Ring-Tailed Tooter (episode #1563)

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 Jan Kuczibel, who is a school principal in the Czech Republic. And he writes, I listen to your show quite often, usually when walking to the school. I even have a place I call Chaneski’s place. This is the place where his quiz always begins, since it comes more or less at the same time from the start of the show. Anyway, he was talking about our conversation that we had about helicopter parents, you know, those parents who tend to hover in their children’s lives and about the fact that in Denmark, they’re called curling parents, alluding to the sport of curling and, you know, those frantic efforts to sweep away all the obstacles that are in your children’s path. Well, Jun and his wife, Sharka, decided that they’re golf parents. And the way he put it was, we tend to strike our children approximately in the right direction toward the hole and let them fly.

Oh, those are both so perfect. Curling parents like this well cared for stone, gliding slowly down the ice. The parents in front frantically brushing away all obstacles. And then golf. Golf, you’re just using your best know-how, everything you can to push them in the direction of the hole and the flag and just putting your hand to your eyes to block out the sun just to see if they’re going to make it, you know, knowing it’s out of your control.

Yeah, maybe putting your hand over your eyes. Yeah, putting your hand over your eyes and just slowly walking behind, trying to catch up to wherever they’ve gone. Yeah. Right? Yeah, at some point you just have to let them go. We love to get emails and calls about the home words that you’ve made, the words that belong to you and your loved ones. Call us 877-929-9673 or tell us the story in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to Way With Words.

Hi, my name is Mimi. I’m calling from Platt Smith, Nebraska. When I was growing up, my grandmother would often use an expression kind of as an exclamation. It was good grief and little fishes. And she would kind of use it in a way that was like if she were really excited about something or if something was kind of like, you know, as an expression of disbelief, she would say, good grief and little fishes. And nobody in my family, not my siblings or myself, really know where that came from. And she’s no longer with us, so we can’t ask her. But I’ve always wondered what the origin of that might be.

So you think of your grandmother and you think of this expression?

Yes, I sure do. She recently passed in her eulogy. Both of my siblings and myself each mentioned it in her eulogy. So it clearly stuck with us.

Oh, how sweet. Yeah, it’s not just her phrase, although it’s not that common. I’m trying to imagine the reaction that she got when she would say that. Good grief and little fishes. She was a elementary school teacher, and she said that, or one time she told us that in her, one of her third grade classes, that a little boy asked her if she was upset after a few days because she hadn’t made that expression in a few days.

So she used it a lot.

I guess if you’re around grade schoolers, that’s a safe way of cursing without cursing. And that sort of brings us to the more common version of this, which is ye gods and little fishes, which is a euphemism, you know, to express indignation or amazement or, you know, the kind of thing where she might say that.

So yeah, ye gods and little fishes is an older expression. And the shorter version of that is just ye gods. That’s been around since probably the 17th century or so. And there are lots of different variations of this. Ye gods and little fishes, hell’s bells and little fishes, ye cats and little fishes. Just a fun phrase.

And I love her version of it, which you don’t hear that often. Great guns and little fishes. I wonder what the fishes did to get such a bad rap.

I don’t know. Some people have suggested that maybe the little fishes have to do with the story of Jesus feeding the 5,000 with two little fishes and five loaves. But we really don’t know that. I think it’s probably just a goofy saying.

Well, I love that. That’s on brand, as they would say.

On brand. It has been used by some writers of note. Louisa May Alcott uses it in Little Men, which was published in 1871. But out of school, you gods and little fishes how Tommy did carouse. So it’s not completely strange to anyone who’s done a bit of reading. She might have come across it in her studies.

Well, thank you so much. It’s nice to have some knowledge there.

Yeah. And do you use it yourself now, Mimi?

We do within my family, and it always makes us chuckle. But any time that I’ve ventured to say it out in the public sphere, I always get raised eyebrows.

Well, it’s a lovely memory of your grandmother. How great.

Yeah, thank you so much.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for talking with us, Mimi.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What expression or turn of phrase is tied to you or to the people that you love? Tell us about it and maybe we can tell you more about it. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us and the world on Twitter @wayword.

On our Facebook group, Laura Jean Jensen asks, I’ve not seen a large air pocket in commercially baked bread in years. In Minnesota in the 1960s, my mom looked at those holes and said, that’s where the baker jumped through. My mom raised us in Minnesota, but she was from western Montana. Has anyone else heard this phrase? And she included a picture of a piece of bread that had a big hole in the middle, as sometimes happens. And it turns out that several people who had German heritage said, yeah, we know this phrase. That’s where the baker crawled through or that’s where the baker went through. If it’s a bigger hole, you might say that’s where the baker and his wife went through.

That’s lovely. I love that idea. You might feel like you got shorted as a kid when you get the piece of bread where you can’t put any butter, you can’t put any jelly, right?

Yeah.

My siblings didn’t get the one with the big hole. I got the one with the big hole where the baker and his wife jumped through. That’s lovely.

877-929-9673.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant. This is Scott in Brownsburg, Indiana. I have a question about something my mom used to say all the time. It used to just crack us kids up, and she would often refer to somebody as a ring-paled tutor.

A person?

Yes, it would be a person. A typical way she would phrase it is she might say, you know, I like your friend Cindy, but she’s a ring-tailed tutor.

What did that mean?

My sister and my cousin, I have a cousin that still lives in Texas, but they both had the impression that I did too, that it’s not a negative. It would usually be about somebody who was maybe got into a little bit of trouble, but not bad trouble. Maybe somebody that was high-spirited, you know, maybe a little bit mischievous. But not a bad thing either.

Like an Eddie Haskell type, maybe.

That Eddie Haskell, he is a ring-tailed tutor. Kind of like when you call somebody a handful.

Exactly. In fact, Grant, one of the things I wrote down was exactly that. You know, a handful, maybe a bit of a force of nature.

Force of nature, yeah, that’s a great one.

Yeah, we sometimes put hurricane in front of people’s names. Hurricane Martha, for example. I have been called a handful.

But not a ring-tailed tooter.

Oh, I love it, though. It’s not tooters and you make toots. It’s just the ring-tailed is the key part here.

Right. I always thought that it probably had a southern connotation.

Yeah, there’s certainly something rural about it. I don’t know about southern. It’s certainly something rustic, maybe. The ring-tailed part is the part doing all the work. This is the one that something that’s ring-tailed is special. You can have a cat or you can have a ring-tailed cat. And then you know it’s a special cat, right?

Because a ring-tailed animal of any kind is unusual.

So there’s a lot of variations on this.

So you can have a ring-tailed roarer, ring-tailed squealer, ring-tailed peeler, tooter, snorter, ape, baboon, mosquito.

I don’t know what a ring-tailed mosquito looks like or how you tell.

And you can have things like ring-tailed know-nothing or ring-tailed waffle brain or ring-tailed SOB.

And there are other variations on the ring-tailed part itself.

A rip-snorter.

And a rip-snorter can be a violent storm or an aggressive angry person or anything that’s outrageous or superlative.

So you can have a rip-tail snorter or a rip-tail screamer.

And these are all kind of of a package.

They’re all about something just outstanding or beyond the pale or out of the usual or something that requires extra effort to handle.

I always wondered if it wasn’t something akin to a reference to a raccoon, maybe, because I didn’t know anything else that’s ring-tailed.

It’s possible.

One of the dictionaries that I’ve looked into suggests that it’s just a fantasy creature, just the idea that something that has a ring-tailed is unusual, because they are rather unusual in nature.

The earliest uses that we find are the 1820s and a reference to a fight between Kentuckians.

So perhaps a raccoon would automatically come to mind.

So, Scott, do you use this today?

We just use it as an homage to my mom.

Aww.

We’ll say something like, well, you know what, mom would call her.

My siblings or my wife would say, well, yeah, ring-tailed tutor.

So, Scott, I guess the real question is, what about your mom?

Did she fall into the ring-tailed tutor category?

She did.

She’s been gone.

She’s been gone a few years now, but, yes, she definitely did.

Actually, all her.

She was from a family of four girls, and they were all ring-tailed tutors.

Oh, that’s lovely.

It’s been a delight to hear your memories, and thanks for sharing this with us, Scott.

Thanks, guys. Love the show.

Thank you. Take care now.

Thank you, Scott.

Well, give us a ring, 877-929-9673.

We’ve talked before on the show about mondegreens, those misheard lyrics like, there’s a bathroom on the right, instead of there’s a bad moon on the rise.

And the other day I learned that a friend of mine for years thought that the Stevie Nicks song about just like a white-winged dove was just like a one-winged dove, which is very sad.

How is a one-winged dove flying? No.

I also learned just the other day that there’s another term for this, which is oronym, O-R-O-N-Y-M.

And this refers to these word strings in which the sounds can be logically divided in several different ways.

Because, you know, if you think about it in spoken language, we don’t have the same white spaces in between words.

And so it’s easy for those words to slide together in different ways.

You know, we have to make sense of that when we’re talking.

And a lot of times we don’t think about that.

But, I mean, a great example of that is the I scream, you scream, we all scream for ice cream.

Right.

We divide differently.

So sometimes it’s correct division and sometimes it’s misdivision.

Right.

And it’s kind of amazing how much work we’re doing in our minds to sort those things out.

And sometimes we make mistakes and that results in mondegreens and oronyms.

Give us a call.

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 joining us now on the line is that international man of mystery, enigmas, and puzzles, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hello, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Here I am on the line once again phoning it in, as people keep telling me.

I heard you on the show the other day phoning it in once again.

Yes, that’s right.

From a mystery location.

That’s right.

The mystery location is Brooklyn.

Anyway, here’s the quiz.

We’re doing takeoffs again.

That’s where we take off the first letter of a word to get another word.

Now, this time we’re going to make two words by taking the letter G from the start of a word.

Only G as in gun now.

I’ll say a sentence that suggests both words.

You tell me what they are.

For example, if I said, that waiter who put fresh Parmesan cheese on my lasagna, I’d give him a 7 or 8 out of 10.

The answers would be grated and rated.

Because we’ve got grated cheese and rating there.

Okay, good.

Here’s the first one.

I have finally made the last payment on my fancy wedding dress.

I’m giggling because of embarrassment.

There’s so much silence.

I finally made the last payment on my wedding dress.

Right.

So now you own your gown.

Yes, gown and own.

Very good.

Nice.

Simple one to start.

Okay.

In an even more ornate wedding gown, she inched down the stairs like a slow-moving mass of ice and snow.

Lazy, lazier glacier?

I don’t know.

Almost there.

Yeah, a lazier gown.

A lazier glacier.

Yeah.

That’s right.

It don’t necessarily sound similar, but you just take away the first word and orthographically.

Spelling is there.

Yeah.

Glacier and lacier.

Right.

We still need to paint that part of the wall near the roof, but I got this.

I’m able to paint the gable.

Yes.

Very good.

Gable and able.

I got this.

Very good.

I walked into my student doing an impression of me and my jaw just dropped.

Ape being in gaping.

Yeah, pretty good.

He was aping you and you gaping.

That’s right.

I had gaped and aped, but yeah, does any of those fits?

Gape and ape?

A plan to gain the entirety of my grandfather’s property soon began to develop in my brain.

Gestate and east estate?

Yes, very good.

Gestate and estate.

Wow.

I was afraid my grandfather saw my eyes quickly dart to the long, pointy weapon on the wall.

I like the dart and pointy.

I like that.

Yeah.

That’s good.

Was it free?

Was it a free lance?

Were you glancing?

Yes, I was glancing at a lance that was totally free.

It was a free lance.

Yes, very good.

Here’s the last one.

My dreams of treasure dashed.

I returned to my weaving with sadness.

Well, gloom and loom.

Yes, that’s it, gloom and loom.

Sometimes there are superfluous clues in the clues, but you got it, the weaving.

I’m not just going to say weaving with sadness unless you get away with it.

I’ve got to make you work for it.

Anyway, those are our G takeoffs for this week.

You guys did fantastic.

Well done.

Hey, thanks, John.

Hey, thank you, guys.

You were great.

Thank you.

And we invite you to join us for some more semantic antics.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts about language to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Twitter at Wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys.

I’m so happy to be on.

I’m John from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, John.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

I appreciate it.

So I have a question.

It has a little bit of a story first, and then I’ll get to my question.

So all my life, my father, who was born in 1928 in Springfield, Ohio, and grew up there, he talked about that they would go to the cemetery on what they called Decoration Day back then when he was a kid, you know, five, six, seven years old.

Now we call it Memorial Day, of course.

He said they would plant flags at the graves of the veterans and I think also some of his family members as well.

But anyway, he called it planting flags.

So my whole life, I assumed that that meant he would take a little stick with a flag on it and put it in the ground.

Well, after he died, my mom, who was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, in 1935, she went on Memorial Day to his cemetery and said she was going to bring a flag or flags to his grave.

And she sent a picture of his gravesite with what she called the flag on it, and it was an iris.

And so I called her and said, what is that flower?

I thought you were bringing a flag.

And she said, yeah, that’s what your father called irises was flags.

And she explained the whole thing to me.

And I just couldn’t believe because my whole life I thought that he was taking little American flags to the cemetery when in reality they were taking irises.

Now, she said she growing up in Cincinnati did not call irises flags.

But I did ask my dad’s sister, who was born in 34 in Springfield, Ohio.

And she says she absolutely remembers that they called them flags.

And she actually had irises growing on the side of their house.

And they would cut them and take them out to the cemetery.

And that’s what they called planting flags.

And I did ask her if she still calls them that.

She says, oh, yes, I still call irises flags often.

But I asked about her kids, who several of them are still in Springfield.

And she says, oh, no, they would never call them flags.

They would call them irises.

So my question is, I’m just curious, was that a highly localized thing?

Has it completely gone away?

Because like I said, her kids are in Springfield now, don’t say it.

So I’m just really curious about that whole origin of the flags and the irises and why my dad would have called irises flags.

Oh, fascinating.

There is a white iris, iris albicans, which is also known as the cemetery iris.

And it’s something that is planted in a lot of cemeteries, particularly throughout the South.

There’s this long, long tradition of planting white irises in cemeteries.

It’s a tradition that goes all the way back to North Africa and found its way to Spain.

And then from the Spanish who settled in Florida, it spread throughout the South.

Now, is there any guess how, I mean, does it look like a flag?

Is there any particular flag it looks like?

Or any guess how the term came about?

Or is there another derivation of flag that I’m totally missing that means nothing to do like a banner?

Well, that’s a very good question because the etymology of the flag that symbolizes a nation and the flag that is an iris plant, they’re both kind of murky.

But the plant flag may come from an old word that means reed or rush, refers to a kind of reed and tall, skinny flower.

The flag that’s made out of cloth, again, is another sort of murky etymology.

It may have to do with the sound of it flapping in the wind,

Or some people think that it has to do with the way that it flutters,

But we really, really don’t know the origins of that.

And there may be some overlap between the fluttering of a flag

And the fluttering of those lovely Irish blossoms.

That’s actually one of my favorite words is onomatopoeia.

I know you guys like to talk about your favorite words,

And so flag man should be an onomatopoeia.

Yeah.

Anyway, the whole thing is just so fascinating.

I sure do appreciate you guys taking the time to help me out with this.

Sure thing, John. We’re glad you called.

Appreciate it.

Thanks for sharing this memory.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks so much, guys.

Bye-bye.

Well, Martha has a sideline in flower etymologies.

You may not have known it.

We’d love to talk to you about flowers and flower words.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or send us a picture of what you’ve been growing

And we’ll talk about the language associated with those plants on Twitter @wayword.

We heard from Susan Gallant in Eugene, Oregon,

Who was writing about our conversation about the term pain in the penny.

Remember that one?

Yeah, that’s when you have something hurts you in your abdomen and penny’s short for pinafore.

Exactly.

And that jogged a memory for Susan.

She writes,

When I was in school in California back in the 60s,

During PE we would sometimes be divided into teams to play sports.

Since we were all dressed identically in our gym clothes, we needed a way to distinguish between the two teams.

For that purpose, we had something called pennies, made of a colored canvas apron-like garment,

Which was basically two squares with straps.

You pulled it over your head and tied the sides.

And it hadn’t occurred to me at the time that that name probably came from Pinafore.

So funny to have an epiphany nearly 60 years later.

That’s wonderful.

But that happens all the time, right?

Where you just have this moment, like two neurons fire that have never fired together before.

The puzzle pieces fit.

They do.

And it did for me, too, because we had those stupid pennies when I was in gym class.

We had these really ugly sort of canvas blue gym suits with elastic on the thigh.

It was awful.

And, yeah, to divide up, to play girls basketball, which at the time was six players on a team, as I recall.

And one stayed on each side of the court and didn’t run because I guess we were just, you know, too delicate to run all the way up and down the court.

But one team would wear pennies.

And I always thought that was a weird term at the time because, of course, I was in the South and pennies, pennies.

But anyway, yes.

Right, the vowels.

I messed it up.

Yeah, I think we, by the time I got to school, we didn’t use anything that you pulled over.

And we didn’t do shirts and skins necessarily in school.

No, I think they just borrowed the flag football flags.

And so you just had the flag football flags on to show one side or the other.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, even if you weren’t playing flag football.

So that’s how you divide it up.

If you’re searching for a linguistic epiphany, this is the place, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Molly White.

I’m from San Diego.

Oh, welcome, Molly.

What can we do for you?

Well, my mother always used an expression, and she’s the only one I’ve ever heard use this expression.

If you are, like, sitting and spacing out, like daydreaming, she would come in and say,

My God, child, I think you’re in a Brown study.

And so I’ve never heard anybody use that expression.

I’m kind of wondering where it came from.

And is she from San Diego as well?

No, she’s from northern Panhandle, West Virginia, a small town called Sistersville.

Brown study. And so you took that to mean what?

It meant that you were daydreaming, and also the undercurrent meaning was you should really stop and go do something.

Yeah, it’s got a long history in English back to the 1500s, and it comes from an older meaning of brown that wasn’t really about color.

It was more about shades.

It was about the darkness of something.

It meant dark or dusky.

So you could call something brown like the sky was brown.

And you didn’t mean brown in color.

You meant that there wasn’t very much light in it.

So to say that someone is in a brown study means that they’re in a, well, we should talk about study as well.

To be in a study means to be in a moment of reverie, to be in a moment of deep thought.

So a Brown study is a moment of dark thought, a moment of deep reverie.

It’s this idea of maybe even gloomy or melancholy thought, a mental abstraction, as one of the dictionaries puts it, or even meditation or reverie.

It can seem unhealthy to other people who aren’t a part of what you’re thinking about.

They might think that your spacing out is somehow unnatural or weird

Or that you’re somehow controlled by outside forces,

Particularly in the old days when things were a little less understood.

Well, I never thought it was a positive thing.

And I wondered if it comes from her background.

She’s a third generation.

Her family’s from Northern Ireland, a county down area,

And she was lace-skirtin Irish.

I don’t think there’s anything particularly Irish about it.

It’s certainly pervasive through English.

I would say that it’s old-fashioned at this point.

You’re not likely to hear it.

I think people who are well-read would know it.

Was she a heavy reader or someone who’s very literate or learned?

Well, she was an English major.

There we go.

So she probably had many great works pass through her mind,

Pass through her hands, pass before her eyes.

Molly, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you for your information.

Take care now. Be well.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

And send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

You know, we get tons of email, and Martha and I love it.

Email for us is a delight, not a chore.

So send your thoughts and ideas along to us.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Shannon. I am going from Marshall, Arkansas.

Hi, Shannon. Welcome to the show.

I have a question. I’m not originally from Arkansas. I’m originally from Indiana.

And I’m in the middle of the Ozarks. It’s a very different dialect.

So one of the interesting phrases I’ve heard used around here, especially by older people, sometimes people in their 30s or 40s, is they use proud a different way than I’m used to hearing it being used.

I first noticed this when my neighbor is in his mid-80s, and he’s lived in this area his whole life.

And he would often say if I come over to talk to him, he’d say, well, I’m just so proud you came over here.

And at first I thought he meant he’s proud of me for coming to check on him.

But after I heard him use it in a couple different situations, he’s just using it to mean glad.

So he’ll be like, well, I’m proud you came down.

He means I’m glad you’re here.

And I’ve heard people at my, I work for the school here, and I’ve heard people at work use it too.

Like, oh, I’m proud we got that figured out, or I’m proud they assigned her to that.

And talking to people back from Indiana, I don’t think it’s used there very much at all.

It’s really super interesting, the fact that usually you think of proud as being, you know, having a high opinion of yourself or someone else.

You know, you’re talking about someone with a lot of pride.

But over the centuries, it’s also referred to an emotion or an action that’s somehow inflated or it’s bigger or more intense than normal.

In fact, in Middle English, you can use the term pitcher proud to mean somebody who’s drunk or belligerent.

So proud is sort of a Swiss Army knife of an adjective.

It can mean a lot of different things.

And one of the other things that it has meant over the centuries and now just in certain pockets is the idea, as you said, of somebody being pleased or glad or gratified.

And you do see this in the South, in the southern United States.

You also see it in parts of England.

But you’ve come across a wonderful example of it with your friends.

That’s so cool.

Yeah, and you know, another variant of this that is one of my favorite terms that I’ve adopted,

Even though it’s mainly from the South, is the term journey proud.

And that’s when you’re excited about a trip.

It’s the night before a trip, and you can’t wait to get on the road, and you can’t eat, you can’t sleep.

People in the South sometimes describe that as feeling journey proud.

That is a really cool phrase. I would definitely hear that.

But yeah, you do hear that particularly in the South, and maybe that’s another one that you can listen for there.

Shannon, we’re going to make you one of our unofficial field workers, and you have to report back.

You have to let us know about these cultural collisions where your Indiana sensibilities are surprised by what you hear from your new Arkansas friends and neighbors.

Absolutely. I’m definitely keeping my ears open here.

Okay, great. Thank you for sharing this one. This was a good one.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, we would be proud to take your call, 877-929-9673, and we’d be proud to accept your tweets @wayword.

I was mid-conversation the other day, and somebody talked about deadpan humor, and we all kind of stopped and thought, deadpan?

What is deadpan all about? Do you know, Grant?

I think so. Yeah, it’s your face. Your pan is your face. So your dead pan is where nothing’s happening on your face.

Yes, I had to go look that up. And it turns out that yes, back in the early 1900s, the human face was sometimes referred to as a pan.

And I did some more digging on that. And it looks like the earliest uses of dead pan are in the early 20th century.

And it’s sports writers talking about either a baseball player or a little bit later,

People talked about Joe Lewis, the boxer, being the deadpan dynamiter

Because he didn’t have an expression as he was pounding away on somebody.

Nice. We know you’ve got questions, something you’ve said all along,

And you don’t know where it comes from.

We’d like to help. 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

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 were saddened to learn of the recent death of nature writer Barry Lopez.

He wrote wonderful books like Arctic Dreams, for which he won a National Book Award.

He’s just a beautiful, beautiful writer, just lapidary prose.

And I’m reminded of a passage from one of his books of essays called About This Life from the 1990s.

And in it, he’s talking about how he was on a very long flight with somebody who had a 15-year-old daughter who was just starting to get interested in writing.

And the guy asked Barry Lopez for advice for his daughter about writing.

And Barry said, tell your daughter three things.

Tell her to read whatever interests her,

And protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash.

No one can fathom what happens between a human being and written language.

She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension,

Things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like

The Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly

Useful. And he goes on to say, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing

By reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she

Wishes to write well, she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs

And then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief,

Whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in

No great need. So help her discover what she means. Finally, tell your daughter to get out of town

And help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean travel to Kazakhstan or wherever,

But to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself

From the familiar. Then when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves

The familiar and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.

So read, find out what you truly believe, get away from the familiar.

And Grant, I can’t imagine much better writing advice than that.

Oh, it’s perfect.

I don’t know that I could add anything to it.

I think anything I would say would just elaborate on that.

As a matter of fact, he says in better words stuff that you and I have said before.

I particularly like the part where he’s talking about protecting the child from criticism about what they’re reading

Because there are many on-ramps to becoming a lifelong reader,

And almost none of them start with reading the great classics.

People don’t go from classic to classic in the beginning.

They go from cereal box to a waiting room magazine

To something their teacher recommended to a gift bought by grandma

To something that they were loaned by an older sibling.

It just is a strange path, right?

And the writing is the same.

You go from notes to diary to an essay for class to deciding to write a story or to an idea that you thought you could do better than the author you were reading did it.

It’s just many different paths.

Right, right.

I mean, the language itself is a magical gift.

And I just love the way that he celebrates that.

I guess the only thing that we can add is do yourself a favor and go read some Barry Lopez.

Right.

He’ll be missed, but his works are here.

He’s left something of himself behind.

We’d love to hear from you about an author or a writer who left a great impression on you.

Maybe there’s a passage that you cherish.

Share it with us so we can cherish it too.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or take a screen grab and put it on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

This is Randy from Live Oak, Florida, near the banks of the Suwannee River.

My brother worked down in Central Florida.

We grew up in Central Florida around Orlando.

My brother worked with a fellow, and he used a phrase that I don’t know that I’ve ever heard anybody else use it.

I say phrase because he would describe something, put the first part of it in,

And then describe something else and put the second part.

Without getting into something that’s technical and line crew in that, he might say something like, well, you bring that line in first, thing air, and then you bring those lines over next, thing like that and all.

Sometimes you just get thing air.

Sometimes you get thing air and then thing like that.

But most of the time it was thing air and then thing like that and all.

And I don’t know where that came from, but I’ve tried to look it up and I can’t find anything on it.

So it’s the thing here and the thing like that and all that you’re asking about.

Right. Mostly the thing here, obviously, because thing like that and all is just a series of words stuck together,

Although I’ve never heard them used that way.

Is your impression that he’s saying that thing here, but just dropping off the H, that he’s saying T-H-I-N-G space H-E-R-E?

I’m not sure. The first thing that came to my mind was, obviously, it’s not A-I-R like air, although that’s what it sounds like.

And came to my mind was Mount Airy in North Carolina, and for whatever reason, I kind of stuck those two together.

And I don’t know why, but maybe I kind of thought he might have been from, or his family may have come out of the Appalachian area.

But that may just be something sticking in my mind. I’m not sure.

I talked to my brother, and he didn’t know for sure where he came from.

And Orlando, certainly after Disney came in,

Was a real melting pot for people coming from other places.

So family could have been from almost anywhere.

That’s so interesting.

There are various kinds of speech pathologies

Where people interrupt their words with things,

And they can’t help it.

It’s almost like stuttering, but it’s with words.

And I wonder if he’s got one of those happening to him.

The radio performer Jack Benny, although he was a fantastic performer and very successful, had one of these.

And his was you know.

And not in the way that people say you know, just as a filler or a thing that they’re holding on to the moment with while they come up with the next thing to say.

But he couldn’t stop himself from saying it.

It just came out, it just inserted itself at the end of a really great punchline or a really great bit of text or a good line reading.

It just automatically, the words, you know, showed up, even when they didn’t make any sense whatsoever.

And I wonder if this fellow has something like that going on.

It could have been.

Of course, we’re talking about probably early to mid-80s.

He’s long since passed away now.

So we have no way to ask him what the heck was going on.

And like you said, if it was a throwaway or something that just kind of came out, he might not even be able to tell you where he picked it up from.

And I hesitate to use the words throwaways because sometimes these things that seem to have no role in the sentence actually do take a role.

Like I was saying, sometimes they serve the purpose to pause while we collect our thoughts.

Sometimes they connect two ideas together.

Sometimes they give the other person in the conversation a chance to let the speaker know that they are listening and paying attention.

Moment to say, are you listening? And they look at the other person and the other person makes a

Gesture or a sound to say that they are listening. I want to talk a second about the thing that he

Says at the end of his sentence. What was that collection of words? Thing like that and all.

Right. That sounds like a sentence tag, Martha, doesn’t it? It does. It does. Like,

Like and thing or something like that, that, that you hear sometimes in the South on the coast there.

Yeah, it sounds like the kind of thing that you just sort of add to a sentence.

And I suppose it means a little bit, you know, like plus similar things and actions or like that or something like that.

But it’s sort of a stock phrase that you just sort of insert without thinking, like Grant said.

Fascinating.

Fortunately, Randy, we have a large audience.

And if we know anybody else who has this particular pattern of speech or knows someone who does, I hope that they’ll let us know and tell us more about it.

We can find out if it’s just the one fellow that you worked with or if there are other people who say this, too.

And then maybe we can learn something from all these people who are reporting into us.

Well, let’s hope so.

All right.

Well, thanks for sharing your information and thanks for calling.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate it.

Be well.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Randy.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Following up on our conversation about the word nickname, we heard from a listener who says she’s heard the term blister used as a nickname.

And blister is the name you give to somebody who always shows up when the work is done.

Someone who pretends that they’re injured with something minor so they can avoid work?

Well, just think.

You’ve been working outside, you know, wielding a rake.

And what shows up when the work is done?

Oh, I got it.

The blister appears at the end.

I think that’s a great nickname to keep in your back pocket for somebody.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Amelia Siders from Traverse City, Michigan.

Welcome, Amelia. What’s up?

Well, I’m hoping that you can help me figure out the origin of a saying my grandfather would say to me when I was very little.

He died in the late 70s, and I remember sitting, he would have us sit on his lap, and he’d lean over and say he had to tell us secrets.

And he’d whisper in our ears, there are no bones in ice cream.

And it was something that was kind of a family joke and funny, but silly, but also a little disturbing and strange.

And I never understood where he got that from.

My father thinks that it was something related to, he had been a saying around his time, but I thought, I didn’t know if there’d be something you guys had ideas about.

There are no bones in ice cream?

Correct.

There are no bones in ice cream.

And something tells me he did this with great drama.

He did.

It was a very, it was like he had to come tell us.

He’s like, I have to tell you a secret.

Come here.

And I actually repeated this with my little nieces when they were older.

It’s kind of a family tradition because it was something we heard.

But I never understood what it was.

Tell us about your grandfather.

Do you know when he was born?

He was born, I would say he had to be born in the early 1900s, probably 1903, 1902.

He died in the 70s, and he was, I think, 76, 77 when he passed away.

Sounds about right.

Grew up in the Midwest.

He was from the Midwest, okay.

We know a little bit about this expression.

It wasn’t his alone.

It did have a little bit of cachet.

There was a period in the 1920s and 30s where this expression was in vogue.

The earliest that we know that it was in use was in the 1920s.

1925 exactly.

It pops up in some college yearbooks and in newspapers as a bit of nonsensical filler,

Right along with expressions like snowballs don’t bounce and Mississippi has no husband.

And if all the crossword fans were laid end to end,

What difference would it make how far they would reach?

So it was just kind of these non-joke jokes, just this humor without a punchline sort of stuff.

Now, some of those sources in the 1920s and 1925, they attribute these jokes, all of these,

They come together as a bunch, to the Purple Cow.

Now, the Purple Cow was a bunch of things.

And one of them was a humor magazine at Williams College in Massachusetts that started in 1907.

It was named after the poem by Gillette Burgess.

You might remember this.

I never saw a purple cow.

I never hoped to see one.

But I can tell you anyhow, I’d rather see than be one.

So this little humor magazine at Williams College is credited by these sources as coming up with this.

Well, that would make sense, though, if it was just a bunch of, you know, a series of nonsensical phrases.

He would have been young.

He would have been a young man and he would have been picking up all kinds of slang and goofy language at the time that this was making the rounds in the late 20s and early 30s.

You know, there’s also a really stupid joke that was making the rounds around that time that goes something like, you’re driving down the road in your canoe and your tire falls off.

How do you get the pancakes off your dog’s roof?

And the answer is purple because ice cream doesn’t have any bones.

There you go.

Well, I’m just very happy that it has nothing to do with actual bones in ice cream.

So that is a good thing.

It’s just nonsense.

By the way, it became so well-known as an expression, it shows up in a Clifford Oditz play, Awaken Sing, by 1933.

And even as late as the 1970s, it’s in a bit of dialogue that Sylvester Stallone wrote for one of his lesser movies.

I think it was 1979.

So it’s still around.

It still pops up occasionally, but it doesn’t have the cachet that it once did.

Well, good.

At least I know now I can actually understand when I repeat this to others.

Yeah, it’s just nonsense.

The snowballs don’t bounce.

Amelia, thanks so much for calling.

Thank you both very much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary. I’m from Albuquerque, New Mexico, and I have a question for you guys.

Excellent, Mary. Welcome.

All right.

So I’m coming to ask a question about the kitchen implement that most people know as tongs.

I grew up in the 80s, and my mother always called them gleepers. And so I grew up calling them gleepers.

I never called them tongs. But nobody else in my life ever called them gleepers. And so this came up at Christmas just recently.

And I decided to give you guys a call because I have absolutely no idea where it came from.

My mother believes her sister invented it because we’re the only ones that we know that use it.

So I was just wondering if there was any history to this word or if we did indeed invent it.

So, gleepers, G-L-E-E-P-E-R-S?

That’s what I would assume, yeah.

Okay, gleepers. My family word meter is pegging red right now.

I think this is a family word. There are lots of those, and there’s no shame im in. They’re all really fun.

Martha, the only thing I can think of, and this is stretching it, but I’ll throw it out there for what it’s worth, is Martha and I both know a word called gleep, which at one time for a brief period in the history of American slang meant to steal.

It was used in the movie The Wild One to mean to steal an automobile. It was used by motorcycle gangsters.

And you might say, I’m going to gleep a cage, meaning to steal an automobile.

So gleepers might be things used for taking or stealing something, but that’s really stretching it because it was never big.

And I think all the slang dictionaries probably got their one mention of that word gleep from that one movie, that one time.

So, okay. You know, I’ve heard people call them clackers, but that makes more sense because you can’t help but when you pick up a pair of tongs to clack them a few times in your hands before you use them.

Right. I think there’s a law. It’s kind of like right there alongside the law of gravity, you have to clack tongs before you use them.

Newton discovered, I think, the tong clacking rule.

Yeah, I think that was his sixth law.

Well, that’s great.

And you know, Mary, if anybody else uses that, we’re going to hear about it.

But I suspect Grant is right.

Thank you, Mary.

Oh, that’s great.

If we find out more, you’ll hear from us, all right?

All right. Thank you so much.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Share your family words with us.

That thing that you say at home and nobody else in the world seems to know, we want to hear about it.

And maybe, just maybe, you aren’t the only ones.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant, Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673, or email us 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.

Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.