Snookums and Snicklefritz (episode #1604)

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. Fun fact, the urine of male mice contains a pheromone that attracts female mice to the odor of that particular male. Now, Grant, I know we don’t often talk about mouse urine on the show, but today is a special day because there is a literary connection.

Fun fact. I’m not sure that’s fun.

Just wait. Hear me out. Hear me out.

This pheromone is called Darsin, D-A-R-C-I-N, and it’s named for Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice.

Oh, wow.

How about that?

Because he’s attractive. He’s attracting the women.

Exactly. But you’ll learn this and much more in a new book by Ed Young.

It’s called An Immense World, and it describes the diversity of sensory perception in the animal world and how animals’ experience of our environment differs from our own.

Now, Ed Young has science chops.

He won a Pulitzer for his coverage of COVID, but he also writes with a literary sensibility.

And here’s another cool word I learned from his book, orripulation.

Spell that.

Oripulation. O-R-I-P-U-L-A-T-I-O-N. Oripulation.

And what in the world is that?

Well, it’s how manatees explore their surroundings.

They have incredibly sensitive lips.

And so, oripulation is like manipulation, but it’s with the mouth.

And manatees greet each other that way.

They oripulate each other’s faces in flippers.

Yeah, yeah, kind of like a smooch.

And at one point, Ed Young describes climbing into a tank with a manatee named Hugh.

And he writes, reader, Hugh oripulated me.

That would be amazing.

I would like to try that.

I would like to meet a manatee, first of all.

Wouldn’t you like to meet a manatee?

Yeah, he talks about looking down and the manatee is doing the manatee version of zoomies, whatever that is.

Right, running back and forth, swimming back and forth.

That’s very cute.

But kind of slow, I think.

But anyway, I think you’d also really like this book, and I’m going to talk about it a little more later in the show.

That’s fantastic.

And Ed Young’s book is called?

An Immense World.

We’ll talk about Ed Young and An Immense World later in the show, and of course we’ll link to it on the website.

And on our website, you can go to waywordradio.org/contact and find more than a dozen ways to reach us, no matter where you are in the world.

And in the United States and Canada, you can call us toll-free, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email right now to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha, it’s Allie Meeks calling from Decatur, Alabama.

Hey, Allie, welcome.

Hi, Allie. Welcome to the show.

Hey, and yeah, so I had a question for you guys, though, about a word that my mom used to use when we were kids.

All right, fire away.

Yeah, so she used to call us Snickle Fritz when we were kids, and it was something that she called us when we were being selfish or just kind of a little turd, you know, like kids can be.

And she usually used it at one of us, not like you’re being a Snickle Fritz. It was more like a name.

So, for example, okay, Snickle Fritz, the world does not revolve around you. Or if you choose that, Snickle Fritz, that’s a really bad choice or something like that.

And my mom is originally from Wisconsin and kind of all over, but her dad was a Beck.

So he was from Germany.

And I thought maybe it sounds kind of German.

So I thought maybe it might be a little German name that we know nothing about.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding.

There’s the winner.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner.

Yeah, the Wisconsin heritage and the German heritage right there puts you firmly in the Snicklefritz territory.

Congratulations.

Yeah, you win. Here’s your prize and answer.

So, Snicklefritz or Schnicklefritz is several different ways it’s been spelled in the United States.

Two common ways, S-N-I-C-K-E-L-F-R-I-T-Z and S-C-H-N-I-C-K-E-L-F-R-I-T-Z.

So the male name Fritz at the end with the Z and then some form of Snickle or Schnickle before that.

This is definitely of German origin.

The Schnickle part is where there’s a bit of a mystery here.

The etymology that’s been proposed by the Dictionary of American Regional English is that it means a little boy’s wiener.

Yeah, schniggle or schnickle.

And so it’s kind of taunting.

It’s kind of like calling somebody your little ding dong, something like that.

Yeah.

But it has been used many, many times over the years to call somebody a scamp.

It’s not horribly offensive at all.

It’s just, it’s kind of like, I can’t say that, but you little, you know.

Snickle fritz.

Yeah, you little schnickle fritz.

It can be really affectionate.

In some families, it is only affectionate.

It’s just a very adoring term.

And there’s no hint at all about the person you’re calling a schnickle fritz being a scamp or a rascal at all.

Now, as for its history, obviously this country in the United States has a huge German heritage.

And if it weren’t for the two world wars, we’d probably still have a lot of people speaking German or still have a strong memory of it being spoken in their house.

So Snigelfritz shows up first as a common humorous last name used in little jokey pieces in theater or the newspaper.

Kind of these little stories that you tell.

Well, here, for example, is something from 1872.

The gentleman who turns the machine that prints this newspaper rejoices in the name of Isaac Jordan Stringworth’s Nigelfritz Smell Fungus, which is clearly a made-up name.

So somebody who works in this newspaper is making fun of somebody else who works for this newspaper.

I wonder if they just like slipped that in there to make fun of their co-worker.

So there’s another bit in a newspaper from 1860 saying, why don’t people change such outlandish names as Hornblower, Snigelfritz, Punkenseed, Doonder, Struckhausen, and the like?

So again and again and again in its earliest uses, Snigelfritz is either a funny name or it’s meant to represent people of German heritage.

And it’s not really until much later that it starts to show up as just kind of a general name for a kid.

You know, a lot of times it’s used to mean like Joe Sixpack or what the Spanish would call Fulano, just like a generic name for like that guy, that schnickle fritz.

Right. Yeah. And the name always makes me hungry for snicker bars. I don’t know what it is about it.

Or snickerdoodles.

Snickerdoodles. That’s what I always think of. Yeah.

Anyway, that’s that’s what we know about that. It’s a it’s a fantastic word.

But aren’t you glad that nobody calls you Dunderostruckhausen?

Right, exactly. I don’t think I could say it.

Yeah, that’s great.

It’s really interesting.

My mom will be so thrilled to know the etymology of how that came about, because I’m not even sure she knew anything about it.

She told me her mom used to use it calling them in as kids into the yard, and her dad.

We’re shouting, schnicklefretzes in here now.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, Allie, thanks so much for sharing this.

Yes, thank you so much, and thanks so much for your show.

It’s such a blessing.

It’s just a really fun thing to listen to.

It’s a joy to everyone who hears it.

Well, great.

Call us again sometime.

Take care, Allie.

We will. Thanks, guys.

All right. Be well. Bye-bye.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi. Who is this?

This is Mrs. Margeson, and I am a seventh grade teacher at Robinson Middle School in Kingsport, Tennessee.

I have some of my class with me.

And we have a question for you.

You have a question. All of you together have a question.

Well, I thought I would ask it just for simplicity.

Okay.

Okay, so here’s our question.

We were learning about the end of the Roman Empire in Western Europe, and we learned how Latin mixed with the local languages to become the romance languages, you know, Spanish and French and Italian, etc.

And what we wondered is when the word romance came to be associated with love or dating.

Okay, great. Yeah, well, you’ve got half the story right there already. When you talk about a romance language, you use a capital R, right? The romance languages like you mentioned, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, there are a few others like that. But originally, what’s super interesting is that in the mid-14th century in English, the term romance language referred specifically to French.

You know, that language of those people across the English Channel who spoke a language descended from the people of ancient Rome.

And that was different from English, which came from a Germanic source, which also gave us German and Dutch and Scandinavian.

And here’s the key.

In the Middle Ages, we see the rise of stories that are told purely for entertainment.

You know, they’re not for religious education.

They’re not in the language of the church, which was still Latin.

And there are these medieval tales that I’m sure all of you have heard about, knights in shining armor and fair maidens and the noble ideals of chivalry.

And a lot of these came from Old French, where the word for this kind of verse narrative was a romance.

That is a story that’s told in the language of the common people there.

And one of the most famous of these, of course, was about Sir Lancelot.

You all may remember the story of this noble knight who rescues King Arthur’s queen, Guinevere, after she’s been abducted.

But the problem is that Lancelot falls for her.

And that’s a big difficulty because she happens to be married to his king, King Arthur.

Problems ensue.

And it gets even worse because Guinevere eventually falls for him, too.

And so you have lots of different versions of this story.

But by the 17th century, this word romance in English came to mean any kind of love story.

It didn’t have to involve knights in shining armor, but it came to mean, you know, a love story.

The kind of thing that involves those butterflies when you get special feelings about somebody.

Oh, very interesting. Very interesting. Thank you.

That makes sense?

That does. I appreciate that. Thank you all so much.

Thank you, Mrs. Mogerson. We appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

If you think you have a hard time getting started on a piece of writing,

Think about Gustave Flaubert, the French novelist.

In 1851, he was trying to start Madame Bovary, and he was having a really hard time.

And in a letter, he wrote to someone,

I’m finding it hard to get my novel started.

I suffer from stylistic abscesses, and sentences keep itching without coming to a head.

I am fretting, scratching.

What a heavy oar the pen is, and what a strong current ideas are to row in.

What a great way to describe that frustration.

Yeah, but he mixed his metaphors.

It goes from skin diseases to rowing.

But, you know, I mean, that’s part of it.

He’s burdened.

It’s going to take him five years to write that novel.

And he turned out Bovary, which is an incredible work by any measure and also much talked about in its day.

Indeed.

Indeed.

I just think about what a great description of that first period of time is when you’re, you know, it’s still a lot of heavy lifting.

A lot of heavy lifting.

There’s lots of ways to reach the show no matter where you are in the world.

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

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 I recognize that guy.

It’s John Chanesky, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

I recognize you guys, too.

This is terrific.

We all recognize each other.

It’s great.

So listen, you know, I’m often struck by pairs of words in which the last sound of the first word is the same as the first sound of the second word.

Now, it seems to me that when we pronounce these phrases, we don’t differentiate between the last sound and the first sound.

What I mean by this is you get to weird sort of word parts, like this word part upside.

What’s an upside?

Well, if you take an object and you turn it vertically so its bottom is on its top, what is it?

It’s upside down.

Now, it’s not upside down, but it is upside down.

It is sort of, you know, smooshed together.

It’s like a sort of a portmanteau overload that way.

Now, you may be the kind of person, the precise talker who says upside down with that pause in there,

But I don’t know many people who do that in real life.

Now, I’ll give you a word part and a description of where you might encounter this word part, okay?

Here’s the first one.

I’m not sure what harvest is, but I hear it every year around September and October when farmers gather their crops.

What is this harvest they speak of?

Harvest time?

No, you have to say harvest time.

Harvest time.

Harvest time.

Oh, I see.

I just say harvest time.

Right.

If you say harvest time, that’s sort of puncturing a hole in my balloon.

All right, let’s try another one.

Now, for a long time, I knew about par, as in, I didn’t have a regular job.

I only worked a few days a week.

What par did I have?

Par time.

Par time, yes.

Very good.

You definitely know my friend, Oren.

I’m sure Oren.

He’s fresh.

Fresh squeeze, that is, every morning.

I delight in his citrusy taste.

Who is my friend, Oren?

Your friend, Oren Juice.

Oren Juice, yes, that’s the guy.

I’m afraid I lost my ard.

I wonder if you’ve seen it.

It’s got numbers on it and allows me to draw money from my financial institution.

Where is my, what’s my ARD?

Your bank card?

My bank ARD, yes, good.

You don’t want to run into AWE.

If you get invaded by an occupying force and the military tells you what you can and can’t do, that’s not a good AWE.

Marsha.

Almost.

Marsha’s in charge, Marsha Law.

Marsha Law, yes, Marsha Law.

Oh, that’s funny because you can work that both ways.

Yeah, you can. You can go both ways with it. Sure.

I actually like re when I’m driving on the highway for a long time.

I need a break. I enjoy a nice re.

A re stop.

Yeah, that’s right. A re stop.

Now, just blame it all on your h—

Your feelings, your behavior, the way you think and react.

It’s all a product of your h—

Human nature.

Human nature. Yes, that’s it.

Be sure to keep an eye out for ois.

They say you should avoid it in speech and writing.

What kind of ois should you avoid?

Passive ois.

It ought to be avoided, yeah.

That’s it.

Passive ois.

Yes, very good.

So those are my examples of what I call portmanteau overloads.

John, those were wonderful.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

Take care, bud.

Talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk with us, give us a call.

We’d love to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever with you.

Call us anytime, day or night, 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. How are you? Good morning.

Hello. How are you? Good morning yourself. Who is this?

My name is Adam. I’m calling from Chicago.

Hi, Adam from Chicago. Welcome to the show.

What’s on your mind today, Adam?

Well, I have this word that I had heard in my youth, and I hadn’t heard it very often through my teenage years and so on.

But the word is tchotchke.

The best definition of it that I can come up with is something like knickknack.

But it really can refer to any, you know, small individual items or trinkets or whatever.

And have you tried researching this?

I haven’t researched it too awful much, but I know that I’ve lived in various parts of the country,

And I’ve been naryfying anybody that actually has heard the word before.

I had always been told that it is basically Chicago slang, which would make sense because it sounds Polish,

And there’s a very sizable Polish population in Chicago.

And so that’s my assumption is that it must come from some Polish word.

Although the reason why it came up for me to have the impetus to call the show was that I was watching a cartoon called Archer where they used the word on that show.

And the creator of that show is from North Carolina.

And so now I have absolutely no idea what the genesis of this word is.

Oh, wow. Adam. So tchotchke. Boy, have we got news for you.

Okay. Well, you’re definitely on to something with the Polish or just a Slavic origin of this term in general.

It’s a hard one to research if you don’t know how to spell it, though. That’s

Why I was asking. It’s a Yiddish word. It can be spelled several different ways. T-C-H-O-T-C-H-K-E, Tchotchke. Sometimes it spells c-h-o-t-c-h-k-i-e or even t-s-a-t-s-k-e. Tchotchke appears to have Slavic origins and you’ll see similar sounding words in different languages such as Polish where it’s tzatzko and Russian where it’s tzatzka. They all mean the same thing, a little trinket or play thing. It’s also been used to apply to an adorable person, especially a small child, a little tchotchke. That’s a lot wider of a birth than I thought at first that this would come from.

Yeah, if you’re around anybody with any kind of connection to Yiddish, you’ll probably hear this term. But yeah, it’s the kind of stuff that you get, like you go to a conference and you get a swag bag and they have a thumb drive and a yellow highlighter and maybe a little flashlight on a keychain. Or I also think of tchotchkes as, you know, those things when you go to visit your grandmother and she’s got those dusty shelves and they’re little figurines on there, little souvenirs that she picked up over the years or at a yard sale or something and maybe she really ought to get rid of. But yeah, those are tchotchkes.

Right, right. Well, I work in retail and I work at a cheese counter in a grocery store, and we do a lot of full wheels of cheese that will cut down into pieces. But every now and then you get these small little, you know, mini brie or something like that. And I like to refer to those as tchotchkes. That’s how I use it in my normal everyday language nowadays. But yeah, wow, that’s very interesting stuff. Thank you so much for all of that.

Yeah, thank you for your call. We appreciate it. Take care. Thank you for taking me. All right. Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Something popped up. You noticed it for the first time, and now you hear it everywhere. We’d love to talk to you about it. Call us toll-free in the United States and Canada, 1-877-929-9673. And if you’re somewhere else in the world, there are lots of ways to reach us. Go to our website at waywordradio.org/contact and try them all.

In parts of Appalachia, if you’re buying gingerbread, you may not literally be buying a baked good. Buying gingerbread is an old expression for vote buying, because in the past, politicians often bought gingerbread cakes from elderly women and distributed them to people in hopes of getting a few extra votes.

Oh, wait. So were they buying the votes of the women whose cakes they bought, or buying the votes of the people who they gave the cakes to, or both?

Both. Both. They got the goodwill of the gingerbread bakers and also anybody who received a free piece of gingerbread. How about that? Buying gingerbread. That’s a good one. I don’t think I knew that one.

Yeah, I learned that from the book Our Appalachia by Laurel Shackelford and Bill Weinberg. Well, we will take your gingerbread. You can vote for us, too. 877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Yeah. Is this Martha?

This is Martha. Who’s this?

This is Jack Cook. Well, I’m Jack Cook. I’m from far western North Dakota in Sentinel Butte, which is about 10 miles from Montana.

Oh, cool. What’s on your mind today?

Well, I’ve used a word around here and other people use this word that means a lot of different things. The word itself is outfit. And, for example, my granddaughter just graduated high school and went to work at a hotel down the road. And her dad helped her get a new outfit, which is a new car. And she wanted a car for the winter to drive through the snow and all that kind of thing. But an outfit could be, I guess, new clothes she needs for work. But around here, everybody says, well, you got a new pickup or you got a new outfit. So the outfit could be car or tractor or clothes or maybe clothes for Halloween, a new outfit. So I was just wondering if you’ve heard that from a lot of places, or is it up here in Montana, North Dakota?

Yeah, when you said she was shopping for a new outfit, I was picturing her going in and out of dressing rooms and putting clothes back on the rack and trying to decide. That’s the way I thought, but no. Around here, everybody says they’re getting a new outfit, but it could be anything.

How about that?

Yeah, this is an interesting one. It’s very much a Western word from where you are through the mountain states. You’re going to find this in that part of North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Utah, maybe other nearby states, although I don’t have evidence for that. It’s a natural outgrowth of that word outfit that refers to a group of people working or hunting or traveling or herding or exploring together. It’s firmly in Americanism. It comes from working in the West. I’ve heard of an outfitter that takes people on hunting trips. He’s an outfitter.

There we go. You’re plugging right into the story of this word. Because what that outfitter does is they equip all of those people, right? They equip them with gear. And they may equip them with transportation. And so the noun outfit comes from the outfitting you might do originally, very originally, to a ship or regiment or an expedition. So outfitting was equipping the group with the equipment. And then that word outfit became the group. That word changed. It became the group that used and carried the equipment rather than the equipment itself. And then, in the case of some of the Western states, outfit became the vehicle that carries the equipment and personnel. So this is what we call transference, where the word is borrowed again and again to slightly modify. So outfit goes from being the verb of what you do to being the group that does something with some things to being the things themselves. And in this case, it’s the thing that carries the equipment and the people. So it’s really a natural progression. You think about it over a couple hundred years. And so when we talk about, oh, so-and-so runs an outfit over there. They got about a thousand head of cattle. That’s related as well because it’s talking about, we’re not talking about just him alone, but we’re talking about his team of people, his equipment, his land, the whole operation. And so that’s kind of an earlier form of that word outfit. So it’s all related. There probably was a time in there, and I have not been able to track it down, where outfit before automobiles would refer to somebody’s wagon or whatever kind of wheels he had pulled by horses. I love that this word outfit is connected to several hundred years of history of the growth and settlement of that part of the country. That’s good to know.

Yeah. And it’s funny how people use it. Different parts of the country use it a different way.

That’s right. We may be one people, but we speak more than one English.

Yes, very true. Good. All right, Jack, take care. Thank you for your call.

Yeah, thanks a lot. All right, be well. Bye, Jack.

Okay, see you. Thanks.

If you want to talk about language, call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories to us in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Pete from Minneapolis. I’m originally from International Falls, where the question comes from.

Okay. Pete from Minneapolis. Let’s hear it.

The word Canuper. I heard it in my hometown about how it was used. Somebody would say, let’s go have a Canuper, or I’ll buy you a Canuper. I’ve always thought it to be referred to like make an alcoholic drink or whatever, but I never knew what it really meant or where it came from.

Oh, yeah. And so this is in International Falls, Minnesota, where you grew up?

Yes. And so about how long ago do you think you first heard it?

Many, many years ago. I’m 75 years old right now, but it was while I was growing up there.

Okay. It’s interesting. This term isn’t listed in any of my dialect or slang dictionaries. It’s very strange because usually they’re very good on language for alcohol and alcohol consumption because it’s just one of those things that’s so productive. Slang lexicographers tend to have an ear and an eye for it. So I have done some digging on this. And we’ve actually had a couple listeners to the show ask about this over the years.

Will Hartman says his grandfather called a highball a kanuper.

And Dennis Holscher said it was old timers in his family too, but they were referring to a shot of whiskey.

And when I look in archives of digital books and newspapers, I almost completely found all of the uses of this word in connection with Minnesota, except for one connection with Wisconsin.

Yeah.

Almost exclusively in Minnesota.

So it looks like a Minnesota term.

So Kanooper has been spelled C-A-N-O-O-P-E-R or K-A-N-U-P-E-R are variations on the theme.

But Kanooper is how it looks and how it’s, how it, I guess it sounds like you’re saying it.

But there’s one intriguing fact that I found that I’m going to share with you.

That it’s a possible origin, just possible.

It’s the best I could have got for you.

Did you ever watch a fishing show by a fellow named Red Fisher?

I can’t recall.

Okay, so Red Fisher was an American who had a television show, however, on Canadian television from 1963 to 1989.

And it was a very popular show.

I don’t know if this was ever broadcast in Minnesota.

I’m just speculating because sometimes Canadian programs are broadcast in the United States, too.

You know, they’re carried on public television.

He tells this interviewer in this book, Vicky Gabbro, who worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, that he coined the term.

He says he made up the term canuper for a fisherman.

Yeah.

That’s what he says.

He says he did it.

So this book was published in 1987, and he says he made it up years ago.

And that’s the only information I have about the possible origin.

And Red Fisher was quite a character.

But his show was hugely popular, so popular that it spawned all kinds of imitators and parodies and that sort of thing.

-huh. Okay.

Well, I have to take your word for that.

Well, it’s not my word, it’s his word.

Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s true.

Because the earliest use that I have of the word in print, where it’s clearly referring to an alcoholic drink, is the 1970s, which is very strange to me.

Oh.

Yeah, because I feel like it should be older, given that a lot of the places where I first find it in print is obituaries of people born in the 30s and the 20s.

Right, who like to have a canooper of brandy.

Yeah, a lot of these obituaries say, have a Canuper in honor of so-and-so.

And their birth dates are like 1938, 1921.

Oh.

It was 1918.

But they’re all from Minnesota.

I was going to say, Pete, I would be very interested to hear if any of our listeners who don’t have a connection to Minnesota have used this term, Canuper, for a drink.

Buy you a Canuper.

I haven’t run into anybody that really can tell me all the things that you’re telling me.

That’s for sure.

Well, I’ve got resources, and I’ve got patience, and I’m as curious as a cat.

All right.

Very good.

Pete, we really appreciate you calling us about this.

And if we find anything more, we’ll be sure to blurt it out on the radio show, okay?

Thank you very, very much.

I appreciate it.

It’s our pleasure.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Pete.

If you know this word in reference to a drink of alcohol or something similar,

Let us know, words@waywordradio.org,

Or you can call us toll-free in the United States, including Minnesota, 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Earlier, I mentioned the wonderful book by Ed Young called An Immense World,

How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us.

And it’s about how there are lots of ways that animals perceive the world,

A lot of different ways depending on what kind of sensory apparatus they have.

For example, a dog’s nose is far, far more sensitive than our own.

And a bee can see ultraviolet light.

And a catfish has taste buds all over its body.

And I wanted to share just one quick example of Young’s writing.

He writes about scallops and their optic systems and a scientist who studies them.

And he writes, Daniel Spicer never thought he would spend his career trying to empathize with scallops.

When he started graduate school in 2004, he thought about them the same way most people do, as lumps of meat on a plate.

But those appetizing pan-seared lumps are merely the muscles that scallops use to close their shells.

Look at a full living scallop and you’ll see a very different animal.

And that animal will see you too.

Each half of a scallop’s fan-shaped shell has eyes arrayed along its inner edge.

Dozens in some species and up to 200 in others.

In the bay scallop, the eyes look like neon blueberries.

And he says the question of why they have so many eyes is still a bit of a mystery.

Because most of the time, scallops just sit there on the sea floor.

But he writes, when scallops are threatened, they can swim away,

Opening and closing their shells like panicked castanets.

Isn’t that fantastic?

What a description. That’s exactly right.

Panicked castanets.

I just love that the book is full of these kinds of analogies.

And again, as I said, it’s really science with a literary sensibility.

In fact, the title itself refers to lines from William Blake when he’s writing about the limitations of our own senses.

Blake wrote,

How do you know but every bird that cuts the airy way is an immense world of delight, closed by your senses five.

In other words, how much more could we see if we just expand our perception?

So the book, again, is An Immense World by Ed Young.

We’ll link to that on the website.

We’d love to hear what you’re reading.

And we’d love to hear, even if it’s not about language,

We’re just appreciative, like you are, of stuff that is written wonderfully.

What beautiful things have you read lately?

Let us know, words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us about the author and the book on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, so this is Elia calling from northern Arizona.

Hi, Elia. What’s on your mind?

So I’m living on the border with the Navajo Nation, and I’m hearing a lot of Navahogan spoken, whether at work or just in the street.

And it’s a wildly different language than I’ve ever heard before anywhere.

And I’m also realizing that I’m not understanding whether it’s like a question, just a statement and not getting the tone of the phrase at all.

And so I know that like in music, like consonance and dissonance like differs based on the culture.

And I was wondering if that was the same with like phrase inflection and stuff like that.

That is a very good question.

Let me ask, do you speak any Navajo?

Very little.

Every time my coworkers have tried to teach me, I have been pretty miserable at it.

It is so hard.

Okay.

So you didn’t grow up speaking it.

Do you speak any other languages besides English?

Yes.

I grew up in France, so I grew up speaking French and learned English kind of as a second language.

But, yeah, I’ve been around a lot of languages.

At the school, I went to Arabic and Spanish, German, French, English.

But this, yeah, this has been just completely new.

It’s really good that you have this other language experience,

Not only speaking, being fluent in two languages,

But having encountered other languages,

And especially that you’ve encountered other non-European languages, such as Arabic,

Because you already have enough experience understanding that tonality,

That is, the tones of a language can be very different.

And Navajo, of course, being completely outside of the Indo-European tradition,

Has a very different tonality.

And so that’s why you’re not picking up those tone clues.

Almost all of the European languages have very similar tonality.

We’re leaving out things like Basque, for example,

That is outside of the isolates like Basque.

So a question generally will sound like a question.

And anger will generally sound like anger.

And the pauses will generally sound like pauses.

It generally will sound the same.

Whereas you shouldn’t expect that in languages outside of the European language tradition.

And I think that’s part of what’s happening here.

We bring our own linguistic experience to our understanding of other languages.

And for some people, that’s really discomforting and discomfitting.

Both of those words are very similar, but they mean different things.

Discomforting means we feel uncertain and maybe scared or bothered.

And discomfitting means that we feel out of place and disassociated and maybe like we don’t belong.

Maybe I’ve made those words sound like more like synonyms than ever.

Some people even would call a language like that ugly, just based on a superficial aesthetic judgment, which is obviously unfair, just because it doesn’t sound like things that they’re used to.

It is normal to hear a language that has a different kind of tonality and feel like you’re not getting any information at all, especially because you don’t speak it.

It’s absolutely normal.

If you’re going to continue in this environment, Elliot, I would encourage you to find a skilled teacher and take formal classes.

Even online would do, but face-to-face is better.

Because you will find that a skilled teacher will bring gentleness and humor and consistency to the language.

And it makes so much more difference than the catch-as-catch-can method that you’re doing now.

You’ll move much faster out of the difficult part of learning the language into the part where you’ll have the everyday stuff down, like the polite phrases that we need to go about our day.

It can make our day so much more effective when we’re going from place to place because you soon realize how much of what we say in any language is repetitive.

And you’ll start to feel like, okay, I get this.

All they said was hello, even though it sounded, even though it took them a while to say it.

All they said was, hello, how are you doing? And how’s the family?

Right on, right on.

Elia, we look forward to future field reports from you.

This is all really, really interesting.

Yeah, thank you for sharing.

And thank you for sharing your awkwardness with another language.

So often we’re ashamed of our experience and not getting it, but it takes some courage to talk on a national radio show about it.

No, I appreciate it.

I don’t mind asking for help, and you guys did really provide that.

So thank you so much.

All right, take care and be well.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, I’m wondering if other listeners have similar experiences, you know, where you don’t know a language, but you live side by side with it.

And you really can’t penetrate it because it’s so different.

It comes from an entirely different language family.

I’d love to hear about people’s experiences with that.

You can call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I don’t even remember how I went down this rabbit hole, but this week I was reading about mocap and mocap slang, mocap being short for motion capture.

You know, that’s when you’re creating digital characters for 2D or 3D computer animation.

And you’ve seen this.

You know, they stick little reflective dots all over an actor, and then they have them move around in front of a green screen.

And this field is relatively new, but there’s already a lot of great jargon, and there’s a whole collection of it at motioncapturesociety.com, which is an organization for professionals in the field.

Those little dots, the mocap markers, are called either dots or jewels.

And just from looking at their vocabulary, it sounds like part of the challenge is keeping all those dots in the right place, like during a fight scene or something.

One of those expressions is marker dune, and that’s what the crew yells if a dot has fallen off of an actor.

And another one is hitchhiker.

That’s when a marker is transferred from one actor to another but hasn’t fallen off yet.

And another one I really like is fear stick.

The fear stick is a pool noodle at the end of a long stick that’s used to hit actors to make them react appropriately during shots.

But wait a second. I want to go back to Marker Doon. It’s not Marker Down?

No, it’s Marker Doon.

So were they imitating a Scots accent?

I don’t know how that arose.

Marker Doon.

This could be a good assignment for you, Grant.

That’s fantastic. I love insider lingo, particularly if it’s got a little bit of humor to it.

Right. MotionCaptureSociety.com. And these terms do check out. I’ve looked them up elsewhere.

Go to our website at waywordradio.org where you’ll find hundreds of past episodes that you can listen to to your heart’s desire.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning. My name is Lucy from Suffolk, Virginia. Virginia is for lovers.

Virginia is for lovers. Welcome to the show, Lucy.

My word is when somebody goes to the doctor and they’re very hypochondriac, hypo, H-Y-P-O, I believe, why aren’t they hyper, H-Y-P-E-R, like hyperthermic or hypothermic?

And that’s my question.

Well, I’m really excited to talk about this because it involves Greek prefixes, which I love talking about.

And there are two different Greek prefixes here, one of which is hyper, which means over, and we get hyper from that.

And the other Greek prefix is chupo, which means under.

And so the hyper, the hyper with H-Y-P-E-R, meaning over, is part of words like hyperactive.

You know, you’re overactive.

Or if you’re hypersensitive, you’re overly sensitive.

And the hypo, the hypo in English, H-Y-P-O, means under.

And as you mentioned, hypothermia is a perfect example of that.

It’s like being underheated, basically.

Or think about the term hypodermic.

If you’re in the medical profession, you know that hypodermic is a needle that goes under your dermis, under your skin.

Hypodermic.

So two different beginnings there, hyper and hypo.

And the other part of the word hypochondria comes from the Greek word chondros, which means gristle or cartilage.

And this is really cool because specifically in Greek, it refers to the cartilage in the breastbone.

And under the chondros, under the cartilage of the breastbone, are the organs of the upper abdomen behind the ribs that include the liver and the gallbladder and the spleen.

And it used to be that those organs generated black bile and vapors and melancholia just made you feel terrible.

Right.

And so the hypochondria comes from that.

It’s the idea of these organs under the breastbone that supposedly, at least back in the 14th and 15th century, people thought generated feelings of feeling terrible.

Okay.

So when somebody’s hypochondriac, they want to squelch those.

Well, yeah, and they just feel a malaise or they are thinking that there’s something wrong with them and there’s not.

So under the cartilage was the source of this illness, and that’s kind of how it’s connected to the idea that hypochondria is about feeling ill today.

Oh, okay.

Okay, well, I’m going to think of some more words.

Well, please do and call us again, Lucy.

We’d love that.

Yeah, we appreciate it.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Lucy.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Star Scherzer.

I’m calling from Santa Claus, Indiana.

Oh, Santa Claus, Indiana, right there in southwestern Indiana, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

What’s on your mind?

As a youth, my grandfather always called me Snooksy.

And my dad picked that up, and so one day I asked my dad, I said, what does that mean?

Why do you call me Snooksy?

And he said, well, it’s a name that your grandpa gave you when you were little, and he said, I don’t know what it means.

He said the only thing he could reference it to is that there used to be a cartoon, and the girl in the cartoon was named Snooki.

Snooksy.

Snooksy.

So do you go by it now? Do people call you that now, Star?

My dad does, yes.

And he also calls my daughter that once in a while.

But that’s what my grandfather always called me.

Oh, sounds pretty affectionate.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s a nice, what did you call him back?

Grandpa.

Just grandpa, nothing like papa or anything like that?

No, no, it was always grandpa.

Yeah, Snooksy, S-N-O-O-K-S-Y, Snooksy, something like that?

I would say, I don’t know, I never even knew how to spell it.

It was just, you know, one day it was just like, why do you call me that?

Yeah, we often have those questions occur to us much later about something we’ve used all along.

I have a different theory.

I don’t know anything about the comic.

You said it was a cartoon?

Like an animated cartoon?

Like a, well, a comic strip.

Comic strip.

Yeah.

I don’t know anything about that.

A young woman named Snooki in a comic strip.

I think there’s a better source for this.

Something far more common.

And I think some of our listeners probably know where I’m going with this.

There was a famous character, famous, famous character named Baby Snooks portrayed by Fanny Bryce on the radio starting in 1936.

Fanny played a devilish little girl, always up to trouble.

She was a huge brat.

And I’m not saying this about you, Star.

Well, they used to tell me I was that little girl with a curl in the middle of her forehead.

Aha.

So when you were good, you were very, very good, and then what happened?

Yes.

And when you were bad, you were very bad.

You were boring.

This show was hugely popular on the radio, and it ran until Fanny Bryce died in 1951.

It ran basically until like a week before her death.

It was loosely based on a comic strip.

That had a baby named Baby Snookums.

But that comic strip was never very popular.

Snooks is short for Snookums, which is a pet name.

And even now people may call people Snookums.

But it’s part of a sweet name, a hyperchoristic, an affectionate name.

Sometimes reduplicated as Snooksy Wooksy.

Okay.

Yeah, so that’s what it is.

It’s part of a super sweet name.

And we have many sweet names like that, like Lamsy Whamsy and Hunpun and Ism Wism.

Yeah.

I have heard Snookums before, you know, and I don’t ever remember it being referenced, you know, as to me.

But I do remember hearing people call them Snookums or, you know.

Well, that is so neat.

Thank you.

Yeah, sure.

So that goes back at least to the 1930s in some form or other.

Well, answered a question for me.

We try, Star, we try.

Thank you for calling.

Bye-bye.

All righty, bye-bye.

All righty.

877-929-9673.

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Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

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

Bye.