One Space or Two?

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673, and you can still send us email to words@waywordradio.org, and you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. Martha, if you ever want to start a brawl in a bookstore…

I always do, yes.

You know, get a fight maybe at a librarian’s convention or something.

I’ve got the phrase for you.

Okay.

Here it is. Typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong.

Put them up.

Step outside.

That’s what Farhad Manju, writing for Slate Magazine, did.

And the internet exploded.

At least our internet, the language internet.

It sure did.

Oh, my heavens.

I had to take cover under my desk.

So there’s this one camp that thinks that you should put two spaces after a period when you’re writing something on a computer, right?

Right.

Me, me, me, me, me.

Okay.

And there’s the other camp that thinks you need one space after a period and two spaces is ridiculous.

And that’s my camp, right?

Right.

And the two sides can’t really meet.

And there’s just all these crazy arguments.

And most of them were good-natured, admittedly.

Crazy arguments about why you need one space or why two spaces are one too many and so on and so forth.

But the gist of Farhad’s argument is that typographically, there’s no good reason to have a space after a period unless you’re using a monospace font.

And a monospace font is when each letter, even the tiniest ones, take up the same amount of horizontal space as the biggest letter.

So a period would take up as much horizontal space as, say, a capital W, which is a pretty wide letter, right?

And he’s got some other arguments and stuff about this.

And even after he’s made this bold statement about it being inarguably wrong, he mollifies the people who are in the two space camp.

But the other side of this, and this is your camp, the people who use two spaces, they’re like, well, gosh, darn it.

Mrs. Frobisher in the fifth grade in my tapping class taught it me that way.

And if it was good enough for Mrs. Frobisher, then it’s good enough for me.

That is my argument, except it was Mrs. Barnado in ninth grade.

FDSA.

Oh, but Grant.

Well, you know, I read that thing and I started thinking, I know that Mrs. Varnedot taught us to do two spaces.

But when I look at my copy, it looks like just one.

Where?

And I’m wondering if there’s an autocorrect in Microsoft Word or something.

There might be.

There’s something really interesting happening.

Most web browsers, when they see two spaces in the HTML pages that they’re loading, will make them into one.

Oh, is that what’s happening?

So even if you look at the source code underneath, there’ll be two spaces, but only one display.

So there’s kind of a normalizing there, which makes it seem normal to have one space after the period.

Oh, so they’re correcting me so I don’t have to correct myself.

That’s great.

One of my favorite arguments for one space after period is Twitter, where every space counts.

Every character counts.

That always feels like cheating.

Well, once we settle this debate about whether or not you should use one space after period or two, why don’t we talk about whether or not you should put your replies in email above the comment before or after the comment before?

All right.

We’re going to be arm wrestling in a second here.

But in the meantime, call us if you want to talk about language or punctuation or slang or word origins or grammar.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Or you can always send those emails and feel free to put two spaces after those periods.

I have a find and replace set up, so I’ll just clean those up for you.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dave calling from Sheboygan, Wisconsin.

Hello, Dave. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What’s going on?

Well, I’ve got a goofy question for you.

Yeah, I was at my car mechanics a couple of weeks ago waiting to pick up my car, and I heard a couple of the employees kind of getting into a bit of a discussion argument.

They didn’t realize I was there.

It was getting a little uncomfortable, and at one point one of them told the other to shut their pie hole.

And I just about started laughing, but it was getting a little uncomfortable.

I wasn’t sure how serious the discussion argument was becoming, so I kind of cleared my throat and made myself known, and they slowed down, and I left.

But it just seemed like such a funny, goofy expression, and I didn’t think much of it until a couple of weeks later I was at a friend’s house, and she used the expression.

And I laughed and told her the whole story, and she said, oh, my parents used to use that all the time when we were kids.

So anyway, I thought I’d call in and see if you knew the origins of the expression.

So shut your pie hole.

And this was said with a lot of energy and anger?

Actually, the energy and anger seemed to be building, and actually, in the interest of full disclosure, there was an adjective inserted into it.

But was there an element of humor about it?

Well, I couldn’t really tell.

I mean, there seemed to be certainly on my end of things, but I couldn’t tell from them.

I love it. It’s one of my favorites.

Shut your pie hole.

To me, it’s automatically funny. I don’t know why.

It’s great. That sounds like a great argument stopper, you know, where everybody sort of makes up.

How could you be serious?

Right. How could you be serious after being told to shut your pie hole?

Yeah, exactly.

And it’s your mouth. When you say shut your pie hole, you just mean your mouth.

Right.

Yeah, I assume.

Yeah. No, it is. It’s the mouth.

And it goes hand in hand with a lot of slangy synonyms that we have for the mouth.

If you look in the Oxford Historical Thesaurus, you’ll come up with a bunch of them.

And there’s some real gems there, and a lot of them have to do with food going into your mouth.

And a lot of them have to do with traps, which is really interesting.

Like there’s potato trap, tater trap, and tatty trap.

Yeah, I’ve seen bun trap.

Bun trap, gingerbread trap, and kissing trap, and fly trap, and rattle trap, and, of course, gin trap, and plain old trap.

You know, shut your trap, right?

And others, mooie, bazoo, mug, puss, yap, all of these things are slang from the mouth.

And bacon hole and cake hole.

Well, cake hole is the older form and is the earlier form of pie hole.

Cake hole comes from about the 1940s.

It probably came up in the slang of the British schoolboy, which is an abundant source of all slang in the world.

And it’s recorded in the 1940s pretty quickly in American English.

Shows up in the Opie’s in their collection of folklore for kids in the schoolyard in the 1950s.

Right, the couple called Opie.

Yeah, yeah, the Opie’s.

Opie, I.E., Ina and Peter Opie.

They do these well-known collections of the folklore of school children.

And by the 1960s, it somehow had morphed in the United States from cake hole into pie hole.

And pie hole is almost exclusively used in the United States now.

It’s really crazy stuff because why do we need all these words for mouth?

I don’t know.

Maybe, and that’s why he asked you about humor.

Maybe there’s some element there of needing to diffuse a difficult situation.

And I really loved your story because it felt like there might have been some drama there that could have escalated into a fight.

And by telling somebody to shut their pie hole, it still might be funny enough and bring a little bit of humor just to knock a few degrees off the temperature of that argument.

Kind of diffuse things.

Yeah.

I also think that it implies that your mouth is better used for eating than arguing with me.

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

Just go back to eating pie.

Yeah, exactly.

Shoving stuff in.

Cork that sound machine with food.

That’s great.

Cool. Dave, thanks so much for your call.

Well, thank you.

We promise to never shut our pie holes about words and language.

Sounds good. I appreciate it.

Take care.

Thanks so much, Dave. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or go to your keyboard pie hole.

No, that doesn’t work.

Go to your keyboards and send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Dawn from Richardson, Texas.

Hello, Dawn.

Welcome.

Thank you.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about a term that’s used.

I’m in Texas, and the term is podunk.

Should I use it in a sentence?

Oh, yes, please.

Okay.

Well, you know my friend, she’s from Podunk, Louisiana.

So it means like backwoods or kind of a small town.

But I don’t know where it comes from, and I was really curious about that.

And why are you so curious about it?

Because I say it, and I don’t know where it comes from, and I really don’t want to offend anybody.

All the Podunkians.

Yeah, but it’s an interesting term. I’ve never seen it written down.

But I love the way it sounds because it sounds like what it is to me.

Exactly.

Right. And how is it to you? What kind of town is Podunk?

Kind of small, quiet, kind of far away from, you know, a city.

I don’t know.

I don’t want to be insulting, so I’ll stop there.

A little backwoods, one whistle stop town with the mayor, who’s also the barber, the sheriff, and the trash collector, right?

There you go.

Podunk has a long history in American English.

It ultimately probably comes from an American Indian word, and you can find early mentions of it in the 1600s.

Yeah, it was the name of a tribe that at the time lived around what is now Hartford in Connecticut.

And then it existed. People knew about the Podunk Indians.

They moved on. Other things happened.

And then it really came into its own as a term for a small town in 1846, when a columnist for a Buffalo newspaper wrote a series of newspaper columns about life in the small town of Podunk.

And he didn’t really say where this Podunk was.

And so, of course, these columns were reprinted in newspapers across the country.

And immediately, Podunk caught on as this generic term for some small city somewhere that’s a little bucolic and a little square and not very cosmopolitan at all.

And that was really the big launching point of it.

So by 1943, it was permanently fixed into American English as this kind of catch-all term.

It’s kind of like the thingamajig of places, you know?

It’s just the kind of random place name for when you speak generically about a place that might have certain characteristics.

Oh, I love that.

Yeah, it’s cool, right, that it has such a long history.

And, of course, it’s used in other English varieties, too.

They use it now in the U.K., which I think is pretty funny.

Oh, really?

So it’s crossed over the Atlantic.

It’s one of those words that they’re not going to complain too much about because it’s got its purposes.

Well, Dawn, I hope that helps.

Oh, that does.

I just love that.

Now I’m going to use it even more.

Yeah.

You know, by the way, it is safe.

You’re not going to offend anyone.

No.

That’s good.

If you speak to the mayor of a small town somewhere in Texas and say that thanks for welcoming to your little podunk, you’ll be offended.

But in general, as long as you don’t call a specific town a podunk, you’ll be fine.

The podunk American community isn’t going to come after you.

Okay, good.

Yeah, the podunkians, though, they have a vigorous chamber of commerce.

You’ll hear from them.

That’s great.

Well, thanks so much.

Hey, Don, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Cool stuff.

What’s your question about words and language?

Got something on your mind, something you’ve always wanted to know?

877-929-9673 or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Sean O’Connor from Charlottesville, Virginia, wrote to tell us that when he was studying in Peru, he learned a great phrase, it’s más perdido que un huevo duro en ceviche, which means more lost than a hard-boiled egg in ceviche.

Something that’s out of place.

One of these things is not like the others.

Right, right.

Somebody who’s lost or clueless.

There’s another expression like that in Spanish.

It’s sort of like a dog on a bocce ball court.

A fish out of water, so to speak.

Sort of, yeah.

Send your idioms and your ideas about language to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-WORD.

Don’t look now!

There’s a word quiz right behind us.

Stay tuned for more of A Way with Words.

The Way With Words, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us now is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

John, hello.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, John.

What’s up, buddy?

Hey, you know, once again, I’m here to proselytize.

Okay.

I’m here to spread the good word about cryptic crosswords.

Oh, yes.

Hallelujah.

Yes, I’ve told you before how I consider cryptics one of the gold standards of puzzling.

So today’s lesson is about cluing individual letters.

For example, here’s a question for you.

What’s the 4th of July?

Oh, so that’d be Y.

Y, that’s right.

Because it’s the 4th letter of July.

That’s right.

Not only is it a U.S. holiday, it’s the letter Y.

The letter Y is the 4th of July.

That’s how cryptics work.

If I gave you the clue, 4th of July, pub drink, for the definition Ivy League school, what four-letter proper noun would you get?

Oh, my gracious.

4th of July, pub drink.

For the definition Ivy League school.

Yale?

Yale.

Very good.

How is that a pub drink?

Help me out.

Well, Y plus L.

Oh, YL.

Oh, I see.

Okay, very good.

That’s how cryptic clues work.

They give you the word in the form of wordplay, and then they give you a definition that connects you Yale and Ivy League school.

Very good.

We’re going to do a few more with Fourth of July, okay?

All the answers will be four-letter words today, all right?

Okay.

Here we go.

Fourth of July metal-bearing mineral for the definition time long ago.

Your.

Your.

So Y plus or.

Or is your.

Very good.

Long time long ago.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

Fourth of July everything for southern plural pronoun.

Y’all.

Y’all.

Y plus all equals y’all.

Good.

Here’s the next one.

Fourth of July sense organ for once around the sun.

Oh, I was going to say nosy, but that’s…

Yorbit?

No.

Year.

Year plus Y.

So it’s year.

Very good.

I get it now.

Fourth of July, Y, sense organ, ear.

Year.

Once around the sun is year.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

Fourth of July actress Thurman for the definition Southwestern American Indian tribe.

Oh, Yuma.

So Yuma plus Y is Yuma.

Very good.

How about Fourth of July director Lee for the definition Chinese masculine principle?

Oh, so Yang.

So Yang Lee, the director of Incredible Hulk.

Now, that’s only one way to clue one letter.

I’m going to switch it up a bit on you now.

So here we go.

First of May help for a female domestic.

Maid.

Maid, right.

Maid, I-I-D.

Want to explain to everyone how you got that?

I threw a dart.

No, M is the first of May.

First of May, right.

And then assistance or help is aid.

Right, for a female domestic.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

First of May finale for fix.

Men.

Men.

Yes, men.

Good.

Next one.

First of May, anger for swampy land.

Mire.

Nice.

Mire plus M, Mire.

Very good.

Now, this next one is a combo, so get ready, all right?

First of May plus 4th of July for Mr. Patinkin.

Oh, Mandy.

Mandy.

First of May, M plus and 4th of July, Y for Mr. Patinkin.

Mandy.

Okay, now get ready to switch it up one more time.

Ready?

Yep.

Okay.

End of the road snitch for mild oath.

Snitch.

If you snitch on somebody, you drat.

Drat is correct.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

End of the road kill for remove a hat.

Doff?

Doff is right.

Oh, so you’ve lost somebody.

Very good.

Yeah.

I have one last switch up for you.

This is the last one.

This one’s tricky.

Get ready.

End of the road consumed for 4th of July.

End of the road consumed.

Consumed.

Eaten.

I would say eight.

Eight.

It’s a date.

But what’s the why?

4th of July is a date.

Yeah.

Oh, very good.

Nice.

4th of July is not just a cryptic way to clue why.

It’s actually also a date.

Anyway, you guys were fantastic.

Go get some cryptic crosswords and start.

You’re ready to go.

John, thank you so much.

Thank you, guys.

That’s always fun.

If you’ve got questions for us about language, grammar, and so forth, 877-929-9673.

Or send us an email.

We read everything to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Vicki Hurst.

I’m calling you from Vista, California, which is in North County, San Diego.

Yes, lovely Vista.

Yes, lovely Vista.

So what I wanted to talk to you about was the movie True Grit.

The remake or the original or both?

The remake.

The remake, I bet.

The remake.

I went to see it a couple of weeks ago, and I noticed in the very beginning of the movie, the girl in the movie starts out talking really, like with a very formal language.

And at first I thought maybe it was kind of, maybe it was bad acting.

It didn’t seem very realistic.

And then I noticed that all the characters were talking that way.

And about, I don’t know, about halfway through the movie, I realized that they weren’t using any contractions at all.

So is that really the way they talked in the wild, wild west?

Are contractions like a later invention of the English language?

This question has been asked online many times and been answered many times in a lot of different ways.

And some of this stuff sounds really great when these folks are answering.

Like Alan Barra wrote something for the Daily Beast where he claims that this is historically accurate.

And I say poppycock.

I say malarkey.

When I say baloney and much sterner words when the mic is off.

Wow.

Well, here’s the thing.

People used contractions and been using contractions for hundreds of years.

It is not historically accurate to portray the Wild West as a place that was contraction free.

It is not accurate.

Now, here’s the thing.

The Coen brothers who made the film and a couple of the actors and the lovely young actress, Haley Steinfeld, who I thought was fantastic.

I think they’ve all been asked about this in a variety of interviews, and there are some various answers.

The Coen brothers are quoted in Newsweek as saying it’s historically accurate.

And I just must say to them that you need to do better fieldwork if that’s what you think.

Wow.

Because you are patently, clearly, inarguably, unquestionably, totally, completely wrong with that, Coen brothers.

You think they’re wrong?

Yes.

Are you sure?

Joel and Ethan, I don’t know what kind of weirdo you hired to do your research, but there are people who can do it for you for free who know better.

Read Mark Twain, for heaven’s sake.

Yes, loaded with contractions.

And every great work of literature is loaded with contractions.

And notice I said great work.

But there’s a gigantic but here.

Here’s the thing.

There are really good reasons that have nothing to do with historical accuracy that you might make a film with no contractions.

Oh.

Now think about this.

You want to portray these people as different from us.

You want to show that they’re not modern, right?

You need to separate their language from ours in some way so that we understand as viewers that they are very different from us.

They’re not just us without electricity and running water in our homes, right?

It’d be easy to look at them and say, well, by jolly, they’re just like us.

They’re not.

And so you might do things to their language to push them a little further away from the modern day and to show that they think differently than us.

They act differently.

They have different backgrounds and patterns of behavior.

And so you can clue viewers in by doing that with the contractions.

And there are other ways.

You can change the vocabulary.

You can change the cadence.

It’s a lot easier than trying to adjust their vowels to reflect the way vowels were pronounced a hundred and some odd years ago.

Yeah, so you’re saying it was an artistic decision rather than a historical one.

And I think that’s right.

I mean, they don’t sound like the Beverly Hillbillies.

They don’t sound like modern people.

For me, when I watched that movie, it was like watching a foreign film almost.

I mean, sometimes I wanted subtitles because, you know, sometimes they would mumble.

But I think there’s a transporting thing that happens when you watch a foreign film.

You have to pay particular attention to it.

You can’t get distracted by other things.

To me, it was a kind of hyper-realism.

Do you know what I mean?

Right, right.

It’s a stylized account of history.

Yeah.

And now a lot of credit, of course, has to go to the original book, True Grit, written by Charles Portis, which also doesn’t feature all that many, if any, contractions.

Right.

And even further, and this may be the most important point here, the book is written from the point of view of the young girl writing as an older woman talking about things that happened decades in the past.

Vicki, she was probably writing from an educated point of view in which for centuries, people who’ve been educated have been told to avoid contractions because it makes them look lazy, sloppy, and low class.

And so there’s that other element there.

The author is doing things so that we understand that this story is filtered through a woman who has lived the life of complications.

But she’s overlaid some sophistication and erudition.

Yeah, yeah.

At the end of the film, she looks really straight-laced.

Yeah, right.

And she has this wild adventure in her youth.

So that’s the other thing.

We can have many long conversations about it, but that’s kind of the short version of it.

There are a lot of reasons to do it, and historical accuracy isn’t one of them.

Wow.

Vicki, thanks so much for calling.

Well, thanks for the answer, you guys.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Some bit of language caught your ear?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or you can send an email, with or without contractions, to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

How are you doing?

Doing well.

Who’s this?

My name is Rakuzo. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Rakuzo? Rakuzo?

Yes, actually, yes. That’s Southern African. I’m from Zimbabwe.

And you pronounced it right.

Oh, did I? I love it. Rakuzo.

Yeah, it means respect, and I hope I’ll show some respect on the show.

Well, I hope so, too. What’s on your mind?

Well, I’m a student of the Romantic period, and I love the King James English.

Both my wife and I were trained in the British literature and all that.

So we have one word that irks us a lot, and we’re trying to find the origin of that word, and this word is irregardless.

Oh, yeah.

I’m sure a lot of people actually really want to know if it’s a word which we think it’s not, so I don’t know if you can help me with that.

Irregardless.

And does it make you want to run to the nearest blackboard and run your fingers down?

There you have it. That’s how I feel.

Yeah.

Where’s the way we can ban this word?

Is there a way we can ban it?

Oh, yeah.

Well, if you start banning words before you know it, you’re banning punctuation, and then where will we be?

Okay.

Irregardless, that is such a loaded word.

It’s a skunked word, right, Martha?

It’s probably the word that gets under more people’s skin than anything else I can think of.

And by a skunked word, we mean that this is a word that is so heavily debated and so disliked by so many people, and yet so commonly used, that if you can avoid it, you should.

Because whether or not it’s a word has nothing to do with it.

It’s just that a lot of people that dislike this word.

Yeah, I’m glad to hear there’s a lot of us out there.

But on the other hand, it is a word.

Right, Martha?

Well, you’ll find it in just about every dictionary, right?

Yeah.

It’s a word. It has meaning. You can spell it. You can say it.

It fits grammatically and syntactically into English.

But you don’t have to like it, and I don’t.

Yeah, you don’t have to like it, and you don’t have to use it.

Wow. Okay.

Well, I didn’t say I’m too enthused to hear that, but I guess we’ll have to accept it then.

Well, here’s the thing about irregardless.

The better choice is just the word regardless.

Right.

It’s got one too many prefixes.

Just leave off the IR and leave the regardless and you’re fine.

Irregardless does a job that it doesn’t need to do.

And it’s been doing it for a very long time, since at least the 1870s.

And it appears in scientific literature and in the speech and the writing of the most educated English speakers ever.

But that doesn’t mean that you have to use it.

Or like it.

Or like it.

I don’t like it.

And you asked where it comes from.

Apparently, it’s just a blend of irrespective and regardless.

It’s just sort of a lazy blend, I guess.

Well, I wouldn’t say lazy.

It’s a blend.

At some point, the word became transmitted on its own.

It’s not like it’s recoined.

Right, right, right.

So people pick it up from each other and don’t think much about it.

It does have meaning, and they use it for that meaning.

But it’s contradictory if you try to break it down because it looks like it should be the opposite of what it means, right?

Exactly.

That’s exactly what I thought.

But English is not a logical language, as you well know.

You don’t think we can vote it off the island?

Oh, no, we cannot vote it out of the Lexus.

Maybe we should try. Call us with your votes.

I’m with you, Martha.

All right.

Well, thanks a lot, guys, for having me on the show.

Our pleasure. Thanks for calling.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What gets under your skin?

Anytime we talk about peeves on the show, the floodgates open.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Susan from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Hi, Susan, welcome.

Hi, Susan.

Hi, thanks.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I’m wondering about an expression that I use a lot, and that is, oh my goodness.

I’m a very young 50-year-old, and I feel like, oh, my goodness, is a phrase that expresses surprise or delight or even disbelief.

And I also feel it may make me sound middle-aged.

Not that that’s a bad thing, but I just wondered, what are younger people using to express delight or surprise now?

So you’d like to adopt a new phrase.

Yes.

Okay.

Oh, you mean surprise and delight in a way that we can actually say on public radio.

That’s right.

But, you know, OMG kind of works online.

It doesn’t really work aloud, right?

You can’t really say.

I mean, people say it, but they say it in a winking, ironic way.

And yeah, some people say if they’re kind of surprised, they might go, yoinks, like shaggy.

But that’s a little played as well.

Yoinks.

Well, Susan, do you have any ideas that you’ve been trying out?

Test driving, maybe?

Well, actually, no.

I feel that, oh, my goodness, is such a versatile phrase that I just have been realizing I can use it in many different ways.

The only other thing I could think of was, in terms of texting, OMLG.

OMLG?

Yes.

Have you heard that before?

No, what’s the L stand for?

It’s Oh My Lady Gaga.

Oh.

Now, I know OMFG, which we can’t elaborate upon, but OMLG, I don’t know.

And, of course, there’s the versatile dude, which basically has followed up the F-words footsteps and now can occupy just about every place in English language.

So if you’re really surprised, you’ll be like, dude!

But people like Susan and me, I mean, I can’t imagine us saying, dude.

Isn’t that the larger question, though?

I mean, how are you going to sound if you’re trying to…

It really is the question.

It’s a fine line, isn’t it?

There’s a story, a folk tale that’s been told a million times in real different ways about a fakir guru in India who is known for speaking every language in India.

And he puts up gold and says, if you can figure out what my first language is, I will give you this gold.

And he goes from village to village and you have to pay him a small price in order to play his game.

And people guess all the different languages of India, which there are hundreds.

And ultimately he gets caught because when he’s sleeping, someone throws cold water on him, and he leaps up and shouts basically the equivalent of mama or oh my goodness in the first language that he learned from his mother.

And I think for you, it’s kind of the same story.

You need to be natural, and the first thing that comes out of your mouth, even if it’s my goodness, is what you should go with because it’s you.

It’s part of you.

It’s natural.

It’s impulsive.

It’s really what you are about.

Oh, okay.

That’s really good to hear.

And out of all the choices that you have, my goodness is polite and safe and comprehensible and friendly.

And I don’t think anybody’s going to be bothered by it.

Well, I guess that does express a lot of the things I am.

I’m, you know, pretty genteel.

So I guess it’s a good phrase after all.

Yeah.

There we go. Perfect.

And since it expresses so many different things, it fits in a lot.

Yeah, it’s sort of the Swiss Army knife of exclamations.

Maybe you could try gee willikers, though, just for once in a while.

Just on the weekend.

That would be great.

Well, thanks for setting that light on it.

Sure, thanks, Susan.

Our pleasure, Susan.

Thank you for calling.

Bye-bye.

Goodbye.

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

We’ll be back with more of your calls as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

There’s something we might could talk about, Martha.

We might could?

Yeah. Multiple modals.

Multiple modals.

Do you know what a modal is?

That’s what you put on pi when you…

Oh, yeah. Pi out of modal.

Right? No?

No, no. In English, a modal is something like might or should or could, right?

Yeah.

These are words that kind of suggest the distance between possible and likely.

To be a little more technical about it, they work with verbs and auxiliary verbs to help distinguish the mood of the verb, right?

And so we say, I might go to the store, which suggests the possibility but not the certainty that I might go to the store, right?

Right.

I should wear a sweater today is different than I might wear a sweater today, right?

Well, in this country, and frankly, in the north of England and northern Ireland and parts of Scotland, they use two or more of these modals together.

And this is really interesting.

It’s a common feature in American Southern speech.

A lot of the places where we’re on the air use this language.

I know that we’ve received emails about this, and we hear it in our caller’s voices, and it’s wonderful to hear because it’s so characteristic.

So these are the folks, when I say something like, I thought y’all may would have some more of them.

Whoa.

It makes perfect sense.

Right.

I thought y’all may would have had some more of them means in a complicated way that there was a pretty good chance that this person thought there might be more of whatever it was they were looking for.

May would have.

Yeah.

And those are called multiple modals.

And the reason this is on my mind is because I went to the American Dialect Society Conference in Pittsburgh in January.

And Michael Montgomery, who is one of the editors of the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, brilliant man, is working on a new project.

He’s working with a fellow named Paul Reed, and they’ve made a database of all of these written uses of multiple modals.

It is very distinctive Southern American speech.

And so they’ve analyzed them and got kind of geeky about it and, you know, marked them up linguistically.

They’re linguists.

Marked them up linguistically.

But it’s really wonderful stuff.

And I’ll link to this so that you can see that this is, as they put it, this is grammatically correct English within that dialect.

It’s not wrong.

It is perfectly grammatical because it makes sense and there are some rules there.

But anyway, wonderful stuff.

That’s Michael Montgomery and Paul Reed at the University of South Carolina.

We’ll talk a little bit more about this probably in future shows.

I know that we’ve had some questions about this, but it’s just a great way to distinguish kind of one of the dialect regions of the United States.

Want to talk about language?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jamie McLaughlin.

I’m calling from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hi, Jamie.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, how are you?

All right.

Listen, I heard you guys talking about the origin of some interesting words on your radio show the other day.

And I got to thinking about a conversation that I had with my roommate one night concerning the word card.

And we were talking about something, and I guess I was trying to come off as being funny.

And I said, yeah, I’m a real card.

And I’m 36 years old, and he’s 19 years old.

And he said, a card?

And I said, yeah, you know, a card.

He said, I don’t understand what you’re talking about.

You think you meant a credit card or what?

A debit card?

I mean, he was genuinely confused.

Nice.

And I said, you know, a card, you know, somebody that’s, you know, the way I understand it,

Someone who’s, you know, I guess quick-witted and funny, you know, with the jokes and stuff.

Mm—

It kind of got me thinking.

I was wondering if it had something to do with possibly the card associated with, say, a boxing fight

Or maybe even going as far back to, like, vaudeville.

So someone who’s maybe on a card for a show or something like that, I really just have no idea where it comes from, and that’s why I call it the show.

Very nice.

Interesting theories.

What do you think, Martha?

I think they’re good, colorful theories.

Colorful, huh?

Yeah.

But do they hold water?

Well, I think that we’re not 100% sure about the origin of this, but we have a pretty good guess about it, and it’s not nearly as fun as your idea is.

You are a card.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, apparently it just goes back to the whole idea of playing cards.

Oh, I see.

Because we’ve had so many other terms come from playing cards, right?

A house of cards, if you play your cards right.

Having a full deck.

Right, you play this or that card.

Yeah, not playing with a full deck, which can also be somebody who’s a card.

And for a while there, Jamie, there were uses of card that were more metaphorical, like a sure card.

It was a sure bet or a wild card went from being something in a game to just, you know.

To programming terminology.

To programming terminology.

What?

Oh, you mean like the asterisks?

Yeah, computer programming, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

And then just generally in life, a wild card is.

So a sure card, if somebody is a sure card, it means that they’re kind of a known value and they’re guaranteed to do or be the thing that you want them to do or be, right?

Yeah, to be a success.

Yeah.

And it appears that that habit of adding an adjective to card to create some kind of metaphorical idea just sort of fell away at some point.

Isn’t that boring?

That’s so boring compared to a boxing match.

So it went from sure card to an old card or a good card.

Yeah, or a knowing card.

So card just came to refer to a person, right?

Yeah.

It became so ubiquitous that they just dropped the preceding adjective altogether.

Yeah, it sounds like it.

And I see here, I’m looking, it says something about eccentricity or peculiarity, and that’s probably the starting point of the card being a funny person.

Right, right.

Because these days, if you’re a card, you’re pretty much just somebody who’s hilarious, right?

Yeah, I think there was sort of a transitional period of it being sort of an original.

You know, he’s a card, he’s one of a kind.

And then it became there’s nobody as funny as he is or nobody as hilarious as he is, and now that’s all we have left.

Right.

So it’s not nearly as picturesque as what you’re suggesting, Jamie.

You must be a card.

Well, I definitely never would have figured that out if I hadn’t called the show,

And it definitely answers the question for me.

So thank you very much.

All right. Thanks, Jamie. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So the kids say one thing and the old people say another,

And they’ve got to meet in the middle.

Call us to find out how to do that, 877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Somebody going by the name of Chivalgry, which means gray hair, emailed us with another one of the What Would You Serve jokes.

Okay, let’s hear it.

What would you serve a lawyer coming to dinner?

A lawyer coming to dinner.

Tort.

Tort.

Tort.

Send us your What Would You Serve to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Megan from Boonville, New York.

Hi, Megan. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I had a question about a phrase somebody asked me when I was at work one night.

This gentleman came up to me. He was an older gentleman in his 70s or so.

And it was at nighttime, and he asked me if I was going to be tripping the light fantastic.

And I had never heard that phrase before, so I looked at him like he was crazy.

And I said I didn’t know what that meant.

So he said basically that it meant like painting the town red or whatever.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, well, it means to dance, dance the night away, that kind of thing.

But this phrase has to do with the fact that the word trip can mean more than just stumble.

You know, you think of trip and walking along and stumbling.

But a much older sense of the word was to dance and to dance really well, to dance nimbly.

And back in the 1640s, the poet John Milton wrote a poem that was encouraging someone to dance.

And it goes, come and trip it as you go on the light fantastic toe.

And the light there means lightweight or light-footed.

And fantastic means extravagantly wonderful, like the thing that you would only see in a fantasy.

So trip the light, fantastic toe.

And then that got adapted in different versions over the years.

And do you know the song that goes east side, west side, all around the town?

No.

Okay.

You made me sing, Megan.

I hate when that happens.

That song was called The Sidewalks of New York, and there was a line in there about tripping the light fantastic again.

And so that’s probably why it appeals to older people and is more in the vocabulary.

Because that song was really big in the late 1800s.

Yeah, yeah.

It was about we tripped the light fantastic on the sidewalks of New York.

So it does have to do with dancing, and it goes all the way back to John Milton and an older sense of the word trip, meaning to dance.

And then there was the Procol Harum song.

Right, the 1960s?

Yeah, do you remember that one, Megan?

No.

Well, Grant can sing that one for you.

But they change it, and they say,

Skipped the light fandango, which is a kind of dance.

And so the phrase continues to morph and change

And become something new in English.

Yeah, so you haven’t heard that one either, huh?

No, well, I was born in 1984, so.

I see, Megan.

Well, they do have oldies radio, so.

So, Megan, what do you say if you want to talk about Dancing the Night Away?

You had a great time?

Tripping the Light Fantastic.

Yes!

All right.

Very good.

I’m glad you’re adopting that one.

All right.

Thanks so much for calling.

Thank you for having me.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Have a question about language?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a great piece of German slang that’s making the rounds, Niveau Limbo.

Never heard that one.

No, it means a limbo of standards, and it’s spelled N-I-V-E-A-U, limbo.

And Deutsche Welle reports that Niveau Limbo connotes the ever-worsening quality of TV programs,

The atmosphere at a party that thins out before midnight,

Or a conversation that quickly hits the gutter when alcohol is involved.

So the limbo level drops.

Yeah.

Are they raised?

No, it’s a lowering of standards.

It’s when everything just goes to pot.

Niveau limbo. I think that word should be adopted into corporate America, don’t you think?

I do indeed. Call us with your new slang, whatever the language, 877-929-9673,

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org, and find us on Twitter under the username Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Thank you for taking my call. My name is David. I’m actually calling you from Tijuana, Mexico.

Hello, David. Welcome.

Hi, David.

Well, I have a little story and a question, okay?

And when I immigrated into the United States about 30 years ago or so, I moved into Woodland Park, Colorado, with my then wife.

And when we got there, we used to go to a supermarket, and I used to say, hey, let’s get three livers to this, or let’s get three livers to that, or things to that thing.

And one time she asked me, why do you call them livers?

And I said, well, it’s what it says there, LBS.

And she goes, no, those pounds.

And at that point I was like, what do you mean pounds? It says LBS. What does it have to do with pounds?

And she really didn’t know why.

And I have asked, believe me, in 30 years, I don’t know how many thousands of people have asked, what is LBS, why it has to do with pounds?

And to my surprise, nobody knows.

And maybe one or two people have said something to do with the Greeks or something to do with Latin, but nobody really knows.

And I’m sure there’s a lot of listeners right now going, I never thought of that.

Yeah, yeah.

When I asked somebody, they never thought about it.

Well, ears are perked up.

Why LBSs?

You are definitely not alone.

Lots of ears are perked up. People want to know.

And I know somebody who knows the answer to this, and I’m looking at her now.

Well, David, let me ask you.

How do you say pound in Spanish?

Well, sería libras.

Libras.

So is that why you’re saying libers?

I don’t know why.

I remember when I was in the supermarket, and I remember looking at LBS, and it just stuck on me calling libers.

Okay.

And I don’t think it had anything to do with libers.

It’s just that I was reading LBS, and my common sense thing is libers.

Right.

I’m a pretty much common sense kind of guy.

Okay, well, David, I can give you a common sense answer.

And here it is.

The Latin word Libra is the source of both the Spanish word for pound, Libra, and the source of that abbreviation.

You know how the astrological sign Libra looks like scales that you would weigh something on?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

It’s all from the same root.

And so Libra had to do with weighing in ancient Rome.

It came down to Spanish as Libra.

And there’s just a little hint of it left in that English abbreviation, LB.

So we use a Latin abbreviation for an English word.

Yes.

Yes.

And the English word pound comes from a longer Latin expression, Libra pondo, which means a pound by weight.

But maybe that’s why you’re thinking of it, because of the Spanish word.

But it’s a completely forgivable mistake.

Oh, absolutely.

English wasn’t your native language, right?

No, it isn’t.

Yeah, you were working with whatever you had on hand and making the best of it, and you made yourself understood, and now you fixed it, and you’re good to go.

Well, David, thank you so much for calling us today.

This is a great question, and I hope you’ll call us again when you’ve got something else on your mind, all right?

Great. Thank you for answering the final question.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Language is interesting.

Somebody should do a show about words and language, and their phone number should be 877-929-9673, and their email address should be words@waywordradio.org.

Don’t you think?

Yes.

Give us a call.

Write us a letter.

Let us know what’s on your mind.

Before we go today, I want to share with you a poem that I really love.

It’s by Pablo Neruda, the great Chilean poet.

And it’s from his Hundred Love Sonnets.

This one is number 17.

You’re going to read the English translation or the original Spanish?

Yeah, I’m going to read the English translation.

Although, you know what, Grant?

It is so beautiful that I think we should link to video and audio of people reading this poem in Spanish.

Oh, great.

Because it is just so beautiful in Spanish.

But the English is pretty darn good, too.

This is a translation by Mark Eisner.

I don’t love you as if you were a rose of salt, topaz, or arrow of carnations that propagate fire.

I love you as one loves certain obscure things, secretly, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that doesn’t bloom, but carries the light of those flowers, hidden within itself.

And thanks to your love, the tight aroma that arose from the earth lives dimly in my body.

I love you without knowing how or when or from where.

I love you directly without problems or pride.

I love you like this because I don’t know any other way to love, except in this form in which I am not, nor are you,

So close that your hand upon my chest is mine,

So close that your eyes close with my dreams.

That’s wonderful.

Isn’t that lovely?

That’s beautiful.

There are lots of different translations of this.

I didn’t know you felt that way about me.

There was a period in my life where I read Pablo Neruda all the way through as best as I could.

Yeah.

And I think I need to do it again because I was young then and I hadn’t experienced life.

And poetry, I think, is for people who have lived.

You’re 100% correct about that.

And his work is timeless.

And as I said, there are many different translations online.

And there are different ones that I like for different reasons.

But it’s great just to listen to the Spanish, too.

So we’ll link to both of those on our website.

And we’d love to hear your favorite poems.

You can send us text or link to a video or link to audio.

Send us a small mp3 if you’d like.

Send it to words@waywordradio.org.

Or call us on the telephone.

Read it, 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

Our romance is growing.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget, you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can stay in touch with us all week on Facebook.

Look for us there under Wayword Radio.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

And we’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell and Jennifer Powell.

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Ta luego.

Arrivederci.

You like potato and I like patata.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Oh, let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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