Pushing the Envelope (episode #1591)

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’ve received lots of responses to our conversation about the phrase, off we go like a herd of turtles. It’s that expression that’s most often used by parents when they’re trying to round up the kids and get them out the door. We heard from Joanna Jarvis, who lives in Santa Cruz, California, who said that that saying really took her back because her father used that expression when he was trying to get everybody into the car. She writes, we were four kids and I can’t imagine it was easy corralling us. But the other thing that he would always say during those moments was, here we go, laughing and scratching.

What do you picture? I’m picturing like a troop of monkeys. I am too. Children are often compared to monkeys, like, scratching in uncouth places and, you know, howling and chattering.

Yeah, I’m picturing the barrel just emptying, you know, here we go, laughing and scratching. But it turns out that her dad wasn’t the only person who used this expression. In a 1939 newspaper column by Walter Winchell, he writes about the Hollywood director Archie Mayo, who directed actors like Mae West and Humphrey Bogart, and one of his last films was a night in Casablanca with the Marx Brothers.

And supposedly Archie Mayo, instead of saying action, when he started to direct a scene, would say, here we go, laughing and scratching. I can imagine with the Marx Brothers, it was totally appropriate. Can you imagine the chaos on set with those guys?

Yeah. That was not a herd of turtles. We’d love to hear from you about the things that your family said when you were growing up or the things that you say now in your own family, whether it’s old or new, whether it’s something that you’ve invented or something that you heard, share it with us, 877-929-9673. That’s toll-free in the U.S. and Canada, 24 hours a day.

And no matter where you are in the world, you can email us, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

All right, who am I talking with?

You’re speaking with Ivan from Delaware.

What’s on your mind today, Ivan?

I have friends on the Western Shore, specifically Hagerstown and Cumberland, Maryland. And on a couple different occasions, I have been at their houses, and I’ve heard them use a term that’s sort of baffling to me. And the term is written up. This one particular day, one of my friends left and went to the store, and she said to me, okay, written up while I’m gone. And I just said, okay, but I didn’t know what retten up means. And when she came back, she said, well, you didn’t retten up. And I later kept talking to her and apparently retten up in that area means to straighten something up or to clean something.

And that was in Cumberland. And in Hagerstown, I was with a friend, and her son was misbehaving, and she turned around and said, you better retten up. And I guess that meant for him to stop the behavior and straighten himself up. And it’s just, I’ve never heard that term in my life.

I’m fascinated that you’re using this version of it, because usually what we see is red up, and it’s R-E-D-D for the most part, but sometimes it doesn’t have that D there. But it’s a variant of red up. And the word red is actually still used in Scotland and Northern Ireland in that same sense of tidying up.

And what’s really cool is that that term came over across the Atlantic to this country with a lot of Scottish immigrants. And that’s where you’ll mostly hear it is in areas of Scottish settlement. So particularly in Pennsylvania, but also nearby states like Ohio, Indiana, and even stretching into a little bit of Maryland, you hear red up meaning to tidy up. And it’s particularly common in Pennsylvania.

In fact, in 2006, when Major League Baseball’s All-Star Game was going to be played in Pittsburgh, the mayor there had billboards put up all over the city that said, it’s time to red up Pittsburgh because company’s coming.

Well, you have just blown my mind because my friend in Hagerstown always talks about her grandfather being Scottish.

How about that?

So a little linguistic fossil there.

Yes.

Yes.

That is amazing.

Okay.

So it’s red up and not actually retten up.

They say retten.

Some people do say retten.

Yeah.

Some people do say it.

Okay.

Well, I thank you.

Take care now.

Yeah, thanks so much for calling.

All right, thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye.

Yeah, red up and red are still used in Scotland, like you said, in Ireland, and some of the northern counties of England. And it’s related to older meanings from the 1700s having to do with reaping or clearing and preparing land.

So not only has a history of several hundred years in the United States, but several hundred years more in the United Kingdom. If you love hearing your stories about going to another part of the country and hearing a word or phrase that you’ve never heard before that really leaves you puzzled, this is the place to talk about it. 877-929-9673 or send the story to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

I recently watched the movie Secrets and Lies with the fabulous Brenda Blethen and the exquisite Marianne Jean-Baptiste. It was made in 1996, and the movie’s a real delight. And Brenda Blethen’s character is a woman from East London, and at one point in the film, she’s talking about someone she wouldn’t recognize. And she says, I wouldn’t know him if he stood up in me soup. And of course, I just had to stop the film and write that down because I absolutely love that phrase.

And apparently it’s not just unique to the movie. That’s a phrase that you’ll sometimes hear. I wouldn’t know them if they stood up in my soup. I love it. Right in your face.

It’s funny that you should mention Brenda Bluffin. I just started watching Vera, which she’s wonderful in. She plays, I guess, a high-energy police detective whose life isn’t really all together in order. But she’s great at getting to the heart of the matter. So it’s very good.

Lots of energy.

She’s got lots of energy, pet.

Lots of, yeah.

She always calls her a pet.

Yeah, in our house, we’re halfway through that series as well. And that’s exactly why we went back and looked at Secrets and Lies, which also, interestingly enough, has a very young Phyllis Logan, who people might recognize from Downton Abbey. She’s Mrs. Hughes there.

Well, I see that you and I are getting our British English straight from the source. You know, we love to hear from our UK callers as much as our English speakers and speakers of other languages anywhere in the world. You can always send us email, words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary. I’m calling from San Diego.

Hey, Mary, welcome. What’s on your mind today?

What’s on my mind is I was wondering what the origin of the phrase pushing the envelope is.

Pushing the envelope. And what got you to thinking about that phrase?

I had just used it in a sentence and then stopped and thought to myself, you know what, I don’t know where this came from. When I thought about it, the only possibility that I could think of was if the postal workers were very busy around Christmas time and just pushing the mail through the system. But really, I don’t have a clue to where it actually originates from.

So you’re talking about pushing limits. Is that the context in which you were using it?

Yeah.

Mary, it’s not the post office. The envelope is, I guess, more or less a mathematical boundary that defines a range of set of curves. And so this usually is in aerospace. And so in aerospace, it’s about an aircraft’s lift and thrust, speed, altitude, range, fuel use, structural strength, and other things.

And so the reason they defined this envelope, it’s the all-encompassing kind of all of those things, the maximum and minimums of all of these things, because they can change depending on the other factors. For example, altitude can affect possible speed. The higher you go, maybe your speed will drop. The length of time an aircraft can fly at a certain speed will affect the amount of fuel that it uses, and that affects its range.

And so all of these things affect the envelope.

And so engineers design the aircraft to do what they want it to do, but then test pilots get out there in the big blue and see if the math used in the design to create that theoretical envelope is correct.

And once they confirm that it is correct, then they push that envelope by going beyond the math, going beyond what the math says is possible, and see if the aircraft can do more than that, go beyond that mathematical boundary.

Wow, that’s pretty incredible. I had no idea.

Yeah. And how it got into mainstream English is Tom Wolfe’s book about the U.S. Space program, The Right Stuff.

It came out in 1979. It was a huge hit. And the movie that came out about it was also a big hit.

And before that, typically people in the aerospace industry, I think, talked about the flight envelope.

It almost always had flight envelope so you’ll find it in aerospace industry magazines in the early 1970s of flight envelope this and flight envelope that but the figurative uses show up almost immediately after Tom Wolfe’s book in the 1980s and and you can just see it just kind of take off from there so people talk about pushing the envelope in in sports or pushing the envelope in politics or in science.

And it’s a great term.

It just immediately was borrowed into all these other fields.

It just, the utility of it is astonishing.

But flight envelope is a term, not pushing the flight envelope, dates to the 1940s.

And then envelope alone, to indicate the larger encompassing or intersecting curve that originally comes from mathematics, goes well back into the mid-1800s.

An amazing explanation.

I had no idea that it reached back that far and pretty quickly took off after that book was published into common usage.

That’s incredible.

If you haven’t read his book, it really still holds a remark of the world.

Sometimes you look at a 1979 book and you’ll say, oh, yeah, this isn’t going to hold up.

That’s so long ago.

But it really does hold up, and it’s still a very good read.

So I would recommend The Right Stuff if you’re looking for something engrossing.

Thank you so much for fronting me with this explanation.

I had a lot of fun.

Our pleasure. Push the envelope every day, all right?

Will do. Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There was a recent miniseries based on the book, which is also worth watching.

And frankly, Martha, I hope more callers push the envelope and give us a ring.

What number would they call for that, Grant?

877-929-9673 is toll-free, 24 hours a day in the United States and Canada.

Or you can send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking a few weeks ago about expressions around the world for somebody who’s a cheapskate, very miserly.

And we talked about, for example, the Spanish phrase cocodrilo en el bolsillo, which means a crocodile in the pocket.

But we heard from Stephen Hilty, who shared a term that he had heard that I really like for this, and that’s taffy pockets.

Yes, I saw that. I laughed. I saw that email and I laughed.

Because you can just imagine somebody like, I can’t get my hand out of my pocket. It’s stuck in my can’t.

My money is like taffy.

Right. 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. And striding to the mic and settling into his chair and putting on his headphones, why it’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, Martha. Hi, Grant. How are you guys today?

All right, John. How about you?

Terrific. You know, a lot of times I like to make the centerpiece of my quiz is some sort of thing that has to do with words that’s out there in the culture.

And this is something that I just thought about recently that I had forgotten about, which is I used to be a member of Toastmasters.

Are you guys familiar with Toastmasters?

Yeah, sure. They help you be comfortable speaking in public.

That’s exactly it. Right.

When I attended the meetings, I recall they did their best to help you unlearn certain speech habits.

For example, if you would frequently use fillers to pad your speech, like or you’d be encouraged to not do that.

Right.

So let’s focus on today, E-R.

I’ll give you a hint to a common two-word phrase or name in which both words end in E-R.

You tell me what I’m looking for, but please leave out the E-R.

For example, if I said, engineer Lonnie Johnson invented this item, which can pretty much be described as an overachieving water gun, you would say, soup soak.

Yeah, instead of super soaker.

Instead of soup soak.

We don’t want to use the errs.

Let’s try a few more.

Now, remember, if I hear you say at all, it’s a fail.

Okay?

Ooh.

All right.

Okay.

Okay, here’s the first one.

It’s flat and it’s brown, and you typically find it wrapped around raw meat, like a few lamb chops or a couple of skirt steaks.

Flat and brown, wrapped around raw meat, like skirt steaks?

Yeah.

Butch pape?

Yes, butch pape. Nicely done, Martha.

Instead of butcher paper. Okay, got it.

Yes, instead of butcher paper, right.

Now, this is a slangy way of referring to your accountant, specifically one who’s good at math.

Numb Crunch.

He’s a numb crunch, yeah.

I would also have accepted paper push.

Right.

But for the math, it is numb crunch.

Number cruncher.

Or paper pusher.

Here we go.

It’s typically found in an office, though little work gets done around it.

Instead, it’s the centerpiece for relaxing and sharing gossip.

What cool.

What cool.

What cool, yes.

The water cooler.

Honk, if you love words, is definitely a version of this I would definitely buy.

Bump stick.

Bump stick.

Yes, a bump stick or bumper sticker.

Now, my dad was one of these for over 40 years, though when he did it, they called him a mailman.

Oh,

Let carry.

Yes, let carry.

He was a letter carrier.

Very good.

Now, careful, this is a triple.

There’s only two words, but it’s still a triple.

A person who lives a lifestyle in which most or all of their food is obtained by trapping or shooting and maybe some foraging is described this way.

A hunt-gath.

A hunt-gath, yes.

Instead of hunt-or gather—

Hunter-gatherer.

I was trying to figure out the triple part.

That’s the triple part.

There are three errs in there, and just hunt-gath is correct, for hunter-gatherer.

Well, that’s my quiz called Blanker Blanker for today, and you guys were fantastic.

You guys get to move to the next level of Toastmasters, whatever it is.

John, it’s been great fun.

Give our best to the family.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Will do.

You too.

All right.

Be well.

Bye, John.

Wherever you go, you’re saying language, you’re hearing language, and you’re coming up with questions.

This is the place to get them answered.

877-929-9673.

It’s toll-free in the U.S. And Canada.

And no matter where you are in the world or what language you speak, try us out.

Send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Haley. How are you guys today?

All right. How about you?

We’re great. What’s up?

I’m calling from the Twin Cities, but I didn’t grow up here.

I grew up in Kansas City, and then I moved to Minnesota as an adult.

So now I tend not to notice the differences between these two places as much as I did, because I feel pretty well acclimated to the Minnesota way of things.

However, in the last two years with quarantines and isolation and working from home, I’ve just been looking out my window a lot more and spending more time outside.

And I’m a poet, so I often notice little possibilities in language.

And in the last two years, I really have started wondering about the season.

It’s very clear in Kansas what the four seasons are, or at least it seems that way to me as a child.

In Minnesota, I’m really seeing that there might be more than four seasons.

And so I’m starting to wonder about these possible transition seasons, especially around winter, because you may have heard of the six-month winter we have up here.

But it does seem like maybe there’s more variation in the other seasons too.

And so I started to wonder, and I knew that you guys would know, or at least be able to find out for me,

If there are other cultures that have other names for seasons that I’ve never thought of before,

Or maybe even further back in history, there have been more seasons that the English language has named.

So I’m just really curious to hear what you guys know about this.

Haley, I’ll tell you what springs to mind immediately for me.

And this is something that I learned from our listeners in Fairbanks, Alaska, even farther north.

You know, they have lots of seasons there.

And the one that they taught me about was breakup.

It’s breakup season.

And that’s not when you when you suddenly have a new ex.

Breakup season is in April and May, and that’s when the snow melts.

And people actually wear breakup boots, which are rubberized boots because you’ve got so much mess, you know, from the snow melting.

There’s breakup and then there’s green up, which happens early to mid-May.

And that’s just this sudden explosion of green.

They get really excited talking about that in Alaska.

So you have breakup and green up and then you go through several other seasons like early summer, high summer, fall, early winter, solstice season, high winter, springtime winter.

And then you’re back to breakup, which was a revelation for me because I tell you, Grant and I both live here in sunny San Diego and there used to be a meteorologist on TV.

And his little saying was, our spring is in the summer.

Our summer is in the fall.

Our fall is in the winter and our winter is not at all.

Oh, I love that.

But Haley, there are also, particularly for the English-speaking countries in the Northern Hemisphere,

There are also a lot of terms for a period of cold or harsh weather that comes after the first period of pleasant spring weather.

You know, you get that first warm week or few days and you think, this is it.

We’ve arrived. Put the sweaters away. Get out the shorts.

And then you get like a cold storm or more frost or more snow.

And there’s so many terms for this.

And almost all of them have to do with that the cold weather comes after something has appeared because it’s spring.

For example, dogwood winter is a term for that.

It comes after the dogwoods blossom or bloom winter, after the blooms of a variety of plants.

And there’s fox grape winter, blackbird storm, buzzard storm, oak winter, whippoorwill storm, redwood or redbud winter, onion snow, and frog storm.

It’s not something biblical.

It’s just after the frogs have come out of their hibernation.

And one more, which I love, is snowball winter, but it has nothing at all to do with snow.

It’s about viburnum, the snowball bushes.

They have these big clusters of white flowers, white blossoms that look kind of like snowballs.

And as a child, my brother and I used to lie underneath the viburnum bushes in the yard,

Much to my mother’s anger, and just rattle them so that the petals would flutter down on us like snowflakes.

So there’s a ton of these.

There’s even, you know, blackberry storms, blackberry winter.

And these are in May and June when the blackberries bloom.

And then in the UK, there’s blackthorn winter.

Blackthorn is a hedgerow shrub.

I don’t know if you’ve heard of it.

It’s got white flowers that blossom in March or April.

And that blackthorn winter has a corresponding term in a lot of European cultures and languages

Because it happens, you know, blackthorn is spread throughout Europe.

There’s so many of these.

And there’s more.

I mean, how much more do you want?

Yeah, do we hear you taking notes there?

You do, actually.

I’m like, oh, that’s a good one.

I’m going to do that.

Maybe I’ll just send you my notes, Haley.

That’d be fantastic, actually.

Oh, wow.

What I will do is when we post this on the website, we will link to a couple of books.

We’ll mention a couple of books about weather lore.

And they include not only, you know, proverbs and sayings about how to predict the weather, but some of these terms are included in there.

Well, you guys, I am going to make just a list of the ones that you gave me right now.

And for my students, this is going to be an assignment for them that they have to write a poem about one of these seasons.

That sounds fantastic.

So you’ll have lots of poems.

How wonderful.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Please send us the results.

Absolutely.

For sure.

For sure I will.

All right.

Hayley, good luck.

Send us some of the poems, all right?

Oh, thank you.

I will.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Be well.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you call those odd in-between seasons that aren’t quite fall, aren’t quite winter, not spring, not summer?

Maybe it’s a little warmer than it should be or a little colder than it should be or wetter or drier than it ought to be.

We know there’s a term for it where you live, anywhere in the world.

877-929-9673 is toll-free 24 hours a day in the U.S. and Canada.

You can also talk to us on Twitter @wayword or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

This is Ryan McHale calling from Linkit-Ani, the land of the Tlingit in Ketchikan, Alaska.

Hi, Ryan.

How are you doing?

Hi, Ryan.

Doing good.

I have a question because I work as a curator of exhibits at Ketchikan Museum, and we recently had an exhibit opening.

And when I was sending out personal invites, I had two people respond that they were going to arrive dressed in bells.

And after I got over the shock of thinking that they were actually going to come dressed in bells, I started to think about where that actually originated from.

What it means.

Did they say, I’ll be there dressed in bells, or did they phrase it differently?

Yeah, what words did they use?

Yes, they texted back saying, I’ll be there dressed in bells,

And I’ve never heard that before.

Wow, that’s a new one on us.

Of course,

The far more common expression is, I’ll be there with bells on, you know, meaning

I’ll be there full of excitement and anticipation, or I’m going to be a really enthusiastic participant,

You know, I’m going to help make it festive and fun.

You wouldn’t say, I’ll be there with bells on

If you’re, for example, going to a funeral or going to take the SAT or something.

But,

Do you know where that originates?

Well, there are lots of different hypotheses floating around

And, it’s, it’s got a really murky past, but I think the most reasonable explanation

Is that it has to do with putting bells on horses.

I mean, think about those Christmas songs we sing,

You know, Jingle Bells and Bells on Bobtail Ring

And Sleigh Bells Ring.

And I think it’s about making that activity

Even more festive than it already is.

Wow.

That’s very interesting.

That’s the one that makes the most sense to me.

Grant, you and I have talked before about other stories,

Like maybe it has to do with the bells on a court jester’s hat,

But that really doesn’t have any evidence to back it up.

Yeah, that was the first thing that came to mind.

Bells on a costume or any kind of dress would be festive,

But the expression is relatively late in English’s history,

Long after such things were customary.

So it’s the late 1800s, 1890s or so,

And by that time, bells weren’t really common on costume.

Wow, that’s interesting.

But dressed in bills, that’s the phrase?

Dressed in bills?

Dressed in bills or with bells on?

Yeah, that’s interesting.

Yeah, with bells on.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, this is wonderful.

We love this report from Ketchikan,

And I hope you’ll listen for more instances of this

And let us know if that happens.

Ryan, our man in Ketchikan, thank you very much.

I love listening to you guys.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Thanks.

All right.

Bye-bye.

What word or phrase has caught your ear lately?

We’d love to hear about it, so give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Shelly calling from Carnelian Bay, California,

Which is on the north shore of Lake Tahoe.

So what’s on your mind today, Shelly?

Well, actually, it’s something that is fairly subtle, but it really stood out to me recently.

I’ve been listening to a wonderful etiquette podcast, and on one episode, the female host

Spoke of someone as being self-depreciating.

And honestly, when I heard that, I stopped in my tracks and I thought, surely I misheard her or perhaps she just had a rare slip of the tongue.

But then a couple of episodes later, the male host spoke of someone speaking in a self-depreciating manner.

And I definitely can be self-deprecating on occasion, but I would never describe myself as self-depreciating. I’d never heard that before.

So I’m left wondering, is self-depreciating even a real word or expression? And if it is, is the subtle difference between depreciating and deprecating a regional one?

Wow. No, it’s a historical one, though.

And you, Shelley, are confirming that a language change is pretty much complete.

Really? Yeah, absolutely.

This is a great usage question, and it’s easy to compliment a question, call all questions great. But this is important because many people are going to have your point of view where self-depreciating sounds wrong.

But there was a time when self-depreciating was correct and self-deprecating wasn’t something that anyone would say.

Wow. Yeah.

And so it’s flipped. Somewhere around the 1940s, the uses of deprecate took over from uses of depreciate when talking about self-depreciating or self-deprecating.

And they flipped and it became more common, even though it’s much older than that.

The usage isn’t as far along in British English. But in the U.S. and Canada, self-depreciating is far less common than self-deprecating.

The usage expert Brian Garner in his book, Modern English Usage, says that self-deprecating is 50 times as common as self-depreciating, although self-deprecating is traditionally viewed as incorrect.

But he also notes that the battle is over. And this is important because Garner is usually very reluctant to give up any ground on language change.

So the fact that he agrees that it’s just done and to stop arguing the point is important.

So I’m not wrong in saying self-deprecating. No, you’re not wrong.

There may be a handful, a tiny number of people still hanging on to self-depreciating. And self-depreciating isn’t wrong.

It’s just now less common. It just makes me want to call my accountant, though.

Yeah, and that’s what happened, Martha. I believe that that’s what happened.

So deprecate has traditionally meant to disapprove, to protest against, to criticize. Well, depreciate was both meant to lessen the value of something and to represent as of little value or to claim that something is unworthy of esteem.

But those meetings are so close that you can see how that they became interchangeable.

But as financial literacy became more common, terms like depreciate seemed more appropriate for discussing property and finances than discussing one’s character or one’s self-worth.

Sounds good. Well, thank you so much.

All right. Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. We’d love to hear more questions like that.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send them to us an email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is about language seen through family, history, and culture. Stay tuned for more.

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

I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, you know my house is a trivia house, right? Yes.

Do you know what that means? Well, I know that you guys know a lot, all of you.

Well, we read true pursuit cards at mealtimes. Wait, what?

Yeah, we read each other trivia questions. And my wife, Sarah, and I are part of Learned League, which is a high-level online trivia competition.

She has tried out for trivia television shows like Jeopardy. She watches trivia like Jeopardy every night.

And she’s part of several online quiz leagues that do their competitions on Zoom.

And this year, we added one more thing to our trivia household. Our son, Guthrie, has taken up Academic League, which is a high school quiz league.

You mean like College Bowl or Quiz Bowl? Something like that? Yeah, yeah, it’s exactly like that.

So after a couple years of doing it remotely because of the pandemic, San Diego public and private high schools are now meeting face to face to have these competitions.

They compete at three levels and they answer questions on academic topics like history and literature, physics, geography, theater, art, poetry, and more.

And what’s interesting to me is how the questions are phrased. They start difficult, like obscure even, and then they get simpler.

So the kids are sitting there poised over their buzzers, waiting to hear the thing that they recognize before they can buzz in with the answer.

So the easier, more likely to known facts appear last. So I’ve got a sample question for you from the National Association of Quiz Tournaments.

Do you want to hear it? I think so.

All right. Here we go. Buzz in.

Just go buzz, buzz as soon as you know the answer, okay? Okay.

I can’t ask for a lifeline or anything like that. No. No, here we go.

Oh, dear. Are you smarter than a high schooler?

In William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, Vardaman is encouraged to eat this fruit instead of pondering his mother’s death.

It is the less starchy of two similar fruits one can fry to make the Asian snack pisan goreng.

Jacobo Arben’s Guzman was overthrown at the urging of a company that mainly grew this fruit in Guatemala, which along with Honduras was this type of republic.

Oh. What?

Okay, I got it. You have to buzz in.

Buzz, buzz. Buzz, buzz.

Do I have to say it in the form of question? No, no.

Okay. What is it? I finally got it.

It’s got to be banana, right? Yeah, it’s a banana.

Banana, yeah. The last part was, for 10 points, name this fruit sold by Chiquita.

That’s absolutely, if you didn’t know it by that point, that was going to give it to you.

But I love the way that initially it seems really difficult. I can’t remember fruit from As I Lay Dying.

But then as you went farther and farther along, it’s sort of like watching a sunrise.

Yes. You would have had to have read the book recently or analyzed it recently really to, or have been an expert in Faulkner to remember the banana, I think.

I guess so. But I love that construct of starting from difficult to easy.

Yeah, the tension is palpable when a question goes on and on and on and gets to the simple part and nobody has buzzed in.

Most adults wouldn’t do much better than the kids because they’re difficult questions.

Although it is clear that there is an advantage for adults because just the more decades that you live, the more that you know.

And even the 80s and the 90s are distant history to children born in the 2000s. Sure, sure.

So I’m picturing you and Sarah in the audience trying not to raise your hand.

Yeah, we elbow each other when we know that the other one knows the answer because that would be something that we discussed recently or something that came up in trivia at home.

I would encourage our listeners to try to get involved as a supporter or even a coach at Academic League in their high school or middle school.

Sometimes they’re just looking for someone to attend and applaud. Sometimes they’re looking for someone to provide refreshments.

So it’s really not a bad way to spend a couple hours once a week. It sounds like great fun, Grant.

Mm— It is.

And we invite you to quiz us about language. I don’t know if we’ll do as well as high schoolers, but we’ll give it a try.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jackie Adams, and I’m calling from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hi, Jackie. So growing up, my grandmother used to say this expression, and we would giggle at it as children.

If she saw somebody that was dressed inappropriately or looked a little unkempt or gaudy or something, she would say, my goodness, they just look like the end of pee time.

And as children, you know, you hear the word pee in your grandma saying it, you kind of think, oh, that’s funny.

But when I got older, I started to think, well, what does that even, where did that come from? Like, I knew the context of how it was used, but I never really knew the origins of that expression.

So, Sophie, you could help. Okay, this was your grandmother saying this?

Correct. And she would say it if somebody, what, looked disheveled or what?

It could even be like someone would come into church dressed inappropriately, in her opinion. And she would say, well, my goodness, they look like the end of pee time.

But later you figured out that it was P-E-A rather than P-E-E, correct?

Correct.

Yeah, because what this phrase refers to, the end of pea time or the last of pea time or the latter end of pea time, it refers to the last of the pea harvest, which your grandmother was probably more familiar with than a lot of us.

It’s the time when the pea vines have been picked over and they’re all scraggly looking.

And so if you’re saying that somebody looks like the last of pee time or the end of pee time, they’re not looking their best.

And sometimes that phrase has been used to mean, you know, they look exhausted or haggard or sickly or careworn.

They just don’t look their best.

And so that’s how your grandmother was using it.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, she had a long life.

She just died last year, a month before her 106th birthday.

Wow.

Oh, my goodness.

Who knows what her childhood was like?

You know, she probably really knows what the end of Pete died.

She probably lived it.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah, it goes back to the early 19th century or so.

Well, that is great to know.

Well, Jackie, thank you so much for your call.

Thanks so much for giving me your time.

All right.

Sure.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Thanks for calling, Jackie.

Bye-bye.

We know there’s something that you say in your family.

You’ve passed it from person to person, generation to generation, and now it’s time to unwrap it for the rest of us.

877-929-9673.

We heard from Janet Hayes in San Antonio, Texas, who was talking about an expression that we’ve discussed before, which is, has your sufficiency been suffonsified?

It’s something that people say after dinner, you know, have you had enough to eat?

And there are different versions of this.

But she shared a couple of versions that I’ve never seen before.

She says her mother’s short version was, my sufficiency has been suffonsified and any more would be flippity-flop.

I really like the mixture of registers there.

And then her uncle’s longer version is, I’ve had sufficiency of all the numerous delicacies offered. Any more would be a superfluity. Gastronomical science admonishes me that I have reached a point consistent with dietetical economy. In other words, any more would be flippity flop.

The last part, I’m like, where? What? Flippity flop? What does that mean? Why?

But there’s no ask in English why. It just is.

It just is.

We do our best week after week to explain why.

And you can call us and we’ll try 877-929-9673 or find out why in email.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. My name is Nancy and I’m calling from Newport, Kentucky.

Well, welcome to the show, Nancy. What can we do for you?

I was thinking about it one day, and I realized that I had heard something that I’ve never been able to figure out.

I had two children here, and the second child was a girl, the first boy.

Women, old women, I loved them very much, came and got little dresses for the girl.

During that time, I was frequently told by these women that I was so lucky to have a pigeon pair.

A pigeon pair.

Yes, a pigeon pair.

And so did you have them as a set?

Did you have boy and girl twins at once or separately?

I had them separately.

The boy was the elder.

And how far apart were they?

Four years.

Four years, okay.

And what did you take that to mean?

Did you ask them to explain?

My daughter was a very difficult child, and I never got around to asking them.

Unfortunately, they all became older and moved or died.

So you’ve got a boy and girl, and people call them a pigeon pair.

And so your question that you’ve wanted to know and have answered is, what in the world is a pigeon pair?

And then I assume that’s P-I-G-E-O-N.

Yes, sir. It is.

Yeah.

Well, there’s an answer, and it goes back to the likelihood that pigeons and doves, which are basically part of the same family of birds, usually have broods that are made of two eggs, two chicks.

And so at one point, it was believed that they were always male and female and that they would go on to have a brood of their own.

And so if you have a pigeon pair of a boy and a girl, it’s like you are a pigeon. You have one boy and one girl in your brood.

That is funny.

Yeah. It goes back at least 200 years, probably much older than that.

There’s actually a lion in Hamlet that refers to doves and the fact that they have two eggs.

Typically, it’s something like as patient as the female dove when her golden couplets are disclosed, meaning when her two eggs are hatched.

How funny. How lovely. I was an older mother. Yeah.

This is not just in English that there are these terms. In Dutch, a boy and girl pair is called a rich man’s wish or a king’s wish or even a koningspader, which is a royal couple.

And in French, it’s similar. It’s a suedeur, which is the king’s wish.

And then there’s a Scots term, and pardon me, I don’t speak Scots, which is a dialect of English, but it’s a dooscleckin, which is a Scots pronunciation of dove, doos, and cleckin, or clecking, which means hatching.

So it’s a dove’s hatching, a dooscleckin, which means two.

And typically at birth are twins, but especially to the birth of male and female twins, the pair of them.

And, you know, it also gets applied to appliances.

Have you heard of a pigeon-pair fridge?

No, I have never heard that.

That’s a combination of an upright refrigerator with a single door and an upright freezer with a single door.

And they come together and they match each other and kind of complement each other.

Pigeon-pair refrigerator, yes.

That’s new to me. I did not know that, a pigeon-pair refrigerator.

This area is largely Appalachian with a big influx of German and Irish, which can also be Appalachian.

And I thought I would have heard about a pigeon pear fridge.

That’s amazing.

Nancy, thank you for sharing your story about your own pigeon pear.

And call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Angel Skinner from South Carolina.

Hi, Angel.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Angel.

My grandfather, who was born in around 1900, lived in Manning, South Carolina, which we call the Low Country.

And he became a pastor along the way.

And one of the things that he used to say was, amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, killed a hen.

So I always wondered where in the world that came from.

Was it something he came up with?

Was it something that other people said or was it just something that in that region they did?

When would you hear this from him?

When my dad was about three, that was about 1948.

He recorded a record at one of those like stores where they let you record your own record.

And he had my dad at three years old say this for the record.

Amen, Brother Ben, shot a rooster, kill the hen.

And we have the record still, and we’ve played it.

It’s one of those big, gigantic records, and it’s really thick material.

But they played it for us when we were all grown up, and I said, here’s the record, and we listened to it.

And we could barely tell what my dad was saying, but I said, amen, brother, then, shot a rooster, killed a hen.

It’s something that Papa used to say.

So I just wondered what the origin of that was.

And he was three years old at the time?

Right. It was 1948 or 49.

You know, that makes a lot of sense to me because so often we see versions of amen, Brother Ben as kind of a joking version of a prayer, the way that kids learn to say grace at the table.

So that makes a lot of sense to me.

There are lots of versions like amen, Brother Ben shot a rooster, killed a hen, rooster died, chicken cried, and everybody was mortified or everybody was satisfied.

That’s a lot longer than I have seen.

Well, a shorter version is, amen, Brother Ben, pass the butter, let’s begin.

Meaning, you know, let’s get the prayer before the meal out of the way and dig in.

In fact, there’s another one, amen, Brother Ben, back your ears and dive in.

That’s the one I was going to say.

Dive into that big plate of food.

And, you know, as a preacher’s kid myself, I can really appreciate this.

I remember when my nephew Drew was really, really small, and he was called on to say grace by my father, who was a minister.

And he looked pretty nervous because I don’t think he’d been asked to do that before.

And so he said, bless this food to the nourishment of our bodies.

And then he kind of hesitated and said, if at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.

Amen.

It was so cute.

Because he knew it was going to be something, you know, something formulaic, and that was the only thing he could think of as a little kid.

Little guy.

He did his best.

But that phrase, amen, brother Ben, has been around for quite a while and used in different contexts as well.

Yeah, and Americanism dating to the 1880s at least, probably earlier.

I had never heard it except for my grandfather, so that is really neat.

It’s around.

Well, what a gift that you have that record.

That is amazing.

Your father at three.

Yeah.

It was really neat to hear him.

And he sounded a lot like my little tiny one that I heard.

Well, Angel, thank you for sharing these memories with us.

I’m sure we’ll get a lot of those made-up prayers.

Those not-quite-real prayers.

Yeah.

I remember we were so proud of ourselves for saying, Buddha, Buddha, thanks for the Buddha.

Trying to be ecumenical.

Oh, no.

Well, at my house, it’s what you say.

Well, it’s what I say to my kids when they say something that I really agree with.

Amen, brother Ben.

Shot a rooster killed a hen.

And we just use that as an encouragement.

Yep, that’s right.

Aw, that’s so sweet that you’re carrying it on.

Take care now, Angel.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s the real grace, the real prayers you say at a meal, and there’s just the jokey ones you say when the parents aren’t paying attention.

We’d like to hear the latter, 877-929-9673, or tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler, and quiz guide John Chaneski.

We’d love to hear from you, no matter where you are in the world.

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Subscribe to the podcast, hear hundreds of past episodes, and get the newsletter at waywordradio.org.

Whenever you have a language story or question, our toll-free line is open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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.