Month of Sundays (episode #1403)

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, you know what a pie chart is, right?

Yeah, sure.

It’s one of those graphic representations of data, right? Round with the triangular wedges.

Yeah, little wedges that represent different parts of the whole.

Well, you know, the image of pie charts is so familiar that it’s hard to imagine a time when we didn’t have them.

But of course, there was such a time. And apparently the guy who invented the pie chart was a Scottish engineer named William Playfair. This was back in 1801.

But here’s the thing. He never bothered to name this type of graph. We didn’t see the word pie chart until the early 1920s.

Now, why am I so excited about pie charts?

I don’t know.

Because do you know what they call a pie chart in French?

Playfair.

Le Playfair.

Le Playfair.

Oh, after the guy?

No, they call it a camembert.

Oh, after the cheese wheel. Isn’t that wonderful?

I love that.

A camembert.

Yeah, yeah.

Now, there are different terms in France. You know, there are terms that translate as circular diagram. But it’s also commonly called in many parts of France the camembert.

And you know what else is really cool? You know what they call it in Brazil?

Oh, I have no idea.

The guava.

The guava.

No.

Oh, wow.

No, they call it the grafico pizza.

The grafico pizza.

The pizza graphic, isn’t that great?

That’s great, yeah.

It’s just a reminder that sometimes it takes looking at terms in other languages to give us new insights about the terms that we eat.

Because, I mean, when do you ever think about pie when you’re thinking about a pie chart, really?

Well, there is that famous graphic that goes around, which actually is a picture of a pie with a slice taken out, and the caption is, a pie chart showing the amount of pie that I ate.

Yeah, I guess in that case, you’re right.

So there’s culture embedded in the language, sometimes deeply, but here on the surface.

Yes, culture, history.

I love it.

Emotion.

This is the place to find out more about those kinds of things.

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Email words@waywordradio.org at the Twitter handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Kelsey. I’m from Tallahassee, Florida, and I have a question about the slang to Ralph.

To Ralph?

Okay, Kelsey from Tallahassee. Welcome to the show. We’d love to talk about vomit. Let’s talk about Ralphing.

You mean as a verb, right?

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like to throw up or to vomit.

Yeah.

You need to tell us why you’re thinking about this.

It’s a funny story. I was putting my tax forms together this year, and I was sitting in my living room on the floor because I have dogs, and so I was petting my dog.

And my older dog came over and threw up on my W-2.

Yeah. Talk about expressing an opinion. So I had to go in the next day and ask my boss for another one. It was just this ridiculous conversation. It was something I never expected to have to talk to my boss about.

Right. And so I was relaying this story to one of my friends, and I was looking for a more clever way to say my dog threw up on something.

Yes. And so I was trying to spell to Ralph. And I was spelling it. I was going, gosh, I don’t actually know how to spell Ralph.

And so I tried to look it up. And of course, it wasn’t there. I don’t know why I thought it would be because it’s slang. But I did find the word Ralphia, which is a plant, a type of bush, I believe.

And it said something in the definition of this word that said that, you know, basically, if you eat small quantities of it, it has a purgative quality. And I thought, like, it makes you throw up.

And I was wondering if there was a connection there. This all happened while I was teaching. I’m a teacher. I’m a music teacher.

And I was teaching this class of middle school boys, and they got really excited about it. And we were all excited about Awolfia, and could this be a connection?

Have we found the etymology of barfing? You know, like, it was just really exciting.

And so I had to call.

Exactly. It was a beautiful learning moment. So, you know, I just had to call and ask, because we have to know.

You know, my class has to know whether this is the truth.

Oh, my goodness.

Unfortunately, no, it doesn’t come from the plant name.

Oh, gosh, that’s so disappointing.

But it’s a little better than that, I think. It’s onomatopoeic. It comes from the sound that you make when you vomit.

Really?

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, and so there are a lot of different forms of this. It dates to the 1960s, maybe 1964 or earlier. And you might say you’re called Ralph because it sounds like you’re saying the guy’s name. There’s some elaborated forms that came along much later to talk to Ralph on the big white phone, with the assumption that you actually, your dog didn’t actually make it to the bathroom. But if the assumption that you made it to the bathroom, you put the job where it needed to be put.

Right, right.

Well, it’s the same idea with, I mean, some people say calling Earl.

Yeah.

Earl.

Yeah.

And it might be where the word hurl comes from when you talk about vomiting. All of these having to do with the sound. It’s a very distinct sound that we don’t make at other times.

Yep.

And we have to find ways to talk about it.

So, Ralph.

I guess that’s true, yeah.

How clever are you to find that plant, though? Because I’d never heard of that plant.

Yeah.

Yeah, Rowolfia. It’s spelled R-O-W, and then like wolf, and then I-A. Yeah, it looks like Rowolfia comes from the name of a German botanist.

Oh, interesting.

His last name was Rauwulf, which is interesting because the name Ralph comes from old words that mean wolf council.

There we go.

Very nice.

You know what you can do, though? You never know. If you want something to look up, even though the plant name didn’t pan out, have them look up onomatopoeia and then try to think of words that fit the definition.

Ooh, that’s a good idea.

Yeah, that’s great. Because onomatopoeia actually is fun to say, and it’s got a really complicated spelling, so that’s a great one for the spelling list.

Oh, yeah.

And the thing is, I’m a music teacher. Like, I’m not even an English teacher. And my kids get so excited. We do the word of the day, and they always get excited about it.

Oh, my gosh.

You’re my kind of teacher, Kelsey. Seriously.

But you can work onomatopoeia into a music lesson easily, right?

Absolutely.

Oh, yeah. I mean, you could just talk about the word boom, for example. I think that was the word of the day a few months ago.

Yeah.

You could talk about a drum booming. A drum booms. A boom is onomatopoeic.

Yeah.

All right. Well, Kelsey, you’re a delight to talk to, and this is really great. I love hearing the stories from inside the classroom. Sounds like you’re training up a lot of bright kids there.

Well, I hope so. Yeah, cultivating that curiosity. And I hope you got a refund.

Oh, yeah. No, it all worked out fine. Everything was okay.

Very good. I would never send my puked-on W-2 form to the IRS. That’s like a guaranteed audit, right?

Yeah.

Here’s another one. This is not a good sign. I need to fix it.

Oh, my gosh. That’s hilarious. Kelsey, thanks for calling. Best wishes to you.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

I came across an expression the other day that was new to me in a news story. Have you heard the expression, at the coal face?

Yes, that’s British, right?

Yes, yes. A particular group is at the coal face of social issues. You’re in the vanguard. You’re in the front lines of it, on the cutting edge.

Yes, yes. And you know the origin then? Newcastle, coal mining, right?

Exactly. If you’re at the Coalface, you’re actually digging into it and loading it up in the carts to take back.

That’s right. You are the miner at the Coalface.

Nice. I wasn’t familiar with that one.

At the Coalface. It’s a good one.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So something’s good in theory, but.

We know it in the U.S., but we don’t use it, right?

I didn’t know it until yesterday.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Dana calling from New York.

How are you?

Dana, welcome to the show. I’m doing well, and Grant looks pretty darn good himself.

I’m fantastic. New York where? I always have to. New York City? Upstate New York?

Yes. New York City, yes.

Where in New York City?

I live in Washington Heights.

Okay, sure. I know where that is. That’s great. Good Dominican food up there, right?

Yes, it is. We call it Upstate Manhattan, so it’s a nice place.

Upstate Manhattan.

What can we do for you, Dana?

Well, I grew up in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia.

Well, my granny had lots of colorful, colorful phrases.

But the one that kept coming to mind was anytime people would start to get upset around her,

She’d say, don’t get all up in the papers.

And I knew what she meant, but I had no idea where that came from.

What did she mean?

She just meant don’t get upset.

Let things go.

Just let it go.

Don’t get all, as she used to call it, frustrated.

So she kind of mixed flustered and frustrated together.

But, yeah, that’s what we understood she meant.

I have no idea what being all up in the papers had to do.

Do you think she might have meant don’t do anything so crazy that you get your name and your mugshot in the newspapers?

Oh, you know, that would make sense.

Because that’s what I’m thinking.

I’m not sure if she meant it, yeah.

There was a time in American history where you didn’t want to be in the newspapers.

Right.

Most of the people who were in the newspapers were people who were up to no good.

I mean, you might have the guy opening his new business and you might have the politician who’s been elected.

But most of the other stuff was either the death announcements or the crime report, the crime blotter.

Yeah, I think ladies were told to have your name in the paper only when you’re born, you get married, and when you die.

Yeah.

That’s it.

And these days, we’re all happy to be quoted.

What do you think of the new video game system?

We’re like, I’ll tell you a whole thing you can put in there.

We’re happy to be quoted on any topic.

I love that.

I had never crossed my mind at all.

That makes perfect sense.

Her particular version of that, don’t get all up in the papers.

Is got another feature I think is worth talking about here,

The all-up in or the all even or the all-up.

The all-up is two intensifiers that we use together

To just really mean more of the same.

So you could say, Martha, don’t do that.

You’ll get in the newspapers.

That doesn’t sound very exciting.

But I can say, Martha, don’t do that.

You’ll get all up in the newspapers.

All up in the newspapers.

And it’s even more in the newspapers, as if that’s possible,

As if there’s like a, I don’t know,

Put you on the front page, top of the fold, right?

Right.

Big picture.

Right.

That’s great.

Oh, I love it.

I love it.

So that’s probably what she meant.

She sounds like a colorful lady?

She was definitely a colorful lady.

I kept trying to come up with phrases that I could say on the radio.

And so that was one that came up that I knew it was okay to say.

But it took you a while?

Dana, you can send the other ones to us in email.

We won’t share them on the air.

Yes, or online.

Facebook, Twitter, let us know.

Put them on Facebook.

Exactly. Exactly.

All right. I really appreciate your call, Dana.

You make me homesick for New York every time I talk to a New Yorker.

You’re making me homesick for the Blue Ridge.

I love it here.

I’m wearing the Blue Ridge.

See, I got both of you in one call.

I know.

You guys, thanks so much.

Yeah, take care now.

Love to say so much. Thank you.

Thank you.

Oh, that’s great. Stay out of the papers.

All right. Bye-bye.

It is a familiar story.

We hear it in our email and our voicemail,

And when we’re doing speeches around the country,

People say, my grandmother or my grandfather used to say this thing, and I’ve always wondered.

Well, this is the show where you get the burr out from under your saddle.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org, and we’ll figure it out together.

One word, many stories, connecting families through linguistic heirlooms.

Stay with us.

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.

And joining us on the line from New York City is the one and only John Chaneski.

Hi, guys.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

You have something wonderful for us, I hope.

I do.

Last night I was watching this movie called R.I.P.D.

I don’t know if you guys know it.

Oh, yeah.

The Police of the Dead, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

Ryan Gosling and I think it was Jeff Bridges, part of this police force.

That’s the P.D. part.

That goes after dead people or demons or something.

That’s the R.I.P. part.

And I enjoyed it, but I like everything except intolerance.

So that doesn’t really mean anything.

In any case, I was thinking that the screenwriter must have just gotten the idea from putting R.I.P. and P.D. together, right?

Now, even if that’s not the case, I bet I could come up with a dozen more movies just by making a portmanteau of two initialisms.

And here we go.

Here’s the quiz.

And here we go.

All right.

So four letters.

Well, not necessarily.

Oh, okay.

There could be more, yeah.

I’ll try to give you lots of clues as to the initialisms.

In this sci-fi movie, an inventor creates the perfect nanny for his toddler, but it consists mostly of a flat panel television.

Now, that would be…

E.T. TV?

That’s not bad. I thought of a T.L.C.D. T.L.C.D.

Oh, T.L.C.D., nice.

Right. And here are some M.O.R.E.

Okay?

All right.

In this feel-good film, a guy in his 60s goes back to get his degree,

But his attempt to join the basketball team is met with resistance by the governing body of university sports.

So NCAA something.

Right.

NCAA, what’s the degree that begins with an A?

Think of someone in his 50s and 60s.

RP.

NCAAARP. Nice.

NCAAARP, yes.

Another college film, this rollicking comedy, is about a geek who becomes the most popular student around after inheriting a highly successful computer company.

IBMOC.

Yes, IBMOC.

Nice.

IBM and Big Man on Campus.

Very good.

It’s kind of old-fashioned.

I thought I had to explain that.

Do people still say that?

BMOC is Big Man on Campus?

I don’t know.

It seems antiquated to me.

I guess not.

Yeah.

This comedy is about a widely disliked government agency that tries to improve its image by sending out finely engraved invitations when they call you in for a tax audit.

IRSVP.

Yes, IRSVP.

Nice.

Be sure to RSVP that audit.

This documentary is about a cable company that provides channels with great resolution, but only to customers with advanced degrees.

PhD.

PhD TV.

Yes.

Very good.

This documentary tells of the surprising history of antidepressant use in Russia, Latvia, Lithuania, and the Ukraine during the 70s and 80s.

Well, USSR something, but SRO?

Oh, oh, oh.

Martha’s got it.

Serotonin reuptake inhibitors.

Yeah.

So USSR I.

USSR I is correct.

Yes, very good.

An alternate history of the U.S.

This film tells the inspiring story of how the 36th president of the U.S. resigned to become a pitcher for the Houston Astros.

MLBJ?

Yes, very good. MLBJ.

Major League Baseball, LBJ.

Nicely done.

Those are our initialism combination movies.

By the way, if any movies get made from this, this is a standard disclaimer I put on all of my puzzles.

Any movies get made from any of these, I retain all rights.

So there you go.

I think some of these are going to have trouble getting greenlit.

You think so?

I don’t know.

Maybe Bryan Cranston.

Yeah.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week with another great puzzle.

Thanks, guys.

See you then.

Bye-bye.

The show is about words and language and speech and writing well, literature, you name it.

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 Madeline from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Madeline, welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Oh, well, I have a delightful assignment to edit a book of children’s games.

Oh, nice.

These are games maybe from the 1940s or 1950s.

Oh, cool.

And they were collected by rural recreation leaders, the kind of people who were then working with 4-H clubs or church camps.

And one of these games is called Hull Go.

And the way the game goes is that children have fistfuls of some number of beans or corn kernels, and they go around the room until they find another child.

And then they stick out their hand, and one of them goes, whole goal, and then the other child says, hands full.

And then the first one says, how many, and then the one child, the other child, has to guess the number of beans.

Anyway, I was just wondering, where does whole goal come from?

So if they guess right, they get to keep all of the beans or corn kernels or marbles or whatever they’re using, right?

Right, and then you run up to another child.

And so all the children are running around, and whoever the person wins, who ends up with the most number of beans or all the beans, you know, after a period of time.

This is like capitalism in minimum form.

Start him early.

Something like that.

Oh, Holgol’s got an interesting history.

You know, years ago, for my old dictionary website, which you can now find merged with the A Way with Words website, I wrote an entry for Holy Golly, which is a phrase that we use to mean disorganized or haphazard.

And it could be like, yeah, she didn’t even fold the clothes. She just shoved them in the dresser all Holy Golly, you know.

And it turns out my theory at the time was that Holy Golly is related to this game, Hol Goll.

I’m not exactly sure why, but there was some evidence in the citation records that kind of showed that the people had borrowed the Holy Golly from the game.

But the clue here that gets to the answer of your question, where hull, gull, that’s H-U-L-L-G-U-L-L, comes from usually two words or two words hyphenated.

You can find a clue to the answer in the Dictionary of American Regional English, one of our favorite books in the world.

And in there, they quote the English dialect dictionary and speculating that hull is an English dialect word meaning to cover or to hide.

And gull refers to a different kids game called gullstones where they used rough stones in place of marbles.

Maybe the kinds of stones that a bird might collect when building a nest.

Do gulls do that?

There’s a certain kind of birds that do that.

Do ox do that?

Some kinds of birds do that.

I don’t know that there’s a connection there.

But anyway, so the English dialect dictionary supposes that it comes from gullstones, and the Dictionary of American Regional English buys into that assumption.

So we’re pretty sure, let’s say 95% confident, that hull comes from an old English dialect word meaning to hide or to cover up.

And the gull part probably is thrown in there just because it rhymes, but it might also be related to gull stones used in other kids’ games in the UK.

I like that.

Cool, right?

Very cool. Yeah, these are fun games.

I have to tell you, though, I’m really interested in the book that you’re editing.

I am too, yeah.

Because Martha and I have talked numerous times on the show about Iona and Peter Opie, who did a lot of children’s research.

And this is the kind of stuff that they loved, and they’ve written some really wonderful books about kids’ games.

And it sounds like if you’ve got old records from the 1940s and 50s, and these are being turned into a book, that’s pretty cool.

Because when they get it pre-internet kind of, I don’t know, it’s a little bit before people were just borrowing all their games and catchphrases from television, right?

Oh, yeah, it’s golden.

But yeah, these are games.

I sometimes try to Google them to find out background, and they aren’t there.

So, yeah, definitely pre-internet, but also definitely passed on and used around the country.

Yeah, I thought you were going to say you tried the games.

Oh, I’ve definitely tried the games.

We’ve got 200 in them, and I’ve done 100 of them myself.

That is really cool.

Thank you so much, Madeline.

Thanks, Madeline.

Yeah, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with a word or phrase that stumped you, 877-929-9673, or you can send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before about threats that are sort of entertaining, like I’m going to snatch you bald-headed or I’m going to knock you into next week.

I just came across another one that I like.

It’s when I’m done with you, there won’t be enough left of you to snore.

Enough left to snore.

That sounds violent.

Tiny, tiny bit.

Tiny, tiny bit.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is James S. Brown from San Antonio, Texas.

James?

Yes.

James S. Brown.

Welcome to the show, James.

Yeah, the S stands for sensational, but that’s between me and a couple other people.

But anyway.

Nice.

All right.

Now everybody knows.

James Sensational Brown, what’s on your mind?

Well, of course, I’m from Texas, as you can tell from my slang.

We have a Texas slang around here.

And, you know, the type of language that we use, you know, we go different places in the country.

Nobody understands what we’re saying.

And, well, not, you know, generally speaking, anyway.

And the other day I was talking with a friend of mine, and I’ve been using this term all my life.

I never know where it comes from.

For instance, one of my friends that I went to school with many, many moons ago, he asked me had I seen a certain person.

And I told him, you know, not what I’m thinking about, I told him, man, I hadn’t seen old John in Coon’s ages.

I hadn’t seen hide nor hair of old John in Coon’s ages.

And, of course, nobody knows what that means, including me.

But, you know, what that means, I guess, in England is I hadn’t seen the guy.

Right. Yeah.

Right.

Yeah, so both those expressions mean you haven’t seen somebody in a long time, right?

Right, right.

Hide nor hair, you know, come on.

I don’t know what the hide nor hair is.

I guess it has something to do with a rabbit.

I don’t know.

Well, it has to do with any kind of animal, and actually it’s much, much older than Texas.

It goes back to the 1400s.

If you’re talking about hide or hair, it means the entire animal.

Everything you can see on the outside, including human beings, because we have hide and we have hair, so to speak.

Are you serious?

Yeah, it’s pretty much that simple.

Century? Yeah, 1400s.

Yes, the 15th century.

Okay. Now, what about the other part?

Well, the other part apparently goes back to an old idea that raccoons live a long time.

It’s a reference to raccoons, although these days, there’s such a sensitivity to that word that I wouldn’t use it.

Yeah, yeah. But around here, you know, when you say stuff like that, people know what you’re saying.

You know, there’s no pun or any ill feelings in continued because this is Texas.

We have found that Texans love to talk about the way they talk.

James. Yes. Yeah, I’ve been living there for 57 years so far. And trust me, that’s not a whole lot I have not heard.

I thought it was kind of cool because I’ve been saying it all my life and I never knew what it was until y’all just told me.

How about that? Neither hide nor hair.

Neither hide nor hair. And that’s just normal language from around here.

That is so cool.

But I really appreciate you guys doing the research and enlightening me on that.

At least I can tell my friends now what the heck we’re talking about.

Well, we can tell our friends that we just talked to James Sensational Brown.

I think that’s pretty cool.

Yeah, I am a musician.

I’m not.

If people ask me, are you the real James Brown? I tell them, yeah, I’m the real one.

The other guy was a fake.

Well, James, we are delighted that you called.

I hope you call again sometime.

Oh, thank you for having me.

I really appreciate it.

And thank you for doing the research, and we’ll be listening in on your radio station.

Okay.

Thanks a lot, James.

All right.

Take care now.

Take care.

Yeah, Coons Age is likely to get you in trouble if you’re the wrong person.

It’s saying to the wrong people.

Right.

But it is about 100 years old.

We do believe it comes from a raccoon, and it does have to do with the supposed age that these guys can go, right?

Mm—

I haven’t seen you in a Coons Age.

Yeah.

That’s a long time.

Yeah, you’ve got to be careful with that, right?

Yeah.

Real careful.

Real careful.

People are just likely to misunderstand your intentions.

Yeah. We’d love to talk with you about your language questions, so call us, 877-929-9673, or send them to us an email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We got a cool letter from Charlotte Reinick in Alexandria, Virginia.

She works with the National Park Service.

She’s not a part of it, but she works with them a lot.

And she was talking about some of the lingo that they use to describe different places around Washington.

For example, Ford’s Theater.

They call that Foth, F-O-T-H.

They take the first two letters of each of those words.

She says the Peterson house is across the street from Foth.

It’s the house where Lincoln actually died after being shot in the theater.

And naturally, it is called Peehoe, which sounds like a flowering shrub or perhaps a wee species of shorebird.

And then the Washington Monument, she says, is referred to by all and sundry, aloud and without irony, as Wham-O.

Wham-O?

Yeah, like the Frisbee manufacturer.

She says, I dissolve into giggles every time someone says this.

No one seems to understand why.

I’ve been to Wham-O.

I’ve been up in Wham-O.

I’ve never been up in it.

Oh, you’ve never been up in Wham-O?

Never been up in the Arch, never been up in the Statue of Liberty, never been up in…

What do they call that?

There must be a name for the Statue of Liberty, right?

There must be, but it’s really unusual to have that form of abbreviation.

Usually it’s the first letter.

Yeah.

And to have it institutionalized is really rare, right?

Yeah, I thought it was really cool.

Cool.

Let us know about the language of your workplace, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joel.

Hi, Joel. Where are you calling from?

Dallas, Texas.

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

Hi, I’m Todd. I have a question about the word that people use to describe the stuff that gets your eyes when you wake up, the grainy stuff.

Yeah.

I called it sleep growing up, just use sleep as a noun.

Yeah, me too.

My wife said sleepy fans, and I had a friend growing up who called them iBoogers.

So I was just kind of curious about, are there regional variations on this word?

Or I don’t know.

I just have never, I’ve heard so many different things from different people,

And I didn’t know if it was like just a family thing or what.

Wow.

I don’t know that it’s regional.

It’s definitely a family thing.

I’ve heard iBoogers before.

We used to sleep.

You have sleep in your eyes in my family, though.

Yeah, we called it sleepy.

We had a little diminutive.

Sleepy, yeah.

You get sleepy in your eyes.

Yeah.

There’s a medical term for it.

The body term for it is really kind of bland.

It’s room.

R-H-E-U-M.

Oh.

Yeah.

Besides having that homophonic problem where it sounds like another word, I have room in my eye.

Room for what?

A moat?

Yeah.

Yeah, it comes from the Greek word for to flow.

How did you spell that?

R-H-E-U-M.

Yeah.

Boring word.

I much like the cutesy words that people come up with.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

I love the way in English we turn things into, like, sleep isn’t really an object, but all of a sudden it’s become an object.

Right.

It’s like a process.

I do, too.

You know what we should do with this, Joel?

I mean, we could just list all the ones that we know here, and there’s a ton of them.

I think we need to throw this out to the whole universe of people who listen to this show and just collect them all and talk about all the answers in a future episode.

What do you think?

Yeah.

That sounds great.

Okay, so here it is.

We’ve got a question for you.

A little, what should we call this, fieldwork?

What do you call the gunk that accumulates in the corner of your eyes overnight?

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org, or start the conversation on Facebook and Twitter.

So we’re going to see what happens with that.

I probably got a list here of about 15 or so terms that I was able to collect on this.

Don’t go to Wikipedia for your answers.

Give us the ones that you use in your house, all right?

That’s better, right?

Yeah, sleepy sand.

I like that.

Although I do want to mention the one that I think is the grossest.

Of course, why not?

Duck butter.

Duck butter.

Oh, Lord mercy.

I don’t know.

Why?

Why would you call it duck butter?

That’s gross.

Gross.

I don’t know.

A duck butter.

All right, Joel, we’re going to find out, all right?

We’re going to have big answers for you real soon on the show.

Hang in there.

All right.

Thanks for calling, buddy.

Yeah, thanks.

Bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Although I know that they talk differently in southeast Missouri,

Which is where my father’s people were from,

There’s a lot of stuff in this dialect notes collection from 1904.

There’s one expression which I really like.

You might say this of a person who thinks that they’re going to go someplace

Where everything is perfect and better.

You might say they’re going to find the honey spring and the flitter tree.

And what they mean by that, the flitter actually means fritter,

You know, like you might fry a fritter up in a pan.

So it’s a thing that you eat.

So the honey is going to come from the ground like a spring of water.

And the flitters or fritters are going to grow on trees.

It basically means they’re going to go find the land of milk and honey.

Right.

They have this grass is greener idea.

It’s perfect over there.

I should go there.

Right, right.

Where trebles melt like lemon drops.

What’s the phrase again?

Give it to me again.

The honey spring and the flitter tree.

I love that.

Yeah.

High above the chimney tops.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Bug bears, bugaboos, and what bugs you.

Stay tuned to A Way with Words.

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.

A while back, we had a call from Nancy in Rhode Island.

She was objecting to the term passed away, particularly in news reports.

You remember this, Grant?

It was passed away for dying, right?

Yeah, yeah.

She preferred the term died.

She felt like saying passed away sort of sugar-coated reality and was particularly inappropriate if you talked about somebody who died a tragic death, for example.

And we received a lot of response to this on our Facebook page.

There’s a really interesting discussion going on there.

But I wanted to share in particular this email that we received from Tricia Mendoza.

She lives in Chula Vista, California, which is just south of San Diego.

And she writes, the discussion took me back to the death of our very young son, Martine,

Who died after a four-year struggle with liver disease in 2004.

When our son died, people were quick to say, I’m sorry for your loss.

All I could think of was tough New York detectives on law and order, and it wasn’t comforting.

I kept wanting to yell back, Martine wasn’t a couch or a wallet. He was our son.

In my own grief, I learned a valuable lesson that I hope you’ll pass on.

When offering sympathies, always use the person’s first name when consoling the friend or family member.

If you don’t know the person’s name or it has escaped you in the moment, say your husband, your brother, your dear friend.

Don’t be afraid to say died. Your caller was correct. Passed away minimizes it, and it’s not

gentle but jarring. When you’re in pain from the death of a family member that went before your

time, you just need a little empathy. I’ve had several friends lose children since our son’s.

Death, and I immediately prepare them for all the things people are going to unknowingly say to them that will slice through their hearts.

While my words prepare them and they have told me later that they were thankful, it will be even better still if more people can just say what is so and share that one small moment of another’s grief.

Yeah, I agree with everything that you read there, everything that she had to say. It’s been 25 years since my brother died, and I can remember very clearly feeling like a lot of people were trying to help and somehow making it worse.

I’m saying the wrong thing at the wrong time. If you’ve got thoughts on what to say when someone dies, what’s the language that you use? What’s the language that you’d like to hear? What could have been said better?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dave Sundin.

Dave, where are you calling from?

Tyler, Texas.

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

Well, my question has to do with the word trace, T-R-A-C-E, especially as it’s used in geographic or place names. I’ve heard of the Natchez trace, for example, and I’ve seen more than one subdivision called southern trace. And I just wasn’t familiar with the use of the word in that aspect.

The Natchez trace is probably the one place name in America where most people have heard the word trace in that way, right?

That’s the first one that I ever knew, and I don’t really encounter it all that much in California nor in Missouri. I do think of trace as being Southern.

What about you, Martha?

I think it’s a Southern thing, too. Yeah, and in Kentucky, did you guys use trace in place names?

Now, I come from Southeast Missouri in part, and we didn’t use it in Southeast Missouri, which is practically Kentucky. I don’t remember it in Kentucky, but certainly the Natchez trace.

There’s an interesting etymology behind this, Dave. Trace actually has been in English to mean a path or a road or even just a casual walkway for hundreds of years, for a really long time. Like 700 years or so.

And so when it appears in these place names, it means a path or a trail. That’s it. It’s really that simple.

So it doesn’t necessarily mean the vestiges of something.

No. Well, it kind of does because we’re not talking about, let’s say, we’re not talking about a formal road with asphalt or macadam or even logs or boards or anything that a bulldozer has done. Usually, at least in the past, we were talking about it could have been a deer trail going down to the Salt Lake. It could have been an Indian trail going from village to village. It could have just been a trapper’s trail going from cache to cache.

So it was never anything where the government or any kind of official body set out to build a road. Nothing like that. But, of course, over time that changes and we don’t follow the deer track down to the Salt Lake much anymore.

But you mentioned subdivision names, and I’m thinking so often the subdivisions just don’t leave a trace of what was there before. They call it the woods of St. Thomas. And I think they just use whatever sounds good at the time.

You know, there’s a Latin component to this, too. So we got this word from the French. A lot of the romance languages in Europe have a form of this word. And it usually means in the verb form to trace or to draw or to stretch or to pull or things like that.

And so in the Latin, probably the most common word that might sound familiar is tractus, T-R-A-C-T-U-S. It’s directly related to trace. And it meant a course or a line or a drawing. And probably also related to our word tract of land.

Yes, 100%. So you can imagine where a tract of land is something that is plotted out on a map or plotted out on a deed of property, right? It makes me wonder whether a tractor is made to use to make a tract.

A tractor comes from the word meaning to pull, which is another form of to draw or to bring along.

Right, which again goes back to that same Latin word.

Absolutely. So to draw has a lot of different meanings here. We could mean to draw a line or it could mean to draw, say, a wagon from one area to another, meaning to pull it. Like you draw up your pants in the morning, right?

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, or a contract is drawing together two people.

Drawing up, yeah. So this one verb in Latin and all related to tractus has spun off hundreds of words in French, Italian, Spanish, English, German. It’s really interesting how important this one particular word has been.

So there you go. There’s your trace.

Well, that’s very interesting.

Yeah. It’s crazy the stories that are deep in our language, isn’t it?

Oh, I love it. I love it. And I never really appreciated it until I taught English in Brazil for a few years. What an interesting language we have.

Take care now.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks, guys. I would appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org, and we are all over Facebook and all over Twitter.

Here’s a riddle I got from Eric Berlin, who is a puzzle maker. He posted this on Facebook. What’s green and smells like red paint?

I have no idea.

Green paint.

Right. Even my son rolled his eyes at that one. Send your bad riddles to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call to talk about language, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julie Keller from Pittsburgh, Indiana.

Pittsburgh, Indiana.

Pittsburgh?

Pittsburgh, yes. It’s about 12 miles west of Indianapolis, just on the outskirts.

Okay, so right in the middle of the state. What are we talking about today, Julie?

What are we talking about?

Okay, my three-year-old grandson was over a while back on one of these hot days. And we had filled up his kiddie pool. And so he decided he wanted to add more water, so he went over to the hose and was kind of messing around with the sprayer, and he said to me, how in tarnation do you turn this thing on?

What? He’s three years old?

Three, yes. I thought, where in the heck did he hear that word?

Julie.

Where in tarnation did he hear that word? What other words does he know?

Well, that one I thought was funny. So I called my daughter and I said, where would he have picked up tarnation? And apparently there’s a show, an animated show on cable, one of the cable stations that he watches that has a sheriff that’s a cat. And she said she’s heard him say it on this little cartoon.

So I’ve told the story many times. I think it’s just hilarious that a three-year-old would come up with that. But then it made me think, where did that word come from? I remember Granny on the Beverly Hillbillies saying it a lot. But I just thought that’s an interesting word. So that’s why I contacted you.

I agree. Very interesting word. We can do things with this.

Yeah. Well, it’s an improvement on darnation.

Damnation.

Yes, the even stronger damnation.

Yeah, so I would encourage him to use tarnation. That’s great. And the other thing that’s really interesting about this word is it is also influenced by a word, an old word, tarnal. Can you guess what that means?

Like the tarnal this or that. Again, it would be something that they’d rank. T-A-R-N-A-L, tarnal.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. Well, I know it’s been around a long time, and you hear it in old Westerns.

Yeah, tarnal. I just thought that was such an interesting word for out of the mouth of babes, right?

Exactly.

Yeah, that tarnal that influences the word tarnation comes from an old use of eternal, which is a word that people would use very critically. Like Shakespeare used it that way, the eternal devil. And you could also talk about eternal damnation, which might turn into tarnal damnation, which might turn into tarnation.

Yeah.

Yeah, so that tarnal hose. It’s been around for a while.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

Well, I just thought that was just such a funny story. It’s great. So I thought I would share it with you and see where tarnation came from.

Yeah, it’s American, by the way. The Brits don’t use it.

It’s not much heard except in American media outside this country.

But it is weird for a three-year-old to know that word because you think of it being some, like, crusty old prospector from a 1950s movie.

You’re shaming, yeah.

I do not think of it.

This cartoon that he watches is very cute, and they all have the little Western accents, and I guess that’s what they say.

What’s the show?

What’s the show?

It’s called Sheriff Callie.

Oh, never heard of it.

Okay.

It’s on Disney Junior, and he loves that show.

It’s very sweet, but they must use Tarnation, because that’s apparently where he heard it.

Tarnation, are you playing that?

And then I bet everybody laughs when he says it, and so that just…

Oh, right, yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, it’s been a great story.

Like I said, I’ve told it many times.

It just cracks me up.

That’s fantastic.

Well, give that sweet boy a squeeze for us, will you?

I will.

Well, thank you very much for the information.

Thanks a lot for calling.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, bye.

You know, that reminds me about when I was three years old.

I once piped up and said, well, that sounds logical.

And it was because of a cartoon character.

I think it was Sylvester the Cat or somebody.

But, you know, as soon as I said that, people just cracked up.

And so, of course, I said it more.

Language is a giant topic, and we’d like to get into all of it.

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

Grant, the other day I sent an email to my friend and I said, I’ve got great news to share with you.

But I didn’t tell her what it was.

And she wrote back and said, I’m on tenterhooks.

And I thought, you know what?

I know what that means, but I don’t know what that is.

Nice.

Good.

Do you know what it means?

I looked it up once and I vaguely remember some sharp instrument that you used to pick up.

Was it fish or hay bales or to load a cargo ship?

I can’t remember.

Something like that.

Yeah, I was thinking it had to do with something hanging in a butcher shop.

You know, I’ve also seen tender hooks.

What is it?

It’s tinter, though.

It’s T-E-N-T-E-R, right?

It is.

And it has to do with the old process of washing wool that you’ve woven because it needs to be washed because it still has the oil and the dirt on it.

Right, right.

So you wash it, but then you have to stretch it out so that it doesn’t shrink.

And so it used to be put on these frames that were called tenters.

Tenters.

And the little hooks that you use to stretch them out and make sure that it doesn’t shrink, they were called tenter hooks.

Oh, and this was a common thing because we were in agricultural society back then.

Exactly.

You know, you don’t see it that much today, but there used to be tenter fields.

The whole fields of this.

Yeah, well, I don’t know how big they were.

And so maybe you would spring from tenter to tenter adjusting things and take a risk of catching your foot on a hook?

Well, the idea is that it stretched at this moment of tension.

Oh, I see.

It’s like stretched just as far as you can.

Right, just before breaking.

Yes, yes.

So this is where my friend was.

I am on tinderhooks.

Ooh, tinderhooks, a real thing.

Yeah.

Not tinderhooks.

Yeah, but it was just one of those words that I knew I knew the meaning of, but I just had no clue.

And a story, a little bit of history lodged back in there.

But what we used to be as a people.

Exactly.

We cared more about wool.

Wool is important, right?

At the bottom of every word is a story.

Call us and we’ll tell you yours.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Brandi Gibson.

Hi, Brandi.

This is Martha.

Where are you calling from?

Hi, Martha.

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Okay.

Well, welcome to the show.

Welcome.

How can we help you?

I called in because I had a question.

I have a coworker that always uses this funny term, and she makes us laugh with the crazy things that come out of her mouth.

But she always uses this term, and she says, I haven’t seen you in a month of Sundays, or I haven’t heard from you in a month of Sundays.

And I just have never heard anyone else use it.

I found it hilarious.

And I just decided to call in to see where does this come from, why does she say it, what does it mean, all things like that.

So it’s so funny.

It’s a good one, though, right?

Really colorful, and you understand what she means when she says it, right?

Yes, apparently she hasn’t talked to them in a while.

Right.

And there’s another implication there, and it was kind of dreary without them, because the expression goes back to when on Sundays you were not supposed to do anything, so Sunday was the longest day of the week.

You went to church, and otherwise you maybe sat around the parlor, and the kids sat around the parlor, and you maybe read some Bible verses or just chatted with company as they came by, but really nothing much else going on.

Occasionally you’ll see a week of Sundays, but usually it’s a month of Sundays.

I’ve been able to find this back as far as 1759.

Wow.

Yeah.

That’s a month of Sundays right there.

A book called The Life and Real Adventures of Hamilton Murray, but it was a pseudonym.

It was published in London.

It’s kind of almost completely preserved its meaning over time.

It always means a long time.

But there’s always this extra component sometimes that it just means a really long time, longer than I care to think of or longer than I actually really can ever figure out.

Yeah, it sort of implies an impossibility, right?

You can’t have a month of Sundays.

Or if you do, it’s a long, long time.

Well, it’s 30 weeks.

30 or 31 weeks, right?

Wow.

That is so interesting.

Yeah, it’s pretty.

I love the history and how it’s lasted so long.

Very long.

And it’s preserved nicely as an expression in English without too much change.

So solid, solid history on that thing.

Yeah, I’ve also heard a variation that’s like, I’ll marry you when two Sundays meet.

You know, it’s just, it ain’t going to happen, dude.

Sorry.

Unless we change the calendar again.

Nice.

So that’s the most that we know, but it just means a really long time and it was kind of dreary without you.

Okay.

Thank you.

Yeah, sure.

I’m glad I know now.

Yeah, it sounds like she livens things up around there.

Oh, she does.

I can’t wait to tell her.

Take notes for us and let us know what else she says.

All right, Brandy?

Yeah, please do.

I will.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Thanks, Brandy.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know that you have somebody in your office or your workplace or your neighborhood who says something that you just can’t quite figure out.

Oh, you can’t let go.

It just got under your skin and you’ve got to find out more.

Yeah.

This is the place to bring it, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, and you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait till next week to chat with us.

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Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten.

We have production help from James Ramsey and Tamar Wittenberg.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

The show’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.