Knuckle Down (episode #1465)

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, did you read about that explosion at the French cheese factory?

Is there a pun at the end of this question?

Debris was everywhere!

Debris was everywhere.

I love bris.

Debris was everywhere.

I think you’re crackers, though.

I can pun, I just don’t like to pun.

You don’t?

No!

Well, Cal Fromage.

Give us a call. End the madness, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Michelle Jannon, and I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Michelle. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s going on?

Well, my daughter was home for the holiday. She lives in San Francisco, and we were driving in the car and just chatting.

And I brought up a mutual friend of ours, and I said, you know, she’s pretty outspoken and direct.

She’s kind of a rabble rouser.

And my daughter said, wait, wait, what?

Rabble rouser?

Don’t you mean rebel rouser?

And I said, no, I think it’s rabble rouser.

But then she said, we got to call A Way with Words and get to sort it out.

So that’s why I’m calling today.

That’s great.

So just to be clear here, you’re saying R-A-B-B-L-E, rouser, and she’s saying R-E-B-E-L, rouser.

That’s right.

Rabble versus rebel.

And what did you mean by that?

Well, you know, someone who’s blunt and direct, but even more than that, you know,

This woman’s not afraid to kind of mix it up and challenge the status quo

And, you know, try and bring people over to her side or her way of thinking.

Right. And so your daughter thinks it’s rebel.

Rebel rouser.

Well, she thought it would make sense because, you know, rebels kind of do the same thing, right?

They often go against the status quo and maybe try and change minds or cause problems.

That was her thinking.

Okay. All right.

Well, you’re right, and she’s not right.

Listen to her mama.

Well, we kind of both agreed that probably rabble was right,

But rabble had such a good feel to it that we thought it was worth asking about.

Yeah, yeah, it’s kind of clever.

I mean, we’ve had the word rabble in English for centuries now,

And originally it meant just a confused collection of things.

You know, it could be like a swarm of insects or a pack of animals

Or just a confused jumble of things.

And rabble also came to mean a bunch of people, like a crowd.

A motley bunch.

Yeah, yeah.

And so if you’re rousing that bunch, that rabble,

Then you’re inciting them to action.

Rousing, meaning to wake them up from their stupor, sheeple.

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

The rouse part is really interesting to me

Because originally it was a term in falconry.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, there are a lot of those terms in English that come from falconry, and rousing originally referred to hawks shaking their feathers, you know, just kind of…

Getting them all in order before they take off or something.

Yeah, isn’t that cool?

Mm—

Yeah.

Your daughter…

That’s why I love your show.

Thank you.

I learn things every time I listen.

Michelle, your daughter is not alone in thinking that it’s a rubble rouser, by the way.

Is that right?

Yeah, I found it in the Eggcorn database.

This is a list of terms where people have kind of misunderstood one word and replaced it with another one that kind of makes sense.

And other people also have not only said rebel rouser, but they’ve said rebel raiser, R-A-I-S-E-R.

Like they are raising rebels.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

So she’s not alone.

It’s not that common, but it’s common enough that it’s been recorded by linguists.

Right, because it makes sense.

Right.

It sort of does make sense.

It makes some sense, yeah.

Yeah.

But the rebel wouldn’t have to be rebels.

No.

No.

You know, like a demagogue.

They could be loyalists.

Right.

A demagogue could rouse the rabble.

The rabble is just the people not in power, right?

The ones out in the street waving the placards and shouting the chants.

Well, thank you for sorting that out for us.

Well, we’re happy to do it.

Thank you for calling, Michelle.

Really appreciate it.

Sure thing.

Thanks a lot.

Have a great day.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Gary Gladstone, and I am from Carmel, New York, in New York’s beautiful Hudson Valley.

Oh, lovely. Carmel.

Welcome to the show, Gary.

Well, thank you.

My dad used to brag about his knuckle-down, screw-bony-tight technique to win

When he played marbles back in Denver in 1915, and I never found out what it was.

For years, this saying rolled around my head.

I wondered what it meant, but Dad never explained its meaning.

So I had this mental image of playing a winning shot

And then having to go to the emergency room with bleeding knuckles or something.

So I’m waiting for a revelation now for almost 75 years.

All I could think of was that the expression sounded all that time

A little like something you could be arrested for.

So I really want to know what he was talking about,

If you guys have any idea about that.

What was the expression again?

Knuckle down, screw bony tight.

Knuckle down, screw bony tight.

And so he played marbles.

I’m assuming he was a child in 1915, right?

And he played marbles.

Yes, yeah, he was about 10 years old.

And somewhere between his generation and yours,

The marble game disappeared, right?

You didn’t play it?

I didn’t play it. I never played it. I used to collect marbles because they were beautiful. I like the swirling colors. I didn’t want to get down on my hands and knees and do anything with them, to tell you the truth.

Well, fortunately, from his generation going back about 300 years, marbles was a great game for kids, a huge game.

And I make it sound like there’s just one.

We’re talking maybe a thousand different versions of marbles.

And with those thousand versions of games, of the game, there were thousands of slang terms and jargon that belonged to each little pocket of each little game and all over the English-speaking world.

So all that is to say, fortunately, variations of this term have been recorded in glossaries in the academic work of people who’ve studied marble language.

I’ve never seen it as knuckle down, screw bony tight.

What I always see it as is knuckle down, bony tight.

Knuckle down, bony tight.

And the interpretation of this is in most common versions of marbles, it’s a little like craps where there’s a lot of shouting.

But in marbles, you can kind of direct the play from the outside.

So if we’re all gathered around a circle, we’ve got the agates in the middle.

These are kind of marble that you target.

You can shout things to the guy who’s currently shooting his marbles to hit them and make him do stuff.

And if you shout at him, knuckle down, bony tight, you’re telling him,

First you have to turn your hand upside down, palm up, knuckles down to the ground,

So you shoot from that position, and you have to put your hand close to or on the ground.

So you’re kind of restricting their ability to have a free and easy throw.

And there’s a ton of these kinds of terms.

So knuckle down, bony tight is kind of a really restrictive, very complicated, not complicated, but very like, you know, I don’t want you to get your knocking marbles out of the middle and outside of the ring.

So I’m trying to tell you what to do to do that.

Yeah, you might do that to somebody who’s in the lead, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Like they’re doing a lot better than everybody else.

So they have to have some kind of thing to limit their movement.

There’s all this language that you can throw at the other player to make them do what you want.

That’s just one of them.

It’s a whole culture.

I had no idea that marbles were that important then.

Well, if you’re interested in this, look for the publications of the American Dialect Society.

They had one entire issue devoted to the language of marbles, and it’s great stuff.

And it’s a real interest in going deep diving into that and seeing how complicated the game could be.

One thing I wanted to say before we go, it’s strange to say that you could tell the other person what to do, right?

We think of this as weird, don’t we?

That if you’re shooting, that I can tell you what to do, how to shoot the marble.

But the thing is, it echoes what was happening in baseball.

Baseball, the batter used to call the pitch and say what they wanted from the pitcher.

It’s very similar to that.

Huh.

I didn’t know that.

So there’s different kinds of directing the play in order to get the marble or the ball where you want it to go.

The fans do that now.

Yeah, don’t they?

But they’re never listened to.

Gee, guys, thank you.

Now my blood pressure goes down and I can sleep tonight.

Well, hallelujah.

We’re glad to help.

Call us some other time, okay?

I really appreciate it.

I’ll call next time.

I’m wondering where the expression losing your marbles comes from.

Thank you, sir.

That’s later.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye, Gary.

Super.

Bye-bye.

I’m sorry I got so excited there.

Oh, it’s wonderful stuff, right?

Can I read a list to you of some marble terms just to kind of give people a taste of what’s out there?

Oh, my gosh.

Aggie, back-kill and crooks, dead, dog-up, drop-up, fat, fudge, goes, keeps, kicks, kill, knucks, lag, marbles, poke-up, rounds,

Slips, tall, tracks, vents.

I mean, and that’s like a fraction of like the,

I think there are at least 1,500, maybe 2,000 terms here

For marbles and variations on marbles.

Very rich language.

And didn’t we get playing for keeps from marbles?

I believe it is, yeah, because you do in most versions of the game

Get to keep the marbles that you knock out of the ring.

Yeah.

Or that you knock into the hole, depending on which version you’re playing.

Yeah, so rich.

Well, join our A Way with Words Poetry Slam here, 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Tim Kirko.

I’m from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Tim.

Welcome from Omaha.

What’s going on there in Omaha?

So I had a question about the word anymore.

Because in the Midwest, I’ve heard like it used in kind of a different way than it is conventionally in a more positive sense.

Like usually you would say like we don’t go to Walmart anymore, meaning we used to go to Walmart, but now we don’t.

But in the Midwest, sometimes it’s said, anymore, we go to target, meaning now we go to target.

So I guess I’m just kind of wondering where this adaptation of the word came from or why that happened.

You’ve got a good ear because that’s known as positive anymore, and it’s something studied by linguists in the United States.

The best guess that they have is that it came to us from the Irish or the Scots-Irish because it pops up particularly commonly in parts of the country that was settled by the Scots-Irish.

Kentucky, Tennessee. My father in Missouri says it. It shows up in Oklahoma and Ohio and Iowa and

Quite a few other places like that. It is not altogether that common, though, and it’s not

Particularly Southern, but you’re right on that, too. It’s mainly Midwestern. Basically, it means

Nowadays. Anymore, you can’t get a good pizza in this town, meaning nowadays you can’t get a good

Pizza in this town. That’s really interesting. Right? Yeah. And where did you hear this? And

And I’ve got to say, my father probably said that my whole life, but it wasn’t until I was in my 20s and I started studying language that I noticed it.

So I’m impressed that you noticed it.

My grandparents, who live in eastern Iowa, around Dubuque, they use it occasionally.

But I didn’t notice it either until I was having a conversation with a teacher when I was in high school about the Midwestern dialect.

And he brought up this positive anymore.

And that’s when I started noticing it every once in a while.

There we go.

Then you hear it everywhere, right?

And it’s not gone either.

It’s still the younger generations will still have it.

Well, Tim, I hope that helps.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Yeah, take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Appreciate it.

You too.

Have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, if you’ve noticed something about the way people talk, give us a call, 877-929-9673

And talk about it with us.

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

Grant, the other day I met a dog named Bolo.

Like a Bolo that the police put out?

Oh, you knew that term.

I was thinking, why would you name your dog after a tie?

But yeah, Bolo.

Yeah, it’s an acronym, right?

It is indeed for?

Be on the lookout.

Exactly.

I thought that was a great name for a dog.

I read a lot of detective stories, Bolo’s supposed thing.

And listen to the Philip Morrow mystery sometimes at night.

Okay, well, see, I don’t do that.

I just meet dogs with weird names.

Good dogs, right?

Well, I mean, what better name for a watchdog than Bolo, right?

Did you rate the dog?

Do you know that Twitter handle, We Rate Dogs?

And always like 12 or 13 out of 10.

Did you rate the dog?

Oh, I should have, yeah.

14 out of 10, probably.

He was a 40-11.

He’s a great dog.

Yeah.

877-999-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

I’m Grant Barrett, and on the line from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

What is up, dude?

Well, you know what?

I was just thinking recently about certain events that occur periodically, and one of

Them is this thing called March Madness.

You’re familiar with it?

This college basketball tourney?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Well, what I love about this event, March Madness, is that it’s not just one day.

It’s sort of like Yuletide.

It’s an ongoing event that lasts for a long time.

I think each month should have within it a little mini season of some kind just to take the edge off of, you know, living, right?

Huh.

I think I know where you’re going with this.

Right.

So to honor March Madness, we’ll make sure that each monthly celebration is both a competition and that each has a name that starts with the month and an alliterative noun that begins with the same first two letters and ends in N-E-S-S.

Got that written down?

Okay.

Yes.

Good.

For example, and you could even do this one as the first one if you know it.

For example, let’s have a festival where everybody wears a hat at a rakish angle

And we decide who is the most lively and cheerful.

It would be…

Jaunty January.

January.

Now remember, January jauntiness.

Oh, January jauntiness.

Jauntiness, right.

Don’t forget the N-E-S-S, okay?

In honor of March Madness.

Very good.

Very good.

You count that as one for you.

Knocked off one.

January jauntiness.

All right, how about this one?

Let’s have an event where we go down to the zoo and determine which of the carnivores is the most savage and brutal.

February ferociousness?

Yes, February ferociousness.

Hear about this one.

Let’s have an event where we determine whose words are the most suitable and fitting for different situations.

Are we doing March or did we already do that?

No, we skipped March because it’s already got March.

I’m going to say either April appropriateness or August augustness.

It is April appropriateness.

Very good.

How about this one?

Let’s give stinky things there due with a tournament to decide what items have the most offensive smells.

Malodorousness.

Yes, May malodorousness.

How about this one?

A celebration of fruit.

Put oranges and limes in your bracket as we squeeze them to determine which one has the most liquidy sweetness.

June juiciness.

June juiciness.

I can get behind that one in various ways, I think.

Next one.

If you can’t calm down, that’s fine.

We’re planning a tournament.

And if you are timorous and easily startled, you’ll make it to the final four.

July jumping-ness.

Yes, July jumping-ness.

July jumping-ness.

Yeah, another one that would be very interesting to watch.

How about, let’s have an event where we judge things and how promising they are

And how likely they are to produce favorable results.

August auspiciousness?

Yes, August auspiciousness.

Well done.

Let’s have a celebration of those who are charitable.

Amnesty International versus Doctors Without Borders,

Oxfam America versus Habitat for Humanity.

Which one puts others before their own needs the best?

September servant leadership?

Service?

September serviceness?

Put others before your own needs.

Sacrifice.

Self-abnegationness.

Self-sacrificeness?

No, I’m going to go with September selflessness.

Oh.

All right.

I’m making it too hard again.

No, that’s good.

That’s good.

Now, I’m sorry to say we’re taking October off.

There’s nothing going on in October.

You cannot find an adjective that begins with O.C. and ends in N.E.S.S.

At least nothing useful.

Here’s the next one.

Toddlers on airplanes rejoice.

Upstairs neighbors with a heavy tread, your time has come.

We’re going to determine who is the loudest and most annoying.

November noisiness.

Yes, November noisiness.

Very good.

Finally, are you two-faced?

A professional spy, perhaps?

We’re going to have a competition to see who is the most double-dealing, scheming, Machiavellian trickster around.

December deceptiveness?

Very good.

I had four possibles for this one.

Oh, really?

We could have December deceitfulness.

December deviousness.

Or December…

Oh, no, I can’t actually use this last one.

Duplicitousness doesn’t have the D-E.

But I like yours.

I like yours.

Very good.

Nice work.

Let’s get started on these celebrations right away.

Party!

Party!

Where’s my bracket?

Thank you, guys.

Thanks.

Really appreciate it.

And if you’d like to talk with us.

About any aspect of language whatsoever,

The number to call is 877-929-9673.

Or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi.

Hi,

Who’s this?

This is Tom Christo. I’m in Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Well, great. Welcome to the show, Tom. How can we help you?

My grandmother was born in 1899. And she used this term when she wasn’t feeling very well, not really sick, but just kind of, you know, not quite right.

She said, I’m feeling punk.

And I thought, well, okay.

And once in a while she’d say, I’m feeling kind of punk.

I’m not really sure which the correct way to use it was.

And then one time when I was feeling bad, I said to my mother, oh, I’m feeling kind of punky.

And she’s like, no, that’s not really the way you use that word.

You’re either feeling punk or kind of punk.

I’m like, okay, there’s rules for this apparently.

And here you are feeling not well.

Right, exactly.

So, yeah, I just kind of wondered what the origin of that was, and if you had heard it before.

You know, I know that punk is kind of like a low-grade hoodlum or something, and I’m pretty sure my grandmother wasn’t feeling like that.

And there was also this stuff we had when we were kids to light firecrackers.

This little kind of compressed wood stick that would smolder.

And you would just keep a little red bit on the end to light firecrackers and stuff.

But I don’t think that’s what she meant either.

And you call that a punk?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah, they used to give them to you free when you bought firecrackers.

But that one actually is connected to the punk that you’re talking about.

And I’ll tell you how.

Because there’s another punk that you didn’t mention, which is old rotted wood.

And so the punk that you use to light fireworks is similar to that because it catches fire very easily.

And that old rotted wood, punk is an adjective, not punky.

Like your mother said, mothers are always white.

It became kind of a generic term meaning bad or inferior or second rate.

And then it was a little more specialized and started to refer to being unwell or out of sorts or sick or kind of queasy or nauseated, that sort of thing.

And that’s kind of the progression of that punk adjective.

Okay.

Yeah, cool, right?

And it’s got at least 100 years on it.

There’s a fellow by the name of George A.D.E., who wrote a book in 1896 where he uses the kind of second-rate version of the word.

And he’s well-known as a slangster.

He had just a great ear for it and worked into all of his stories.

But I would bet that it’s older than that.

But 100 years is not bad for a term like this.

But nobody really uses it that way anymore.

I mean, I never hear it.

I don’t think.

No, it pops up in Stephen King novels.

He always has a great ear for dialect and unusual expressions that make sense in context and he doesn’t have to explain very much.

But no, outside of literary uses, it’s not that common anymore.

That’s what we’ve got, Tom.

By the way, you’re keeping good company if you’re still using that punk as an adjective.

Hemingway used it in letters.

Sinclair Lewis used it in his novels.

Stephen King, of course.

William Volman, who’s much more recent, writes these giant, complicated books.

Maybe there’s some grandmas and grandpas out there saying it, but mostly it’s gone.

Yeah, well, I never use it in everyday speech myself.

Yeah, you’d be misunderstood, wouldn’t you?

I would, yeah.

I don’t think people would just look at me like, oh, he’s kind of crazy.

Well, you might be that, but not for the use of punk.

Tom, thank you so much for your call.

I really appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for calling.

Oh, well, sure.

Well, thank you guys.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know out your way, they say things that strangers think are weird.

Call us.

We’ll talk about it.

We’ll make you feel better.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Dustin Aguilar. I’m calling from Denton, Texas.

Hey, Dustin, welcome from Denton.

What can we do for you, Dustin?

Well, I would like to know if you guys have heard of a linguistic phenomenon called freezes, where we tend to say word pairs in the same order, specifically like black and white.

You don’t really hear people say white and black, white and black TV.

It’s more black and white TV.

Also, something like spaghetti and meatballs opposed to meatballs and spaghetti.

And so my question is, one, have you heard of this phenomenon?

Two, what is your opinion about it?

And three, is there some sort of age-related aspect to these freezes?

Is there geographical aspects?

And I asked because I heard a 12-year-old girl say that she wanted to eat eggs and bacon instead of what I would say, bacon and eggs.

And so I had that question about the freezes to see what you guys thought about it.

That’s super cool. How did you hear about freezes? I’ve heard of them, but most people don’t know that lingo. Are you a linguistics insider?

Yes. I got a master’s in linguistics from the University of North Texas in Denton.

And one of my professors was Hodge Ross, who is one of two people who coined the phrase freezes and have written papers about it.

So I’ve heard him give two talks on freezes, and I thought that would be a good A Way with Words topic.

Absolutely. Freezes are super interesting.

Freezes are also known as binomials or irreversible pairs, right?

And there may be some other terms for them.

And there’s two really interesting things about your question.

One is, yay, let’s talk about freezes, things like when you say yes or no, we mostly don’t say no or yes, right?

Some of this stuff is so ingrained we don’t even think about it.

I say, oh, you know, I go to that park now and then.

I don’t say then and now.

There’s a ton of this.

The other thing that’s interesting about your question is we have talked on this show about bacon and eggs before, and I think you have zeroed in on one that is not as fixed as the others.

It is sometimes eggs and bacon, and it’s not particularly age-graded.

There’s nothing geographic to it.

It’s just some people say bacon and eggs and some people say eggs and bacon.

People say ham and eggs.

I don’t hear eggs and ham unless you’re reading Dr. Seuss.

There we go, right?

Yeah.

But in general, as you probably learned, freezes tend to follow some set, like certain things come before certain other things.

For example, the definite thing comes before the indefinite, positive before negative, close comes before far away, above comes before below, on before under, up before down, large before small, male before female.

They tend to do this. But with bacon and eggs, it doesn’t really fit any of those X before Y.

It doesn’t really. So it’s more tradition than it is like that internal word order thing that all native speakers of English develop automatically.

Hedge mentioned that there tends to be a meat first rule.

You mentioned meat first.

And I’ve also noticed that we tend to mention, as far as food goes, main dish first and side item second.

And that’s why I think we get the spaghetti and meatballs instead of meatballs and spaghetti.

Because I think maybe we conceive of spaghetti as the main dish, meatballs as the side.

Maybe that’s why bacon and eggs can go either way.

Because bacon is the more meaty, but it seems like a side.

That’s right.

You’ve really got it there, too.

They’re just, I love your perceptions, Dustin.

You’re really doing this right.

Because we have bangers and mash.

We have ham and eggs.

We have meat and potatoes.

These are kind of standard set.

Burger and fry.

Burger and fry.

Standard set constructions.

But if I get three eggs but two slices of bacon, which one’s the most important, right?

Or am I getting six slices of bacon and one egg, right?

Maybe that has something to do with it.

But these X before Y, you know, new before old or definite before indefinite, those are just general and usual.

They’re not absolute.

For example, I said one of them was male before female.

We will almost always say kings and queens, but we would say bride and groom, right?

And also ladies and gentlemen.

Yeah, we say ladies and gentlemen.

So there are other places where the order, and I don’t think this applies to bacon and eggs, but there are other places where the order has to do with phonology, what sounds better.

It has to do with word stress, you know, what sounds better in another way, number of syllables, or even just plain politeness.

And I think a bride and groom and ladies and gentlemen are about politeness.

A wedding day is seen as the bride’s day more than it’s seen as the groom’s day, right?

Yeah, boys and girls.

Boys and girls is one where the male is first kind of following the typical pattern.

I feel like I hear girls and boys sometimes.

I’m hearing it more.

Yeah, and I left off the other one.

There is a tradition of trying to upset these longstanding binomials or irreversible pairs in order to remove or reduce some of the inherent sexism in English.

Yeah, lesbian and gay versus gay and lesbian.

There we go.

Girls and boys.

So we just will become used to saying girls and boys, and then boys and girls will sound really weird to our ears after a while.

So I wanted to know, when people say your two names together, what’s the order that you say?

What do people usually say?

We established early on, I know we talked about it, it’s Martha and Grant.

Martha has a little more experience in the world than I do.

Notice how I said that.

This is beauty and age is what we’re talking about.

Beauty and age.

Beauty and age.

Also, she joined the program before I did.

But we do mix it up from time to time.

Yeah, we do occasionally.

But it depends what we’re doing.

Mostly it’s Martha and Grant.

Right.

Grant’s more meaty.

I’m more eggy.

Something like that.

Great.

Well, thank you very much.

Dustin, thank you so much for your call.

Take care.

You’ll have a good day.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Call us with what you’ve been thinking about when it comes to language, 877-929-9673, or email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi.

This is Donna, and I’m calling from Kerbill, Texas.

Hi, Donna.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Donna.

What’s up?

Well, I’m so glad to get to talk to you guys.

I love your show.

Thank you.

I am a freelance editor and emphasis on the free most of the time.

I understand that.

And I’m very aware of words and the way people use them.

And I’m always catching typos and grammatical errors and things.

And I have been a little, found a little annoying recently when I had seen a phrase that I always heard of as Free Reign, R-E-I-N.

And I’ve read some well-known newspaper people and others who have said Free Reign, R-E-I-G-N.

And I thought, no, that’s not right.

But then I got to thinking about it.

That phrase could be appropriate, depending on how you want to…

Either phrase could be appropriate, I think.

So I wondered what your take on it is and what the actual original use was.

How is it used in a sentence?

Well, giving someone free rein to do as they wish.

And so you think that it’s the R-E-I-N, like the reins on a horse.

That’s why I’ve always used it.

But then this REIGN has kind of come up recently, and I’m thinking maybe I’m wrong.

Maybe it could be used in both ways.

Well, you’re right.

Free Reign with the four-letter version, REIN, has been around for much longer.

And it means what you might guess it would mean, which is to give more, what would you say, more reign to the horse.

Yeah, you let him have his head.

Yeah.

Give him his head, yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s one of many, many horse terms we have in the language.

And using free reign like a royal reign is a much later development, a misunderstanding really of it.

Okay.

And I would say that the R-E-I-G-N, the royal reign, is in this case almost always wrong unless you’re intentionally making a pun about royalty.

Okay.

The R-E-I-N version still is by far and away the best choice in every piece of writing I think that I’ve ever seen, except where someone was making the pun.

Right, right.

Well, since you opened the pun door, you know that story about the king who had so many wild animals in his house.

He loved to go out and gather game and bring them back to the castle.

And it finally got to be such a problem that the rain was called on account of game.

Terrible.

I know.

I apologize.

And a lot of puns.

That’s wonderful.

I think you want to need surgery after that one.

Thank you for that one.

I’ll add that to my store.

Okay, great.

Yeah, maybe when you’re editing, you can put that in the margins or something.

Yes, yes.

Donna, thank you so much for your call.

Well, thank you for your show, and carry on, please.

Thank you very much.

We do.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Donna.

Bye-bye.

Two kinds of carrying on going on here.

Yeah, there’s some carrying on.

Yeah.

But definitely reins like the reins of a horse.

R-E-I-N is the one that you want almost always.

Yeah.

Or if you give somebody, you know, you have somebody on a tight rein.

Right, still R-E-I-N.

Yeah, exactly.

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More conversation about what we say, how we say, and why.

Stay tuned.

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.

I’ve been following a discussion about language online recently that’s pretty sad and serious.

But I think it’s really useful.

This is on the website called The Mighty.

This is a website where people discuss issues about disability and disease and mental illness.

And Kyle Freeman wrote an essay on there.

She lost her brother to suicide several years ago.

And she had some interesting thoughts about the language we use to discuss suicide.

She wrote, as time passes and the shock subsides, I’ve discovered that I bristle each time I hear the expression committed suicide.

Historically, in the United States and beyond, the act of suicide was deemed a crime.

Until as recently as 1963, six states still considered attempted suicide a criminal act.

Thankfully, laws have changed, but our language has not.

And the residue of shame associated with the committal of a genuine crime remains attached to suicide.

My brother did not commit a crime.

He resorted to suicide, which he perceived in his unwell mind to be the only possible solution to his tremendous suffering.

So to say that someone committed suicide feels offensive to me, and I’m not easily offended.

I don’t judge people for using this expression.

Until August 17, 2007, I did the same, but now I don’t, and I humbly ask that you consider the same.

When you have occasion to talk about suicide, please try to refer to someone dying by suicide.

And she argues that by shifting our language around suicide, we have the power to reduce some of the shame carried by the survivors of suicide.

And Grant, the discussion that followed in the comments was really interesting to me.

A lot of people were saying, oh, you’re parsing this expression too closely.

You’re breaking it down too much and focusing on the language too much.

And other people were saying, hey, you know, it bothers her and it probably bothers other people.

Why not respect that?

Do you have any thoughts about that?

I do.

I think dying by suicide is a great replacement.

And it doesn’t have what I sometimes feel when people have these essays where they want to change the language because there’s something that bothers them.

A lot of times their suggestions are weak or tinged with another mistake or are not really fully addressing the problem.

Dying by suicide, to me, sounds like a great replacement that you can’t argue with.

Really?

Yeah, it does.

It sounds like, to me, it’s grammatical for one thing.

It’s perfect English for another.

And we do talk about dying by cop.

You ever heard this expression, right?

Suicide by cop.

Suicide by cop.

It has an echo of somebody seeking out ways to die and choosing suicide when they could have chosen another way.

That’s really interesting.

At first I was thinking that way, and then I was looking at some of the comments,

And some of the people were saying, you’re just making too much of the word commit.

Yes, you can commit a crime, but you can also commit to another person.

You can also commit to a cause or something like that.

It’s really a benign word.

But then I went back to thinking the way that you were thinking about it.

And I think my feelings are pretty much summed up by Jennifer Michael Hecht, the cultural historian, who wrote the book Stay, A History of Suicide and the Philosophies Against It.

I wrote her for her thoughts about this, and I wanted to share them.

She was suggesting the same thing, that commit is a word that has a life outside of just the idea of crime.

So she doesn’t think that that’s really a big deal.

But then she added, it’s a calcified phrase.

That is, I don’t think people quite hear its components anymore.

And whenever that happens, I’m in favor of changing it up.

Lately, I avoid using commit suicide because I know that some people have said they don’t like it.

And I’m not interested in distressing anyone over the issue.

I think dying by suicide is better for a different reason because it’s more blunt and doesn’t let death hide behind other words.

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Doesn’t let death hide behind other words.

Yeah.

And we do find that again and again throughout English and different euphemisms for death.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah.

Where we, it’s a fact that we will all face.

Right.

But we hide it until that last moment.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I like that.

I liked the way that she’s suggesting we honor the survivor’s experience,

You know, the fact that their loved one died.

But I’m sure we’ll have lots of responses to this.

We’d love to hear what you think about this term.

Is committed suicide an offensive term to you?

Is it uncomfortable?

Does it bother you?

Let us know.

You can email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org

Or call us 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisbeth in Hudson, New York.

Hi, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, my boyfriend was born and raised on Long Island.

He hasn’t lived there for 25 years, but still every so often he says something that I think to myself,

That’s exactly the opposite of what I would say.

And the one that’s really in question right now is that he’ll say that three people called out at work today,

Meaning they didn’t come in or they called in sick,

And I say, well, three people called in at work today.

Called in sick.

Called in sick.

So he says called out, which I don’t understand.

And what’s your background?

Actually, English is my second language, but I’ve lived in a lot of places.

I’ve lived in Canada, and I’ve lived all across the U.S.

So I’ve heard a lot of different variations.

And when he said that, that was actually the first time I’ve said it, and I’ve asked people about it.

And a couple of people who live down Long Island Way kind of go, yeah, I’ve heard that, but I’ve never heard anyone else use it.

That’s interesting.

Okay, we can settle this.

Are you sitting down?

Oh, don’t tell me that.

Well, it’s good news and bad news both, all right?

The thing is both are in common use in the United States.

Both calling out sick and calling in sick are widely used.

However, calling out sick is more common in the New York City metropolitan area.

And maybe a few states here and there, Philadelphia, a little south, New Jersey, of course.

So it is a thing.

It has been recorded.

Linguists and lexicographers do know about it.

And probably a million or more people say it.

Call out sick.

Okay.

She sounds so sick.

I got a million out of…

What? A million? Can’t dismiss a million people?

That doesn’t make sense to me.

What we’re looking at here is how you divide the phrase up.

All right.

So you’re calling in sick.

Are you calling out sick?

Do you hear the division there?

So one place we have a two-word phrasal verb to call in, sick.

And the other one, we have just a single word verb to call out sick.

And out sick kind of is the collocation together.

Those two words belonging together.

And the other one, calling in are the two words that belong together.

Well, that totally makes sense then.

I have to say I always called in sick.

Called in sick, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Maybe because I was thinking of the excuse.

I was thinking more about what was going on in the office rather than calling saying I’m going to be out sick.

I’m more focused on the person I’m talking to explaining that I have strep throat or something.

But I know why the people that you talked to who are also from Long Island didn’t necessarily really say that they used that because it’s not that common.

But I remember distinctly running into this when I worked in New York City.

It was a thing where some people called out sick and some people called in sick.

And then they would go to the pharmacy to get their prescription.

And would they stand online or in line?

Well, in New York City, you wait online.

Right.

You probably wait rather than stand online.

We had that discussion very early in our relationship when he stood online with me standing next to him in line.

Oh, my.

And your posture was very different.

Yeah, I do that now.

I still stand online.

That’s not right.

My years in New York City means I still stand on mine, even now.

And I blurt it out without thinking, and I’m like, oh, they’re probably going to think I’m really weird.

Wow.

Yeah.

I’m interested that you solved that problem early in your relationship.

I mean, you resolved that you were going to say it differently.

It was very early, and it didn’t break us up, so yes.

Okay.

Well, that’s good.

So to recap, the short version is he’s fine to say calling out sick.

It’s just not nearly as common as calling in sick.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, our pleasure, Elizabeth. Thanks for calling.

And maybe I’ll hide this episode from him.

Sure.

Yeah, go for it.

I’m with you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Well, do you have a dispute in your relationship about language?

We’d love to hear about it.

So call us at 877-929-9673 or send the story in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karina Ostberg from Jackson, Wyoming.

Karina from Jackson?

Yes.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a conversation with a friend of mine a while back.

It actually happened right after the election.

And she was saying that, I just don’t understand it.

He’s such a wingnut.

Then she sort of paused and she said, why do we use the word wingnut for people that do crazy things?

Because wingnuts are really useful.

They’re handy.

They’re smart.

So why do we use this word to describe something that’s kind of out there?

So I have no idea.

Why do we call certain people on the political spectrum wingnuts when that little metal piece that we use to hold things together is so useful?

Exactly.

You know, what’s funny is that this term really, really came into its own after the 2000 election.

Do you remember this? All the hullabaloo after Bush v. Gore and all that, and there was a lot of rancor.

It reminds me very much of the 2016 political campaign.

It’s just a lot of angry chatter back and forth.

Does that ring a bell?

Yeah.

And at the time I looked into this term, I helped William Sapphire come up with some stuff on this for his column that he was writing for the New York Times.

And I did a political slang dictionary in 2003.

So I’ve dug into this before.

And what’s really interesting is it’s pretty simple.

It’s just a shortening of the term right-wing nut.

And nut meaning a person who is out of their nut or out of their head.

That means not expressing, not having common sense or common behavior.

Or have a screw loose.

Yeah, or have a screw loose.

So wingnut used as it is today is nearly always somebody on the right side of the political spectrum.

And there’s a wide variety of matching terms on the left, such as, you know, pinko commie or left wing loon or what have you.

Fruit bat.

Fruit bat, yeah.

So, yeah, it’s just a shortening of right wing nut.

Huh.

Yeah, that’s it.

I had no idea.

Pretty simple, right?

That’s interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, that is really simple.

Huh.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, my pleasure.

It’s funny, though, as wingnut continues to be used, I just don’t see the matching left terms quite as often.

They come up with all new ones every four years, I think.

Yeah, that was my question.

They’re so much more creative.

Yeah, you know, the world is complicated and interesting, and why just call each other the same insults over and over, and we can come up with new ones?

I know.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate this lesson.

I didn’t realize it was actually just a political term.

I thought it was something that was used for other things.

No, yeah, it’s just mainly a political term.

Thanks so much for calling, Karina.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right, bye-bye.

And terms for the sinner are really rare.

Did you know that?

Like, there’s things like fence sitter and the man trying to ride two horses and things like that.

But, like, really snappy zingers for people who won’t choose a side, those are independents.

Those are really, really rare.

What about mugwump?

Mugwump.

That’s, what’s that?

That’s like an old muckety-muck, isn’t it?

Well, isn’t that somebody who’s sitting on a fence and their mug is on one side and their wump is on the other?

Am I wrong?

I don’t know.

I don’t remember that one.

I should do recall something like that.

I remember the term, but I don’t remember that.

That sounds unlikely origin story.

I feel like I’ve seen a cartoon.

I’ll let it go this time.

It could be.

It could be unlikely origin, but I have this mental picture of some cartoon.

A mug on one side and a wump on the other.

Hilarious.

877-929-9673.

In English, if you’re feeling out of place, you might say, oh, I was a fish out of water or something like that.

In Spanish, you say I was como un pulpo en un garaje, which means…

Octopus in a… I don’t know if that last word is.

Yes, yes, garage.

Garage.

An octopus in a garage. That’s pretty much out of place.

It could happen.

It has happened.

Right, because they’re smart, they escape, right?

Yes, yes. I actually saw a photograph on the news.

In a garage.

In a garage.

In Spain.

In South Florida. No, it was South Florida during the rains. Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you guys doing today?

Doing well. Who is this and where are you?

My name is Matt Ernst and I’m calling today from Red Lodge, Montana.

Red Lodge, Montana. Welcome to the show, Matt. What is up?

My wife and I have a little thing that we would say to each other, and we both assumed that the other one got it from the other one.

So we will call each other once in a while when you catch the other, not in a major infraction, but doing something, a little practical joke or something, a sneaky Pete.

We’ll say, oh, you sneaky Pete.

And she said that to me one day.

I said, you got that from me.

She goes, no.

My mom said it.

And so I grew up hearing my mom say sneaky Pete.

She grew up hearing her mom say sneaky Pete.

And I asked my mom about it, and she had no idea where it came from, and she thought that her mother had said it when she was a child.

So my question is, who’s Pete? Why is he so sneaky?

Oh, my gosh. I need a chart.

Sneaky Pete. And so what is this?

You are, like, sneaking into the cabinet to get somebody else’s special treat, like their cookies?

Exactly. Exactly.

You wouldn’t refer to somebody that was breaking into your car or committing a heinous crime as Sneaky Pete.

But yeah, if you’re exactly trying to sneak a cookie off my plate or pull a practical joke on me, it’s, oh, you sneaky Pete.

Or the thing we do in my house where my wife and I will silently move the basket of laundry to the other person’s side of the bed as a hint.

That would be a sneaky Pete infraction, I think, yeah.

Sounds like Sneaky Grant.

No, she doesn’t do.

She’s like, oh, the cats were there.

Right.

Right.

The cool thing about Sneaky Pete is we do have some recorded uses of it, pretty much like you guys say it.

At least as far back as the 1960s, we have people using the verb Sneaky Pete, meaning to sneaky Pete around, which means the pussyfoot or kind of like act suspiciously, that sort of thing.

But we also have at the same time, Sneaky Pete more or less is an adjective.

It’s really kind of more of an attributive noun, which just means suspicious or secret or confidential.

But older than that still is a Sneaky Pete that refers to alcohol.

Usually really bad alcohol, like rotgut, or one of the sources has it listed as a fortified muscatel, whatever that means.

That sounds good.

But it’s terrible, terrible wine.

Sometimes it’s used in prisons to refer to the pruno, the wine that they make from raisins, whatever food they can filch from the cafeteria and prisons.

But it’s been going on since at least like 1941 that Sneaky Pete has also referred to an alcohol.

But the connection there in my mind is it’s an alcohol that you might put, say, in a boot flask or that you would keep from the authorities or the cheap stuff that you could only buy at the really terrible corner store in the bad neighborhood because they don’t check your ID because you’re under 21.

You know what I’m saying?

It’s like that kind of – it’s not alcohol that you serve at dinner with fine people.

Not at all.

But it would refer to the actual alcohol.

Yeah, it would refer to alcohol.

A bottle of Sneaky Pete.

Okay.

But older than that is a dance called Sneaky Pete, which one of the sources from about 1904 describes as an old-time cakewalk two-step.

Now, do you know what a cakewalk is?

No, I know what a two-step is, but I’m not familiar with a cakewalk.

So a cakewalk is kind of like musical chairs with dancing couples.

You have couples dancing, the music plays, and whenever you stop, you’re standing on a square or a marker on the floor.

Whoever is on the square or a marker stays in, and if a couple is not on the marker, you leave.

And the last couple, and they’ll take one of these markers away for every song that they play.

The last couple left wins the cake or all of the cakes, depending on how you do it.

They’re in the center of the room, usually made for the fundraiser by the, you know, the people who are there.

And anyway, so I’ve been thinking about this and thinking, what if the Sneaky Pete dance was so named because it better positioned you to win the cakes in the cakewalk?

I don’t know.

It’s a theory with no evidence.

You were kind of, not being dishonest, but kind of trying to play a trick or make sure that you would apply the win for yourself.

I don’t know what it looks like, but what if it were a splay-leg two-step where you could actually stand on two squares at once?

That would be a sneaky Pete.

Well, it sounds like there’s no Pete, that there’s no Pete who inspired.

No.

My guess is that it has to do with the assonance of sneaky and Pete.

Interesting.

Well, that absolutely answers my question.

I sure appreciate it.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Our pleasure.

But go forth and know that there are many other people using sneaky Pete to mean suspicious or surreptitious behavior.

Well, good.

All right.

Well, I will try not to do much sneaky Pete around.

Thanks, Matt.

Behave, Matt.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Want more Way With Words?

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

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

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

This program would not be possible without you.

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

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

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

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

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.