Sleeve Island (episode #1637)

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.

Suppose you overheard some people talking excitedly and they’re using terms like LYS and frogging and squishy mail. You might wonder what they’re discussing.

We received a great email from Alan Wise of North Dallas, Texas. She hosts the podcast called Sal and Al, the Wool Slayers, and it’s on YouTube and it’s all about knitting. And she shared some of the terms that are widely used in that community.

Like, for example, LYS stands for local yarn shop. That’s one of those independently owned stores rather than a big box store, which is a very important part of many knitting communities. And then I mentioned frogging, which is when you knit something and it’s not right. And so you start pulling it apart. And that’s called frogging because, you know, you rip it, rip it like a frog. Rip it, rip it. Rip it.

And then squishy mail is when you receive yarn in the mail. The package isn’t rigid, and therefore it’s squishy. So people get all excited about squishy mail, M-A-I-L. It’s a present that you give yourself. You forget what you ordered. Yeah, right? And then you put that in your stash, which is your yarn that’s currently not in use on a project. You have to say stash in a hushed voice, I think. Do you? My stash. There’s a certain reverence when people talk about their stash.

Oh, for sure, when it comes to knitters. Well, knitters not only have a reverence for their stash, but they have a reverence for their lingo. And if you haven’t heard your lingo, tell us some more, 877-929-9673. And whatever your hobby, whatever you do on the side, we want to know your language. Send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Tony from Fort Worth. Hi, Tony in Fort Worth. How are you doing? Doing well. I went to a restaurant the other day, and I noticed when I made my order, the server responded with perfect instead of okay or I got it or something like that. So it sounds like the definition of the word perfect is changing. Talk us through this.

So you’re in a restaurant, you place an order, and the person that you’re talking to says perfect back at you. That’s right, because I’m pretty confident that my order of chicken fajitas isn’t the perfect order. Tony, I want to tell you a little story. When I go to my doctor’s office every single time, everybody there says perfect at least once. The receptionist says perfect. The lab tech says perfect. The nurse says perfect. You know, I give them my name and they say perfect. And, you know, they take my blood pressure. Perfect.

And they say perfect so much that the last time I went to the doctor, I counted up 14 perfects. Now, Grant and I were giving a talk at a conference in Oregon, and I started talking about this again and going on and on about how I’m hearing perfect so often, and it’s really bothering me. And he pointed out to me that on this show, we always talk about not complaining about other people’s language, and he pointed out that I was complaining about other people’s language. I was being imperfect.

Martha. So I had, yes. That was my exact reaction. My original reaction after the first four or five times I heard that was to be annoyed. And I thought, Martha and Grant, don’t be annoyed, be curious. So that’s why I called. But Martha, you’re at the hospital, you’re at the doctor’s office, and they tell you you’re perfect? And you’re annoyed by that? Come on. You’re perfect.

Well, my name is perfect. My social security number is perfect. Your blood pressure is perfect. Your height is perfect. Your age is perfect. You’re perfect. The date for my next appointment is perfect. Tony is perfect. Listen to him. He sounds perfect. He is.

There’s something else happening here, though, Martha, isn’t there? I mean, once we get past our initial, like, oh, wait a second, this is happening too often, that initial, like, wait a second, I’m sensing a trend here, we know as linguists that something else is going on. Well, sure. I mean, perfect doesn’t necessarily mean in those contexts the kind of definition that you’ll see in the dictionary, like characterized by supreme moral or spiritual excellence or virtue or righteous or holy or immaculate. That’s those fajitas all over.

But, yeah, I mean, it serves a function. It’s a semantic element that serves a function, right, Grant? That’s right. What’s happening here isn’t a factual exchange. It’s an emotional and social exchange. What we take away from it is a feeling and a sense that two people did what society requires them to do, not that we traded information. And, you know, Tony, what’s also interesting is that I’ve talked to people at my doctor’s office about that. I’ve said, do you realize there’s a virus going around this office? And I’m certain that they often do not know that they’re using it. They say, what? I say perfect? Yeah, you’ve said it five times. And so I think people aren’t even aware that they’re saying it. And I know I’ve started picking it up. And I’ve also noticed that when people reply to me in email with perfect, it doesn’t bother me as much.

So, I mean, I think as Grant said, it’s an element of communication and doesn’t necessarily mean you just can’t take the word too seriously. You’re right, Tony. Don’t get furious. Get curious. Yeah, yeah. So if we, here’s the field work for you, Tony, and for everyone else. If we examine all the times in our lives that people say something automatic, that on the surface sounds odd, in these commercial exchanges, we’ll find that nearly all of the time that they don’t really mean to convey factual information.

Yeah, along the lines of how are you? Yeah, exactly. You probably don’t want the whole story, right? But humans, as social animals, have these rituals of exchange. And what they’re doing is doing what society requires, is participating in these rituals of exchange. There does not need to be information passed in those rituals. There does not need to be. And perfect is not being transmitted. The idea that anything was perfect is not being transmitted. All that’s being transmitted is the concept that something was acceptable. That’s it. That’s the only information that’s being passed there. That was acceptable to me. So thank you for your order of fajitas.

All right. So I don’t have to embellish the word perfect when I actually mean perfect. Well, there is reports of this happening in the U.K. as well. So it’s not only in the United States. But in the United States, we do have a hyperbolic culture where we reach higher and higher for more extreme forms of adjectives and adverbs and exaggeration and overstatement. So I suspect that beyond perfect, we’re going to go for something even more exaggerated soon. It’s going to be, I don’t know what it will be. But something beyond perfect. We’ll see.

So, Tony, this has been an awesome call. That has been super luminary, Tony. Thank you very much. The pleasure I’m sure is all mine. Yes, sir. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it. Thank you. Take care of yourself. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

We’d be perfectly delighted for you to give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send us an email, words@waywordradio.org. Hi there. You have A Way with Words. Hi. This is Joan from Buffalo. I have a question about the word zhuzh. Hi, Joan from Buffalo. Zhuzh, like zhuzh in outfits? Yeah, zhuzh in outfit, exactly. My sister and my sister-in-law and I, we love looking at the red carpets. And so we make these kind of photo accounts and then we comment on them together. And I have been trying to spell the word zhuzh in these comments so many times and I can’t do it.

So set this up for somebody who’s on the red carpet and they’re like 99% of the way there. Their outfit’s amazing, but they just need a little tweak. And you say they need to zhuzh it up a little bit. Yeah, they need to zhuzh it up means they need to fix it a little bit. Yep. I think I counted once 40-something spellings of zhuzh before it really settled down. But it took about 50 years for its spelling to settle down. And even now you will find on any given day at least a dozen spellings on the social networks.

Because it is primarily an oral word.

It’s just not commonly written down.

And when you have a word that’s transmitted orally, it’s variable.

But what do they recommend to journalists?

Or what’s the official?

There’s no official.

Martha and I are going to give you our best advice.

The best choice you can make for the word zhuzh is Z-H-U-Z-H.

I agree.

That’s it.

Z-H-U-Z-H.

Yes.

And that’s the one that is most common, and I think it’s listed first in most major English dictionaries.

Okay.

It’s actually in dictionaries.

Yeah, it is now.

You’ll find it in most mainstream English dictionaries.

But I want to tell you the story of the word while I have you here, Joan.

Sure, okay.

So it comes to mainstream English from the London theater, entertainment, and fashion worlds of the 1940s to the 1960s, where it is part of a jargon called Polary.

P-O-L-A-R-Y.

You do know Pahari.

Yeah, it was a gay slang.

It was also other slang, but the gay people used it a lot because gay people are in those worlds, theater, entertainment, and fashion, right?

In London.

But before it was that, it was a trader’s jargon, or a cant, based in large part on Italian and Romani, an Indian dialect, which itself spun off into a bunch of sub-dialects.

And Romany, interestingly, in a variety of its dialects, has a variety of words that sound quite a bit like zhuzh that mean to clean.

So we think, linguists and lexicographers, that zhuzh might come from Romany.

We’re not 100% sure.

There’s not enough evidence.

We’re always looking for more.

But there’s a really good chance that zhuzh comes from Romany.

However, how did that word go from there to here?

Well, there was a BBC radio show in the 1960s called Around the Horn, which featured two characters called Sandy and Julian, who if you listen with the modern ear, give off gay vibes.

And their patter, their lingo was stuffed with Polari words.

Words like drag, words like camp for excessive or showy, and words like zhuzh.

So those two characters on this BBC radio show kind of launched zhuzh into the English language.

And here we are using it now.

I wonder if that’s why I use it a lot or want to use it a lot because I’m a huge fan of drag.

I’ve watched every season of RuPaul’s Drag Race since the beginning.

I think they use it on the show and it’s just become part of my lexicon.

That’s part of it.

Also, the first run of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy was a big launcher of the word zhuzh.

Thank you so much.

I’m elated to find out that it is a Polari word, and I can’t wait to look more into the Polari words that have made it into my lexicon.

I’m going to have to do some research.

Look for Paul Baker’s books.

I think one of them is called Fantabulosa, and he’s written all about the language, and it’s fun stuff and very well researched.

Well, I’m a librarian, so I can get that for you.

There we go.

Perfect.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Thank you so much.

Joan, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I got to find that.

And you can find all kinds of ways to reach us on our website, waywordradio.org/contact.

The other day I was listening to an account by a commercial air pilot who had lost power in both of his engines.

And he was describing what he did next to land the plane safely.

And he used a term which I had never heard, which was rubber jungle.

Do you know this term?

I don’t.

That’s amazing.

I love it.

What is this?

This is the dense forest-like profusion of tubes and straps and bags and masks that come down when oxygen masks are deployed.

It’s called the rubber jungle.

Okay.

And so when they reach rubber jungle stage, then you know stuff is happening.

Right.

Right, right.

The cabin has become depressurized and you have that rubber jungle in back.

Rubber jungle.

Hit us up with your new lingo, the stuff that you found.

Martha and I keep lists and we’re adding yours to it.

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 having just arrived on his unicorn with his luscious locks blowing in the wind, it’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi guys, sorry I’m late.

I was posing for the cover of a romance novel, but we’re ready to go.

Okay, now we all know and love dictionaries, even dot-com ones, but a particular favorite among a particular type of person is a dictionary begun in 1881 by author Ambrose Bierce.

You might know it as the Devil’s Dictionary.

Are you familiar with that?

Yes, of course.

Good.

Yeah.

In the Devil’s Dictionary, Bierce offers alternate, though accurate, definitions for words.

And these definitions are often cheeky and scathingly funny.

For example, the entry for lawyer is one skilled in circumvention of the law.

And positive has the definition mistaken at the top of one’s voice.

I’m going to give you the first letter of a word and the definition of it, the devil’s definition of it.

You tell me the word, and I’ll give you the word length if you need it.

Let’s see how this goes, okay?

All right.

Now, this word begins with A, and it’s our polite recognition of another’s resemblance to ourselves.

It’s 10 letters.

Admiration.

Admiration, yes.

Very good.

Very good.

Well done, Ambrose.

A, again, A, five letters.

The kind of clothing worn by a man whose tailor is a blacksmith.

Armor?

Armor.

Armor, yes.

Kind of a strange clue, but yes, it makes sense.

C.

A familiar kitchen garden vegetable about as large and wise as a man’s head.

Cabbage.

Cabbage, yes.

This is N.

The extreme outpost of the face.

The nose.

Nose, yes.

It’s a funny way to define that.

P.

A parlor utensil for subduing the impertinent visitor.

It is operated by depressing the keys of the machine and the spirits of the audience.

Piano.

Piano.

Depressing the spirits of the audience.

Well done.

Well done.

T.

T as in Thomas.

An invention of the devil which abrogates some of the advantages of making a disagreeable person keep his distance.

Telephone.

Telephone, yes.

Very good.

Finally, in Europe, an American.

In the northern states, a New Englander.

In the southern states, a Northerner.

Yankee.

Yankee, yes, indeed.

Man, Ambrose Bierce, who, by the way, if you’ve never read any of his short stories, I’ve read all of them, and he is a fantastic writer.

So I highly recommend, go ahead and read some Bierce.

Well, we’re always happy to have John join us, and we’re happy to have you join us as well.

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

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha Grant.

Ben Benson calling here from Philadelphia.

How are you?

Hi, Ben.

Welcome to the show.

Doing well.

What’s up, Ben?

Well, you know, my wife and I were out at Valley Forge here a few weeks ago for a walk and wanted to go along one of the nice trails there.

And as we left the visitor center, I must have taken a wrong turn because somehow we ended up where we couldn’t get there and needed to just kind of cut across this field.

And in doing so, we were talking about my wife is German, and so we often talk about German words and English words and so forth.

And we talked about that what we were doing was going in, in German, which literally means diagonally into the field.

And thought, you know what, there is not, I can’t think of an English term that matches that.

So we’re walking, you know, trying to get to the path.

I know it’s over there.

There’s no path to get there.

I’m not following any sort of dirt path or anything.

Just kind of exactly as it says, diagonally across the field.

And, yeah, so I thought, let me ask the experts, how do we say that in English?

So the German was Querfeld ein, is that right?

Querfeld ein, Q-U-E-R-F-E-L-D-E-I-N, all one word, of course.

Okay.

Diagonally quer, diagonally feld, field in, diagonally into the field.

Okay, yeah.

And it’s a little bit naughty in German because they’re sticklers for rules.

And so that term has a slight undertone to it.

You’re not doing something right if you’re doing this.

There are a couple notions here in English that Martha and I have discussed on the program before.

But they’re more about what happens when a lot of people do this after a long time.

And maybe you know the notion of the desire line or the desire path or the social path.

And these are paths that are created when a lot of people do this.

So this isn’t quite what you want, though.

No, because this is a completely individual, random thing, completely devoid of any other path.

There is a field, and you just need to get to the other side.

And so you’re just going on a way that nobody goes otherwise.

So there is nothing. It’s just exactly as it says, diagonally into the field.

As the crow flies in English, we talk about, which means you…

Gets a little closer.

But that’s usually used in terms of distance.

We talk about as the crow flies where you say, well, if there weren’t any obstructions, this is how far it would be as the crow flies.

Yeah, and Kreeffhead Iron does have that straight line.

Is it like you’re cutting diagonally across to the part that’s catty corner?

Are you traveling catty corner?

Yeah, exactly.

You’re in one place on the field and you want to get to the other place.

And you just go in a straight line to that other location.

Completely devoid of paths and obstacles.

And there is a straightness to it.

Well, catty corner works, but it doesn’t contain that notion of naughtiness.

You want that, though, right?

But that’s kind of just a subtle thing.

Because catty-corner perfectly works.

Yeah, catty-corner is kind of right.

But catty-corner works specifically for corner-to-corner.

But it’s not always corner-to-corner, is it, what you’re talking about?

It could be a corner.

It might not.

You could, yeah.

It does have diagonal, so.

That’s a really good question.

For some reason, I keep going towards off the beaten path,

Which is off the beaten track.

And that’s kind of right.

Which is what we use in English.

The French have it as well.

Sentier, Batu, the beaten path.

And in German, I think it’s Trampelpfad?

Trampelpfad, yep.

Yeah, T-R-A-M-P-E-L-P-F-A-D.

But all of those, you just basically say you didn’t take the beaten path or didn’t take the beaten track.

So it’s an opposite, or the trod path in English.

Yeah, the Kriaphe’s Iron assumes no path at all.

And again, I keep going back to the idea of when the path is well established is being non-standard or non-established, not created out of concrete and tarmac.

And these are cow path and dog runs and deer trails.

And in Dutch, they say elephant path.

And in French, they say donkey path.

Elephant path, I’ve heard that.

But again, I don’t know.

This is one I think we’re going to have to toss out to the listeners and see if people have an idea.

I’m thinking that there’s some term in orienteering when you’re not hiking along the usual trail.

You’re looking at your compass and you see a point in the distance and you just go to it.

You just go.

And I’m blanking on what it is.

Oh, that’s ringing a bell, Martha, but I’d have to dig for it.

Yeah, that’s ringing a bell and I’d have to dig for it and it’s going to be around the time I have at this moment.

Well, somebody’s going to let us know.

They will, absolutely.

That sounds, that’s the concept.

That sounds promising, right?

You’re in one place.

Yeah, because it is.

There’s a straightness to it, and it is devoid of path.

You’re just going straight like you would by a compass.

Somebody out there knows.

Somebody out there knows.

And we will hear from lots of them.

We love a puzzle, and our listeners love them too.

So thank you for tossing us this one.

If you’ve got an answer for Ben, we would love to hear it.

It’s 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Ben, we’re about to be deluged with possibilities.

We thank you for it.

Thank you.

And we’ll let you know what we come up with, okay?

Thank you.

Have a great day.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Best to you and your wife.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant, you know those annoying add-on fees that you don’t come across online until you’re almost at the end of your transaction? Maybe it’s extra money for checked luggage if you’re booking an airline or seat selection. Handling. Yeah, yeah. Handling or facility fees if you’re renting a car or, you know, different fees for concert tickets. Yeah, I’m looking at you, Ticketmaster, whatever those nine fees are that are mysterious. I was reading about an airport in Venezuela that actually charged customers a fee several years ago to cover its ventilation system. And people were joking that that was a breathing tax. If you went through that airport, you had to pay a breathing tax. Well, this is a lucrative practice. In fact, in 2023, I was reading that airlines raked in $33 billion from extra baggage fees. And what I didn’t know was that in the industry, this practice has a name.

It’s called drip pricing.

That drip word is done a lot in marketing and sales.

Drip has become a kind of an add-on word for anything that slowly increases revenue.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, and it also slowly increases consumers’ attention.

So there’s drip marketing, where you drip emails and texts and other bits of marketing to somebody,

Where you don’t hit them over the head at once with your message.

Oh, interesting.

Oh, I knew about drip pricing, but not drip marketing.

Oh, yeah.

I just found a drip pricing in my bank account where somebody has been drip charging me for a service that doesn’t even work anymore.

And does anybody say I like your drip anymore?

I don’t think so.

They do.

Yeah, you’ve got mad drip, Martha.

You haven’t seen me lately, have you?

Well, come see our website at waywordradio.org where you’ll find all of our past episodes.

And you can subscribe to our podcast where you can listen to all of our past episodes on your phone or your tablet and on your desktop computer.

You can also contact us from our website from any device.

That’s waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant.

This is Juanita Winner from Carolina Beach, North Carolina.

The word I have is momok, and it means to the way we use it,

It’s used to really foul up something.

And I have heard it on the coast, but my mother’s from the Piedmont section of North Carolina,

And I’ve never heard folks from the Piedmont use it.

And I know what it means, but I don’t know, you know, the etymology of it, if there is one.

What can you tell us about your family use of it?

How did it come about?

What do you remember about it?

Well, my grandmother and I guess my dad, too, if something went really south, really wrong, they would say, you know, I’ve just momicked that up using the past tense of momock.

Yeah, yeah.

So like you’re cooking dinner and you just make a mess of it.

You momicked it, right?

Or you momicked it up.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah, this is a word that you will hear a lot in the Outer Banks and Ocracoke and places like that.

And it’s spelled a number of different ways.

M-O-M-M-I-C-K or M-A-M-M-O-C-K, mammock.

Mammock is an old word that means a fragment or a torn piece of something as a noun.

And as a verb, it means to break or tear.

And in fact, in Shakespeare, one of the characters talks about mimicking the flower beds, decapitating the flowers with lashing blows, leaving petals flying in his wake.

So mimicking is really, yeah, mimicking is really messing something up.

And so if you’re mimicked or you’re mimicked, you’re bothered or you’re frustrated or exhausted or something has definitely gone wrong.

Yes. That is so interesting.

Yeah, isn’t it? And actually, if you want to momic somebody in the Outer Banks, you can mumble squibble them. I don’t know if you’ve ever come across that term. But in that part of the country, mumble squibble is a local word for giving noogies, you know, when you give somebody a scalp and knuckle rub.

Yeah. Oh.

You can momic somebody by mumble squibbling them.

So you confuse them by giving them noogies.

Yes. That’s wonderful. All right.

Thank you, Juanita. We appreciate it. Take care of yourself.

Yeah, call us again sometime.

Bye-bye.

Bye. Thank you.

All right. Take good care.

Whatever little mimics you’d like to discuss, this is the place.

877-929-9673 or put your mimics to keyboard.

You can send them to us in email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Mark.

Hey, Mark, where are you calling from?

I’m in Madison, Wisconsin area.

Welcome to the show, Mark. What can we do for you?

We’re going to talk about yuppies today. I was talking with a guy that I work with, and he’s about in his early 30s, and he was telling me they just bought a new house, and they bought two new cars, and he’s going back to school for his master’s, and his wife has a good job.

And I said, oh, you’re yuppies then. He looked at me like, what’s a yuppie?

Oh, he really didn’t know the term?

No. I work for kind of a high-end restaurant on the weekends. That’s where I know him from. And it’s an older crowd because it’s a pretty high volume, pretty intense place. And it’s for a restaurant. It’s older people, 30s and 40s for restaurants.

But I started asking around other people, maybe about a dozen people. And only one other person knew what a yuppie was. I thought, isn’t that interesting? Nobody knows what a yuppie is in this next generation, previous generation.

So people in their 30s and 40s don’t use, as far as you know, the term yuppie.

Right. He did not know. This one guy, he was probably 40-ish, and he said, yeah, my mom and dad used to talk about yuppies, but I really don’t know what it is, but I’ve heard of it.

It has fallen out of favor. If you look at, there’s a website called Google Ngrams, which is more or less reliable for some things, but it tracks the use of words and phrases in books. So it’s a very select group of texts, but for this purpose it works.

And it shows that “yuppie” peaked around 1990, and the use of the term has been on decline ever since. So that’s around 30 years.

Yeah, because I lived in the Chicago area in the late 80s, early 90s. I remember, especially in the late 80s, it was yuppie everything, yuppie townhouses and yuppie cars, BMWs, and yuppie food, Haagen-Dazs.

You were yuppie if you had one of the Motorola brick cell phones or if you had one of the car phones installed in your car with a real squiggly antenna. You were really something then.

That’s interesting because yuppie first appeared in Chicago Magazine in 1980, as far as I know.

That’s interesting. Yeah, but it quickly spread to the whole rest of the country because it really kind of put this idea in place of these younger professionals who had two incomes and had this demonstrative way of showing off their incomes.

My thought is kind of interesting, too, that it came and went so fast, like as I was trying to relate it to hippies, which predates yuppie by a long time. And I still meet people in their 20s today that still relate to being hippies. And that kind of stuck around.

Yeah, hippie is older. It appeared around 1948. And it had a peak around 1970 and then really dropped in use by 1983. But then around 20 years later, in 2013, it had another peak, although it has been, again, declining ever since.

But hippie has had this kind of second wind, this second life. But language is like fashion and jokes and contagious diseases. It has the same kind of lifespan as anything that humans pass around on their social networks. It goes in and out of fashion.

Well, Mark, thank you for musing with us on the lifespan of these words, yuppie and hippie. This has been a real interesting thing to think about.

But, yeah, they definitely have a birth and a slow decline into oblivion. Most language just doesn’t persist.

All right. Well, take care of yourself. Good luck in the restaurant business.

All right. Thanks. All right. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

Do you still use the word yuppie or do you use a different word to describe the kind of person that Mark’s talking about? Let us know, 877-929-9673.

This show is about language seen through family, history, and culture. Stay tuned. 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. From time to time, we ask you to share the specialized vocabulary that you use in your work environment, your hobbies, those places you spend most of your time.

And that prompted an email from Brother Abraham Newsom. He’s a monk at the St. Gregory’s Abbey in Three Rivers, Michigan. That’s a Benedictine monastery in the Episcopal Church.

And he shared some language that gives you kind of a sense of the fabric of daily life there. And there are three terms that I want to mention.

The first one is corporate prayer. Now, that might conjure a particular image in your mind. But in a monastery, the monks gather for seven times a day to pray as a group. And that’s called corporate prayer because they’re praying as a body as opposed to the private prayer they do when they’re going about their daily chores.

And they rotate the assignments doing those chores. And they also take turns being the cantor in the monastery church. And the person is assigned to be the cantor for a week. And therefore, that person is called the hebdomadary.

That word ultimately comes from the Greek hebdomas, which means seven, because it’s seven days in a week that the person is the cantor. And from that same root comes the French word for a weekly magazine, hebdomadaire, or just hebdo, H-E-B-D-O. So hebdomadaire is another word that they use at the monastery.

And finally, the monastic dining hall is called the refectory, not reflectory, but refectory. And that comes from a Latin term for a place of restoration. To refect is an old word that means to refresh oneself or another person with food or drink.

And one other thing I want to add about that is that meals at the monastery are silent, but each week a different person is assigned to read aloud a book while other people eat. And it’s a really cool practice. Their reading list is really extensive and wide-ranging.

I want to read all the books on the list that he sent me because they include things like a history of women in astronomy and space exploration, weapons of math destruction, how big data increases inequality and threatens democracy, and Yiddish, a biography of a language, books by Atul Gawande, the surgeon who writes for the New Yorker.

It’s just, I think that would be such a lovely thing. You know, you have all this meditative time at the monastery doing your chores, and then you gather together with other people and you sit there and eat, but you listen to somebody read a wonderful book. Isn’t that cool?

I love that. Yeah, I feel like you and I are this close to joining a monastery or a nunnery or any place that will have us and give us silence and a bookstore read.

Yeah, or at least drop by for a couple of meals.

Right, absolutely. Is refectory related to confection or confectionary?

Well, it goes back to, as I said, Latin for to refresh oneself. And if you go back to the original root of that, the F-E-C-T, it’s related to all kinds of words having to do with making.

So, yeah, confection is pulling stuff together and making it. Manufacture is making stuff by hand. Yeah, there’s a whole family of words associated with that.

But in any case, I’m really grateful to you, Brother Abraham, for sharing this with us. And we’d love to hear more from other folks. And thank you, Brother Abraham, for sharing that reading list.

I’m with Martha. That’s an astonishing reading list, and it’ll take me the rest of my life to work my way through it, but I’m going to try.

We’d love to hear what you’re reading, and we’d love to hear the language of your trade profession or hobby. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us another way.

There are lots of ways on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Courtney Cullen from Anchorage, Alaska. How are you guys?

Hi, Courtney. How are you doing?

So I was calling because I’m having some confusion over the words mixtape and mixtape. This came up because I thought my son was saying mixtape, like just M-I-X, and that sounded weird to me.

And so I asked him, and he said, yes, he’s saying M-I-X. And I’m like, that’s not right. And I’m like, that’s my generation. I know it’s mixtape. And I was telling him how wrong he was. And he looked it up on the internet and showed me a lot of things that said mixtape.

So I was like, wait, what’s going on with this?

So I thought I would call in and ask you guys.

What generation are you again?

I am a Gen Xer.

So I grew up in the 80s and 90s, high school in the 90s.

Gotcha.

Me too.

Gen Xer.

And so for you, a mixtape is what exactly?

So a mixed tape would be like you want to get your favorite songs on one tape.

So you listen to the radio when I was younger and then later on you had your CDs to record.

Anyhow, you just get your favorite songs, make a mix of them and have that tape for yourself or for your for your crush that you give it to you.

Feel embarrassment about it.

Or when you’re driving around with your friends, you put on your mixtape just to show that you have really good taste and you want everyone to go, wow.

Yeah, that’s a great song, and you kind of feel good about yourself, right?

Exactly, yes.

And so your question is whether or not mixtape is one word, two words, hyphenated, something else?

Yeah, or M-I-X is how my son says it.

Oh, or M-I-X-E-D.

And I say M-I-X-E-D is how it is to me.

Two words, mixtape.

You might be surprised, Courtney, to find out that it was probably, it looks surely like it was mixtape without the E-D from the start.

And the reason we can know this is that there was something called a mix album, that’s without the ED, before there was a mixtape.

And a mix album was something that a band would put together, just like a collection of songs that didn’t really have this overarching theme.

Where it was just stuff that they really liked that they’d made that didn’t really fit anywhere else into their release schedule.

Albums used to really be thematic.

This one’s about druids.

This one’s about the universe.

This one, you know, I was actually thinking of, everyone knows I was thinking about Spinal Tap.

Another Gen Xer.

Yeah, another Gen Xer.

But there’s another thing that we can look back in the mid 80s and we can look in the written record and see that it was often there as mixed tape.

And mixed tape, the ED was really rare.

Actually, it was far less rare.

And even now, the ED form has always been far, the ED form is far, far rarer.

It’s just not out there.

It’s just not, it wasn’t the established form ever.

The mix without the ED.

And there’s another thing happening here.

And this is an overarching theme in English in general, which is the ED does tend, I think this is where you were heading.

The ED does tend to drop off of words.

There’s something about that unvoiced D, and it happens with unvoiced T’s, where you don’t use your vocal cords, where there’s something called lenition, a softening or a quieting of that sound where eventually it can disappear.

And there’s a lot of food words where this happens.

Corned beef.

Sometimes it’s corned beef.

Or grilled cheese becomes grilled cheese.

Or mashed potatoes becomes mashed potatoes.

Or shaved ice becomes shave ice.

Or whipped cream becomes a whipped cream.

I only know of one non-food one, Martha.

One non-food one?

Yeah.

Tiled floor becomes tile floor.

I’m sure there are non-food ones, but we like to talk about the food ones.

But mixtape.

The way people say it is one word.

It sounds like one word.

Mixtape.

Right?

That stress on that first syllable.

Mixtape.

To me, that says one word.

What do you think, Martha?

I agree.

And that’s how I would write it too.

M-I-X-T-A-P-E.

Mixtape.

People don’t say mixtape.

They say mixtape.

Yeah.

And I think, yeah, if you’re using just the M-I-X, it does look cooler if it’s just one word.

Mixtape.

But do you make mixtapes for your son or for your sweeties, the sweeties in your life now?

I do.

I make playlists for them.

And I am really happy to say that they appreciate all of the 90s and 80s music that I like.

My son has been into that too.

He’s 17.

And so he’s been playing like Pearl Jam in the car.

I was like, whoa, what’s happening here?

So for him, this stuff is like, he loves it.

And I’m like, okay, I can dig this.

This is nice.

Like me playing like Elvis in the car when I was his age.

Exactly.

My youngest son had a Smith’s phase and both of them love Nirvana.

So that makes me very happy.

All right, Courtney,

Thank you so much for your time and enjoy your music.

And we’ll talk to you again sometime soon.

All right.

All right.

Thank you both.

Take care of yourself.

Bye bye.

Bye bye.

We were talking earlier about knitting terms, and I also love Sleeve Island.

Do you know what Sleeve Island is, Grant?

These are all the sleeves that you’ve made for sweaters that will never be finished.

This is the bag containing these lonesome sleeves.

It’s the Island of Lost Sleeves.

Yeah, well, it’s sort of like that.

It’s like when you feel like you’re almost finished with a sweater because you have only the sleeves left to do.

Oh, opposite.

Because you’ve already knit the part that goes over the torso.

But that’s an illusion because the sleeves still involve a whole lot of knitting.

And so you feel like you’re stranded on Sleeve Island.

Oh, yeah.

I just imagine that knitters, if knitters are the people that you want in charge of your, like, your big undertakings, if you’re a government, right?

I think I want knitters in charge of, like, if I were president, I’d put them in charge of all my major offices.

Because people with patience, right?

And perseverance.

Right, right.

Who get things done, right?

Department of Homeland Security, there’s a knitter.

State Department, a knitter.

Knitters everywhere.

Share the jargon from your hobby with us, 877-929-9673.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, this is Joseph Lee calling about a term that my grandmother used to use all the time growing up.

Whenever I got in trouble or misbehaved and wanted, you know, get back in her good gracious, I would try to suck up to her.

And she would always say, don’t come over here soft soaping.

I just always wondered where that term started from, where it came from.

Joseph, that’s a really good one.

Where was your grandmother from?

And are you from the same place?

Yes, Knoxville, Pennsylvania.

Soft soap for a long time has served as kind of a, you know, a luxuriating kind of soap, a lubricating kind of soap.

And as early as the 19th century, people were using the term soft soap to mean flattering somebody or, you know, treating somebody deferentially, doing all the kinds of things that you were trying to do to get back in her good graces.

You know, telling somebody what they want to hear.

So it’s been used metaphorically in that way.

And for a long time, we’ve seen expressions like somebody’s pouring soft soap down somebody’s back or somebody’s pouring soft soap into somebody’s ears.

And so it has to do with, you know, I guess cleaning things up, but also the softness there is key.

Right.

But also because it’s kind of oily or unctuous, which is not necessarily a pleasing feeling if you’re maybe even greasy, which is something reprehensible.

Yeah, I guess so.

If you have that poured down your back, you didn’t ask for it.

There are related terms.

Like you might also say, don’t give me all that lather, which means it’s just a lot of bubbly talk without much substance to it.

And it’s related to salsa.

So it sounds like you got pretty good at that.

I was excellent at it, absolutely.

Joseph, we appreciate you sharing your memories and your spending time with us.

We appreciate it very much.

Thank you.

I appreciate you having me and taking the call.

Thank you.

Take care.

You too.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye, Joseph.

We’re having good, clean fun here on A Way with Words, and you can join in.

Call us 877-929-9673.

We were talking earlier about the term stash that knitters use to describe all the yarn that they’ve collected that they’re waiting to use for future projects.

And they also use the term sable from time to time.

And that stands for stash acquisition beyond life expectancy.

I love it.

That’s my books, actually.

Yeah, I guess it could be applied outside of knitting.

I mean, in knitting, it’s when your stash is so large,

There’s no way that you could possibly knit all of it before you die.

No, but then you have to spend money on a lawyer to draw up a will to figure out who gets your sable.

Who gets your knitting stash, right? Let them figure it out.

While your nieces and nephews are like in fisticuffs. Thanks.

Who’s going to get the expensive cashmere?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Ed Molesky. I’m from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hi, Ed. Welcome to the program.

Quite a few years ago, back in the 70s, I worked at a paper mill in Ohio, and our plant engineer was a real Louisiana gentleman.

And he had a couple of phrases that I had never heard before.

One of them was, if he wanted somebody to change their opinion, to his way of thinking, he said, we need to bring them to the lick log.

And I know a lick log is a source of salt for animals. I used to have horses. But I don’t understand how a salt lick is linked to changing someone’s mind.

So you know all about these already, and you know about lick logs themselves, which are these felled trees that ranchers would cut slots into, and then they would fill those slots with lickable blocks of salt, right?

Yeah. That’s a lick log.

Yeah. And so it’s pretty straightforward.

It just means if you’re coming down to the lick log or you’re coming up to the lick log, you’re coming to the place where the whole herd gathers because the whole herd is going to want to come and lick on those salt blocks that are in the lick log.

And of course, they put those out there because cattle and horses need salt and other minerals.

And so if you’re coming down to the lick log or coming up to the lick log, then you’re at a gathering place. You’re at a meeting place.

And a lot of times, I’m interested that he was from Louisiana because I associate this a lot with Texas as well.

You know, you’ll hear Texas lawyers say, we’re getting down to the lick log, meaning they’re getting down to the very point in negotiations where maybe everybody will be happy.

All right.

Well, thanks so much.

That helps.

Well, sure.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling us.

Call us again sometime and take care of yourself, all right?

Bye.

Bye, Ed.

We’d love it when you pull these expressions out of your own life.

Work, home, school, wherever.

877-929-9673

Email words@waywordradio.org

And talk to us on social media.

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The Spanish word for dog is perro and the Spanish word for son is hijo.

And a lot of people are using the term perrijo now to mean, you know, your little fur baby.

Oh, that’s so cute.

A little fur baby, right?

My perrito is named Osito.

Oh, you have a little bear.

I do.

I’ve seen bear.

He is the handsomest devil I’ve ever met.

Oh, I’ve never met him, actually.

The man deserves to be, like, bronzed.

He is a very attractive dog.

I like to say, who needs elf on a shelf when you have bear on a chair?

Just watching everything.

It’s very cute.

Well, send us your language questions and your pictures of your perrijos and your gatijos to words@waywordradio.org.

Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, and quiz guide John Chaneski.

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

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

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

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

Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

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

Bye. you