Like a Boiled Owl (episode #1559)

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, of late, I’ve been immersing myself in the language of through hikers. Those are those intrepid souls who do things like hike all the way from Mexico to Canada. And I got some terms for you.

For example, nobo, sobo, and yo-yo. Any idea what those are?

They’re kind of Japanese noodles.

Yeah, I could see ordering some of those and standing in… I’m just thinking of soba, I guess.

Right, right. What are they?

Yeah. So nobo, sobo, and yo-yo.

Yes.

Hiking terms.

Yes.

I don’t know.

Well, nobo is someone who’s hiking northbound.

Oh, okay. So sobo would be southbound.

Correct. And yo-yo would mean back and forth.

That’s exactly it. They go up and then they go back.

Yes.

Yes. People actually do this.

Here are a couple of other ones that I liked. One is zero day and the other one is nero day.

So zero day is what, the day you first set out?

Oh, I hadn’t thought about it that way, but no. If you take a zero day, it just means that you don’t hike that day.

Okay. And near-o day would be?

A near zero day.

So you just hike 10 miles or so, not the usual 20 or 30.

Oh, yeah, just 10 miles.

Just 10 miles. A near-o day.

But really good stuff.

Yeah, when it comes to the language of hiking, there’s some really good stuff. And I want to talk about it some more later in the program.

Well, you know, the show talks about the inside language of everything, sports and hobbies and business and finance and industry and the military and different things that you do that we’ve never heard of.

We’d love to hear about the inside language of your hobbies and professions. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us and the world on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Natalia and I’m calling from Portland, Oregon.

Portland, Oregon. Well, hello, Natalia.

Hi, Natalia.

So I am calling about a phrase that my grandfather used to use before he took my mother for Sunday drives. So he would go, like, right before he went off on their Sunday drives, he would say, oh, well, we’re off in a cloud of whale dust. My mom always was like, what in the world does this mean? And she would tell the story to me. And I was just curious, where could this possibly have come from?

Off in a cloud of whale dust? Like W-H-A-L-E, whale?

Whale as in, like, the swimming mammal dust. The huge swimming mammal that spouts water from its flow hole.

Yeah.

Well, he would use a little bit more of an expletive term at times for dust.

Oh.

S-H? Dust?

No. Actually, like P.

Oh, I see.

Oh.

Yeah.

Oh, I see.

In my research, I found other people asking about off in a cloud of whale dust, which is, I mean, the closest I’ve come to finding where this phrase comes from. And I’ve also heard off in a herd of turtles or like a herd of turtles in a cloud of whale dust.

That’s a good one. Kind of nonsensical like sign off. And did that mean leaving in any particular fashion, like slowly or quickly?

I think just weirdly.

Weirdly.

I think he said it more to make the kids chuckle, and he would always get, like, my grandmother would be like, oh, stop, don’t use that language around the kids.

Yeah, off in a cloud of whale dust is a phrase that’s been kind of dying out. I mean, usually when I see it, it’s people who are looking online for what Grandpa used to say. We’re off in a cloud of whale dust. And I think it’s, you know, just about as nonsensical as the bee’s knees or the cat’s pajamas or, you know.

Heard of turtles.

Yeah, yeah, herd of turtles. It’s something that clearly was memorable for you and made the whole family laugh. But as far as I know, it’s just a goofy expression.

It’s totally meant to befuddle. It’s meant to amuse. It doesn’t have a known origin or some concrete fantastic origin. But it wasn’t his alone.

That’s cool, right?

It was something that other people said.

Yeah, yeah. I just thought it was interesting. I mean, he was a military guy, so I thought maybe like he picked it up in the military or something like that and then kind of put his own crude twist on it. But, yeah, it’s always just a goofy phrase. I’ll say it now. Just, you know, kind of bringing forth his memory in my language. It’s just a goofy thing.

Oh, that’s lovely. The cruder version off in a cloud of whale pee might be his own version. I don’t think I’ve ever seen that anywhere.

Or heard it.

Well, it’s definitely, like, evocative. It has some good visuals, I think, that come with it.

Definitely.

Definitely. So now it’s your trademark phrase? You use it with friends?

Yeah, on occasion, just to goof off, you know.

Stop the conversation down, right?

Yeah.

Oh, thanks for sharing those delightful stories, Natalia.

Yeah, thank you so much. It’s such a delight to talk to you guys.

Great to talk with you, too.

Oh, call us again sometime.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

All right.

Thanks, Natalia.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Well, the latest guilty pleasure in our household is binge-watching the Great British Baking Show. I was really excited to see one of the contestants who was told that they were going to have to do some kind of fancy Swedish tart or something. He was just kind of shaking his head saying, not a Scooby-Doo. And I realized he was saying, I don’t have a clue.

Not a Scooby-Doo.

Oh, yeah. Rhyming slang. How about that?

Yeah.

Yeah. Not a Scooby-Doo.

We’d like to hear your encounters with other dialects, 877-929-9673, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katie Fuller. I’m calling from Texas.

Hi, Katie. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Katie.

I was wondering, is it pronounced caramel or caramel?

You mean like the brown, sweet, sticky stuff that you might put on an apple?

Yeah. And what got you to wondering about that, Katie?

Okay, so my dad is from Nebraska, right? So he calls it caramel. So I call it caramel. But my mom calls it caramel. So I’m like, what?

Huh. And where’s your mom from?

My mom’s from Texas.

Okay, so dad pronounces it with three syllables and she pronounces it with two?

Yes. And you take your dad’s pronunciation?

Yes, I do.

Why?

I’m not sure, actually. I kind of switch between them mostly, but, like, I usually say caramel. So I don’t know why, honestly.

You know what? That’s exactly what I do. I grew up in Kentucky, and I go back and forth between those two pronunciations. But get this, Katie. There are at least seven different ways to pronounce this word. Can you believe that?

Seven?

What?

Yeah. So that first syllable alone, Martha, what is it, three different ways to say that first syllable?

Yeah. I mean, we’re talking about the word C-A-R-A-M-E-L, which looks like it has three syllables. But in the United States, some people say caramel. Some people say caramel. Some people say caramel. And some people actually say caramel. And that’s just in the United States. There are three other pronunciations in England.

That’s crazy. The three-syllable pronunciation is one you hear mostly along the east coast of the U.S., all the way from Maine to Florida and into parts of Texas. But I’m not surprised that there’s some difference because sort of the rest of the United States tends to pronounce it the other way.

Yeah. There’s no one place that pronounces it only one way. There’s always a scattering of both pronunciations no matter wherever you go, no matter where you go.

Yeah. I think I say caramel. My wife and I talked about this recently. I think I say caramel most of the time. And when you add it on to another word like caramel corn, I can’t imagine saying caramel corn. It just doesn’t sound right.

Caramel corn sounds right.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Do you eat caramel apples or caramel apples?

I eat caramel apples.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Me too. But when I’m talking about other things, like caramel.

Right. Do you want a caramel?

Sounds better than do you want a caramel.

Yeah.

Yeah, this tastes like caramel.

But your family is representative of the same differences that we hear all across the country.

There are all these different ways to pronounce it, and there’s no one correct way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how do you feel about that?

I think that’s cool.

I thought there were only three.

You know, that first syllable can be car, cur, or car. The last syllable can be male, mil, or mel. And that middle syllable can either be or not pronounced. And they’ll mix them up, and you’ve got a lot of different pronunciations.

Yeah.

But by any pronunciation, it still tastes as sweet, right?

One of the sweetest.

I’m not a very big, like, candy person, but when it comes to caramel, ooh, can’t go wrong with that.

I agree.

I’m with you.

Totally with you.

All right.

Take care of yourself and be well. Call us again sometime, okay?

All right.

Thank you.

Thanks.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear about the differences in your family. Let’s talk about it. 877-929-9673. Email words at waywardrader.org or share it in Twitter @wayword.

Grant, you remember we had that call from Nicole in India about the word buoy, B-U-O-Y?

Oh, yeah, the thing that floats in the water and marks off one part of the water from another.

Yes, and you’ll recall that her husband is British, and he said boy, you know, boy, and she pronounced it buoy, and so they had a little disagreement about that. And I don’t think she left buoyant exactly.

But one of the things that we didn’t talk about was the confusion that I think we have in this country because so many of us grew up with Lifebuoy soap.

Oh, yeah, Lifebuoy soap.

And they don’t say Lifebuoy soap in the ads, right?

Right.

In this country, the predominant pronunciation is buoy, like Nicole says. But the reason that we don’t say Lifebuoy soap is that Lifebuoy soap was invented in 1895 by the Lever Brothers Company in the United Kingdom. So that’s why we say Lifebuoy rather than Lifebuoy.

So it kept the British pronunciation even though we also have that product here in the United States.

Yes, that had puzzled me for years, and I finally started digging into it, and that’s why.

Well, you know, in your family, two or more of you are disagreeing about how to say something. Martha and I would love to get in on that. Choose a side and battle it out with you.

877-929-9673.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by that magical man of mystery, John Chaneski, our quiz guy in New York.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This week, I have a puzzle for you. I call it snames. You’ll remember that a takeoff is what we call it when we remove the first letter of a word, leaving another word. Now, this time we’re going to do takeoffs in which the left behind word isn’t a word but a name.

Now, I’ll describe a person in my family, and the description will clue you into the first word. You remove the first letter of that word, you get the name of the person. For example, my cousin is a lab assistant who is famous for the extreme strictness with which he does his job. He does his job with rigor, and his name is Igor.

Got it? Very good.

Got it.

That’s up to speed.

All right.

Here are the clues. My other cousin is a social media legend who invented the thumbs-up feature on Facebook. Social media legend looking for a four letter word related to the thumbs up on Facebook thumbs up on Facebook.

Oh oh a like his name is yes because the four little word is like like yes very good.

Is that really your cousin?

Not really, no. Disclaimer, all of these people are fictional characters I have created.

My sister is an amazing cook. Her food is so good, it’s as if it was given to us by heaven.

Oh, given to us by heaven.

Oh, Nana and Anna.

Nana and Anna, yes, very good.

Now, my aunt, or aunt, she administers polygraph tests. I don’t know what you call a polygraph administer, and that’s no lie.

Oh, Truth and Ruth.

Truth and Ruth, yes, my Aunt Ruth, who does not really exist.

Okay.

My nephew is a dog walker. Well, actually, he’s not a dog walker. He’s an assistant dog walker. He’s the guy who follows the dog walker and cleans up after the dogs.

Oh.

Cooper?

Yes, his name is Cooper. He’s a scooper.

Cooper’s a scooper.

We’re so proud of Cooper and his scooper.

Yes.

My great-grandfather, though, he was in advertising. He wrote stuff like Fly the Friendly Skies of United or Maxwell House Coffee is Good to the Last Drop.

Logan?

Yes, his name was Logan. And he wrote slogans.

And his slogans.

Ingle? Oh, Ingle and his jingles, sure.

Finally, my great uncle made his fortune inventing medical supplies. He invented that thing that people with a hernia need to wear.

Russ?

Russ, yeah, and his truss.

Anyway, I’m glad I got to introduce you to some members of my family. You guys did fantastic.

Oh, thanks, John. Fun, as always. I hope the families well. Give them our best, and we’ll talk to you next week.

They’re doing very well, thanks. You guys stay safe.

All right, bye-bye.

This show’s about words and language and speech and grammar and slang and new words and old. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or put your thoughts in email at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Ignatius, and I’m asking a question on behalf of my son.

Oh, okay. Where are you and your son located?

We are in Pennsylvania.

Oh, okay.

Northeastern Pennsylvania.

Welcome to the show. What is the question that you two have?

Okay, the question was, he asked me several days over dinner, and I kept not answering him, what came first, the color orange or the fruit orange?

Oh.

Oh, good question.

All right, what’s your son’s name and how old is he?

My son’s name is Siler, and he’s eight.

That is a great question. What came first, the color orange of the fruit?

All right, so give us some backstory. Why did this come up?

I don’t know why that one came up, but we had this long discussion about what might be the roots of that. And my best guess was I was basing it on I think that the orange is all originates originates from Mandarin oranges in China. I don’t know if that’s true or not, but if that were the case, then he and some of my other kids came up with the idea that maybe Marco Polo brought oranges back. And then they just said, what is it? And they said, oh, it’s orange. I don’t know. And so we’re assuming that the color came first in whatever language, and then it was put to the orange because it was the color orange. But I don’t know for sure.

Interesting.

Interesting.

So the color orange is named for the fruit. So we did indeed name the color orange after the fruit, just to clarify. So that surprises a lot of people. And then the next question usually is, well, what did we call that color before the fruit came along? And the answer is we usually lumped it in with yellows or reds when we described it. Or we compared it to other things. Like we might say, oh, it’s the color of this or that flower or other things that were approximately like that. Or, you know, you remember that sunset the other night? It looked like that.

A white red or something.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We might say something like that. We just didn’t give it its own one name. And you’ll often find that over the millennia that names for colors have changed and what we, I say we, meaning humans, have considered the core colors haven’t always been stable. For example, pink as a color is relatively new. It’s only centuries old. They didn’t used to consider pink a canonical color.

So it’s not surprising at all. Pink was just a tint of red.

That makes sense. I lived in China for a while, and I always find it fascinating that there are some colors that they will talk about that we don’t really have an exact connection to. Like, it’s in between two colors, like a blue-green kind of a thing.

It’s interesting that you bring up the China connection because there is a word in German for orange that is Apfelzene, which means Chinese apple.

Oh.

But your theory about the original, original name for the fruit, the orange is originally from southern India.

And it was not originally sweet.

It was bitter.

And the original, original name probably came from a Tamil word meaning fragrant.

More about its smell and the smell of its blossoms.

And then that word became the Sanskrit word.

I’m going to mangle this, but Naranga, meaning orange tree.

And then the Naranga, in turn, became the word for orange in a zillion languages throughout Asia and Europe.

Oh.

So how does it come to English?

It passes from Sanskrit into Persian, into Arabic, into Provencal, which is an early French dialect, into French.

It actually lost the N at the beginning of the word in Provençal, where the article in front of it.

So we would say an apple.

The N moved from the front of the word and attached to the article.

And then it went into French, and then it entered English.

So it lost the N in front of the word before it reached English.

Interesting.

So the short version, the fruit came first.

That’s great. Well, thank you.

Take care, and give our best to your son, all right?

Tell him to keep up the questions.

I will.

Yeah, yeah, call us again.

All right, thank you very much.

Thanks, Ignatius.

All right, bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

This is Lois calling from Newfoundland.

Hi, Lois.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Lois.

How are things there?

Hi, Martha.

Thank you so much for having me.

A couple of weeks ago, I was out walking my dogs,

And when I got back from walking them, I was thirsty and they were hungry and they were demanding food.

So I guzzled down a soft drink and then I started getting their food ready.

And while I was getting it ready, I was chatting away to the dogs like I always do.

And the gas from the soft drink started moving around uncomfortably.

And I told the dogs I had a pain in the pinny.

And they looked at me like I had two heads.

So I thought I’d better explain to them what I mean,

and I realized I don’t know what I mean precisely.

I’ve never heard of a penny outside of my mom or me using it.

A pain in the penny, and your dogs were befuddled.

First, what kind of dogs do you have?

What are your little sweeties?

Standard poodles.

Oh, okay. Very good.

They’re really smart, but they had never heard that expression.

They had never heard that particular expression before.

That stumped them.

Pain in the penny, P-I-N-N-Y, do you think?

I suspect so, yes.

Okay.

Mm—

Yeah, well, that’s a phrase that you really don’t hear much in the United States at all.

But to have a pain in the pinny or a pain under the pinny is something that you’ll hear in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, England.

It’s actually a pain in the pinafore.

Originally, you would pin a pinafore over a dress.

What’s super cool about that word is it’s very picturesque.

You pin it a four.

That is, you pin this apron in front of you.

So this covers the torso and it’s kind of the skirt area, right?

Yeah, it protects the front of your dress.

Like fastens around the neck and around the waist.

Yeah, and it’s like an apron that you would take off after you’ve finished cooking or something.

And so you hear this expression, I have a pain in the penny or I have a pain under the penny.

I think that one might be more common.

But it’s, you know, where your pinafore would go, that part that goes over your belly.

Do you think that this is kind of a way of not talking about parts of the body, kind of not impoletly mentioning?

I really do.

Yeah, I think maybe mom would have been uncomfortable saying certain things.

So, you know, if she had a bit of gas, she probably wouldn’t want to say that.

That makes a lot of sense.

And here you are saying it on, you know, all North American radio.

Canada and the United States now know about your gas, Lois.

Well, I wonder where she picked it up.

I checked, and none of her siblings had ever used that expression, apparently.

Well, it’s got a long history.

How far back would you say that goes, Martha?

At least in the late 19th century.

But again, you’re not going to hear it in the U.S.

Where was she from?

Oh, from Newfoundland, yeah.

Okay.

Like you, right?

So Newfoundland, Canada, definitely the Commonwealth country.

So it makes sense that you and your mother would use it.

Definitely more common in Canada than the U.S.

But it has faded.

Wouldn’t you say, Martha?

Oh, definitely.

Just not on the way out, pretty much.

Pinafores just are on the way out.

Right.

Oh, well, this is displaying my age now.

Will you still wear pinafores in your 40s?

That’s weird.

Oh, God bless you, Grant.

So, Lois, you can take this back to your dogs and explain the whole thing.

I absolutely will.

Thank you so much.

It’s our pleasure.

Yeah, thanks for calling.

Take care of yourself and give those doggies a treat for us, will you?

I certainly will.

All right, then.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thank you so much.

877-929-9673 is the Magical Language Line,

Where you call with your language thoughts, questions, and observations.

You can also tell us all in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I’m already wondering who my QualTalk will be this year.

What’s a QualTalk?

This sounds like some financial acronym.

The quarterly QualTalks have come in today and they’re up 4%.

Wall Street’s up nine points.

First of all, it’s got a weird spelling.

It’s spelled Q-U-A-A-L-T-A-G-H, Qualtach.

Or in some parts of Britain, it’s pronounced Qualtach.

And it comes from Manx.

It comes from the Isle of Man.

And it’s the word for the first person one meets after leaving the house.

Or the first person one meets on New Year’s Day.

That’s your Qualtach.

I believe we’ve talked before about the folklore involved there.

Like if a dark-haired man shows up at your house, that’s supposed to be good luck.

Okay.

Your qual talk.

Okay, nice.

877-929-9673.

Or tell us about your language findings.

You know you like to dig through old books.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes, my name is Alex calling from Bishop, California.

What’s going on in Bishop?

Yeah, well, I work for an environmental nonprofit here in Bishop.

We work with the Forest Service and National Park Service to do a lot of environmental projects on the ground out in the field.

And I’ve noticed that whenever we go out into the field for multiple days, it’s called a hitch.

And I’m just curious as to where that might come from.

Well, now I’m real curious what you’re doing out there in the field.

Yeah, yeah.

So a hitch is an assignment to do what?

You know, usually it’s a lot of environmental rehabilitation work or maybe it’s cutting out logs from, you know, a trail.

The logs have fallen down.

So just opening it back up and basically anything where we’re going out and, you know, bringing our tools and overnight work with us and kind of we’re back in the area for a while.

Okay.

So you’re camping.

Yes, we’re camping.

It’s, yeah, more of an overnight.

For if we were just going out for the day, not usually call it a hitch, but I’ve noticed that we call it a hitch when we’re out for multiple days.

So your question is, why do you call this kind of assignment a hitch?

It’s an extended job, more or less, right?

Yeah.

Extended assignment.

Exactly.

And I’ve known, you know, obviously other ways we use hitch in language, but this one seems kind of unique.

Well, they’re all connected.

They all involve getting caught or fastened, more or less, and I’ll explain that.

For example, if you have a door hitch, you are fastening the door so it stays closed.

Or you have a hitch that connects horses or a team of horses to a wagon, you’re making sure they stay connected.

If you have a hitch in a plan, you get caught or entangled or impeded in a way that you weren’t expecting so things don’t go smoothly.

It’s kind of the unexpected or unwanted hitch, an unexpected catch.

And so this kind of hitch you’re talking about is a job-related hitch.

And you can have hitches in military service or hitches in the nautical life or, you know, you might take a hitch aboard a ship.

These are you get hitched to the period of service, which means they have temporarily fastened you onto their team or temporarily caught you as a as a worker, so to speak.

That makes sense.

Getting hitched, getting married is you’re getting you’re tying the knot, literally, maybe or figurative.

So all of them involve some kind of connecting of you to something else.

So it’s a term of enlistment, more or less.

Gotcha.

I’m still entranced with the idea that you go out and spend all your days outdoors.

That sounds lovely.

It’s not the worst thing to do for work, and I definitely am lucky to be able to do that.

Yeah, you’re right there at the southern end of the Sierra Nevada, right?

That’s right, yeah.

Yeah, more little middle.

Lone Pine and Mount Whitney are about an hour south of us.

And then Mammoth, which is a big ski area, is about an hour north of us.

Yeah, so some great hiking there if you don’t have a hitch in your get-along.

Or a hitch in your giddy-up.

Yeah, that makes sense too.

Yeah, the hitch in the giddy-up, you know, having an entanglement.

Yeah, exactly.

Don’t want to have one there.

You’re hoping you don’t have one.

Well, thanks so much.

That’s right.

All right.

Thank you, Alex.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, bye-bye.

Well, you can hit yourself to our wagon and join the Language Roadshow, 877-929-9673.

You can also talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

More about what we say and why we say it.

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.

We were talking earlier about the language of through hikers,

Those people who hike for many, many weeks and months to get to a destination.

And when you’re doing a long trail like that, you tend to acquire what they call a trail name.

And Grant, you’ll remember we had a call from Liz in Laramie, Wyoming,

Who spent six months hiking the Appalachian Trail, and people commented on her accent.

Right. They kept thinking she was from somewhere else, but she was born in the United States.

Right. And you may remember that she said that on the trail, her name was Half Note.

That’s what everybody called her.

And it’s partly because she’s a musician and partly because, in her words, she’s rather short and petite.

And what I didn’t realize until recently is that hikers usually don’t think up that trail name for themselves.

It tends to be bestowed on them by others.

It’s inspired usually by something you’ve done that’s unique or smart or maybe just spectacularly stupid.

And I learned this and much more from a new memoir called Journeys North.

It’s by Barney Scout Mann, who, as it happens, hiked all 2,650 miles from Mexico to Canada on the Pacific Crest Trail.

And he’s also done all of the Appalachian Trail and the 3,100 miles of the Continental Divide.

So he’s what hikers call a triple crowner.

He really knows his stuff.

Wow, a triple threat.

Yeah, and triple sore, I bet. Anyway, each of these trail names ends up telling a story. Somebody who’s singing a lot on the trail might be called Figaro, for example. And one of my favorites is a guy who was sitting around with a bunch of hikers during a break, and he said, gosh, wouldn’t it be awful if you ended up with a trail name like Cuddles? Well, you can imagine what trail name they gave this guy.

Oh, poor Cuddles.

But the best names are the ones that come from stories, right?

Not the ones that you assign yourself out of who you think you are.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s who people think you are.

So shout out to Cuddles.

Another cool term is trail angels.

These are people who leave food for hikers all along the way.

Or they have a standing invitation for hikers to just pop off the trail for a day or two and stay at their home.

Oh, that’s fantastic.

Yeah.

You might have overestimated your abilities or just need to rest your knees.

Yeah, or it gives you something to look forward to.

I mean, word gets out among hikers.

You know, in terms of the Pacific Crest Trail, about 300 hikers do that every year.

There’s a window of time when the weather lets you do that.

And about 300 people at least start out, not all of them finish.

But they know where the Trail Angels’ homes are along the way.

And people just open up their homes or their yards and let people crash for a day or two.

It’s really a cool subculture, I guess.

Yeah, that’s wonderful.

I love that spirit of community and of co-giving, the back and forth.

So it’s not only the angels giving to the hikers, the hikers giving to each other,

And then the hikers sharing their stories with those of us who don’t go

So we can appreciate the beauty of the relationships that they form,

But also the wilderness that they pass through.

You know, I’m really glad you said that because reading this book, Journeys North,

I really thought that it was going to be about the landscape and the beauty.

And, of course, that’s absolutely true.

But it’s really a book about relationships because you’re in this world that’s cut off from other people,

Usually for about five months.

And it sort of reminded me of, you know, when you take a long airplane flight

And you sit down next to somebody and you pour out your life story to somebody

And then maybe you never see them again.

Or maybe you do develop some kind of friendship

That lasts a lifetime.

Martha, it sounds like a wonderful book.

What was it?

It’s called Journeys North by Barney Scoutman.

That’s fantastic.

We’ll put a link to that on the website

When we post the episode.

We’d love to hear what you’re reading

Or about your travels and the language that you uncovered

When you went to interesting new places

Or even terrible ones.

And we’d love to hear the good and the bad stories.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or try us on Twitter @wayword.

You know, we were talking earlier about the word orange and which came first, the fruit or the color.

And we talked about the Spanish word for orange, which is naranja.

And it reminded me of this joke in Spanish.

There’s a long tradition of referring to your sweetheart as your media naranja.

It’s like half orange.

It’s the other half of the orange, you know, like the two of you have been looking for each other,

And the two of you form a whole orange.

But the pun here is that media means half in Spanish, but it also means sock, you know, like you wear on your foot.

And I don’t know if that’s because it used to go halfway up your leg or what.

And so you can look online and see all these adorable cards that people give to each other where they have an orange sock.

So it’s media naranja.

You are my orange sock.

Oh, that’s lovely.

How sweet.

Right?

It’s really sweet.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, A Way with Words.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Sean.

Greta.

From Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania.

Well, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thank you very much.

So I’ll present the case from my side and perhaps a cross-examination is necessary.

Oh, boy.

I didn’t know this was a Law & Order episode.

This is going to be done.

So I’m from Northeast Pennsylvania, and we’ve got enough proclivities in our dialect, I’m sure.

But when I first started dating my now wife of 17 years, I drove down to her house in Allentown in the Lehigh Valley.

And I parked my car apparently where I shouldn’t have parked it behind her dad’s car.

And I came into the house and I greeted her and everything.

She looked at where I was parked and she says, oh, hey, let’s go move your car a while.

And I started to walk out and I stopped and I’m like, a while we do what?

And she goes, no, no, no.

We’re just going to go move your car a while.

So my question is the a while.

I don’t get it.

Now, I’m going to just verify with her.

Yes.

Okay, so a while to us means, to us, meaning my family or wherever I grew up, I guess, that I adopted this statement.

It’s just like, while you’re waiting to do something else or in the meantime, so why don’t you go get changed a while?

Or why don’t you have a snack a while?

Or why don’t you go move your car a while, Sean?

So he says it doesn’t make sense, but I say it’s like a perfect catch-all term for kind of an interim period when you’re waiting to do something else.

And so this is in the Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania?

Yeah, Lehigh Valley is where I’m from, so I think that’s probably where I got it.

All right. We can help you with this.

Actually, it’s funny. Martha and I were just commenting recently about how often we get questions from Pennsylvania about the German influence on the language there.

And this is another one of those cases. It really is remarkable, isn’t it, Martha?

Yes, it sure is.

The immigration patterns over the last centuries from all the different parts of the world have left their imprint on American English in lots of different ways.

And they still show up.

You might think, oh, you know, America, it’s this monolith of language and culture.

We’re not.

And even centuries from now, these imprints will still be felt in small ways and large.

And this is just one of them.

So that a while is a direct borrowing from German, Pennsylvania German to be specific.

There’s a German word, A-L-L-E-W-E-I-L, all of a while, which means just now.

And it’s used almost exactly that way in Pennsylvania English in Southeast Pennsylvania.

It’s something you want to say, do at this moment or now or after a little bit.

But it usually means right away almost.

Yes.

And so it can definitely throw outsiders just as it did you, Sean.

-huh.

Yeah, it did.

And just, you know.

Wait, Greta’s having a moment here.

She is having a moment.

So listeners, I’ve been a podcaster for years, so I feel the need to provide visuals.

She just elbowed me in the stomach as you began that explanation and gave me the sea look.

So it’s going to be a long night, guys.

Thanks.

Thanks a lot.

I suspect you’ll be making dinner for a while, cleaning the house.

What is owed?

That’s right.

That’s right.

Well, thank you for helping solve our longstanding…

Yeah, Pennsylvania is so interesting.

If you look at a dialect map of Pennsylvania, it is broken up into three major regions and probably 10 or so minor dialect regions representing German influence and Scots-Irish and English influence.

It’s a really interesting state linguistically because of centuries of these overlays of migrants coming in and leaving their mark.

And the German influence is just one of those little footprints.

And you’ve got it in your language, Greta, which is amazing.

Hey, thanks, gang.

Sure. Take care now. You be well.

Yeah. Thanks for calling.

Take care.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

What’s the language question that you’d like to talk about?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Another hiking term I learned from the book Journeys North by Barney Scoutman is hike naked day.

What?

Like literally naked or with no gear naked?

With gear, but otherwise naked.

Wow.

Brave.

Very brave.

Hike naked day.

There’s actually a day of the year. It’s June 21st. It’s summer solstice.

And this may have started among hikers on the Pacific Crest Trail where you just, you know, you’re in the back country and you just take off your clothes and you hike.

I just sense a lot of chafing.

Well, funny you should mention that.

One of the guys who earned the trail name Guts ended up hiking all, I think it’s 14,000 feet to the top of Mount Whitney, buck naked, on Hike Naked Day.

Okay.

That’s a lot of guts.

Yeah, he was known as Guts.

He probably should have been known as Sunburn, though, because he neglected.

Or Red Buns.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, but anyway, something to look forward to.

Hike Naked Day on June 21st.

All right, let me know how that goes, Martha.

I will. Pictures or it didn’t happen, right?

No, you can keep those.

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

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Bodley.

I’m calling you from Frisco, Texas, and I just had a question about a term that I heard when I was younger.

Great, John. We’d love to hear it.

So when I was a kid, my dad used to say, tougher than a boiled owl.

And I’ve asked people if they’ve ever heard that before, and no one seems to know where it came from, so I thought maybe it was something that my dad made up.

When I talked to him, he said it was like a cooking term.

So if the meat you were eating was overcooked, it might be tougher than a boiled owl.

He also said that it’s used to describe a person, like a strong person or somebody who was tough.

So like, oh, I know, John, that guy is tougher than a boiled owl.

So I’m just so curious to find out where that came from, and I need your help.

Oh, okay. Yeah, sure, we can help with that.

So you learned this from your dad. Did he see where he learned it?

You know, he said that his dad, so my grandpa used to say it as well.

That’s funny how these things get passed from generation to generation.

Yeah, and so I just never heard that before except from my dad and my grandpa.

He’s got bits of the history.

He’s picked out certain parts of it, and I’m going to connect those for you.

Owls are these strange creatures that pop up in myth and mystery and religion as long as humans have been considering nature and their relationship to it.

But I’m going to just kind of connect to around the 1700s, we start to see in English, although it may have happened in other languages too, owls being used in metaphors and similes connected to drunk or alcohol.

So drunk, variations on drunk as an owl or drunk as a hoot owl or owl drunk.

And even further back, there are associations of owls with drinking, not necessarily drunk.

In the 1600s, there’s a little ditty from, oh, 1609 that goes, of all the birds that I ever see, the owl is the fairest in her degree.

For all day long she sits in a tree, and when the night comes, away flies she.

Tee-wit, tee-woo, to whom drinkest thou?

And it goes on and on.

It talks about just how she ends up with a jolly red nose, meaning she’s been drinking.

So this idea of owls as being drunk connected to other adjectives meaning drunk.

But one of them was stewed.

And stewed happens to be a word that also is something you do to vegetables or to meat or other things that you cook.

And you also boil stuff.

So we’ve got a mishmash here of these adjectives then later being reapplied to the owl.

So a boiled owl is a drunk owl.

So anyway, so it’s not boiled as in boiled in water at 212 degrees Fahrenheit, but boiled isn’t drunk.

Wow, that is so interesting.

You know, I have heard it also as hotter than a boiled owl as well, and I thought that meant that you were mad, like you were hot as a boiled owl.

Yeah, the key is there that once an owl started being used in these metaphors, then people just started expanding all the different ways that you could be something as a boiled owl.

I’m just so relieved to hear this because I’ve heard, you know, madder than a boiled owl or feeling like a boiled owl, and I just always thought of this, you know, terribly awful smelly thing in the kitchen.

But you’re telling me that it’s an owl that’s slurring its hoots and stumbling around.

I love that.

The reasons you might think of an owl as being drunk are really interesting.

There’s three different ideas here.

One is it has to do with the glassy-eyed stare of an owl.

They can stare at you without blinking.

And some drunks look like this, right?

Oh, yeah.

And so to stare like a boiled owl has been a phrase at different points in English.

And another one has something to do with the way they regurgitate the pellets of their prey, the indigestible bones and fur.

Another one, too, is the way they behave in the middle of the day when they’re discovered by other birds.

And they kind of fly erratically and clumsily because these other birds will mob owls and chase them out of the territory.

Because they don’t want the owls to eat their young.

And so the owls kind of fly awkwardly and weirdly, and they look like they’re flying drunk.

I’ll be darned.

Yeah.

Wow.

So there’s these three different contributing reasons

why you might think of an owl as drunk or boiled.

You know, that is so interesting.

I have been wondering, you know, for many, many years where that came from.

I just love your show, and I thought, if anybody knows, these guys can help me.

John, I’m so grateful that you called.

This is the sound of a light bulb going on over my head.

I’m really glad to hear this.

So thank you, John.

All right.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’ll give you some wise old advice about language.

Just give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Another hiking term I came across in the book Journeys North by Barney Scout Mann is hiker midnight.

Any guess what hiker midnight is?

Hiker midnight.

Wow.

I don’t know.

I’m kind of thinking about halfway between when you put up your tent and when you get up,

which isn’t necessarily the middle of the night since you often set up your tent well before dusk

and you often get up well before dawn.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Barney says it’s 9 p.m.

You know, you’ve hiked 20 miles or 30 miles, and midnight comes at 9 p.m.

You are just out.

Oh, yeah.

There’s none of this, like, romantic sitting around the fire until the early hours because you’re just finished.

You’re beat.

Yeah.

Hiker midnight.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

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

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who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow

for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.