Skookum (episode #1534)

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.

Ian Gordon, who lives in the UK, emailed us to ask if we know the Welsh word for children.

I don’t think I do.

I was so excited to learn it.

I didn’t either, but the Welsh word for children is plant, P-L-A-N-T.

Oh.

How cool is that?

That’s a coincidence, right?

Yes, yes.

That’s a complete coincidence.

Gotcha.

The word for child is something like plentyn, and the plural for children in Welsh is plent.

And in the language world, we call those kinds of words false friends, the words that look like they mean something that they really don’t.

Right. They look like they’re etymologically related across languages, but it’s just an accident.

Well, sometimes they’re etymologically related, but they mean different things.

For example, the word fastidious in English means meticulous or really careful about detail, but it goes back to a Latin word fastidium, which means loathing or disgust.

And that’s reflected in the Spanish word fastidioso, which actually means annoying or irritating or tedious.

And so if you see that word, you shouldn’t assume that it’s a positive word.

But other times the words are just arbitrary.

The Italian word burro, for example, meaning butter, sounds like the Spanish word and looks like the Spanish word for donkey, right?

But they’re not related at all.

They’re not related at all.

Yeah, and it’s a common etymological mistake.

When people begin to first explore how languages are connected, they find all these accidental, oh, wow, these words are spelled the same or they sound the same.

Almost always it’s just an accident.

There’s no real history there.

It’s just because human mouths make the same sounds, and those sounds combinations are just likely to happen again and again.

Right, right.

So if you’re learning German, you don’t want to give someone a gift because that word means poison in German.

And weirdly enough, it means married in Norwegian.

Right, just like kind and kind.

Your child might be kind, but it’s just a coincidence.

Exactly.

Well, I’m going to share a couple more of those later in the show.

And I bet a lot of our listeners have had experiences learning other languages and maybe being tripped up by something similar.

Absolutely.

And we’re looking for the uncommon ones, too.

So let us know, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning, Martha.

Good morning. Who is this and where are you?

This is Stacey Young and I am in Eureka, California.

Well, welcome. What can we do for you, Stacey?

Well, I don’t believe that the word B-U-R-Y is a homonym with B-E-R-R-Y.

-huh.

Really? Why not?

Well, you know, that’s funny because I thought it would have been that I was an Air Force brat and just grew up in different regions of the United States, and it turns out that my parents don’t say the word the way I do either.

So now I don’t know if I’m just a pretentious person that, you know, read it long before I heard it and just assumed it was pronounced Murray.

Oh, that’s probably it. Thanks for calling.

No, no, no. All right, so you don’t say B-U-R-Y to rhyme with B-E-R-R-Y.

Correct.

Where did you spend the most time?

Midwest.

Well, I mean, now I’ve been in California for a very long time.

What, 20 years, 30 years?

Growing up, I was in the Midwest.

Alabama for a year and then four years in Illinois.

How long in California, 20, 30 years?

Yeah, we could say that now.

Okay.

Let’s just zero in on this.

Most people throughout the English-speaking world do say B-U-R-Y the same as they say B–R-R-Y.

Berry and Berry.

They say them identically.

Exactly the same. However, there are a bunch of people, not many, that say B-U-R-Y differently.

And there are two reasons that they might. The first reason is that it’s a pronunciation spelling, which is probably what you’re doing, which is they see that it’s spelled differently. And so they say, yeah, that can’t be right. Why would that sound like that other word? It doesn’t look like the other word. U is never pronounced that way. I think I’m going to make it follow the more typical pronunciation of the U and pronounce this as bury. It’s going to be bury. Like fury and jury. Yeah.

It just kind of follows some other rules. And that’s logical. And we do that often throughout the language. However, the reason that some other people pronounce it differently is because they still retain an ancient pronunciation from a bazillion years ago when Middle English was weird and there were a bunch of dialects and the pronunciation wasn’t settled.

Because what happened was the old word that meant to bury, to put something into the ground, someone or something into the ground, had one pronunciation, but it was borrowed into all these different dialects throughout what is now the United Kingdom in a lot of different ways and a lot of different spellings.

What happened was one of those pronunciations stuck with us and one of those spellings stuck with us, but they don’t match. So the pronunciation that matched the spelling didn’t stick with us, and the spelling that met the pronunciation didn’t stick with us, and that’s where we are.

Yeah, so it’s just a weird quirk, and it’s happened just a few times before.

I think left is another one, L-E-F-T, it happens also.

Just a few times, where just through tradition, that one spelling stuck, and that one pronunciation stuck, and there are two different traditions of English that just don’t coincide well.

It’s very strange, and English is a weird little beastie.

Stacey, I’m interested that that you say B-U-R-Y as bury and your parents say it as bury?

Yeah, that was what was really the most fascinating out of this whole conversation.

I was stunned to find out that they don’t say it that way because I proposed it to them as the way I proposed it to you where I spelled it for them and said it’s not a homonym.

And they’re like, really?

Well, I find that really interesting because I will tell you that I grew up saying bury, B-U-R-Y being bury.

But I have a very, very close friend from Baltimore who says bury and has always insisted that it’s bury.

And the two of us spent so much time together that, and this is someone I really admire and am close to, and I picked up that pronunciation and I’ve done a complete 180 on it.

Just, just, yes.

I’m thrilled.

I am so glad that you brought this up.

So that is one of the pockets where the old pronunciation is retained.

Is that right?

Baltimore?

Well, not always Baltimore, but part of Maryland, New Jersey, and eastern Pennsylvania.

So these are all geographically contiguous.

You know, it could be like Martha. You could have had a teacher or somebody that you respected who influenced you, or just somebody who you just liked the way it sounded coming out of their mouth, or it just made a lot of sense to pronounce it that way.

It really does.

Well, you know, I was horrified when I was reading the Harry Potter books to find out that I had been pronouncing Hermione wrong until book four.

Oh, it’s so common.

J.K. Rowling spelled it out for us.

It’s so common.

I’m like, what?

Well, if you listen to the books on tape and Jim Dale reading, he says Rubeus Hagrid.

And a lot of people are like, it’s not Rubeus?

What?

What?

Oh, no.

You’ve totally ruined that for me now.

Stacey, this has been an eventful call for you.

Thank you, Stacey.

Call us again sometime.

You’re a lot of fun.

Thanks.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

There’s so much more to say about this.

But the Middle English thing is really cool.

So it wasn’t the only word that happened to where you get all these spellings and all these pronunciations.

And it’s kind of a mix and match.

It’s kind of like finding socks in the dark, you know, and you leave the house and you’re like, I guess this is the spelling and pronunciation of the word meaning to put something in the ground that we’re going with.

You know, the stripes and those colors, that’s what’s happening.

This is the way it’s going to be.

Well, we’d love to hear your stories about language, so call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mark Newcup from Newport News, Virginia.

Well, hello, Mark. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Mark.

What’s up?

Hi. I’m calling about something that I learned from my mom, but when I use it around work, my coworkers get confused. So I was hoping that y’all could provide some insight.

We all can.

We’ll try.

The phrase is one that my mother would use when she was in particular talking to us kids, my siblings, if we had finished our homework. She wanted to know, how much do you like in the sense of how much more do you have to go before you’ve finished your homework.

And over the years, I’ve used it and never really noticed people giving me funny looks. But as I used it with my coworkers on a more frequent basis, they commented on it.

And I said, you know, I didn’t actually know where that came from. I asked my mother about it, and she said that was just something that they said where she was from.

And where is she from?

She’s from a small farming community called Fancy Farm in western Kentucky.

Oh, yeah.

Love it.

Where the big picnic is every year, right?

Exactly.

That large picnic also is a family reunion for her side of the family.

How interesting.

Mark, did you know I grew up in Kentucky?

I did not know that.

I did.

And you’re taking me back to fourth grade. My teacher, Lutetia Sinton, who seemed so tall to me at the time. I guess she wasn’t, but she seemed so tall and she had this flaming red hair down to her shoulders.

And I remember writing a book report, and I was taking a long time, which anybody who has ever edited me knows that I take a long time to write.

And she asked me if I had finished it, and I said, no, I haven’t finished my book report.

And she said, how much do you like?

And I thought, well, I kind of liked the book, but I was completely confused.

But it’s the same thing. Like in that case is simply another pronunciation of the word lack.

How much do you lack?

How much more do you have to go?

L-A-C-K, lack.

L-A-C-K.

But it’s pronounced in the South and South Midlands often as like.

Oh, yeah.

So it’s throughout the South, right?

Yeah.

Texas all the way up through, right?

Yeah.

So you might say it liked two minutes to 10.

It was two minutes before 10 o’clock.

And people will spell it L-I-K-E, but what they mean is lack.

That is really neat, and I definitely never heard that as even a possible origin.

Would that be something that shows up in, say, Southern literature?

Is that something I can be looking for?

William Faulkner.

Oh, excellent.

Yeah.

So you’re keeping good company on that one.

Although I’ve got to say, in the workplace, if folks aren’t getting it, you might want to switch it up and just say lack instead of like.

I think I may do that and see what happens.

Although they’d still likely give you the side eye.

Well, yeah.

Mark, thank you so much for calling.

We appreciate it.

And give us another call sometime, all right?

I will.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

I appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

Or if you have a story to tell us, email it to us, words@waywordradio.org.

We got an email from Marianne Jones in Grants Pass, Oregon, who says that she lived in Sitka, Alaska for 12 years.

And when she first moved there from Texas, she heard people using an unfamiliar word.

And that word was skookum.

Oh, nice.

S-K-O-O-K-U-M.

Do you know this word, Grant?

I do know it, but only because there’s a very weird subreddit that I come across.

What?

Yes.

No, what?

A skookum subreddit?

It’s a very odd.

Of course you do.

It’s just people post the oddest stuff there.

I can’t quite make out what it is.

I come across it when I’m browsing just the whole all subreddits, everything.

She says it’s usually used to describe someone or something who’s strong or muscular, like that malamute is really skookum.

Oh, nice.

And it’s a term that’s chiefly heard in the Pacific Northwest and Alaska, and it comes from Chinook jargon, that mix of Chinook and Nootka in English and French and other languages.

Originally, it meant a ghost or demon or spirit, but it also became an adjective that meant strong or good or powerful, like you have a skookum drink.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

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, and we’re joined by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hello.

Any word fan worth their salt, probably when they were growing up, one of the first things they began to wonder about was why we say o’clock, as in 10 o’clock, right?

And they probably looked that up and you find out that o’clock is short for of the clock because obviously who has the time to say of the anymore?

This is a go, go, go world.

So why should we stop with of the clock?

What would other common phrases sound like if we shortened of the to o, all of the time, or all o time?

For example, what would the common phrase be for a priest or a reverend, a phrase that references their garb?

Some man-o-cloth.

Man-o-cloth, yes, very good.

Now, I’ll clue you into some more O contractions.

Anybody, guys, you are free to use these anywhere you go.

Here we go.

It’s been a popular brand of underwear for many years, but we still call it by four words instead of two with a contraction.

Fruit-o-loom.

Very nice.

Fruit-o-loom.

Now, it was the linchpin of the first Indiana Jones movie, a box that supposedly at one time contained God’s contract with his people.

Ark O’Covenant.

Ark O’Covenant, yes.

Sounds like malt-o’-meal.

Ark O’Covenant, yeah.

It’s when you default to the belief that someone’s intentions are honest, even when you can’t be sure.

Benefit O’Doubt?

Benefit O’Doubt is right, yes.

It describes a gathering of very intelligent individuals, though it’s often used facetiously.

Not meeting o’ minds.

It is meeting o’ minds.

Yeah, there’s a real meeting o’ minds there.

Yeah.

Now, we’re right in the middle of the quiz right now, and this is supposed to be when things quiet down a little, like in a hurricane.

What’s that called?

I-O-Storm.

I-O-Storm is right.

This was a series of conflicts over the throne of England between the houses of Plantagenet and Lancaster.

War O’Roses.

War O’Roses, right.

Now, he’s the guy wearing the lamb shade on his head or the woman telling the outrageous anecdote.

Life a party.

Life a party.

Now, his real name is John Clayton II, the Earl of Greystoke, and he’s the title character of what novel by Edgar Rice Burroughs?

Tarzano Apes.

Tarzano Apes, that’s right.

Now, there’s a common belief that a hangover can be cured by a little more drink.

I don’t know if that works, but I do know what it’s colloquially referred to as.

Harrodog.

Harrodog. Harrodog it is.

Now, finally, the quiz is over and we’ve come to the last question.

Just like when your train pulls into the last station and the conductor tells everyone to get out.

EndoLine.

Stand clear of the closing doors.

EndoLine.

Stand clear of the closing doors, please.

Yes, it is the EndoLine for me.

So this has been wonderful. Thanks, guys.

Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you next week.

Well, we’d love to talk with you about any aspect of language whatsoever, wordplay, word origins, slang, a dispute you have at work about workplace jargon.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, is this Grant?

It is, who am I talking to?

Hi, this is Jeff Kaiser, calling from San Diego.

I was calling because I, as I’m getting towards closer to retirement age, I’m a 56 now, but I had raised a few eyebrows when I mentioned that I might be interested in researching how to do some fictional writing with the end goal of doing some novel or something along those lines.

And I’m kind of at the stage where I’m looking at it like eating an elephant.

It’s just so daunting to try to get started.

How do I – I know it’s a one bite at a time type of thing, but I am so out of touch from a grammar standpoint, sentence structure, proper syntax, writing in the person and a certain person, narrative.

The illustrative. I just have no idea where to start, and I figured I would ask my favorite worders.

How to start writing fiction?

Yeah, how to start doing something, creative writing, I guess it would be.

I’m a little leery about, you know, learning annex kind of creating writing class, but if that’s the way to go, that’s the way to go.

Why are you leery about a creative writing class?

It just seems to be kind of self-serving kind of.

Yes.

I look at it like a continuing education class to teach people how to paint, and I feel it’s fairly rudimentary.

Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, hold on a second there.

I want to back you up a second here.

I think you’re doing a disservice to what are some really fantastic programs.

Oh, great.

Really.

For example, at the San Diego Community Colleges and the continuing education programs here in Southern California,

You will find some phenomenal programs, some fantastic teachers.

There are some hidden talent teaching classes for very reasonable rates here.

There’s some really accomplished writers who are going unnoticed because they are working their tails off teaching classes

And then writing on their own time elsewhere, putting out really good work.

You’re going to get some really good stuff happening here.

There are organizations like San Diego Writers, Inc., not just here in San Diego, but in every city across this country of any real size,

You’re going to find writers organizations who have classes, mentorships, writers groups.

These are all good for you.

These are exactly what you want.

That is exactly how to begin eating the elephant.

Oh, fantastic.

I can’t tell you how pleased I am to be proven to be thinking in the wrong direction.

And part of it has to do with what do you have the urgency to say?

Toni Morrison has talked about how, you know, there just comes a point where you have something and you’ve got to say it.

And she’s talked about how she never had nine days to write.

You know, she never had a whole week off to just write.

She had to write around her life and raising two boys and getting up early or working on weekends.

And it was because she had something that she really wanted to say.

And if you have something you really want to say, then you’ll find a way to do it.

Another thing that I would mention is that if you’re wanting to work at home, in the privacy of your home,

There’s a great book by Judy Reeves here in San Diego called The Daily Appointment Calendar for Writers

That’ll inspire you to write from prompts.

It’s got a lot of inspiring quotations in it.

And I think the key that Grant and I are both edging toward is just to start.

Yeah, I went to the San Diego Book Festival.

I appeared on a panel, and I went to a bunch of other panels.

And the same things kept occurring in all of these panels one after the other.

And we had some really amazing authors come through San Diego and to talk about their craft and their process and their books and their lives and sort of things.

And Martha hit one of the really important ones.

First, start.

Just start.

Don’t let anything stop you from starting.

Another one is put your butt in the seat.

When writers fail, it’s most often because they fail to write.

And I didn’t invent that phrase, but that’s it.

And another one is writing classes, short circuit, a lot of trial and error.

One of the best things I heard from a couple different writers was not just writing classes for fiction,

But screenwriting classes, even if you don’t want to become a screenwriter,

Because they teach you plot and narrative arcs.

They talk about getting to the point really quickly so that you can keep your readers engaged.

And you can use those same lessons for screenwriting and larger volumes that might be more traditional fiction and might be more literary.

And I would just also add that you mentioned something about grammar or syntax, something like that, and this is not the time to worry about that.

No, that comes later.

Trust us.

That’s what editors are for.

And editing can be a great process.

Yeah, so write first and do all the editing later.

Don’t edit as you go.

It’s a big trap.

Oh, fantastic.

Blown mind.

Just gone.

And, you know, Martha and I both sit here and go, well, does he want the six-hour version of this?

Something tells me you do, Jeff.

Oh, my goodness.

You have no idea.

I would actually die and go to heaven six hours talking with you guys about this.

But just to kind of recap, here in San Diego, I recommend starting with San Diego Writers, Inc.

I do recommend the continuing education programs at any of the colleges and community colleges here.

I do recommend the community colleges throughout Southern California and throughout this country.

They are fantastic.

You get great value for your money at community colleges everywhere.

And I do recommend this book that Martha talked about by Judy Reeves.

That’s R-E-E-V-E-S.

What’s it called again, Martha?

The Lively Muse, Daily Appointment Calendar for Writers.

It’s a great way to ease into writing every day.

And good luck to you.

Send us your first draft when it’s ready.

Oh, I’ll send it before it’s ready.

How about that?

And we’ll send you a go-get-em, Tiger, all right?

Thanks, Jeff.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, just like first responders and police and doctors, again, I am so thankful for the service that you provide, the Great Unwashed.

All right.

Take care now.

And good luck with this.

Remember, butt in seat, all right?

All right.

All right.

Polish that chair.

You betcha.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Thanks a lot.

We heard from Ray Hansen, who’s a nurse in a cardiac intervention lab in Baltimore.

And she says everyone in her unit, from the attending docs to the nurses to the radiation technologists,

Refers to the esophagus as the goose.

And she was wondering, is this just in our unit or is this a common thing?

And she said it’s so common where she works in this lab that they have a big sign on the wall that says,

Respect the Goose.

And it has an image of a Canadian goose because when you’re doing heart surgery,

You want to be careful not to damage the esophagus or the goose.

And she wondered if it was just unique to them.

But no, it’s a common term in surgery to talk about the goose as the esophagus.

And some physicians talk about, you know, if you swallow something and it gets caught in your esophagus.

It’s chicken and the goose.

Oh, interesting.

That’s fantastic.

Is it about the shape or?

I don’t know if it’s about the shape or if it’s about the esophagus.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

Maybe other people can tell us.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Mary from Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Welcome, Mary.

Hello, Mary.

What’s going on?

I’m calling because I grew up here in Tulsa in Midtown, and four older brothers and I enjoyed riding bikes.

We have a big bike culture in our neighborhood, and older kids and younger kids, we would pump each other.

So if you had someone riding on your handlebars or if you turned over your feet and just stood up on the pedals and gave them a ride, we called it pumping.

When I went to college, I went to Colorado College in Colorado Springs and actually majored in English.

And I would ask people, say, you know, after the library closed late at night, I’d say, well, you pump me over to my dorm.

And I got the strangest responses.

I hardly know you.

And, you know, we could conjugate the verb.

I’d say, just give me a little pumping, you know.

It’ll only take a minute.

This gets better and better, Mary.

And the school was small enough.

Usually, you know, about 2,000 people were there.

And I knew everybody else from Oklahoma.

There were about a handful of us.

Two people from Tulsa knew exactly what I was saying.

And they said, oh, sure, you know, hop on.

And then anybody from Oklahoma City, I had a friend from WeWoka, someone from Broken Arrow.

That was just right on the outskirts of Tulsa, they had no idea what pumping was.

And so I wondered if it was because the person on the pedals would be pushing so hard.

Right.

You know?

I think that’s right.

And did the students from Texas know it?

I’m guessing that they would.

Maybe I didn’t have enough friends from Texas.

In fact, most of the people I remember asking were from Colorado or Connecticut or Tennessee.

Like, the kids from Oklahoma City didn’t use it, so I’m surprised you heard it used in Texas, huh?

Yeah, well, I’ve looked through our phone records because we save everything that we get from listeners and all of our email.

And we’ve had so many questions about this over the years.

Some people from Denton, Texas.

We’ve had Sacramento and New Mexico people mentioning it.

It does appear in parts of California, Central Valley, I believe.

I think it’s related to the migration back and forth during the Dust Bowl period.

Oh, sure, from Oklahoma to California.

That’s right.

But other than that, those patches are the only places that I have any reports of people saying pumping.

The Dictionary American Regional English has it.

But there, they just have Texas and California is the only places that have reported it.

But I wouldn’t be surprised if there are Coloradans who use it, and Arizona and New Mexico and other neighboring states to Texas and Oklahoma.

Sure.

Oh, I love the idea of that being part of the sort of grapes of grass patch.

But in Texas, it might be a Texas hand handle mostly.

But I think you’re absolutely right.

I think it’s about those legs pumping up and down like an oil derrick.

I really do.

It’s just you’re working so hard to push that extra weight around.

Okay.

Well, thanks for clearing that up for me.

And I didn’t know it was anywhere outside of Oklahoma.

So I’ll look.

And what was the dictionary again?

Oh, it’s the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Most university libraries will have it.

Okay, great.

I’d love to look into it.

Thanks again.

Thank you.

Take care.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got another term for giving someone a ride on your bike so you’re riding double or even triple, let us know, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or ask us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Sister Patricia Marie, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Well, hello, and welcome to the show.

Growing up, my mom would say a few things that I always would ask her about, and she would say this one thing.

It was a gentle way of thinking about people who were inebriated.

She would say there were three sheets to the wind.

And I remember once asking her about that, and she says, oh, it’s just three sheets blowing.

And I’m like, why three sheets? Why sheets?

So I was hoping maybe you can enlighten me some on this.

I’ve been spending a lot more time out on San Diego Bay here in sailboats.

And I got corrected very quickly when I referred to the ropes on there as ropes.

Lines on a sailboat are actually referred to as sheets.

Wow.

And the corner of a sail in Old English, the word is shayata.

And that gives us the word sheet.

And so if you’re talking about the sheets coming loose on a sailboat, and you have three of them, it’s going to be flapping around.

And you’re going to have a hard time controlling that boat.

It’s sort of like somebody who’s inebriated kind of stumbling around.

So your boat is flopping from side to side because you’ve got no control over direction and speed and that sort of stuff.

Yeah.

Gosh, I never would have thought about the wind sails on a boat.

I’d always thought about clotheslines.

Yep, yep.

That was what I picked.

Well, there you go, Sister Patricia Marie.

What do you think?

Well, I think it’s pretty awesome.

I learned to do sailing with my dad, and that’s something that I don’t ever remember learning that much.

So that just makes it more endearing.

I’m thinking about the sails on a boat and the ropes and stuff.

Yeah, or lines or sheets.

Yeah.

So I love the idea that this is kind of a linguistic heirloom for you.

It conjures memories.

It does.

My father has passed away, and my mom, sure, her mind’s not too with us anymore.

So you can’t really have conversations with her, so it really does endear it more for me.

Oh, that’s wonderful. We’re glad to help.

Thank you so much for sharing with us, and thanks for calling.

You’re welcome. I really enjoy your show.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Thanks so much.

All right. Bye-bye.

So, Grant, just to clarify, on a sailboat, they’re not ropes.

They’re called lines, and there’s more than one kind of line, like they’re halyards and things like that.

But the lines connected to the corner of the sail are called sheets, and you sure don’t want sheets flapping around.

Boy, I got a lot to learn.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673.

I was always puzzled by the French word for now.

It never made sense to me.

No?

Mm—

Why?

It just seemed like an odd word for now.

It looks like main tenet, right?

-huh.

Yep.

Yep.

And I had this light bulb moment this week when I realized that it actually goes back to the Latin manutenendo, which means holding something in one’s hand.

Oh.

And so if you’re talking about now, it’s this moment that you’re holding in your hand.

Oh, the palm of your hand.

You’re holding time here in the palm of your hand.

Yeah, kind of.

Like a grip of your little mitten.

Yeah, kind of.

It suggests the idea of immediacy.

Yeah.

Well, interesting that you said far because it suggests the idea of immediacy, you know, something you’ve got right there in your hand and proximity.

And then it sort of morphed into the idea of now.

Just now.

But yeah, but it’s related to the English word maintain.

But maintenant comes from French words that mean while one is holding something in one’s hand.

Call us with your language discovery, 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back, we got a call from Dennis in New Smyrna Beach, Florida, who was asking about a word that he couldn’t remember.

And it was a word for the interval between the end of something, like an event or a person’s life, and the death of the last person who has a meaningful memory of it.

And Grant, we had some interesting discussion about it, but we didn’t really give him a good answer.

No, we danced around it, came up with some stuff, but didn’t quite zero in on it.

However, I think we can answer that question now, thanks to Antony Taubman, who listens to us in Geneva, Switzerland.

He wrote us with an answer that I think is the right one, and it also sent me down this really cool etymological path that I think you’ll enjoy.

Antony says the word that this caller is looking for is the Latin word saeculum, S-A-E-C-U-L-U-M, which in English is pronounced saeculum.

It’s traditionally understood to refer to the period from an event occurring to the death of the last person alive at the time of that event.

And the earliest record that we have of this kind of thing is with the ancient Etruscans.

And the Romans later picked it up.

But the ancient Etruscans would make a sacrifice to the gods at the beginning of what they considered a seculum.

And this offering to the gods was made on behalf of everybody at that time.

And when all those people died, supposedly, in their tradition, the gods sent a sign that the cycle was over and a new sacrifice had to be offered.

So a seculum is a length of time that embraces even the longest life.

Now, you’re probably thinking, that sounds a lot like an English word, seculum and secular.

And these are related.

Secular in English, meaning worldly, comes from the Latin secularis, which means pertaining to a generation or age, and otherwise worldly as opposed to the eternal notion of the church.

This word secular in English also means existing or continuing through the ages or centuries.

I didn’t realize until I started digging on this that economists will talk about secular inflation, and that’s inflation over a very long period of time.

Or scientists will talk about secular oak trees, which are oak trees that exist for 100 years or so.

And that sent me to a wonderful poem by Ralph Waldo Emerson called The Garden.

It goes, many things the garden shows, and pleased I stray from tree to tree, watching the white pear bloom be infested quince or plum.

I could walk days, years away till the slow, ripening secular tree had reached its fruiting time, nor think it long.

And so that was just such a thrilling way to end up.

Right. So you start with an answer to a question and you end up with a lovely poem.

Yes, we learn so much from our listeners.

We do indeed. And it’s nice to get that answer.

So, seculum is the answer to the question?

The interval of time between an event or the end of someone’s life and the death of the last person who has a meaningful memory of it.

Meaningful memory, all right, gotcha.

If you’ve got more to add to the answers that we give on the show, we welcome that, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Ashley Daigle, and I’m calling in from Hoffman Estates, Illinois.

It’s one of the northwest suburbs of Chicago.

Okay, well, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Ashley?

Well, my accent and geography may belie my origins. I’m originally born and raised in a place called Thibodeau, Louisiana.

Oh, yeah.

So there are lots of Cajun words that we use down south in Louisiana. Some I’ve used my whole life that I kind of already knew they were Cajun.

So my family doesn’t really speak French, but these things kind of get peppered in.

So, you know, I’m used to saying shabba bae, so poor baby, if somebody’s not feeling well.

Or we say, how’s your mom and them? To ask, how is your family? How are your mother and them?

Or lanyap, which means a little bit something extra that’s good.

Yeah.

We use that around here.

We learned that from one of our, well, we picked it up from one of our listeners years ago.

And so in the house, in the radio, our little radio team, we use lanyap.

Yeah, we sure do.

That is excellent.

I do what I can to spread it around.

So I’m glad to hear it’s other places. That’s exciting.

So I knew that those words, you know, were Cajun. But only a couple years ago, I was walking around my house and I bumped my knee into something.

And I said, I P-laid my knee.

And my husband, who’s from Illinois, said, what?

And I didn’t know that P-laid, you know, isn’t just a real word, I guess, or a common word.

And so I’m presuming it’s something, you know, Cajun.

And so I asked my dad, like, hey, what does pilate mean? And where is it from?

And he’s like, well, it means you bump into something.

I was like, right, but like, why?

And I couldn’t figure out a spelling. I don’t speak French, so I couldn’t find anything trying to do some research on my own.

So I’m interested in that word specifically, you know, what’s it about?

First of all, I love this, and you’re fantastic.

I love everything that you’re teaching us right now.

This is one of the things we enjoy about this show because you’re teaching us stuff outside of our experience.

The other thing is I speak a little bit of French, but not this French.

And so I love adding on the different dialects of French to what I already know about mainstream kind of French Frenchy French from Europe.

So cool.

Pile in French means to grind, P-I-L-E-R.

And so you might grind, say, garlic or you might grind nuts or something like that.

And so you kind of ground your toe against a piece of furniture, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But I want to refer you to a dictionary which you are going to love and you can give as a gift to your spouse.

And he will understand you better.

And it is called the Dictionary of Louisiana French.

It’s edited by folks with the last names of Waldman, V-A-L-D-M-A-N, and Rottet, R-O-T-T-E-T.

But anyway, look up Dictionary of Louisiana French.

And it has a whole big entry on this verb and all the different ways that in the different parishes of Louisiana, this verb is used in French, including meaning to step on someone’s foot or to crush pecans or to trample down the mud in a parking lot or to beat someone up.

So all these different varieties, all of these kind of connected to grind or to pound, right?

But not quite or to beat or to beat up.

So anyway, it literally has one here. Piller sur le pied de quelqu’un, to step on someone’s foot, which I think is very close to what you’re talking about.

Oh, it’s real. That’s so exciting.

Yeah, right? And they indexed them according to the parish that they picked them up in, where they found them when they were doing their fieldwork.

Oh, that’s exciting. Yeah, that’s really great.

Yeah, right?

Thank you for sharing that resource.

Yeah, I think you’re going to love this book.

I think it’s going to have a ton of answers to you.

It’s going to make you have a perfect marriage.

Oh, wonderful.

And that’s such a super cool word.

I mean, it almost substitutes for a curse word.

Right.

You know? Oh, I peed my name.

Well, I like how easily that could be borrowed into English without even a second thought.

Well, yeah.

I mean, I’ve used it my whole life, and it didn’t even occur to me that it was something outside of, you know, normal, everyday English.

Yeah.

Like, voila is kind of on the edge of being borrowed into English without thinking about it.

You can see in all the spellings where people don’t know that it’s French, and they spell it English ways.

But it still has a foreignness about it, but pile, that doesn’t really have a lot of foreignness about it.

Definitely.

Definitely.

Well, cool. Ashley, you know, I got to tell you, I have instructions for you, which is to call us again with this stuff, because I want more of it from an insider, and you are that.

Absolutely. Will do.

All right. And let us know if this improves your marriage any.

All right. Definitely. Thank you so much.

Take care. Bye, Ashley.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Have you moved across the country and used a word and people looked at you like you had two heads?

Call us about that or any other aspect of language.

877-929-9673 or send that whole story to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Fred DeRosa from Ottawa, Canada sent us another linguistic false friend.

The French word for enamel looks just like the English word for email, only it has an accent on the E.

Right. It’s got the acute accent on the E, right?

-huh.

Yeah.

That’s one of the reasons why they didn’t really borrow email to refer to digital mail because of that confusion, and they use courriel or le mail or other things instead.

Beware the linguistic false friends.

877-929-9673.

Hello there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John from Orlando. How are you?

Hi, John. Doing well. What’s going on in Orlando?

Well, I was enjoying a wonderful flight on the second longest flight in the world back in 1996.

We were leaving Miami for Cape Town, South Africa.

And it was a very exciting time for my wife and I to go visit some friends who were in the State Department.

So we’re on our way to go to Cape Town.

And by the time we landed out at the International Airport, we had this wonderful arrival to the southern tip of the continent of Africa.

So we land out, we get out of the airplane, we walk into the terminal building, and now we have to exchange money, U.S. Money, for Kugurans.

And we go up to, just like in any airport, we walk up to the booth, and the gentleman was waiting on a person in front of us.

When he completed that transaction, we sort of step up like you would expect in a queue.

And he says, I’ll be with you now.

Put his head down and started counting some money and, you know, sort of doing his busy work behind the glass, you know, with a little hole in it like a bank teller.

And my wife and I looked at each other, kind of did a double take.

And then we took the social queue that he actually meant just wait a minute.

And so that was just an odd interaction, one of our very first moments in another country where they had this colloquial saying, I’ll be with you now.

So I didn’t know the roots of it.

And the follow on is we went and finally met with our friends.

And they said, not only is that a saying that just means wait just a minute, but if they tell you, I’ll be with you now, now, that’s actually like a flight that they will just take their sweet time getting back to you with whatever it is that you’re asking or inquiring about.

So I didn’t know the origins of, I’ll be with you now. Yeah, it’s pretty complicated. And it’s shared with some of the other English-speaking countries, just not with North America. We had an email from a listener named David Cannon, who is South African, a number of years ago, who had this great email, and I wanted to share some of this, that he says. He was talking about, now is a definite commitment to get it done as soon as they’re finished with what they’re currently busy with, which sounds like what you were talking about.

The difference between right now and just now is also something that they honor. And we maybe don’t quite really see the difference here in North America. Right now is this moment. And just now is soon, but not at this very moment. And then now now is definitely urgent. Now now comes actually not from English, but from Afrikaans. So it’s nunu in that language, which just means now, now.

It’s the typical reduplication where you take a word and for emphasis, you say it twice. And it maybe means a more specific case of the word, a more specific instance of the word. But you were saying that now, now in that case meant the opposite?

Opposite, yeah.

That’s what it seemed to us.

Oh, really?

We were explaining it to our friends.

So, you know, I actually sort of cued it up with something like in the South where they say, well, bless your heart. Or I’ll be with you presently. I’ll be with you now, now. It’s kind of like a silly person, you know, I’ll take my sweet time.

I don’t know. It was just sort of the context of the moment really is decisive in terms of how the meaning gets given. Because it doesn’t really conform to what I learned from people who’ve lived in South Africa or the South African dictionaries. They’re all very clear, at least as far as they’re concerned, that now now means absolutely now.

It means right away.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

So it was so fun. And then the years since, we’ve just enjoyed adding that into our lexicon. And people who listen to my wife and I interact sometimes will say that to each other, you know, sort of jokingly. Like, hey, I’m a little busy and I’ll be with you now. You know, so we’ve borrowed it and have a lot of fun with it.

John, this is wonderful. Thank you so much for calling.

All right.

Take care.

Great.

Have a good day.

You too.

All right.

Bye-bye.

In Caribbean English, they say now for now. So this would be Belize and Jamaica and a few other places. And it’s basically the same as right now. It means right away.

But now for now.

Oh, they say the phrase now for now?

Yeah, now for now as a Pat set expression.

Oh, and that means right away?

Right away, yeah.

I’m going to do this now for now?

Now for now, yeah.

Interesting, right?

Oh, yeah.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to Way With Words.

Hi, this is Cindy calling from north central Wisconsin.

Cindy, what’s on your mind?

So I’m calling about the word toolies.

Toolies.

Toolies.

When I was growing up, my mom would ask us to take things out to the toolies. Potato peelings, cherry pits, apple peels, peach peelings. She was a big canner and a cooker. And in meal prep or as we were taking in our harvest from the garden, we would be canning things for the fall, and all of our food waste would end up going out to the Thuleys.

The Thuleys.

And how would you spell that?

I’ve never written it down. We just talked about the Thuleys. I think it might be T-U-L-I-E-S.

So just to be clear here, the Thuleys are what?

At my house where I grew up, it would have been the south corner of our yard where the wild plum trees grew. And it’s where we would throw our food waste. I think now it would be called a compost pile.

Sure.

Okay.

Cindy, I have to ask, did anybody in your family have any contact with the West, say California or the Southwest? The Pacific Coast or Alaska?

No. German heritage from my grandmother, and my grandmother used the word as well.

Did anybody serve in the military in California?

No.

Huh.

Well, the reason we’re asking is because there is the word tule, T-U-L-E, which is used largely in California and the Southwest. If you’re talking about out in the tulis, you’re talking about out in the wilderness. And it comes from a word from Mexican Spanish that means the bulrushes or the sticks, you know, the marsh. And so it’s like out in the sticks. It’s plants that grow in the sticks.

And that’s the only thing I can think of, a remote part of your backyard that is similar to that. But maybe it’s some other origin. I don’t know. Unless your mom picked it up from a movie or a book.

It’s possible.

Yeah, I’m not sure. I just know that my grandmother used it.

Oh, she did?

And then my mom used it, and I’m trying to carry on the Thule tradition with my girls.

When we look at where this is used, I see Canada, Western Canada, Alaska. I see Texas is about as far east as it gets. Oregon, California, New Mexico, Arizona, throughout California, very California. It just does not make it typically as far east as Wisconsin.

Wow.

That’s very interesting.

But anyway, it sounds so much like the Thule’s that we use out here. It’s got to be the same thing.

Yeah, it means like the most remote corner of your yard where you’re never going to go. I mean, that’s what we understood. So we’d pick whosever shoes that were bigger than yours were sitting by the back door and march out there and dump out the potato peelings.

In the middle of winter, it didn’t matter.

Well, I love that you’re passing on the Thule tradition to your kids.

Thanks.

So keep up the good work there. And I would be very curious to know if anybody else farther east than Texas uses this word.

Yeah, and didn’t pick it up in the west.

Yeah.

Cool.

Sandy, thank you for calling.

Thank you very much.

We love your show.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for listening.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Well, whether you’re here in California or out in the Tule somewhere else, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or 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.

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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.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.