Lord Love a Duck

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.

Every once in a while, a book comes along that I just want to recommend to everybody, not just my close friends,

But I want to put this book in the hands of every single person I meet.

And these days, that book is Letters of Note.

This is a book that grew out of a website by the same name run by Sean Usher.

And you might have seen this website before because a lot of times the letters on that site get passed around the Internet.

But don’t settle for the site because there’s nothing like curling up with this big, beautiful book and going through all this personal correspondence.

It’s subtitled An Eclectic Collection of Correspondents Deserving of a Wider Audience.

And these were letters that were never intended for publication, but he’s gathered them together in what he calls a book-shaped museum.

And I’ve just been

Delighting in these

And you’ve been reading it too, right?

The book is filled with letters from

Important people to important people

Letters from nobodies to nobodies

A lot of the letters are about important events

Even if you don’t know the names attached to them

Some of them are in there simply because

They’re beautifully written, not just the handwriting

But the composition themselves

And some of them of course are put in there for their humor

And so there’s one that I wanted to share

I love Dorothy Parker

She probably wouldn’t have had a thing to do with me, were we contemporaries, but this is a great letter.

It’s 1927.

She’s in the Presbyterian Hospital in New York City from exhaustion.

She’s trying to recover from this, but she’s stir-crazy,

And she’s having a hard time dealing with the fact that she can’t do all the things she wants to do,

And her little pet dog is not with her.

So she writes this letter to her lover at the time with her usual wit and dryness,

And there’s a part where she talks about a nurse, and she says,

There is the nurse who tells me she’s afraid she’s an incorrigible flirt, but somehow she just can’t help it.

She also pronounces picturesque, picturesque, and unique as unique.

And it is amazing how often she manages to introduce these words into her conversation, leading the laughter herself.

Also, when she leaves the room, she says, see, Anon, I have not shot her yet.

Maybe Monday.

Brilliant.

And there’s a ton of this stuff.

There are letters in here that will make you cry.

Yep.

There are letters to lost love, letters to the deceased, letters to the past and to the future.

Little kids writing to celebrities.

One of my favorite ones is a little kid writing to basically Australia’s equivalent of NASA with his rocket design.

It’s basically postcard size.

And he’s got a picture of a rocket and a few little kind of pointers.

This is the nose and the antenna and so forth.

And he says, fill in the detail.

Kind of like, you know, whatever happens inside the rocket ship.

You take care of that.

Yeah, just make it work.

We’ll share some more letters of note later in the show.

But in the meantime, we’d love to talk with you about language.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Chris from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Chris.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Chris.

What’s on your mind?

My wife is from California, and I’m from Texas, and there are a bunch of things that we say differently.

And this has kind of become a small, you know, lighthearted argument between the two of us.

We have a bunch of them.

And one of them was just the phrase bacon and eggs.

I’ve always said bacon and eggs, and she says eggs and bacon and insisted that eggs and bacon was the more common usage.

What?

Wait a second.

This is what you’re arguing about?

I always thought, oh, yeah, we’re going to have to help them with the financial troubles.

Do we have kids?

I made up a song while I was cooking breakfast about bacon and eggs,

And she said, oh, I think you mean eggs and bacon.

So which came first, the bacon or the eggs, right?

That’s right, yeah.

Wow, okay.

So we always ask this question, but I want to know, is there anything on the line here?

Is there a bet?

Small, friendly wager on it.

Okay.

Who cooks breakfast?

Who cooks the bacon and eggs?

Who gets the bacon and eggs or who gets the eggs and bacon?

Let’s break this down.

We have data on this.

We can actually look this up.

Google Ingrams will do it.

Any good corpus of data will do this.

Bacon and eggs is substantially more popular than eggs and bacon.

But don’t start doing your victory.

No, don’t do your victory dance yet.

The problem with this is that neither of these phrases is really idiomatic.

Either one is completely acceptable, and neither one is ensconced on the language in such a way that it can’t be altered.

They’re both totally fine.

And I don’t know why you would argue about eggs and bacon versus bacon and eggs, but okay.

It’s better than arguing about other things.

That’s right.

I think.

Sheet stealing, maybe.

I don’t know.

I think it’s good that it’s the only thing we argue about.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s nice.

That’s great.

You put all your anger into the useless things.

You can look for data and try to support this argument one way or the other, but really it’s just kind of fishing in the dark with no bait.

There’s just no consistency here.

The question usually is, does it get fixed in the language as a thing?

And whether or not something gets fixed in language as a thing is almost an accident.

Not always, but for example, we talked on the show previously about socks and shoes.

Right.

But most people say shoes and socks.

Put on your shoes and socks, even though the order is wrong.

It became ensconced in language as mostly shoes and socks.

Even though either one is perfectly fine, totally grammatical, completely allowed by English.

Right.

And then there are other phrases that are set, like little old lady.

You wouldn’t say old little lady, for example.

Yeah, when we talk about order of adjectives, adjectives have a specific order in English.

It becomes intuitive to English as a first language speakers.

You have things like black and blue.

We would never say blue and black.

Probably not, right?

There’s a few other things like this.

We would say flesh and blood, not blood and flesh.

Body and soul, not soul and body.

Right.

So those are ensconced and fixed as almost immutable idiomatic expressions,

But bacon and eggs and eggs and bacon are not.

Yeah, I’m assuming her whole family then said eggs and bacon, and that was fine.

Yeah, that’s kind of how it went.

I’m a bacon and egger.

What about you, Martha?

Soy, sausage.

Sausage and nothing.

No, there’s no comma between soy and sausage.

It would just be soy sausage.

Okay.

Not even the fake bacon, the faken?

Yeah, sure, fake bacon.

Okay.

Sure, yeah, and eggs.

And eggs, okay.

Yeah.

Well, Christopher, you’re going to have to tell us about all the other disputes sometime, all right?

Send us an email, and we’ll see if we can tease those out, too.

All right, guys.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Cheers, bye-bye.

Thanks, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I bet we’re going to hear from some eggs and bacon types.

Don’t you think?

Yeah, we will, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And the number that they would call is 877-929-9673,

Or you can send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, is this Grant?

This is. Who am I speaking with?

Hi, Grant, this is Kurt Meyer from Jefferson, Georgia. How are you today?

Great, thank you. And yourself?

Doing well, thanks very much.

Hey, Kurt, what’s on your mind?

So much communication happens in today’s day and age through emails or blog posts,

And there’s so much room for misunderstanding, it seems,

On the subject of emphasizing a specific word in a sentence.

For a long time, it’s been kind of a family joke that there is a particular sentence that changes its meaning based on which words you emphasize.

That sentence is, I didn’t kiss your mother.

And I’ve just pronounced it the way probably most people would pronounce it if they read it on the written page.

But depending on which of those words you emphasize, you get a vastly different meaning.

And so long story short, I guess my question is how would you express an emphasis in written text?

Great question.

How would you do it?

There’s kind of the standards.

You could use all caps.

You could use bold or italics or things like that.

I don’t know.

Some of those seem a little clunky.

I don’t know if there’s a good way to do it.

That’s why I’m calling the experts.

What’s clunky about italics or bolding or all caps?

Particularly all caps seems a little contrived.

The whole you’re shouting on the page.

Yeah, especially in email communication, right?

Is that what you’re talking about?

Right, correct.

You’re feeling a little like the written language doesn’t have the expressiveness of the spoken language.

Correct.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a common problem, frankly.

The written language is an imperfect representation of the spoken language,

Which has a much longer history and more nuance and inflection than the written language can possibly have,

Even doing things like bolding and capping and italicizing or underlining.

And there are other ways to get emphasis.

You can insert periods between words to indicate force, you know.

Best show ever, you know, with periods between the words is a form of emphasis.

Yeah, and Grant and I were both on the Internet as early as the 1990s, early 1990s.

And back then, you would often put asterisks on either side of the word.

I don’t see that so much anymore.

Oh, no.

Or underscore.

Oh, it still happens.

Actually, in most Microsoft Word products, the default is if you put asterisks around a word, it turns to bold.

Right.

And there are various markup languages in HTML that use a variety of simple symbols in order to automatically turn things bold or italic or what have you.

Right.

But I’m talking about if you’re just writing in email in simple text.

I used to use asterisks, but now I often capitalize the first letter of the word.

Oh, I see.

Okay.

But not the whole word.

Correct.

Oh, I see.

So if I didn’t kiss your mother, you would just capitalize the Y.

Correct.

Okay. That’s kind of unusual, though, isn’t it?

I guess it is. I mean, I guess my writing looks a little bit like German sometimes because of the capitals.

But I think I developed that in the early 90s, and I never stopped.

And I think it’s pretty handy because it doesn’t look like shouting.

But shouting only really, the whole shouting and email thing is only if the whole transmission is in all caps.

Yeah, that’s true.

The odd word here or there, that’s not really shouting, that’s emphasis.

That looks different.

And I also find that emoticons are very, very helpful.

I mean, I guess I wouldn’t put a winky face after I didn’t kiss your mother, but…

I might.

Right, right.

And that’s a bit of a contrived sentence to prove a point.

Yeah.

But you would never have that in necessarily a business email.

But just to prove the point of meaning is very much carried an emphasis in our language.

And trying to express that is a big trick sometimes.

So, Kurt, what would you do with that sentence if you wrote it?

I’ve used the all caps example.

That’s kind of been my default.

And it usually gets a chuckle from everyone,

And then we move on to the next thing.

So it sounds like you put a lot of thought on this.

I hope we’ve given you a few more ideas.

Oh, this has been fantastic.

Absolutely.

Thanks very much.

I love your nice show.

Keep doing what you do.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot, Kurt.

That’s wonderful.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Or you can send your messages to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

In my opinion one of the most phenomenally successful words in the internet age actually

Should say the computer age is the word photoshop so it comes from this product used for editing

Photos it’s i think it’s at least 25 years old turned into a verb and now people have removed

The photo part and they’re using shop to mean you shop an image means you photoshop that you alter

It. And I came across a hashtag, which really I thought was funny because it’s perfect also for

The internet age. It’s lazy shop, which is instead of actually posting a photo that you Photoshop to

Be funny or to show the thing that you want to show, you simply describe what the photo would

Look like had you actually done the Photoshop work. And then you hashtag it lazy shop.

That’s great. 877-929-9673.

More language conversation in just a minute.

Stay with us.

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 on the line is John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hiya, John.

I always want to make you sound dangerous like a guy who carries a knife.

He is dangerous.

There we go.

So cut the seal on those quizzes and let’s get started.

What do you have there?

Let’s do it.

Some people don’t deserve their own name.

Other people do.

Oh, okay.

Like what?

Yeah, what do I mean by that?

As you know, most surnames come from the names of places,

Descriptions of a person, or occupations.

For example, the actor Gary Cooper was an actor.

He didn’t make barrels.

No, he did not.

Even though Cooper is someone who makes barrels.

Yep.

Okay.

I’m sure you guys know.

Yeah, sure.

Here’s what I’ll do.

I’ll give you the names of two famous people.

One of them has a last name that better describes the other.

These may be a little tough.

There’s a little bit of, you know, knowing word history and stuff.

Otherwise, you could just kind of make a guess.

That’s fine, too.

Okay, sure, yeah.

Here’s an example.

Elizabeth Taylor and Levi Strauss.

Okay, Levi Strauss is the tailor.

He should be, right, because he was the tailor.

Okay, good start.

Maurice Chevalier and Roy Rogers.

Oh, it should be Roy Chevalier.

Yeah.

Roy Chevalier is knight.

Knight or horseman, right.

Roy Rogers is a horseman.

Because Cheval is in there.

It’s got the root for the word meaning horse.

Right.

Exactly.

Whereas Rogers means something has to do with a spear or a lance.

Not a lance.

More like a sword.

All right.

Next one.

How about Dan Marino and John Paul Jones?

John Paul Jones.

John Paul Marino.

John Paul Maria, why is that?

He’s a sailor.

That’s right.

That’s very good.

Sailor.

Jones just means of John’s.

John’s kid.

So here’s the next one.

Cary Grant and LeBron James.

They’re not all occupations, by the way.

Okay, yeah.

Cary Grant and LeBron James.

I don’t know what James means.

Grant means large or big or great or tall.

So LeBron James is very tall, so LeBron Grant.

LeBron Grant, yes.

That’s what it should be.

It’s all basketball player.

How about Alan Kunstler and Jackson Pollock?

Jackson Kunstler because Kunstler is German for artist, right?

Yes, very good.

Pollock comes from Polish meaning like pool or pond, something like that.

How about Margaret Sanger and Elvis Presley?

So Sanger, is that blood?

I have no idea.

Presley?

Don’t know.

Sanger’s Singer?

Yes.

Is it Singer?

Yeah.

So Elvis Sanger.

Elvis Sanger.

Elvis Sanger.

Still not quite as good as Elvis Presley, I think.

I don’t know.

Presley sort of means priest’s meadow.

The priest’s league.

Oh, priest’s league.

Okay.

That was a difficult one, John, but thanks for it.

Yes, challenging.

Yeah, the challenging is good.

Challenging is welcomed.

And we learned a little something.

We learned quite a bit, actually.

There was lots of names that I never really spent much time thinking about, last names.

Sure.

But now I have.

Thank you, John Chaneski.

Thank you, John.

Thank you.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Okay.

Take care.

Cheers.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language, the number to call is

877-929-9673.

And you can email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi.

Who is this?

This is Cree Harris calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Cree.

Welcome to the show.

Hello, Cree.

So a few weeks back, I was at my grandmother’s house, and she was telling me about a gentleman down the street.

He’s in his 70s or 80s or something like that.

And he goes down to the bingo hall and picks up women.

Maybe like a week after he went down there, he went to the doctor and said that he was feeling really tired

And that he wasn’t feeling himself and just wasn’t feeling well altogether.

So the doctor asked him some follow-up questions, and the gentleman revealed that he had been trying to pick up these women at the bingo hall and was trying to act like he was young again, pretty much.

Okay.

So the doctor said to him, man, you must have picked up one of those white liver women.

I didn’t believe it at all, and I told my grandmother, no, he couldn’t have said that.

What is a white liver woman?

So I Googled it, and sure enough, a white liver woman is someone with an insatiable sexual appetite.

Yep.

So my question is, where did that term white liver come from, and why is it associated with an older woman with an insatiable sexual appetite?

Yeah. Well, it’s a very well-attested term, and it means exactly what you’re talking about.

There’s this longstanding folk belief, especially in the South, that somebody who has a pale liver or a liver with white spots on it is going to be driven to sexual excess.

A male or female, right?

Right, right.

There’s also a term, there’s a great term, a white-livered widder or a white-livered widow.

And this is a woman who marries several men in succession and they all die fairly quickly.

And the presumption is that she just wore them out.

That is surprising.

I would have never have guessed it.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

There’s a long, long tradition.

In fact, it goes all the way back to Plato, the notion that the liver is somehow the seat of desire.

And there are comparable terms in French and German and Italian as well.

So it’s a long, long, long belief, but why white liver?

We don’t know, do we?

We don’t know.

The white liver has been credited with other characteristics in the past.

Someone who’s white livered could be a coward.

And you might know it as the variant of lily livered,

Meaning somebody who just doesn’t have the brass on the backbone to do what needs to be done.

Yeah, I have heard of that one before in respect to being a coward,

But never on the other side of that.

You’re not likely to find white liver used in this way these days outside of fiction.

It’s just, it’s kind of fatal.

Yeah, outside of the South.

It’s gone the way of most of the traditional folklore, which is it’s an area of study.

Perhaps you see it in stories, but you’re not likely to pass it on unremarked upon.

Well, you learn something new every day.

Yeah, is your grandmother from the South, by the way?

She is. She’s from the South. She’s from Mississippi.

Okay, yeah, well, that makes sense.

It’s also a good way to talk about that kind of thing in front of the children, you know.

She has a white liver.

That is very true.

That’s actually been my new term here for the past few weeks.

Well, you may have just popularized it, Crete.

Hey, if you hear it on a TV show, it was all because of me.

There we go.

Yeah, if it comes back into vogue, it was Crete.

All right.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

We love the new old language.

Bring it back to us, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

This is Richard Valdez calling from Sugar Land, Texas.

Hi, Richard.

Hi, Richard.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I was calling because this has been bothering me for a few years.

I was in France, in the south of France, a couple of years back,

Visiting a company that we were buying a piece of equipment from.

And our host, during dinner, I was asking, well, we were in Nîmes, a city of south of France called Nîmes, N-I-M-E-S.

And I asked him, well, what’s unusual about Nîmes?

Is there anything to do here?

And he said, well, we’re known for a coliseum that’s here that’s more well-preserved than the Roman coliseum.

And we’re also known because during medieval times, we invented blue jeans.

I thought, well, he’s putting me on.

But he assured me he was serious, and he said that back in medieval times,

The weavers around Nîmes were famous for some fabric that they used to construct with a very tight weave.

And all around Europe at the time, they didn’t have a name for the fabric,

But they started calling it the material de Nîmes,

Because in France and in Spain and Portugal and everywhere from Nîmes would be called denim,

And that became denim.

And I’ve always wondered if that story is true, and if it is, how did denim become blue jeans?

Great question.

And the story is a little bit convoluted, but you’re right.

As far as we know, denim comes from that idea of that coarse cloth coming from France.

Well, the important part is the cloth comes from Neem, but not blue jeans themselves.

Right.

That’s the important thing.

I see.

So he was kind of half right.

Yeah, never take your etymological evidence from tour guides.

Yeah, that’s a hard and fast rule on this show.

The other part of the story is that there was also a tough, coarse cloth produced from cotton in the Italian port city of Genoa.

And the name of that cloth came to us via French, which was Jeanne, and came to English as Jean.

And that name was applied to the heavy cloth and then later to things made out of that heavy cloth.

And that same year, Levi Strauss and Jacob Davis got together and created a new kind of really sturdy pants that were useful for minors and people who were doing really heavy work.

They were reinforced with rivets at places where the pants might tear.

And they call those waist overalls because they only went up to your waist.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah.

And eventually the name jeans got applied to those types of trousers.

So the fabric name transferred to the garment’s name.

Yeah, yeah.

So the fabric names coexisted for a long time.

And the original jean fabric and the original denim fabric weren’t exactly the same.

No, they were a little bit different.

They could be wool or cotton.

They might have a tighter weave, different colors, produced in different places, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, exactly.

I see.

And in fact, the first trousers that Levi Strauss came up with were made either of indigo denim or a brown duck cloth.

Oh, interesting.

But also a very sturdy cloth.

Yes.

It could take the use of the mining fields.

Exactly.

I thought Levi Strauss had invented the whole thing, but here it came all the way from Genoa.

Yeah.

That’s great.

There’s another city name buried deeply in the story behind these, and this is fustian, which is a type of fabric.

So the jean fabric originally was a type of fustian, which is named from a suburb of Cairo where cotton weaving really became a thing originally.

So a lot of these fabric names have city origins because we’re talking about trading.

We’re talking about city to city trading, cotton moving from one country to another, textiles moving back, garments moving back the other direction.

And in each case, the city name somehow being relevant to the product as it’s moving across the world.

Well, another example of that is Dungarees, which take their name from a district of Mumbai in India, Dungaree.

And Madras Cloth as well, right?

Yeah, yeah. Paisley from a town in Scotland.

So we find this again and again and again, that the textile names frequently are related to the cities in which they originated or which they were known to be sourced.

That is, that they came through there, although the product, like the original cotton, might have come from the cotton fields on the banks of the Nile.

Yeah.

So your tour guide was partly right, but the story’s a lot more complicated.

And frankly, more interesting, I think.

Yeah.

That’s great.

I didn’t know.

I always wonder about dungarees and all these others, but that’s amazing.

Yeah, there’s actually, there is a fantastic group of paintings from, I think it’s the 17th century by a northern Italian painter who’s called the Master of the Blue Jean.

Google that, and there are some amazing paintings from the 17th century with that cloth in it.

The next time I put on a pair of pants, I’ll be thinking about all these places.

I thought you were going to say you’d be thinking about us, but yeah, be thinking about all those places.

Thanks, Richard, for your call.

Hey, Richard, thanks for calling.

Thank you all very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s a history behind every word.

Call us and find out.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another letter I wanted to share from the book Letters of Note.

And the background of this is that in 1957,

It was announced that Elvis Presley would soon be drafted into the Army.

Oh, no.

You can imagine the reverberations across the country.

And this letter was sent to President Eisenhower by three female fans who’d resigned themselves to his induction, but they had a request.

It goes, Dear President Eisenhower, my girlfriends and I are writing all the way from Montana.

We think it’s bad enough to send Elvis Presley in the army, but if you cut his sideburns off, we will die.

You don’t know how we fell about him.

I don’t see why you have to send him in the army at all, but we beg you, please, please don’t give him a GI haircut.

Oh, please, please don’t.

If you do, we will just about die.

Signed, Elvis Presley, lovers.

And then their names.

And then at the end it says, Presley, Presley is our cry.

P-R-E-S-L-E-Y.

That’s sweet, you know, on a certain level.

They fall in love with him for his looks.

Right.

But I’ve got to say, even with his haircut, he was a pretty handsome man.

Exactly.

I don’t think they knew exactly what they were going to get.

Yeah, not bad, right?

Elvis Presley dressed up as a soldier with the soldier’s haircut.

It was like, all right.

But this letter is just so soulful, right?

And it’s handwritten.

It’s in cursive, you know?

And it’s so different from an email.

It’s so much more effective.

No self-consciousness about what would become of this letter.

Right.

We will just die.

We’ll share some more from the book Letters of Note, compiled by Sean Usher, later on in the show.

If you’ve got a question about language, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Stephanie Halver from Frisco, Texas.

Hi, Stephanie. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Stephanie.

Well, I’ve had a question since I was a little kid about a, I guess, a family recipe.

I’m originally from eastern North Carolina, and growing up, the story goes,

My grandfather came up with this sort of sauce concoction that he called julep. And I never knew

What it meant. I only ever heard the word julep on my mother’s side of the family. And what did

It mean there? Well, julep was, it didn’t have a recipe. Basically what they would do is take a

Old ketchup bottle, well not old, but when the ketchup got down to a certain level, then they

Would pour in apple cider vinegar because, you know, North Carolinians like to add vinegar to

Everything. And they’d shake up the bottle, put the cap back on, take off the label, and that was

Julep. Oh, and what would you put it on? Fried chicken, mainly, and sometimes that North Carolina

Style barbecue, the finely chopped pork. Stephanie, did anybody in your family use julep to refer to

A sweet, sugary drink? The classic mint julep, like you might drink in horse races? No, it was

Just sort of ingrained as a kid that julep was this sauce, and it was a family thing.

I never heard it outside of my family.

If I had gone to a restaurant and asked for julep, they would have thought I was crazy.

Well, they probably would have brought you a drink with a whole lot of bourbon and a

Whole lot of sugar and a whole lot of ice.

Yeah, it’s a little sprig of mint on top, right?

Very, very powerful.

Wow.

I’ve never heard of julep used in this way.

I wonder if there’s some kind of just, they’re just taking the idea of julep as a concoction.

There’s a mix of things.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There is a word juleper in the Ozarks that refers to the juice that comes off of a cooked fowl.

That’s different.

Yeah.

That’s different.

I’ve never heard of it used that way.

I wonder if it’s just a family word.

Yeah.

I thought it was growing up.

It was like a nonsense word to me because none of my family drinks.

So we didn’t have any experience with that.

Oh, really?

But that’s interesting because the interesting thing is if your family is not a drinking family, that leaves a lexical use for these drinking-related words.

And it would be easy for you to justify, not consciously maybe, one, to justify borrowing julep from the drinking terminology and applying it to something else.

That reminds me of when I was young.

We had a car that we bought that was, the color for it was champagne mist, but my parents insisted on calling it Baptist beige.

You know, I had always wondered about it because I asked my father or asked my mother if my grandfather drank.

And she said, no, he passed away before I was born.

So I never got to ask him about that.

And he never lived outside of eastern North Carolina.

He was a tobacco farmer.

That’s where they stayed except for his service in World War II.

So I didn’t know if it had been used anywhere else in the U.S. If he had lived there.

But, you know, he stayed in that one area.

Well, I’ve never heard of that concoction.

Did anybody else in that area make it and call it something else?

I don’t know.

You know, like I said, North Carolinians add vinegar to just about everything.

And the North Carolina style of barbecue is a vinegar-based sauce.

It’s very runny.

So there may be some people who mix ketchup with vinegar, among other things, to use for the barbecue.

But I never heard julep used in any other family.

Well, let’s put the word out.

We’re lighting up the searchlights and starting the sirens, I guess, on this one, Martha, aren’t we?

Yes.

So do you know, A, you, the listener, know of the concoction ketchup plus vinegar called julep?

And B, if you know it, where do you know it from?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send your details and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Stephanie, we’re going to find out.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks, Stephanie.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

More stories about what we say and how we say it.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We’ve been talking during this show about the new book, Letters of Note,

And there’s a letter that I want to share that was written by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman.

In June of 1945, his wife Arlene, his high school sweetheart, died of tuberculosis at the age of 25.

And 16 months later, he wrote his late wife a love letter and sealed it in an envelope that remained unopened until after his death in 1988.

And I can’t read all of it, but I’m going to read parts of it that I think are so moving.

He starts out, I adore you, sweetheart.

I know how much you like to hear that, but I don’t only write it because you like it.

I write it because it makes me warm all over inside to write it to you.

I find it hard to understand in my mind what it means to love you after you are dead.

But I still want to comfort and take care of you.

And I want you to love me and care for me.

I want to have problems to discuss with you.

I want to do little projects with you.

And later he says, when you were sick, you worried because you could not give me something

That you wanted to and thought I needed.

You needn’t have worried.

Just as I told you then, there was no real need because I loved you in so many ways so much.

And now it is clearly even more true. You can give me nothing now, yet I love you so that you

Stand in my way of loving anyone else. But I want you to stand there. You dead are so much better

Than anyone else alive. And then toward the end, he says, my darling wife, I do adore you.

I love my wife. My wife is dead. And he signs it rich and then adds, P.S. Please excuse my not

Mailing this, but I don’t know your new address. And the whole letter just takes my breath away.

And part of the reason is because I think what he’s articulating here is something that you

Experience when you lose somebody like that. You don’t really lose them, but your relationship

Changes. Right, exactly. Yeah. It brings back a lot of memories for me as well, for the people

That I’ve lost. And it’s interesting to think such a brilliant man was, he’s got this part in the

Letter where he talks about not being able to articulate exactly what he’s thinking. I mean,

He’s done a great job in this letter and it’s beautiful and I don’t think I could do it. But

There’s a moment in there where he admits, I just don’t really know how to put this down.

That last line you read though, I took that as a joke when I read the letter. I really think

That that might have been the kind of the relationship they had where they could talk

Seriously to each other about their feelings and about their intentions and plans and all the stuff

They’re going to do and had done together and then also a little bit of joke like i don’t know

Your current address you know i i and i thought i saw an echo there of the relationship that he’s

Had with this woman isn’t it beautiful yeah well there’s lots of letters in this book like this

This is letters of note compiled by sean usher some of them are serious like that they’ll move

You, and some of them are hilarious. Many of them are significant in history. There are letters

Written on cuneiform tablets. There are letters written in many other foreign languages on bark

From Russia in a strange dialect from the 1300s. There’s a letter from a pregnant wife to her dead

Husband from Korea from the 1500s. Really astonishing stuff in here. Some of it you’ve

Never seen before. Most of this stuff has not been around the block. If you’ve got a favorite letter,

Maybe something somebody wrote to you or something that you found on the Letters of Note website,

We’d love to have you share it with us, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Zoya. I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Oh, okay, we know where that is.

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

Thank you. So I’m taking a 19th and 20th century literature course at UCSD,

And I came across a peculiar phrase.

So the phrase shows up twice in a short story called Why I Live at the P.O. By Eudora Welty.

I’m not sure if you’ve heard of it.

Sure.

Yeah, of course.

It was written in 1941.

The phrase that I’m referencing is the man in the moon.

And the two times it’s brought up is first, quote, Papa, Daddy, you know, I wouldn’t anymore want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon.

And second, she has no more manners than the man in the moon.

And I find the phrase peculiar because the context seems to be discrepant in both sentences.

So I’m wondering if this was just a colloquialism referring to the interest in the 40s of space and lunar exploration or what it means.

Let me ask you, what do you take away from the first of these?

Papa Daddy, you know I wouldn’t anymore want you to cut off your beard than the man in the moon. Is that it?

Yes, that’s exactly it.

And I take away from that just that she wouldn’t want Papa Daddy to cut off his beard because it would emasculate him.

Okay.

So I think something about that.

Something really interesting happening here with the man in the moon is it’s almost contentless.

The semantic value of that entire phrase only represents an extreme form of speech.

It simply means, I really mean it.

Or it’s a way of adding emphasis or underscoring the seriousness of the person’s statement, the statement that comes before it.

And I think that applies to both of these.

Now, historically, when you talk about the man in the moon, like, I don’t know him from the man in the moon.

You’re talking about I don’t know him compared to anyone else.

He’s no different to me than anyone else that I might see on the street and not know.

And so we’re really talking about this rare character who is unusual and is a faraway place

And maybe was put there in punishment because that’s sometimes the story of the man in the moon.

It’s just a way of expressing this extreme kind of sentiment.

It’s really not about any man in the two sentences you quote at all.

Well, yeah, the expression man in the moon goes all the way back to the 14th century.

It’s really, really, really old.

Yeah, it’s really old, but used in this particular way like Eudora Welty uses it,

It’s not about really the myth at all.

One of the myths was that the man in the moon was put up there

Because he had been picking up brush or sticks on a Sunday.

And if you look in the moon in a particular way,

Some people think they see a man carrying a bundle of sticks.

Other people think the whole moon looks like a face,

Very much like the early French films with the rocket in the eye.

But many cultures around the world, including the Chinese, various European cultures, have all seen a face in the moon.

So we find back this particular use of the man on the moon to refer to anyone or not at all.

That’s kind of what we’re talking about here.

Like, I wouldn’t want you to shave off that beard.

Not at all.

She has no manners.

Not at all.

I mean, really, that’s what the man on the moon is doing here, emphasizing this negative in both of these statements.

Yeah.

So nothing about space exploration.

Nope.

That’s so very interesting.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

I was really scratching my head.

We’re glad you called, Zoya.

Thank you so much.

Okay, thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

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

One of the things I really like about the book Letters of Note is that it includes a lot of correspondence between adults and children.

As you mentioned before, the kid who wrote to the Australian equivalent of NASA, right?

There are a couple of letters from cartoonists to kids who’ve written them.

I don’t know where they found the time, but one of them is from Charles Schultz,

Who’s responding to a kid’s suggestion that he get rid of an early, early character in the peanut strip called Charlotte Braun.

Right.

And he writes back and he tells the kid, basically, that’s a good idea.

I’m going to do it.

But her death is on your head.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But here’s the thing.

My little brother, Jimmy, wrote to Charles Schultz.

And he wrote him years ago to say that he had a favorite blanket, just like Linus.

And when he runs, the blanket flaps and it sounds like pigeons taking off.

He wrote Charles Schultz that.

And Charles Schultz wrote him back.

Oh, that’s wonderful.

Isn’t that something?

That is wonderful.

And included a little illustration, too, for my brother Jim.

Where did they find the time to do that?

I know you and I both do try to write back to as many people as possible.

It itself is a full-time job.

Absolutely.

But I appreciate the position of writing back to the kids.

We do try to always respond to the children when they write.

We try.

And there’s a sensitivity about the letters to children.

I noticed that Sean Usher, the compiler of this book, Letters of Note, has really been careful to make sure that there’s no meanness there,

That when people are talking to each other, if there is meanness, it’s because they’re equals, right?

It’s not somebody beating up on another person who’s helpless or weak or in a disadvantaged position.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you? This is Susan Buller from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Susan. Welcome to the program. How are you?

I’m wonderful. Thank you very much. It’s great to be talking to you all.

Great to have you on the show. How can we help you?

There is an expression that I have heard my grandmother use throughout my life,

And I have never heard anyone else use this at all.

And when I have asked other people if they’d ever heard this expression, they were unfamiliar with it.

And so I was just curious to know about its derivation and where it’s most commonly used, if at all.

Okay.

The expression is bored for the holohorn.

Bored for the holohorn.

And when would your grandmother use this?

In a self-deprecating way, when she was saying, I’m so foolish or I’m so crazy, I should have thought to do whatever she should.

She would just say, I should be bored for the holohorn.

Okay.

And was she from Texas as well?

No, Mississippi.

Mississippi.

Okay.

Yeah, bored for the holohorn has to do with a supposed disease of cattle.

And it was a condition that took many different forms.

It was kind of questionable, but basically if you had hollow horn, if you were a cow and you had hollow horn,

It meant you had a dullness in the countenance.

Maybe you were really wanting to lie down all the time.

Why am I talking about cows in second person?

I have no idea.

Anyway.

Empathy.

Empathy.

But the cows are in need of help.

Yeah.

They’re dragging ass, basically.

They’re not right. They’re just not right. Or maybe they’re kind of giddy and crazy.

But this supposed disease hollow horn was diagnosed by boring a hole into the horn of the cow.

And if the horn seemed hollow, that’s how they would diagnose the disease.

And I’m not sure that it was a real thing.

Yeah, this is before veterinary medicine was a real thing.

Yeah.

And what I’ve read is that they would drill a hole down through the horn and then put medicine in there.

Yeah, sometimes turpentine, sometimes salt.

Gunpowder even.

Yeah.

Yeah, it sounds terrible.

So if you’re smacking your forehead and saying, oh, I ought to be bored for the holohorn, it means, you know, there’s something wrong with me.

I should be checked out.

Yeah, yeah, I need medical treatment.

Yes.

Like I say, it was her way of saying, you know, I must be crazy, you know.

I should be bored for the holohorn.

Yeah.

There we go.

Yeah, I think that’s a match.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Well, that’s the best we can do.

It sounds like they were applying veterinary terms to a human being.

Thank you so much for the research and letting me know what she was actually talking about.

Sure thing.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks, Susan.

I appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Did your grandmother say something weird that you can’t figure out?

Call us about at 877-929-9673 or send it in email to words@waywordradio.org

Or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Remember when we talked a few weeks ago about name regret?

You name your child something and then you think,

Whoa, maybe I shouldn’t have done that.

Leah Sugar from Madison, Wisconsin, wrote us to say that

She had that experience with their son who is now two years old.

His name is Bodie, which makes sense in this country.

But she said the issue came when we took Bodie to France to visit some friends.

Unfortunately, it soon became clear that to French speakers, the name Bodie sounds exactly like the word body.

So when we would tell people his name, they would give us a strange look and say something like bodyguard or bodybuilder.

And she said, since then, we have asked many foreign friends and they all say it’s one of the most bizarre names they’ve ever heard.

Of course, we say, why didn’t you tell us before?

And she said he’s two now and just goes by Bo when he’s traveling.

Oh, there we go.

That actually is his traveling name.

He’s already working on the incognito.

Right.

You know, since we aired that segment, I talked to my son about it.

He actually heard a little bit over the radio,

And he wanted to know if anybody actually named their children God

Because he thought that that would be really funny.

And I told him that in some cultures people name their children the equivalent of Jesus,

And he just thinks that’s the most unusual thing.

It’s all about what you’re used to, right?

Yeah, good point.

877-99-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jimmy, and I’m calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Jimmy. Welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

I’ve found myself in the last couple of years using the phrase, Lord, love a duck.

And it’s when I’m frustrated, usually with myself.

And I’ve looked it up.

I know it’s British, but where did it come from as a phrase?

I mean, why Lord love a duck?

Why not Lord love my soul or something?

Or some other animal.

Yeah.

Lord love a pig.

Lord love the little baby lambs.

There you go.

Lord love my dog.

Oh, this is a good question.

You’re right.

It’s British.

I’m glad you found that out.

Americans use it, though, too.

It may have started there, but definitely came across.

Some people say this is a classic Cockney phrase, although it’s going to be old-fashioned Cockney if it’s actually true.

There are three things happening in there.

One of them we can’t really talk very much about on the radio because it is a Lord love a duck rhymes with a very offensive four letter English word.

And it is related to this. Yes.

It is also related to the mildly offensive for the love of Christ.

So it’s a variant of that as well.

And in general, Lord Lovaduk or Cor Lovaduk or just Lovaduk are all euphemisms for trying not to say God’s name or trying not to take his name in vain or trying not to take Jesus’ name in vain.

It’s another one of the like dozens or maybe even more than a hundred ways in English to try to not take the Lord’s name in vain.

And this is one of those.

But they all kind of reinforce each other.

So Lovaduk has multiple paths before it comes to your words.

That makes complete sense.

Because I have realized that I replaced another word that when I’m angry has two syllables with this.

There we go.

So I can prove my speech.

This is much more polite, right?

Much more gentle.

I want to throw one other thing here to you two southern ladies,

Which is there is, interestingly, evidence that shows this may be related to the kind of polite way

That when somebody does something wrong or doesn’t act well or doesn’t dress well,

You say, God, love them.

Oh, yeah.

It’s related to that kind of way you’re like, Lord, help them.

They just need all the assistance they can get.

So it may be related to that as well.

We find this frequently in English, by the way, particularly with idioms and slang,

That a variety of terms will reinforce each other until there’s one winner

Who kind of like takes its strength and inspiration from all these other things

That are happening that sound similar or are used in similar circumstances.

Oh.

Yeah.

Well, I’ve learned something today, and you should learn something new every day.

Once an hour.

You should learn something once an hour.

Once an hour.

Ooh, I’m going to have to get to work.

Thank you for calling, Jimmy.

All right?

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Best wishes to you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org,

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The show’s coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

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