Primary Colors (episode #1590)

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. Butter of antimony, blue vitriol, flowers of zinc.

Aren’t those gorgeous terms, Grant? Yes. Are these crystals?

You’re close. These are terms that were used for centuries by alchemists and scientists for various chemical compounds. So butter of antimony is now called antimony trichloride, blue vitriol is cupric sulfate, and flowers of zinc refers to powdered zinc oxide.

And I learned all of this from a wonderful book I just finished called Uncle Tungsten, Memories of a Chemical Boyhood. It’s by Oliver Sacks, who’s the guy who’s probably more famous for the man who mistook his wife for a hat. But this is about his childhood when he was fascinated by metals and chemical reactions and the periodic table. And it’s also a really good introduction to basic chemistry.

But he writes in the book about how that brilliant 18th century chemist Antoine Lavoisier had decided that every substance should have a name that denotes its composition and chemical character. He’s the guy who went in there and said, we’ve got to be more systematic about this. We’ve got to have names that indicate how these substances would react or behave in various circumstances.

And Sacks writes about how he understood that, but he also missed the old names because they had a poetry. Right. Yeah, they do have a poetry, but there’s also a mystery about them.

Yes. All the elements ending in enium or whatever just really doesn’t have a… You wouldn’t put that into a rhyme, right? You wouldn’t sing that as part of a song.

No, you wouldn’t put it into a poem, but I mean, it communicates a lot. It’s doing a lot of work, the ides and the eights and the different suffixes and prefixes. But I think we’ve lost something that we no longer talk about, jovial bezoar.

Oh, jovial bezoar. Bezoar being the, what’s that, something found in the stomach of goats.

Yes. I learned that from Harry Potter.

Oh, really? Was it in Harry Potter?

Yeah, it’s meant to cure poisons, I believe.

Oh, okay. Yes, yes.

Now we’ve replaced jovial bezoar with bezoar to come joviale. I’m not even sure what that is.

It’s some kind of substance. But I think the jovial part has to do with Jupiter somehow. It’s some alchemist term.

But it’s not even funny.

Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, you lose something and you gain something when words change. Well, at least you can go back to the original sources and enjoy them for what they were.

And how is your turning lead into gold coming along?

Yeah, I’m still working on the lead to gold.

OK. Let me know when you succeed.

We’ll retire happy. I assume that you’ll share the secret with me.

Of course. We’re hoping that you, our listeners, will share your language secrets with us. So what are you thinking about? What’s your question? What’s your idea? 877-929-9673. Email us, words@waywordradio.org, or chat us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Nancy Nesham. I’m from Berthold, North Dakota.

Hey, Nancy. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you. I’m glad to be at your show. A few weeks ago, we were visiting our daughter in San Antonio. And I don’t know what we were talking about. My husband and she and I were talking. And one of us said something about what my husband or I said, something about two bits. And she said something about costing something two bits. And she said, what are you talking about? We said, well, two bits. And she’s going, she had no idea what we were talking about. And my reply was, you know, two bits, four bits, six bits a dollar, all four, whatever school you were from, you stand up and holler. She’d never heard of this.

And so we were trying to explain, where does two bits come from? It means 25 cents, at least that’s what we understand. It’s a quarter. Where does it come from?

So she’d never heard of two bits?

No, she’d never. She’ll be 50 years old for Pete’s sake. And she’d never heard of shave and haircut two bits?

I don’t know if she has or not. I guess we never thought about throwing that one. Our older daughter knows it. I’m thinking my younger daughter probably doesn’t either, but I’m going, because I’m asking people, do you know what two bits is? And the woman who was in the office here with us, she said she thought it was two nickels, because she thought that’s what her father would give him, two nickels to go buy candy back in the old days. And she said, and I said, oh, it’s a quarter. I’m thinking, boy, I’m really old here. I know what two bits is. And she got ripped off, too.

Yes, she did. I was two nickels. Her father was getting by really good. Where did that come from? We are talking about a long time ago. We are talking about basically during colonial America, after the establishment of the U.S. Dollar. But while there were many other currencies traveling in the world that no longer exist, including the Spanish real. And the Spanish real was this big silver coin. When you watch pirate movies and they talk about pieces of eight, this is what they’re talking about. It’s literally a big coin with a large number eight on it. It’s a big silver coin. And if you divide that into eight pieces or eight bits, one of those pieces would be worth 12 and a half cents. So since it’s worth eight reales, one reale is worth 12 and a half cents. So two of those is worth 25 cents. Therefore, two bits is worth 25 cents.

Oh, my God. So we learned a couple of things here. We learned what a piece of eight is. We learned what two bits is. We learned about reales. So what’s really interesting here, too, is eight reals being worth as much as it was was way too much money. I mean, we’re talking about 25 cents at the time was a lot of money. I mean, you could get a room in a boarding house and a couple of meals and maybe a little, you know, maybe your clothes washed and dried for 25 cents. We’re talking about a fair amount of money. So what they would do is they would cut up these pieces of eight because they were literally made of pure silver. Very interesting.

I learned a new thing. I just, you know, we always just, two bits was 25 cents.

Yeah. Sure. And that kind of sucks. You have to know where the background comes from.

Right. Shave and haircut, right? Shave.

Yes, that’s it. Yes, shave and haircut. You don’t get that for two bits anymore either, so.

No, you sure don’t. You got to know somebody.

Yeah, that’s about it. All right. Thank you, Nancy. Take care now.

Well, thank you very much.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye. Call us 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Justin Currency. I’m calling from Kalamazoo, Michigan. I’m calling because I was browsing an article on the H.J. Hines Company’s marketing slogan, 57 Varieties. Part of this was a photo of an old advertisement, and it listed several of those products, familiar ones, ketchup and pickles and all of that. And then one of them caught my eye. It was called Euchard Figs. So this is spelled just like the card game Euchre. And that caught my interest because I, here in Michigan, am in what’s called the Euchre Belt. So that’s this region where people play the card game Euchre. And you’re spelling that E-U-C-H-R-E, right?

Uker. Correct. Yeah. And so and that’s roughly, you know, people would people think of the Rust Belt. I think they’re roughly similar. But that definitely extends to Western Pennsylvania and to Pittsburgh where the Heinz Company was based. So so that got me curious. I was looking up definitions, a lot of them pertaining to the game. If you’re familiar with the game, if you Uker or Uke someone, it’s a small upset in the game. Those obviously weren’t relevant. I saw definitions from down under where they use euchard like mackered or tired out. Another one mentioned cheating, and I wasn’t so sure about that. But the closest I got to food preparation definitions was speculation on some old message boards, one saying it meant something akin to treated with acid, and another preserved and sweetened alcohol. So pretty much all over the map from the food definitions there.

And so I thought I would come to you.

I’m slightly curious how the figs were preserved, but mostly I’m wondering how this word euchre came to be used in these two very different ways.

When now outside the Midwest, it’s really not used at all.

So I wondered if you had some insight on that.

That’s so funny that you mention a euchre belt because I spent some time in Indiana and people were just looking at me like I had two heads because I didn’t know what euchre was.

They were just incredulous.

But apparently, yes, it’s very popular in that part of the country.

Let’s talk about euchre figs.

Like Martha said, it’s E-U-C-H-R-E-D.

I have an answer for you, and it comes from H.J. Hines, the company itself.

There is a document from 1910, a booklet of all their products, very nicely produced, beautiful document.

And you can find it on the Internet Archive.

And they define euchard figs and talk about how they’re made.

And they claim that euchard, and they put it in quotes, and you know that when a word is put in quotes like that, that they’re calling special attention to it.

They say euchard, in quotes, is Old English for preserved.

And immediately we’re going to stop right there and say that old is lowercase and it’s probably false.

Because as far as I know, there’s no earlier use of euchred used this way.

I have looked in 40 dictionaries.

I’ve looked in the deepest dictionaries that I have.

I’ve looked in the oldest dictionaries I have.

I cannot find euchred as a verb used in this way or as an adjective.

Yeah, I don’t remember Beowulf eating euchred figs.

No.

And now it’s possible that it was spelled a different way or I missed a trick, so to speak.

But as far as I know, this company invented this use of this word.

In any case, they say it’s a special kind of preserving.

And it says the flat sweetness of the sugar is modified to the tart and stimulating flavor of Heinz vinegar.

So what they’ve done is they’ve mixed vinegar and sugar to preserve the figs.

It says our final vinegar added to the sugar and choice spices.

There’s another thing.

And preserving the liquor gives a piquant appetizing flavor.

So what we’ve got is vinegar, sugar, and spices to preserve the figs.

And so that’s what eucharing a fig is.

So I’m imagining H.J. Hines and some friends sitting around a table playing euchre and not knowing what to call it and just say, oh, just say it’s euchred.

Yeah, I think maybe that’s true.

There’s always been a notion.

You had mentioned one of the verb meanings of to euchre something or someone is to cheat.

But further along is to swindle or to trick.

And I think it’s important that there’s that notion of tricking in there.

And often in card games, a trick is something that happens three times.

And we’ve got preserving it with sugar, preserving it with vinegar, and preserving it with spices.

So if you’re eucharing it, you’re tricking it, and you’re doing it with something to it three times.

Well, perfect.

Well, if you two are ever in Kalamazoo, I’ll grab a fourth, and you can join us here for euchre.

Oh, you’re going to have to teach me first, but I’m ready.

I’m game.

Thanks, Justin.

Take care, Anna.

Thank you.

Thanks, Justin.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s another lovely chemical term that’s been replaced, sugar of lead.

Sugar of lead is now lead acetate.

As I said, you lose something and you gain something when language changes.

Yeah, you don’t want sugar of lead in your coffee.

words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Parrott.

And we’re joined by that giant among men, our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

How are you guys doing today?

All right.

How about you?

Fabulous.

Just great.

Just great.

You know, you guys talk about a lot of things in this show, but I think it’s time to talk about what we don’t talk about.

Now, I don’t care who you are.

Every family has secrets.

I mean, look at the seemingly perfect Madrigal family in Disney’s movie Encanto.

They sing and they dance and they laugh, but the one thing they don’t talk about?

Bruno.

Bruno.

Talk about Bruno, no, no.

Let’s look at other family secrets and the things they don’t talk about.

For example, in Roman mythology, their chief god had a wife who was quite jealous of his affairs.

So according to Jupiter, we don’t talk about…

Juno?

Juno, no, no.

Now give me the no, no, no part.

Oh, I do?

Do I have to sing it?

Well, if you feel you’re up to.

And dance around?

Sure, why not?

No one’s watching, sure.

Now, one family thought they’d make a killing in the fertilizer business, so they opened a bat farm, but they just couldn’t take, you know, the smell, so they don’t talk about…

Guano?

No, no, no.

Yeah, really sell it for me, if you would.

Guano, no, no.

Very good. Guano, no, no, no. Right. We don’t talk about guano, no, no, no.

All right.

I had a friend in high school who was very popular and very handsome,

But, you know, he gave everybody the kissing disease,

So now they don’t talk about…

We don’t talk about mono, no.

No, no.

That’s right.

Very good.

No mono.

Now, at one family reunion,

Everyone was enjoying the cousin’s homemade wine

Until they find out he learned how to make it in prison.

So now they don’t talk about…

They don’t talk about pruno, no, no.

I was going to say vino.

I would have taken either one of those, but pruno.

Yeah, vino’s good.

Yeah, pruno.

We don’t talk about pruno.

I know more than one family that are very competitive,

And all it takes is one accusation of cheating during a friendly card game,

And, well, now they don’t talk about…

Ooh, no, no.

Yes.

We don’t talk about ooh, no, no, no, no.

And even fictional families have their secrets.

The Rubbles complained about the Flintstones’ noisy pet, and now they yabba-dabba-don’t talk about…

Dino-no-no-no, the dinosaur.

Exactly. They don’t talk about Dino-no-no. No.

Now, this last one is three syllables.

My mom’s a pretty good cook, but after a thing happened involving a whole mess of Italian herbs accidentally dumped into a sauce pot,

Well, we don’t talk about…

Oregano, no.

No, no, no.

We don’t talk about mom and her oregano, no, no.

We do not.

Oh, I’ve just got something here.

I’ve got a cease and desist from Lin-Manuel Miranda’s people.

There we go.

I was waiting on that.

Well, it looks like we can’t talk about it anymore,

So I guess it’s time to end the quiz.

Thank you, John.

That was, yes, yes, yes, very fun.

Thank you.

We love playing word games and we’d love to entertain you. Give us a call. We’ll talk about language, your thoughts, your ideas, your questions, what you’ve been reading, 877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Marian Morrison from Powell, Wyoming.

Hello, Marian. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Marian. What’s up?

Thanks. Well, I was talking with my sister about vein procedures, as in on your legs.

And she had a procedure done a couple of decades ago. And I asked her why she did it, what her symptoms were. And she said, well, it was pure vanity. And in my mind, I thought, okay, she was being vain. And whenever I find words that come up organically in the same moment, it always makes me wonder if they have some kind of a common origin. So vanity coming from being vain and veins of one’s legs, I realized they’re spelled slightly differently, but I wondered if they had a common root. Actually, they’re completely different words, completely different origins.

They do have in common the fact that they’re both really old. They’ve both been around for about 700 years or so. But the word vein, like a blood vessel, comes to us through Old French, and that goes back to a Latin word, vena, V-E-N-A, which simply means blood vessel. And I think the much more interesting word of these two is not the vein, the noun that’s the blood vessel, but vain the adjective, because that goes back again via Old French to the Latin word vanus, V-A-N-U-S, which means empty or void. And we also get the expression in vain, you know,

Somebody tried in vain for something to happen. And over time, by the late 14th century, it just meant silly or foolish. And then by the late 1600s, it also came to mean conceited. So it’s gone a long way from the Latin word for empty or void to meaning silly or foolish. And ultimately, you know, somebody that you might kind of laugh at because they’re conceited.

And you mentioned vanity. And Grant and I were just having a conversation about the expression vanity fair. Like the magazine or the book. And you might never have thought about the meaning of that, but it’s literally a fair, like a place of a festival for the vain, for people who are conceited.

Yeah. What’s the original source of that, Martha?

The original? Well, there’s a reference to it in Pilgrim’s Progress or the idea of vanity, like a place called vanity where people were, you know, where vain people lived.

Well, I really appreciate your knowledge and research on that and for sharing it. And I really appreciate your show.

Well, we really appreciate your calling, Mary. And thank you so much.

Thank you so much. Take care now.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You go about your day and you have these questions. And you’re like, oh, I’ve got to ask Martha and Grant, and then you forget about it by the end of the day.

Well, this time, don’t forget. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Write those questions down, and then email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a lovely passage from New York Times critic-at-large Wesley Morris. He was writing about crying at the movie theater and about what he called the ancient power of art to make a puddle of us. He said that seeing the movie E.T. led me into a love affair with being made to cry among strangers in the dark.

I almost typed being reduced to tears, except where is the reduction? Crying for art is an honor, an exaltation, a salute. It’s applause with mucus and salt. What I presume we all experienced was a willingness to give ourselves over to the ridiculous beauty of a story about feeling everything.

Oh, I love that. And you know what? E.T. has a special place for me. When I showed it to my son when he was about five and the spaceship leaves E.T. behind, my son was so distraught that he started crying. And he ran outside the house to go save E.T. because he was so upset that they left E.T. behind.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, his little heart was broken. How could they leave him behind? Poor guy.

Yeah, and so, yes.

Yeah, that speaks to the power.

It does speak to the power.

We’d love to hear your thoughts and ideas about language. 877-929-9673 is toll-free in the U.S. and Canada. Or you can email us from anywhere in the world, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sarah calling from Haddonfield, New Jersey.

Hey, Sarah, welcome.

So I wanted to talk to you about some dark or morbid or meant to be humorous sayings that my parents had. And I’m wondering whether it was because of their generation. They were both born in 1906 and lived through a lot of things. So I didn’t come along until 1950.

So my mother would say, you know, when you’re getting ready, especially if there’s a group of people and you’re getting ready to leave the house or whatever, and you’re saying, are you ready? Are you ready? Are you ready? My mother would always say, I’m ready. I’m ready for Freddie.

And it wasn’t until I was a teenager that I asked her, well, who is Freddie? And her answer was, Freddie the Undertaker. I was, I don’t know. I didn’t know how to answer that.

And here’s my father. Didn’t say things like that, but he taught me this little song that he sang all the time. That’s really strange. So I’m not going to sing it. But when I was little, I thought it was really funny and I wanted to learn it. So I can remember a couple of the verses.

It’s called Fuzzy Wuzzy Wuzzy. Fuzzy Wuzzy Wuzzy was a wise old guy, nose like a hawk and an eagle’s eye. Fooling people was his game because Fuzzy Wuzzy Wuzzy was the old guy’s name.

Now there was a little boy coming home from school, saw a silver dollar at the foot of a mule, crept up slowly, quiet as a mouse. Next day, a funeral at the little boy’s house.

Oh, fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy, fuzzy, wise old guy.

Definitely morbid.

I know. I know. And when I was little, I thought these things were funny. But, you know, because your parents tell them like they’re amusing.

Did you build on a cemetery?

We’ve lived across the street from a cemetery once, but I learned these songs before we lived in that house.

I see.

Oh, my goodness. Oh, these are all good. I think phones are going to light up. The email box is going to be full because people are going to have a ton of these.

I remember something about Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear. Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair, but I think that was a different one.

Right. He wasn’t Fuzzy Wuzzy. But Ready for Freddy is the one I think that’s probably going to require more explanation because it’s not as common as it used to be. And it’s important that your mother said it was the undertaker because that is the absolute truth. That is who Freddie is.

Because we know who Freddie is, Sarah.

Okay, tell me, please.

All right, so just get this out of the way. There are a lot of incidental rhyming of Ready and Freddie in lots of contexts. For as long as Freddie’s been a name and as long as Ready’s been a word. There was even a Ready Freddie doll sold in the 1920s.

But Ready for Freddy started as a catchphrase in a comic strip. The Little Abner comic strip. There’s this folksy down-home strip drawn by Al Cap. Yeah, it was read by tens of millions of people. It ran in 900 newspapers from the 1930s until the 1970s.

Well, Al Cap had a running gag at one point in the 1940s. And he kept teasing a line that said, are you ready for Freddy? Are variations on that? And he would just keep inserting it in his strips. And he didn’t explain for the longest time who Freddy was or why we needed or anybody needed to be ready.

And he’d have his various characters in Dogpatch, that’s the little town in the strip in Lillabner, respond to that. And so finally, after weeks of this, finally there was a payoff. Freddy shows up in the strip. And the townsfolk of Dogpatch are running around. And there he is standing in front of his shop with his name in huge letters. Says Freddy’s.

And one of the Dogpatch locals says to him, there they is, Freddy. Notice the eager looks in their bright little eyes.

Oh, they sure is ready.

And to which Fred replies, no, they are not, son. Not quite. Because they are still breathing. Because Freddy, you see, was an undertaker.

Freddie was the first undertaker in Dogpatch. And then he was a character.

Yeah, Freddie was an undertaker. He was a character in the strip long after that.

Oh, my goodness.

Yeah, my father used to read me the funny papers all the time. I can remember reading little Abner with him. And I don’t think I saw that one. At least I don’t remember it anyway.

But, oh, my gosh, I’m so glad that my mother.

Yeah, so that was 1947 when that happened.

Okay, okay, so you got an answer how about that.

I did. I know and I really wasn’t expecting one.

Well, we hope you’ll call again sometime.

Oh, I have a whole notebook of things.

Yeah, we’re ready for Sarah.

Thank you so much. Take care now.

All right, okay, you too. Bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Marcus from Kingsport, Tennessee. How are you today?

Great, Marcus. Thanks for calling.

So, as kids, my sister and I, we would hear our mother make a statement, a phrase that she loved to say, usually in exasperation.

But she would say, you kids, all you ever want to do is mess and gom.

Oh, that’s such a strange word, gom.

But usually that was said after she had finished cleaning the kitchen, and my sister and I had left snacks or crumbs or whatever.

But years later, probably as a teenager and a little more brazen, I challenged her and I said, that’s not really a word. You’re just making that up. And no, no, this is a word. I’ve always heard it. I said, well, how do you spell it? Well, I don’t know. Maybe G-O-M or G-O-M-B, but I don’t really know. And I said, okay, prove it. Look it up and show it to me in a dictionary. And she grabbed a Webster’s or an Oxford dictionary and couldn’t find it. And so I said, see, I told you, it’s not a real word.

Years later, I was probably in college or maybe out of college. She had been reading a series, fictional series, and she found it was printed in one of these series books. And it was kind of set in the mid-1800s, Westward Expansion, Pioneers, that sort of thing. And she came and she felt so vindicated. Look, here it is. It’s printed in this book. I have a suspicion that it’s probably Irish or Scottish in its history, its origins, because that’s where most of our ancestors came from. They immigrated from that part of the world, Ireland, Scotland, England, immigrated into the Carolinas and Virginia, and then migrated over the mountains into eastern Tennessee. So that’s what I’d like to talk about.

Fantastic. Well, this certainly chimes with what we know about the word gom and the phrase messing in gom. And it sounds like you all were maybe messy little kids, huh? Yes. Yeah. And if you’d looked in, for example, specialty dictionaries like the Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English or the Dictionary of American Regional English, you would have found this word gom, G-A-U-M. And it’s, as you suggested, it’s spelled a couple of different, several different ways. G-O-M, sometimes G-U-M, sometimes G-O-M-E. And since the 19th century or so, it’s meant a greasy or sticky mess. It might even have to do with the grease on an axle, but we’re not totally sure about that. Its origins are a little bit murky, but it might also be influenced by the word gum.

By 1859, you see citations like, don’t let her gom herself all over with molasses, or the baby is all gommed up with molasses. And it’s sort of a word that sort of sounds like what it is, isn’t it? Yeah, definitely. In Ireland, the word gom as a verb can mean to be stupid or mope about, and as a noun, it’s a foolish looking person. So it’s negative in general. I know that my mother intended it to be negative. She was not happy when we were messing and gomming.

Messing and gomming, yeah. Well, this is great. She’ll be pleased to know that she’s vindicated and that it truly is a word. I appreciate it. Thank you very much. We appreciate it. Take care now. Yeah, watch that messing and gomming now. Bye-bye. Thanks. Bye-bye. All right. Take care.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. We had a call a while back from Amanda in Evansville, Indiana, who was talking about the fact that their family referred to their garbage disposal as simply George. You remember that call, Grant?

Yeah, like if they had some spoiled food, they’d say, oh, just give it to George, and they’d just jam it down the garbage disposal. Right. Well, we heard from Richard Martinez, who says he refers to a garbage disposal as the spoon sharpener. That makes perfect sense, doesn’t it? The spoon sharpener. Yeah. If you’ve ever dropped a spoon down a garbage disposal, you know what we’re talking about. The spoon sharpener. Absolutely. You’ll never forget that sound.

Oh, it’s like the sink is falling out. It’s like one of your pistons is misfiring on a transmission. It’s just the worst sound. Isn’t it? It’s just one of those -oh moments.

877-929-9673. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. We got an email from David Lauren in Chicago who attended Catholic Seminary in the 1960s. And he told us that at mealtime, they sat 16 to a table and breakfast was completely silent. As part of their discipline, nobody was allowed to speak. But you still have to ask for things to be passed to you. And so what they developed was a one-handed sign language.

So if you wanted somebody to pass the milk, you extended an index finger. If you wanted the salt and pepper, you extended your first two fingers. Past the sugar was first three fingers, and past the cereal was just holding up your thumb. And David’s email sent us down a very interesting path, because in fact several religious orders take a vow of silence during mealtimes, and also for many other times of the day, including what’s called the Great Silence, which is eight to nine hours after sunset.

But of course, living in a community like that, you still need to be able to communicate about the food you’re preparing or how the garden is coming along or equipment you’re fixing or clothing. And for centuries, these communities developed their own highly sophisticated system of hand signals. And this was hundreds of years before the development of things like American Sign Language. And in fact, as early as the 10th century, we have records of an order of monks in France that developed a system of nearly 300 signs to use during periods of silence.

And more recently, there was some fascinating work done by anthropologist Robert A. Barakat, specifically among Cistercian monks in Massachusetts in the 1970s and 80s. He compiled a comprehensive dictionary of these signs, and you can find them online. And one thing you notice right away is that many of the nouns involve combining simpler terms, like, for example, to make the sign for horse. You make the generic sign for animal, and then you pull a shock of hair just above your forehead, and you bend your head forward slightly.

And then for tractor, what you do is you combine the sign for horse with the sign for the color red, which is touching your lip, the red part of your face. And so you can see sort of the etymology, I guess, of these terms. How cool is that? I love it, yeah. And so you can see the growth of a language that way. And, you know, the other thing, Grant, is the more that you read about all this, the more you start to understand that there’s something really beautiful about being a part of a community that chooses to live in silence.

And that led me to a gorgeous book called A Time to Keep Silence. It’s by Patrick Lee Fermor. It was published in 2007. He writes about staying in some of the oldest monasteries in Europe. And he talks about arriving at one of them when he’d been sleepless and sluggish and depressed, but amid the enforced silence there, he finds that there were no automatic drains, such as conversation at meals, small talk, catching trains, or the hundred anxious trivialities that poison everyday life.

Soon, he writes, dreamless nights came to an end with no harder shock than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a lake shore. Isn’t that beautiful? Yeah, it is perfect. We know we have plenty of listeners who have gone to silent yoga retreats, for example, or maybe you’re part of a religious order and you have something to say about that. We’d love to hear about it. Our phone number is 877-929-9673 or write to us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Ed from Ithaca, New York. Hey, Ed, welcome. What’s up? Well, I had such a long list of things, but I think what I’ll focus on is color. It kind of comes from a pet peeve of my dad’s about what are the primary colors. And if I asked you, what would you say?

Red, blue, yellow? Red, blue, yellow. Well, it actually varies. If we’re talking about light or we’re talking about pigments with light, it’s actually red, blue, and green. And in pigments, it’s magenta, cyan, and yellow. My dad’s theory is it doesn’t matter if you know it correctly or not, even if you’re teaching it. It doesn’t really matter if you’re teaching it correctly or not, because the only people who it matters to are artists, photographers, people in the print profession.

Otherwise, it’s, you know, colors are just such a random thing. I mean, different cultures have different names for different colors. Some don’t even have names for things that we would consider a color. Just look at paint chips. My golly, those are just, you know, somebody makes it up. I want that job.

Yeah.

What do you think about the fact that colors seem to be so random?

And that when scientists actually agree on what they are, it doesn’t matter that people don’t know them?

And that there is no agency, you know, an international committee that says, okay, these are the names of colors, so we’re not miscommunicating?

Because we do that for so many other things.

We have standards, we name things, but not colors.

That’s actually right. We define colors in a scientific sense by their hertz, by the frequency of the color, the light frequency.

But we don’t do it by name because they are so variable because red, as you say, in one language isn’t maybe the same as red in another.

And some languages might not have, for example, the color orange indicated or a language like Russian might have two different colors for blue, two different words for blue.

It’s really interesting, and there’s so much work has been done on this.

The famous study, of course, is from the 1960s.

Brent Berlin and Paul Kay did a study that found that generally, if a language had only two color terms, they were almost always black and white.

And if there was one more color term, then it was going to be red.

And the fourth and fifth were probably going to be green and yellow in either order.

And the next was probably blue, and the next was probably brown, and so on.

It’s just so interesting that humans, no matter where they are, tend to create color names in approximately the same order.

Another study that was done by Ted Gibson and Bevel Conway, they studied 110 languages and found that people are much better at telling other people about warm colors, that is the reds and the oranges and the yellows, than they are the cool colors, like the blues and greens.

And this is because we’re more attuned to the reds and oranges and yellows.

So I could better convey to you, say, a magenta or a burnt sienna than I could say an ocean blue.

And colors can go with emotions, too.

Yeah, that’s right.

Way of categorizing them. And they’re not the same.

And then the cultural attachment of color is like white doesn’t mean the same thing in every culture.

Black doesn’t mean the same thing in every culture or purple or red.

This is almost philosophical.

We need a way with philosophy because this is almost more than language.

It’s almost about the basic level of humanity.

The fact that we even perceive our world through light and say, not exclusively through touch or sound or taste.

This is so good.

I don’t have them at my fingertips right now, but there are a number of books that we’ve recommended over the years about colors and color names.

And I think we’ll attach them to the show notes for this episode just to give them another good airing because there’s so much more to this than language.

There’s something right at the essence of humanity, what it means to be human, to talk about color and to perceive color and to have this really personal relationship, even that very childish impulse to have a favorite color.

It’s true.

I never thought of that.

Ed, thank you so much for launching us off into this.

I think this is a dinner conversation waiting to happen across America.

Wonderful.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate your insight and I look forward to seeing those notes.

Bye-bye.

Great.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye now.

And we’ll take your questions at 877-929-9673 or email your thoughts and ideas to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matthew from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hello, Matthew. How are you doing?

I am well, thank you.

What’s on your mind today, Matthew?

Well, when I was a boy, I remember my grandfather saying to me and my brothers, it’s time to go out and get in the machine and go to the store.

And I thought, machine, what does he mean, go out and get in the machine?

It sounded, I don’t know, a little unnerving to me, the thought of getting in a machine.

Like the leaf blower or something?

Yeah, a time machine, perhaps.

So, you know, we walked out the back door of his house and out to the driveway and got in the car.

And, you know, I’ve always wondered, why would my grandfather call his car a machine instead of calling it an automobile or just calling it a car?

When would he have been born, do you think?

My grandfather was born in 1889.

Okay.

Oh, my goodness.

That kind of hits the sweet spot for that, Martha, doesn’t it?

It sure does.

And, Matthew, I’m so glad you asked about this because I have a memory of being a very small child.

And my dad, every once in a while, saying, oh, I must have left it out in the machine.

And my little brother and I would just laugh and laugh because he meant the car.

And, you know, let’s go in the machine or should we take the machine or walk?

And what’s really interesting about the word machine is that you might not realize how many times we’ve used the word machine to talk about all kinds of different things in the 17th century.

The word machine could be applied to ships and then later to horse-drawn vehicles or stagecoaches.

And in the 19th century, people used the word machine sometimes to refer to bicycles and then later motorcycles and sometimes aircraft.

You know, originally when people were talking about ballooning, sometimes they would talk about flying machines.

And then, of course, you have a political machine that controls a political organization.

So the word machine does a whole lot of different kinds of jobs.

But the one that you’re talking about is really fascinating because, as Grant said, that time period really hits the sweet spot.

If you look at novels from the early 20th century, say, Dashiell Hammett writing in the 1920s, they often use the term machine to mean automobile.

You know, it was this new contrivance and a new use of the word machine.

Yeah, it’s interesting you mentioned, you know, machine being applied to things like maybe a horse-drawn carriage, because I was thinking that, you know, perhaps my grandfather called his car a machine because, you know, when he was a young man, I would assume he mostly got around by walking or perhaps on a horse or in a horse-drawn carriage.

And he would think of this newfangled mode of transportation as a machine as opposed to a horse.

Right.

That would be the main machine in his life.

Unless he was working, say, with a sawmill machinery or something like that, he probably didn’t have many other very sophisticated, high-powered equipment in his life.

That makes a lot of sense.

So if he was born in the 1890s?

1889.

1889.

Yeah, so he would have been in his 20s about the time that we first find this popping up in print in the early 1900s.

Mm—

Yeah, that’s very interesting.

Yeah, about the time the first motor cars were being, I guess, somewhat mass-produced.

Yes, exactly.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for sharing that with me.

My own children, I may just say, hey, you want to go for a ride in my machine?

That’s right.

And they’re like, where’s the airplane, Dad?

All right.

Bye-bye. Thank you.

Thanks, Matthew.

Bye now.

Sometimes it’s a memory of something your grandparents said.

Sometimes it’s something that your four-year-old brought home from preschool.

We’d love to hear the words in your lives.

877-929-9673.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you doing? This is Eric Miles calling from New Jersey, Raleigh, New Jersey.

Welcome to the show. What’s up?

So the reason I’m calling is I actually had a question instead of, you know, the question was I was looking for a word that I heard a number of years back, but I sort of since then sort of got lost.

And I sort of tried to find the word again, but I haven’t been able to.

And the words related to, it’s basically a word that is something that’s no longer needed or something that’s obsolete, but it’s still simulated and used on items.

And the example that I had was sort of like rivets on jeans and things like this.

But, you know, I read an article a number of years about tools that were going obsolete.

And there’s all these tools that are no longer used.

And the article just gone over, you know, a number of different tools.

And eventually it moved into, you know, rivets and things like this that are obsolete.

But as an example of something that isn’t used anymore either.

Yeah. You know, you were talking about the rivets on jeans.

When they were introduced in the late 19th century by this Latvian immigrant, Jacob Davis, who was working with a guy named Levi Strauss,

What they were doing was making these heavy-duty work clothes for miners and cowboys.

And they reinforced those pants at places where they were more likely to fall apart, particularly the pockets.

You know, if you’re a miner working underground and you’re putting things in your pockets or tools,

Then they might be more likely to tear there.

That outdated design element that no longer serves a useful purpose,

I’m hoping that the term you’re looking for is skeuomorph.

Does that sound familiar?

Yes, it does. Okay.

That’s why I couldn’t remember the word because it’s a very unusual word.

I guess we should spell this word.

It’s S-K-E-U-O-M-O-R-P-H, skeuomorph.

And another example that I like to use is the auditory skeuomorph on your phone.

You know, a lot of phones, when you take a photo with the camera, it still makes that single lens reflex camera noise that is completely useless.

You don’t really need it, right?

But it still sounds like that old-fashioned camera.

And there are lots of different ones like that.

I’m thinking of stickies, at least on my computer.

You know, I have these little Post-it notes that aren’t really Post-it notes.

They’re just part of the software.

But the ones in software are a little different because those were intentional.

They weren’t a design change through generations of an item that merely becomes decorative.

These were intentionally meant to mimic.

So when we talk about copying and pasting or desktops and so forth, that was something decided, somebody decided to do that.

Or that little floppy disk.

Yeah, but when we talk about, for example, ceramic pots that are made to look like baskets that are woven, that’s a scuomorph.

Okay, that is the word, and that’s fascinating.

So I mean, I guess there’s a host of uses now.

For some reason, I thought it was just for physical objects, but now I realize it’s actually for even the virtual world as well.

So that even makes it more fascinating and more even applicable.

Thank you. Thank you very much.

Yeah, our pleasure. Take care.

Okay, and have a nice day. Thank you.

Sure thing.

Bye.

We are pretty good at coming up with the words that you once heard or once read but now can’t remember.

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Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.