The Whole Kit and Caboodle

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I was writing some business correspondence recently in email,

And I made a comment that I thought was witty and charming,

But then I caught myself just in case adding a little smiley face.

But then I had to stop and think, wait, what am I doing?

This is business correspondence.

I would never, ever put a smiley face in a printed letter.

What am I thinking?

And then, Grant, that’s when it hit me that in email correspondence,

There’s a kind of boundary line.

You know, there’s a point that you may or may not reach where you feel comfortable adding those little symbols in business correspondence.

You might call that point the Rubicon of the emoticon, that point which you cross.

And there was actually an article in The New York Times about this recently by Judith Newman,

And she was noting that many people are saying more and more emoticons are creeping into my business correspondence.

Some people like it because it helps them communicate, and other people just say it just makes their skin crawl.

And, in fact, we put something on our Facebook page, and, boy, we heard from the skin crawlers more than anybody else.

Yeah, most of the people on there said, absolutely not.

Absolutely not.

Don’t use that in correspondence with me.

Right.

I can see a small reason for it.

If you do have a personal relationship that, I mean, you might sign your emails, love, or, you know, what if you work for your father or, you know, partners with your sister or something.

Yeah, I don’t know.

So there’s a gradation there between formality and informality, and some workplaces are incredibly informal, right?

Yeah, but I mean, if you’re writing somebody you want money from or—

Well, let the other person cross that Rubicon first.

I like that idea.

As long as they’re not using them, you shouldn’t use them either.

It feels significant, you know, when you get a smiley face from somebody who never smiles in person, and all of a sudden there’s one in your email.

It’s weird.

I do smile sometimes.

It’s weird.

I remember your first smiley face you ever sent me, Grant.

I thought our relationship had changed.

It’s true.

But I didn’t put you on the Christmas card list.

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

What do you think?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you doing?

This is Ryan.

I’m in Camp Pendleton.

Oh, wow.

Great.

Just down the road.

What can we help you with?

Well, I had a topic that I wanted to discuss.

It was actually the rank of petty officer in the Navy.

-huh.

Petty officer?

Yeah, and basically I’ve been in the Marines for 11 years now,

And we call all of our enlisted from the rank of E-4 to E-9 non-commissioned officers.

And basically what that means is that you have leadership,

But you just don’t have a commission.

In the Navy, they say petty officer.

Now, I’ve served aboard three naval vessels,

Wearing petty officers from the rank of first class all the way up to master chief petty officers.

There’s nothing petty about them.

So I’ve always wondered why the Navy chose to call there.

You know, they’re enlisted with leadership petty.

-huh. That’s a great question.

Nothing petty about them. That’s great.

There’s absolutely—I mean, have you ever seen these guys operate the way they run these ships,

The way they get us Marines from the shore to the beach?

It’s unbelievable the things that they do.

So I always wondered about that, you know, maybe where that came from.

Right, because it seems kind of oxymoronic.

It doesn’t really apply to these men and their power and their position.

Interesting.

Exactly.

It goes back to the French, which also has more than one meaning for the word that’s the source of our word petty.

It’s P-E-T-I-T, which is pronounced in French something like petit, which to an English speaker comes out more or less as petty.

And it doesn’t mean small.

It means under or less than or inferior to.

And not inferior as a pejorative, but it’s simply saying in a hierarchy or in a ranking, this person is below somebody else.

That’s it.

The military is all about rank.

A lot of the military words that we use for modes of defense, for titles of positions, for just a lot of different words in there are French origin, just like in our judicial system.

For example, grand larceny versus petty theft.

Exactly right.

Same idea.

Grand comes with a French word for large or big, and petty comes with a French word for small.

Yeah, so petty just basically means subordinate to others that are higher in rank.

Exactly right.

So, yeah.

So it’s just simply about rank and nothing about their personal character.

Yeah, I definitely figured that.

I figured it was something traditional and historic.

I just had no idea where it would have come from.

Your instincts were good.

They were spot on, Ryan.

Yeah, that’s a really good point.

Well, thank you for enlightening me on that.

Maybe I’ll share with them because I was asking those guys.

It’s funny.

I’ll go to them.

I’ll say, hey, so why do they call you petty?

They’ll say, you know what?

I really don’t know why they call us petty.

That’s great.

So as a Marine, I’ll be able to tell the Navy why they got their name.

That’s great.

That’s fantastic.

You’re going to make up some wild story, though, right?

Yeah, I probably won’t say it has anything to do with, you know, other languages from Europe.

I’ll say, you know, maybe some Marines, you know, didn’t like the Navy.

And he, you know, decided to call them.

He didn’t think about that.

You know, it wouldn’t be right if I didn’t mess with them.

Yeah, a little bit.

Exactly.

It’s kind of your job.

Thanks for calling, Ryan.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks for your service.

Thank you for having me.

Bye-bye.

Our pleasure.

That’s kind of a workplace question. Maybe you have one too. 877-929-9673.

What do you call your boss or the people who work underneath you?

You can send an email to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sue calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Sue. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Sue.

Thank you.

What’s happening there?

Well, I was looking at the newspaper a couple of weeks ago,

Reading an article about the amount of spices and seasonings that Americans are going to use

During the holiday season coming up. And the beginning of the sentence said,

All told, Americans will purchase, and then went on to say how much. And I got curious about the

Phrase all told and thought I would call you and ask about it.

Well, Sue, how did they spell it?

Well, A-L-L and T-O-L-D.

Okay. So they didn’t spell it A-L-L-T-O-L-L-E-D.

No, I was curious about that as another way of possibly spelling it.

Yeah, yeah, that’s what I used to think. I used to think it was like the bell tolling, you know, however many times…

Right, like going through a toll booth.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Those tolls add up, right?

Yes, yes.

But they actually did it correctly. Tolled, in that sense, comes from an old sense of the word tell, that means to count, like a bank teller.

Oh, okay.

Aha! I heard that light bulb!

Yes. Well, I had also thought maybe the word had been totaled,

And over the years had been abbreviated, and part of the word had just fallen out.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that’s a good guess.

Yeah.

So, told comes from an old meaning of to tell, meaning to count.

Yes.

Oh, that, all right.

Yeah, and so all told together is kind of this, what they call an absolute construction,

Which is its own thing.

It’s not very dependent upon the sentence that it’s attached to.

It has its own subject, in this case, all.

And it can’t even be broken down, really.

It’s got to be treated as a single entity.

Oh, I see.

To get nerdy about it.

Yeah.

Great.

Does that clear it up for you, Sue?

Yeah.

It does.

It does.

Thank you so much.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Bye-bye.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

English.

It’s just filled with all these little mysteries, isn’t it?

It is.

Sometimes the smallest ones are the most fascinating.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sarah from Copham, Virginia.

I called you a same, I have a quandary.

I have an expression that I realize I’ve been using all my life.

And A, I have no idea what it means, and B, I don’t have any idea of the origin of it.

Oh, wow, this is good. I like a puzzle, a mystery.

Well, there might be a puzzle, it might be very obvious.

It’s one of those things I haven’t really discussed with many people

Because the subject doesn’t actually come up.

But when I tuck my children in at night, I say,

Good night, sleep tight, and see you on the big drum.

And it’s something that my parents have said to me.

I guess there was an interlude in my life when I didn’t say it at all

Because I wasn’t, you know, when I’d left home.

And then when I had my children again, I picked it up again.

And I don’t know if anyone else says it.

Good night, sleep tight, see you on the big drum?

See you on the big drum, yeah.

On the big drum.

And your parents said this to you.

This was growing up in England?

In England, yeah.

What part of England?

The South, Hampshire.

Okay.

That doesn’t help me at all.

I just thought I’d ask.

Well, I mean, obviously, I’ve been thinking about it lately,

Wondering what the connotation of it.

We have a military background.

So whether it was, I don’t know, drumbeat or something.

My niece had this lovely idea of it,

Because my sister says it to her children, too.

And they had this idea.

She used to see it as like, you know, going to Toy Town at night

And sort of everyone meeting on the skin of the big drum at night in their dreams.

Oh, that’s nice.

It’s a nice idea.

Interesting.

That’s nice.

Sarah, I see online that there is a Sarah asking about this very phrase in a lot of places.

Is that you?

Really?

Yeah.

No.

It’s not?

Well, recently?

Well, I don’t know.

It’s on a ton of sites.

It looks like they all stole it from each other.

Did you ever submit this as a question to one site

And then all the other sites just ripped it off from them?

No, I haven’t. I’ve looked at the expression.

I haven’t actually submitted it.

That’s the only use I can find of it online is somebody asking about it.

I don’t find any, and this is in British and American,

And frankly tons of reference works in newspapers and online archives,

And across the entire span of every text that I have at my disposal,

I find nobody using this except for you.

Okay, so it must be something weird about our family.

It’s not weird, no.

No, it’s weird.

No, it isn’t.

Family things are natural and normal.

They’re a byproduct of a close relationship,

And they’re part of the glue that holds you together.

Yeah, well, I was hoping you could tell me why.

That’s nicely said.

But what could a big drum be?

I don’t know.

I thought it was a military one, so maybe, you know, the military tattoo,

The military sort of, I hope it’s not.

I wonder if it’s one of those things that comes from a particular regiment

That maybe your father or grandfather belong to.

Oh, yeah, that’s true.

They were both in the same regiment.

My grandfather was in the cavalry and my father was in the tanks,

Which is a derivative of the cavalry.

And they often have their own in-house slang and jargon

That this is transmitted from year to year, from generation to generation.

I wonder if it has something to do with that.

It might not have escaped that particular close-knit group

And found its way into the wider world where it would appear

In the reference works that we have at our disposal.

Because, Sarah, I got bupkis, nothing, zip.

But I think it’s this fantastic linguistic relic.

I feel like we’re archaeologists who just found a little shard of pottery that, you know, I mean, maybe we’ll find a connection someplace.

So from that shard, we can posit an entire family.

Yes.

Maybe a culture.

An entire regiment.

Yeah, maybe somebody out there, maybe one of the many, many people out there listening has heard this.

Could be.

We’ll stay in touch, Sarah.

Thanks for calling.

See you.

You know where.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So good night.

Sleep tight.

See you on the big drum.

If you’ve heard that, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, have you heard of that time management strategy called eating the frog?

No. What is that?

It has to do with doing the most distasteful task first thing in the morning.

So you get it out of the way.

You just take the bull by the horns and you eat the frog.

Eating the frog?

Yeah.

I like it.

But I found a variation of that recently.

Carry guts to a bear.

Oh, that’s even nicer.

I thought you would like this, Grant.

You like that kind of thing.

It means to do the most rudimentary or distasteful task first.

You’re eating the wrong things.

I’m vegetarian.

I don’t know why I’m even talking about this.

What do you want to talk about when it comes to language?

877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Next up, the weekly word quiz. Stay tuned.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego,

Whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined once again by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Yo, John.

Yo, Martha. Yo, Grant.

Yo, what’s up, baby pops?

Do you guys watch Glee?

I do watch Glee.

I’ve seen it before.

Glee!

Oh, good. Well, you know, I love it. I love the show.

I am amused that the cheerleaders are called the Cheerios.

That’s funny, right?

Yeah, a little bit. First time.

Then what else would a cheerleader eat for breakfast but Cheerios, right?

That started me thinking.

-oh.

What kind of cereal do you think a hedge fund manager might have for breakfast?

Flakes.

A hedge fund manager.

Yeah.

But if an artist has something, if they want to carry things around.

Portfolio.

Yes.

As you can tell, I don’t have one.

Apparently.

Neither do I.

It’s okay.

Hedge fund managers eat portfolios for breakfast.

Gotcha.

It’s a brilliant niche marketing scheme, and I retain the rights to Portfolios, the breakfast cereal, and all the rest that you are about to guess.

Okay.

Got it.

Got it.

How about this one?

What do you think an antique dealer would have for breakfast?

It also ends in I.O.

Yes, it does.

Okay.

I.O.S.

Just to help you out.

I.O.S.

Okay.

Like Cheerios.

Wow.

An antique dealer would have.

Think of little tchotchkes they keep in a cabinet.

Curios.

Curios.

Very good.

My favorite antique dealer eats Curios, a big heaping bowl of Curios.

What does a geometry professor have for breakfast?

Ratios.

Ratios, yes.

Yum.

What do book collectors have for breakfast?

Folios.

Folios.

Yum.

That’s great.

Nice work, Rand.

What do cowboys have for breakfast?

Rodeos.

Rodeos.

Rodeos.

I wrote that one down a few minutes ago because I knew it would come up.

Very nice.

Way to think ahead.

How about audiophiles?

Audios.

Radios.

Radios.

I’ll take stereos.

Big bowl of stereos.

Stereos with berries, perhaps, with bananas.

Now, of course, some people like different cereals.

Let’s think about Wheaties.

Now, suppose you wanted something like Wheaties and you attended a liberal arts college.

What might you have for breakfast?

Oh, Wheaties.

Wheaties.

Granola, of course.

I know it doesn’t rhyme, but that’s what you eat at a liberal arts college.

It’s true.

I was looking for a big bowl of humanities.

Oh, very good.

The rest are going to be like that.

How about a priest?

What would a priest have for breakfast?

Say why they’re writing their sermon.

Hail Mary’s.

That’s not bad.

We’re getting a lot of alternate answers on this quiz, but that’s okay.

What about while they’re writing a sermon?

Curies.

Homilies.

They’d have a big bowl of homilies.

Nice.

Homilies and grits.

Homilies and grits.

Ooh, nice.

How about a ham radio enthusiast?

Frequencies.

Frequencies.

Nice.

What did Nostradamus have for breakfast?

Prophecies.

Prophecies.

Very good.

How about a trial lawyer?

Testimonies

Testimonies, Grant’s on fire

Alright, here’s the last one

What does film director George Romero

Have for breakfast?

Zombies

Big bowl of crunchy zombies

For breakfast

And what does a dentist have for breakfast?

Caries

Cavities

Well that’s my sounds like a cereal quiz

I hope you liked it

Yeah, I’m hungry

Very good, thanks John

Thank you, John.

Thanks, Martha. See you later.

And if you’d like to talk about words, grammar, slang, punctuation,

The number to call is 1-877-929-9673

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Liddy.

Hi, Liddy. Welcome to the program.

And where are you calling from?

I am calling from my office in Carlsbad.

Carlsbad, California, just north of us.

Yes.

Okay.

I wanted to know, a coworker of mine and I got into a discussion about the difference between the words adept and deft.

Because he was writing an email and he was trying to determine whether or not another coworker of ours was adept at something or deft at something.

And it occurred to him, so he came over to me and asked me what I thought and we got into a kind of long discussion about it.

And I said, you know what, let’s ask A Way with Words.

Great idea.

Because maybe we’ll be adept at coming up with an answer, right?

Adept.

Or will we be deaf?

Adept, A-D-E-P-T versus deft, D-E-F-T.

Well, let me ask you, Liddy, what was the thing that the person was either adept or a deaf?

Or deft at?

Yes.

I believe it was at programming.

Okay.

Very good.

Okay.

And which side did you fall on?

Well, I immediately went to, I guess, what is my fallback idea about the two words.

To me, adept always meant you were good at something.

Adept always, to me, meant you were really good at something.

So it was a matter of skill level or, you know, degree.

And my coworker, Andre, and I can put him on.

He’s standing right here.

But he had a different idea.

We started looking it up, and we just actually found all different kinds of definitions.

Well, let’s hear what Andre has to say.

Okay, here’s Andre.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

Hi.

Hey, how you doing?

Doing all right.

You know, it’s funny that Lydia and I had different ideas about the differentiation of these words.

And to me, adept was always applied to description of someone’s skill,

Where deft was sort of in the execution or action that that skill enabled.

As opposed to a matter of degrees.

And in searching on the Internet, we really couldn’t find anything conclusive, surprisingly.

I like your distinction there.

I do too.

And when I look at the corpora, that is these large bodies of text

Where they’ve tagged all the sentences and words for parts of speech,

I find that generally deft describes an act.

Yes.

Or it might actually describe the product of an act.

Like deft brush strokes or a deft move on the soccer field, that kind of thing.

Whereas adept usually describes a person and rarely describes an act.

So it just depends.

I mean, people obviously play with language, and the boundaries here aren’t altogether clear.

There is some overlap between these two words.

They both have connotations of cleverness or skill, but they are not perfect synonyms.

And I find that in the use of them, people do tend to differentiate subconsciously in what they apply them to.

So you would say a deft screenplay or a deft turn of phrase.

Or you might say he’s adept at programming.

He’s adept at surfing.

What do you think about that?

Well, I guess I’m a little bummed that there isn’t something to help me choose between the two.

But at the same time, there is.

It’s called your native speaker’s intuition.

And if that fails you, then find consensus in the office.

And if it’s just you and Liddy, then arm wrestle.

I think you’ll win, actually.

Oh, really?

Oh, wow.

This is a really interesting question.

And the more that I think about it, the more I think we’re talking about maybe the difference between mastery and artistry.

Very good.

I like that.

How about that?

So mastery is about being adept and artistry is about being deft?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What do you think about that?

I mean, they are very close.

That’s fine with what I was thinking, sort of about knowledge versus skill of execution.

-huh, -huh.

It’s a really good question.

The fact that you’ve considered this at length and then called us means that you are thoughtful speakers of English.

Trust your native speaker’s intuition.

If you disagree, then the person who gets paid more wins.

That’s right.

All right.

Oh, was that you, Liddy?

I don’t know.

We’ll have to look at it.

I’ll show you mine.

All right.

Thanks for calling you, too.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Do you remember that program that we did quite a while ago about words that we love to mispronounce?

Oh, yeah, yeah, like skidooly.

Skidooly.

-huh.

James Schmidt from Arcata, California, where we’re on KHSU.

Yes.

Sent us an email with two words.

He says a friend from Tennessee called a spatula a spatular, pronounced like bachelor,

And her father called aphids on the roses atheists.

I just thought those were cute and fun.

Thanks, John, for sending those.

And if you’ve got words that you or someone you know loves to mispronounce,

Send them along, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Patricia from Pine Valley, California.

Well, welcome to the program.

Thank you.

How can we help?

Okay, I was watching a show on television. Am I allowed to say the show?

Oh, sure.

Okay, it was decoded. Brad Meltzer, I think his last name is the show, and they were talking about the gold in Fort Knox.

And they were talking to a retired senator from Kentucky, and he said that the government would never say whether the gold was there or not, because our enemies would make hay of it.

And I thought, that’s strange.

That’s kind of a strange expression because you think making hay would be something positive,

But it sure didn’t sound positive.

Yeah, you think you would make gold out of hay, like the old fairy tale.

Like Rubble’s still skill.

So make hay out of something.

Yeah, but it was definitely a negative connotation.

He meant that they would take advantage of the situation.

Since they knew where it was located, they would go after it.

I kind of felt like maybe that’s so, but more like if our enemies knew that there was no gold in there,

They would make a big deal out of it and discredit the United States in some way.

Yes, I see, right.

It would undermine the value of the dollar and therefore the American economy.

Exactly.

But that’s still taking advantage of the situation.

Yeah.

That’s one of those old agricultural terms.

It goes back to at least, what, Grant, the 16th century?

There was an old proverb that went, when the sun shineth, make hay, which is to say, take time when time cometh, less time steal away.

Or make hay while the sun shines.

Yeah, exactly.

Because wet hay is no fun to bring in.

Oh, I did not know that.

I kind of thought, you know, I’ve heard the expression, make hay while the sun shines, but I thought that was a positive expression.

Yeah, originally that’s positive.

And then, again, we have the idea of taking advantage of the situation.

Okay.

Well, that’s kind of pretty easy.

Yeah.

Patricia, thanks for calling.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Sure thing.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Or you can send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, recently we were talking on the show about how hairstylists talk about using product on your hair and how strangely that strikes some people’s ears.

We had an interesting email from Bob Vincent in Springfield, Illinois.

He writes, I work in the commercial food service industry and the coffee beans or even its grounds for the tea or the syrup are referred to as product.

This is a distinction between the before and after state of the product.

Once the beverage is ready to be consumed, it is called by its common name known by the public.

For example, the coffee is product before being brewed, but it’s coffee after being brewed.

Same for tea.

The tea is product before steeping occurs, but the finished beverage is tea.

He goes on to say, I think what caused the caller to take notice is that normally industry people don’t use the word product when talking with the general public.

Very good point.

Yeah.

So I thought that that made a lot of sense.

He may be right.

Got to have those generics inside your business because the tea and the coffee,

When they’re just shipped, are probably handled in precisely the same way, right?

It’s all product.

It’s the collective term.

Right.

And the hairstylist is working with you directly as opposed to the people who are putting the coffee into the machines.

Very good.

So I like that explanation.

Me too.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Herschel from Detroit.

Hi, Herschel.

Hi, Herschel.

How are you doing?

Good.

Thank God.

How are you doing today?

Great.

What can we help you with?

Good to hear.

I’m a very new listener to The Way of Words and having just discovered it, traveling through

Ohio.

And the first time I heard the show, I thought to myself, there’s a problem that’s been bothering

Our family for many years.

What was the deal?

We’re a family of seven children, ten and the two parents, and everybody was given various

Different sundry chores to do.

So it happened after one supper that one of my daughters came in from taking out the trash,

And she said, the trash can is half full.

And I just kind of quizzically looked at her and said, well, does that make you an optimist or a pessimist?

And everybody sort of like stopped, and they kind of like got it, and everybody laughed.

And we’ve been throwing this around.

It comes up occasionally over the last, we’re talking six, seven years,

That we’re still throwing this around.

We’ve been approaching it from philosophical terminology and sociological,

And I figured I’d like to hear from linguistically how would we go approach the answer to this question.

Is she an optimist or a pessimist?

Because she said the garbage can is half full.

Right, it’s half full of trash.

Right, right.

So I guess…

Right, it didn’t have puppies in it or daisies.

No.

Yeah, yeah, I was going to say.

It’s half full of garbage.

Garbage, right.

So I guess it depends. I don’t know.

Did she point this out because she wanted to get out of taking the trash that she thought that she didn’t need to take it out until it was full?

It could very well be.

Oh, so that would be optimistic.

Yeah, that would be optimistic.

Yeah, I guess it depends on what the trash means to you, right?

Mm—

I mean, it is trash, and this is one of the things everybody’s been sort of like having their wing.

I’m a little bit more philosophical about it and think I’d be called myself an optimist,

But for the wrong reason, because if it’s a half-full trash can, that means I can put more trash into it.

Which is really saying that I’m looking at the trash can as being half-empty,

Which would make me a pessimist, but I’m really optimistic about putting more trash into it.

Love it. And even further, you could say that you might be an optimist

Because you’re pointing out that you’re not as wasteful as you could be.

You’ve only half filled the trash can.

That’s right.

What’s the situation with the recycling?

That’s going to be my next point.

The only one who really came up with any concrete answer at the time

Was my then eight-year-old who piped up like a meteor.

She was introduced to recycling in third grade

And just has turned the world over in recycling.

The high school that she went to didn’t recycle,

And she insisted the first day that they institute recycling.

And so she said, I would be considering myself an optimist

Because if the trash can is half full,

That must mean that the recycling bins are full.

Aha.

That’s a very good thing.

Yeah.

You know what?

Brilliant kid.

Give her a raise on her allowance.

Yeah.

So she’s, what, 15 now?

She’s now 15, yes.

So linguistically, can we offer anything, Grant?

We can offer our best advice as Zen masters.

I mean, really, we’re talking about a question of pure philosophy, right?

Philosophy.

Philosophy.

Philosophy.

Yes, sorry.

It’s about the discussion more than it’s about the answer, right?

Probably.

You consider all the facets of this question so that you can reach some kind of enlightenment

And not actually ultimately solve it.

Well, if the optimist has always been defied,

Looking at the glass of water half full and the optimist half empty,

But here’s a whole different switch on it.

I saw this recently.

There’s a woman by the name of Jill Morris.

She’s very funny.

She wrote a book called Please Fire Me.

And on Twitter, she wrote,

Some people look at the glass as half empty.

I look at the glass as a weapon.

You can never be too safe around pessimists.

I like that.

I like that.

That’s good.

I want to hear what our listeners have to say.

Do you think that this garbage can is half full or half empty?

And if you think it’s half full, are you an optimist or a pessimist?

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

Terrific.

Thanks for calling and thanks for explaining that.

It sounds like you’ve got a lovely family there.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

Bring us your hefty questions, 877-929-9673.

In our Facebook group, Ken Clayton asked about kit and caboodle.

He wanted to know what a caboodle is.

Did you see that question?

Yes.

Well, it turns out that the phrase kit and caboodle probably comes from Dutch.

There’s a phrase in kit and boodle, meaning a house with furnishings.

So it basically means the house and everything in it.

So the caboodle, the ca was probably added to the boodle in the same way that we add a ca to kerplunk and kerflush and kerplank and other words like kerfuffle and things like that.

Cool, right?

Kit and caboodle from Dutch.

From Dutch.

English is a rich history of stealing from other languages.

877-929-9673.

Coming up, books to put on your wish list and more of your questions about language.

Stay tuned.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett, and it’s time once again for our annual book recommendations.

Here are some books that we’ve been enjoying that we think you might want to add to your wish list.

Martha, do you have one in mind?

I do. I have a beautiful little paperback book by Polly M. Law.

It’s called The Word Project, Odd and Obscure Words Illustrated.

And Polly is an artist, and she has made the most delightful illustrations for all kinds of weird words,

Like kunkater. Do you know that one?

Something to do with a globe or something.

No, no. It’s a procrastinator.

Isn’t that great?

Or pig’s knee. There’s a wonderful illustration here

For pig’s knee, which means a sweetheart

Or having very small eyes.

Pig’s knee is a term of endearment?

Yes, yes. Yes, pig’s knee.

Thank you, my little cat.

It’s a beautiful little book full of

Obscure words and delightful

Illustrations for them.

In our house, we are readers.

We just put a second bookshelf in my son’s room.

Congratulations.

He’s four. He’s not quite reading yet. He has three words.

His name, zoo, and papa, which makes me very proud.

What happened to mama?

I don’t know. I think he gets the M’s and W’s confused, so he just doesn’t try.

Oh, he’s saying wawa.

Well, there are a couple books that we read recently that my wife and I felt were above and beyond what you ordinarily find in children’s literature.

And I wanted to recommend these to an audience that has children, say, an age of about three to seven.

My son’s right in the middle of that, and I think these would work.

The first one is The Three Pigs by David Wiesner, W-I-E-S-N-E-R.

This isn’t The Three Pigs as you know them.

This is a meta-narrative about The Three Pigs.

It starts with beautiful illustrations, The Three Pigs and The Stone House and The Wolf and all that.

But then they break out of their story.

I mean, literally break out of their story.

They leave the margins of the illustrations and go into other stories in other books.

Oh, cool.

They’re illustrated in other beautiful ways.

And the three pigs have these adventures with dragons and all other kinds of creatures and eventually come back to their own story.

My son loved this.

We had to read it many times.

My wife and I loved it because it was beautiful.

And it actually turned out to be a great way to explain movies and television shows and other books where there’s time travel or dream sequences or where there’s some kind of portal into another world like the Narnia books and the Narnia movies, right?

My son now gets it because of this book.

That’s cool.

That you can leave kind of a one story.

He calls it behind the scenes.

Oh, that’s so cute.

You go behind the scenes.

And then another book that we want to share is even stranger, but it left such a long feeling with me.

It’s called Elephant Wish.

It’s written by Lou Berger, who, by the way, I believe is still the head writer for Sesame Street, and illustrated by Ana Juan.

Elephant Wish kind of avoids the usual tropes and plots of children’s books.

Instead, it tells this vivid, unique story of a young girl whose wish is granted, and she’s guided to a strange jungle where a 97-year-old woman who, when she was a girl, had the same adventure, kind of becomes her new friend and is someone who’s in on the secret.

And this old woman guides the young woman, the young girl, back to her own place and time.

As you notice, it’s another portal book, another transportation where somebody is brought from the real world into a world of imagination.

We loved the book because it was strange, because it’s beautifully written, it’s striking in its visuals.

But we also loved it for this one simple thing.

It connects generations.

We have this young girl who is guided by this old woman.

And it’s something that’s often missing from literature for children.

I was going to say, yeah.

So that’s The Elephant Wish, written by Lou Berger and illustrated by Anna Wan.

The other book was The Three Pigs, not as you know them, by David Wiesner.

And then your book?

The Word Project, Odd and Obscure Words, illustrated by Polly M. Law.

We’ll link to all three of these books on our website so that you can find out where you can buy them or find out a little bit more.

Send us your book recommendations to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi, my name is Ray. I’m calling from Peru, Illinois.

Hi, Ray. Welcome to the program.

Hello.

Hi.

What can we do for you?

Well, my grandmother used to use an expression that I had never heard anywhere except her.

When someone’s hair was messy, she would say that your hair looked like a hoo-rah’s nest.

And I wondered if you’d ever heard that.

Did she ever spell it for you?

She didn’t. I don’t think I was ever old enough to ask either.

Mm-A hoo-rah’s nest. Have we ever heard of this? Yes.

This term, hoo-rah’s nest, is pretty widespread.

Yeah.

Long history, almost 200 years.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Really?

Yes.

So she wasn’t the only one who used it by any stretch of the imagination.

And I’m interested that she said this, for example, if you had bedhead or something, right?

Okay.

And would she ever tell you to clean up your room and tell you it looked like a hoo-rah’s nest?

No, I don’t ever remember her using it anywhere except for someone’s hair.

Although she may have with my dad and his siblings, but not for us anyway.

This is such a great linguistic relic.

I love it.

It means a confused or disorderly mass,

And it’s spelled the way that we discussed before, H-O-O-R-A-H.

And I’ve also seen it spelled H-U-R-R-A, and like hurrah.

Oh.

Or hurrah.

You’ll also find it H-O-O-R-A-W.

And it’s anybody’s bet what a hurrah is,

But it’s pretty clear that the nest it left behind is a mess.

Oh, wow.

I had just, you know, I hadn’t heard it.

I almost assumed that it was a southern expression because I had never heard it before.

-huh.

And your grandmother was from where?

She’s from southern Illinois.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s very informal, possibly rural, I guess.

I’m looking at a reference right here from 1860 from a dictionary of Americanisms.

It says a hurrah’s nest is a state of confusion, and then it says a woman’s word.

Oh, really?

So I think that must have to do with moms telling their kids to clean up their rooms.

I think I might start using it that way because I have several children with Hoorah’s nests here then.

Great linguistic heirloom.

I’m glad you shared it with us.

Oh, well, thank you very much for taking my call.

Thanks for calling me.

Bye-bye.

And if you see a Hoorah, let us know because we’ve never seen one.

Very rare.

Oh, if I find out, I will.

Okay.

Okay, thank you.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

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

Grant, you remember the game we’ve been playing, Books with a Letter Missing, where you remove

A letter from the title, and then it creates a whole new book.

Yes, yes.

Well, Claude Van Der Veen from Milwaukee wanted to know if we had a category for a missing letter from the title and from the author.

Claude suggests the book Animal Fire by George Owell.

I mean, what would the plot for that be?

Your pet pig named George ran off far, far away and Owell.

I don’t know why that’s funny, but it is.

Exactly.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Who is this?

This is Hannah Persson calling from Denver, Colorado.

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

Okay, well, I’m hoping you can help myself and my 9th and 10th grade students.

Oh, another teacher. I love having the teachers on the show. Where do you teach?

I teach at Beth Jacob of Denver, which is a religious Jewish high school here in Colorado.

And we have a bit of a dilemma that we’d like you to help us solve if you could.

Okay, great.

The school that I teach in has an international student base.

We’ve got girls from the United States, Mexico, Israel, Canada, Costa Rica, Russia,

Pretty much you name it, they come.

And so the language base is enormous,

Because in addition to the languages that they speak from their countries,

They also usually speak Hebrew or a little bit of Yiddish.

And I’m getting used to, when I mark papers,

Different things that transfer from languages into English when they translate it.

But there’s one thing that I’ve seen across the board with almost every girl.

They all switch the word at with the word by.

For example, they’ll say, I’m going to be by someone’s house overnight,

As opposed to I’m staying at someone’s house.

Or I’ll see you by school as opposed to I’ll see you at school.

And we keep telling them, if you say bye while you’re standing outside all night in the snow,

You’re not actually getting into the building.

But it’s not really sticking.

And I’ve found that I’ve spoken with other English teachers in other parts of the U.S.

Who teach Jewish students, and they say that it’s something that they have trouble with as well.

And we’re starting to wonder if it’s a Jewish language thing

Or if it’s something that all teenagers are doing and we’re just noticing it in our students,

What could be the reason for this?

Anybody who learns English has this problem, regardless of what their first language is.

Does that make sense?

Okay, with prepositions.

With prepositions.

Even if you had some Russian students come in who spoke only English as a second language

And did not speak Hebrew or Yiddish, they would probably have this problem as well.

We have a problem when we do translations.

Mostly that’s what we do when we learn a second language. We kind of translate in our heads.

And we try to find parallels from language A to language B. And prepositions don’t usually have

A perfect one-to-one translation. So what means by in language A might mean two or three things

In language B. And the reverse is also true. And it’s not just by and at. From has a problem and

To has a problem, and you can just go down the list of English prepositions, and pretty

Much there’s a whole host of languages where when those speakers learn English, they’ve

Got a problem with it.

But Hannah mentioned Yiddish, and this is what I’m thinking might be the key, because

The word by in Yiddish, like if you say by mir, which means literally by me, it can mean

To me, it can be with me, it can be in my opinion, it can be in my house or in my

Circle. I’m wondering if it’s the Yiddish influence. It’s a great example, though, of the

Imperfect translation into English. Are many of them Yiddish speakers? That’s really what my

Problem was, because at first I thought, well, it must be that they’re, you know, they’re translating,

Like you said, either literally from their native language or possibly from Hebrew,

Because that’s really what most of the girls would speak, and not so much from Yiddish.

But then I realized even my native English speakers, the ones that are coming from the U.S.,

Grew up in Denver or grew up, you know, in different places in the U.S. Or Canada,

Also have this problem.

And that was…

Would it be something left over from possibly the Yiddish that their parents and grandparents

Thought?

I don’t know.

Or their peers.

It’s possible.

Or their peers.

Yes, I was going in that direction.

Even English speakers aren’t in perfect agreement about which prepositions should be used in

Particular circumstances.

There was a survey that was done for the Linguistic Atlas of England.

They wanted the survey takers to respond to a question that said, if you stay blank home, what do you put in the middle?

Do you stay at home?

Most people chose at home.

But a lot of people chose by home.

And some people said they don’t stay, they stop home.

They stop at home or they stay by home.

And I believe the same thing is true in the United States and Canada and other parts of the English-speaking world where there’s a lot of variance among native English speakers who do not speak another language.

And don’t have any recent history of having heard another language from parents or grandparents.

Well, here’s the really big question that the girls wanted to know.

Yes.

Based on everything we’ve just said, do they get marked off for this?

Yes.

I should take off points?

Yes, you should.

Because you want to teach them the best English that will present them at their best to the world at large.

You’re not running a class that’s saying, I’m going to teach you how to talk street English.

You were teaching them formal, professional, sophisticated English that they can speak to a parent or grandparent or a boss or a religious leader with

And not be embarrassed because they’ve said something that’s kind of too informal for the situation.

Right.

And if they’re educated…

That’s what I thought.

Yeah.

They should be able to switch.

They can speak that with their peers.

That’s fine.

But in a formal situation…

So your job as a teacher is always to teach them the best English that you can.

All righty.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Recently on my personal Facebook page, somebody posted an odd photograph.

It was someone wearing a T-shirt, and in big letters it said,

Polyamory is wrong.

And I thought, why in the world is somebody posting that on my Facebook page?

But underneath polyamory is wrong, it said it is either multiamory or polyphilia, but mixing Greek and Latin roots?

Wrong.

Gotta love it.

That’s funny.

877-929-9673.

Or send your comments about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ruth from Lake Bluff, Illinois.

Lake where?

Lake Bluff.

Lake Bluff, Illinois.

Where about is that?

It’s about 30 miles north of Chicago.

Oh, great. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

How can we help you?

Well, I have this problem, but it’s not keeping me up at night.

It’s just something that’s kind of niggling in the back of my head.

I always wondered why they use the word solon, S-O-L-O-N, often in headlines.

And it’s probably a short form of legislator that seems to be from the background,

From the meaning of the headline.

But I wondered where it came from.

Okay, good question. You’re seeing this in newspaper headlines, you say.

Yeah, once in a while I’ll find it in the body of a story or an article or something.

So can you give us an idea of what those headlines look like, what it might say?

It would say something about the government.

It must be a legislator, a Solon from the state of something-something.

Aha.

And I know there’s a Solon Springs in northwest Wisconsin.

I’m a transplanted Wisconsinite.

But I don’t think that has anything to do with it.

I don’t think that’s, maybe it’s the name of a founder.

But I was trying to figure from the beginning of it,

Would it be Sol for a son or Solo?

We can help you with that.

I bet you could.

Yeah, the word Solon, S-O-L-O-N, is an eponym.

It comes directly from the name of an actual person.

He was a lawgiver in ancient Athens around 600 B.C.,

And he instituted a lot of reforms that actually laid the groundwork for Athenian democracy.

And he was known as a really noble statesman-like person.

In fact, after he instituted all these reforms, he voluntarily went into exile for 10 years,

Just so people wouldn’t accuse him of interfering with them or benefiting with them in any way.

So it’s interesting.

I don’t know if this was your experience, but a lot of times you see the word Solon used almost in an ironic kind of way.

Yes. And I think this is the opposite. You’re someone with great respect. And sometimes we don’t treat our legislators that way.

Right. Or we don’t see legislators acting that way without self-interest.

I mean, before Solon came along, for example, there was this huge gap between the rich and the poor.

And in fact, if you were in debt, you could be sold into slavery.

Whoa.

So he put a stop to that and a lot of other draconian laws like that.

We have a lot to thank him for.

I’m glad it’s a positive meaning.

Yes, it is, except when it’s used ironically, as I said, because, I don’t know,

Solons are sometimes few and far between, don’t you think?

I don’t use it in conversation very often.

And it’s shorter than saying senator or House of Representatives person.

Yes, indeed. Yes, indeed.

But he was a real guy.

I’m glad to hear it.

Okay, well, great talking with you.

Thanks for calling, Ruth.

Great talking to you.

Bye-bye.

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

Grant, one of my favorite quotations about writing comes from, of all people, Leonard Bernstein.

You want to hear it?

Yes.

A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.

That is so true.

It’s true because you care, right?

Well, you care, and you keep going back and back and polishing and revising.

Love it.

Yeah.

Send your quotes, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s our show for this week.

Call us in the U.S. And Canada at 877-929-9673 whenever you have a question,

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week long on Facebook and Twitter.

You can listen to all our past shows by downloading them from waywordradio.org

Or get the podcast on iTunes.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell and James Ramsey.

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

A nonprofit organization.

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

Thank you for listening.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Auf Wiedersehen.

Bye-bye.

And I say neither, either, either, neither, neither.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and potato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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