we do know about whether or not people add the the,

It’s whether or not you’re going to go to the place, how should we put this,

The definitive, canonical, ultimate epitome of a place for a thing.

For example, I can go to school.

And if I tell you that, what am I doing?

You’re just going to school.

Yeah, I’m going to take classes and listen to a teacher and study and do exams.

However, I can go to the school for a PTA meeting.

And I use the the for school to indicate that I’m going there for something

Of which the school isn’t ordinarily thought of.

Right.

It’s more of a specific.

There’s like indefinite, indefinite nouns.

I did teach English for a number of years.

Very good.

Exactly.

Very good.

But the thes is more specific.

I want the dog, you know, not a dog.

And so part of it is cultural, the way you think of your institutions.

Part of it is dialect, what you inherited from the people who came before you.

And that dialect has some roots in, apparently,

Some of the varieties of English spoken in the United States

Have a strong influence, not from English English,

The English spoken by the people in England,

But the English spoken by people in Ireland and Scotland.

And so we have all these Scots-Irish influences here,

And the varieties of their languages that aren’t English, Gaelic and Gaelic,

They have different kinds of rules for their articles.

And so they use those also in their English.

We picked those up in the United States.

And so you have these pockets of interesting the-less-ness,

You know, no the, article-ness-ness, and arthriss-ness,

In our thrissness.

In the United States.

A dearth of the.

What’s that?

A dearth of the.

A dearth of the.

Very good.

A dearth of the.

As a result of a dialect collision.

I love this.

A dialect collision.

And so what you are doing is kind of what I often call, you’ve probably heard me say this, a little bit of field work.

You’re actually out there collecting evidence and kind of establishing these rules.

And I bet you if you just take some really simple notes about who says the prom and who doesn’t, you’ll find some commonalities.

Maybe they’re from another side of the state.

Maybe they’re from a different community, ethnic community.

Maybe they’re older or younger.

And you’ll start to see these patterns kind of fill out your note card.

You’re like, oh, I see a pattern here.

Okay?

So that’s interesting.

Yeah, I could do that.

Yeah.

And arthris nouns.

What a great word.

I know.

That makes my day.

Yeah.

Come back to us when you get some information.

I’d love to hear what’s happening there.

All right?

All right.

Thank you, Martha and Grant.

Okay.

Thanks, Lori.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Lori.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Here’s a children’s rhyme that you might not know.

Or maybe you do.

You know so much.

Thank you, Grant.

First I gave her peaches, then I gave her pears, then I gave her 50 cents and kissed her on the stairs.

I thought it was going to end with underwears or something.

I love children’s rhymes.

What are your kids saying on the playgrounds or your grandkids?

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

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but join us online on Facebook and Twitter

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Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Hurdell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc.,

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

Ciao.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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