Tennessee Top Hat (episode #1432)

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.

Grant, as a lexicographer, as a dictionary editor, you know that people are forever sending words to the dictionary that they would like to be included.

Yes, yes they are.

And their chances are usually…

Almost zero.

Not so great.

But what if one of those words had the force of legislation behind it?

Ooh, maybe. Maybe it’s got a chance. What is it?

Well, the word is upstander.

Oh, yeah. Opposite of bystander.

Yes, yes. The opposite of bystander is somebody who stands up for somebody who’s being picked on.

Well, it turns out that in June of this year, the New Jersey State Senate approved a resolution urging Merriam-Webster, Inc. and the Oxford University Press to include the word upstander in their dictionaries.

What’s their motivation for that?

Well, it’s the result of years of campaigning against bullying by New Jersey high school students that campaigned by the high school students.

For other students.

Yes. And I don’t know, a legislative body voting for a word to go into the dictionary?

Yeah, it’s kind of an overreach of power, though.

The dictionary editors consider the evidence and probably are no more likely to be swayed by a legislature than they are by lots of lawyers coming from a big company to tell them that a word is actually trademarked.

Oh, well, yeah. Right. Yeah. Good point. On the other hand, I do think there is enough citational evidence for upstander. That is, it’s been used in a lot of places by a lot of people in print over enough years that it’s probably already in the citation files at Oxford University Press and Merriam-Webster’s.

Yes, it is. And it’s in the ascendancy, I think, and this event will certainly help. So we’ll see.

Here at San Diego at the Museum of Man, where I give my time, they have an exhibit called Instruments of Torture. And the torture exhibit talks quite a bit about what it’s like to be the opposite of a bystander. Rather than watching the torture, you are an upstander and you speak out and you say, this is wrong. We shouldn’t do this. Let’s do something else.

Oh, interesting.

So that’s what an upstander is.

So they actually use that word.

Yeah, it’s on the wall and in the description inside the exhibit.

Excellent.

To talk about setting a new course for being better humans, basically.

Excellent.

That’s really interesting.

Yes, it seems to have gained some currency thanks to a book by Samantha Power, the current U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations.

She used it in her Pulitzer Prize winning book.

But the problem with these word campaigns to get a word in the dictionary is that they assume that the dictionaries change rapidly.

And they’re really slow.

You may think when they put out their new words list that they’re just throwing any old slang in there.

But really, they’re way behind the times almost always.

It just takes a long time to come up with new additions.

But we’ll see.

Yeah, I do hope this one gets in.

I think it’s a great word to use with kids.

You know, be an upstander, something positive.

The thing I would say about this overall, and any dictionary editor will tell you this, is that there are tons, millions of words that aren’t in dictionaries.

Being in a dictionary does not give a word any more legitimacy than if it’s not in the dictionary.

It’s not an official crowning of a word is real.

A word can easily be real and never be included in a dictionary.

Right. The dictionary is more like the phone book than the social register.

Exactly.

Well, we’d love to talk with you about language.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

And we have a very active group on Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Laura McCabe from Wausau, Wisconsin.

Hello, Laura. How you doing?

Hi, Laura.

Hi, I’m doing well, thanks. How are you?

Super duper.

Pretty good.

Welcome to the show. What’s up?

So my dad used to use a word when I was little that I haven’t been able to find in any dictionary. It’s difuglety. And it’s a great word, and he kind of uses it like, oh, what a mess, what a mishap, what a difuglety. And it’s such a great word. And I started using it as an adult and people would look at me basically cross-eyed because they had no idea what I was talking about. And I’ve just been able to find it in any dictionary. So I was wondering if you guys had any ideas as to where it came from and why it isn’t in any dictionary. Is there anything else?

Difugulty. Is that how he says it?

Difugulty, yes.

Difugulty. And how would you spell that, Laura, if you were forced to?

If I was to guess, I think D-I-F-U-G-A-L-T-Y.

That’s not bad.

I’ve seen it spelled that way.

Yeah, you know what? This is just a silly mispronunciation of the word difficulty.

You’re having difficulty with the word difficulty.

Yeah, that makes perfect sense now that you say that.

Yeah, sometimes people spell it D-E-F instead of D-I-F.

Yeah, I’m counting one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight different spellings at least.

There’s probably more that I missed.

So it’s just a silly way to say a silly word about a silly situation.

Well, it’s to have a difficulty with the word difficulty.

So you’re making a joke about difficulty, right?

Yeah, does that square with your dad’s personality?

That sounds right up his alley, yeah.

-huh.

Good.

-huh.

Is he a jokester?

He is.

He is the funniest thing.

So it’s got a good 120 years of history behind it. You can find it in the late 1800s easily in old texts. And it’s almost always presented as a jokey word by a jokey person.

Okay.

Or in a humorous situation.

Occasionally, I have seen it appear in like minutes in like some official proceeding. And I’m not quite sure what’s happening with that. Because it should be the word difficult. And I just wonder if the person taking the minutes didn’t know what they were doing and misspelled the word.

Oh, that’s funny.

When I’ve asked him about it before, he thought it was a totally different word. So I wonder if somebody that used it around him when he was little knew the context and he just took it at its face. But it perfectly fits with his personality.

You know, it’s funny. There is some evidence that it has split off far enough from difficulty where it just means a small inconsistency or problem or something that’s not quite right rather than like a major difficulty.

It’s not like your car won’t start. It’s more like you left the window down when you shouldn’t have something like that.

You put the keys in the refrigerator.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, that’s perfect. And thank you so much. That makes perfect sense to me.

Awesome. Thanks, Laura.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you, guys.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk with us, or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org, and you can find a very active Facebook group devoted to our show on Facebook.

I came across this old Scots expression, it’s a verb, to summer and winter.

I’m not for summering and wintering about the matter.

So to burn hot and cold for something?

To change your mind?

You’re getting close.

No, I don’t know.

What is it?

You’re getting close.

It means to carry on at great length, to talk at great length.

To summer and winter about something to natter on, basically.

Yes, to natter on.

Thank you.

Oh, interesting.

Thank you.

And if you call us, we will summer and winter about any question.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Jessica from Milwaukee.

Hey, Jessica, welcome to the show.

Hi, Jessica.

Thank you.

Hello.

What’s up? What are you thinking about?

Well, my coworkers and I, I work in the news, and we were kind of brainstorming the other day. We were trying to come up with some other words for church. I had a lot of kind of timely news stories about things happening at churches, and we were wondering if there was another way to say it that’s broad, because if you get into, say, cathedral or synagogue, those kind of, you know, go into a specific denomination or religious background. And so we were trying to think about one more broad term besides just the word church.

Because you’re using church too often in a news story?

Are you in broadcast media?

Correct.

Yep, I’m in broadcast television.

So, you know, saying church three or four times, you know, gets a little redundant.

And so we were trying to reduce the redundancy a little bit and maybe try and think of some other words.

What’d you come up with so far?

Church.

Well, let me ask you kind of the obvious question.

Why not say it more than once?

Well, I think that we want to be conversational, so I think we do want to say it more than once, and that’s okay.

But if you’re getting into it three or four times, it may be trying to find another way around it.

It just sounds a little more professional and educated sometimes.

Yeah, that’s my thinking as well.

I assume that’s where you’re going.

I read a book the other day where somebody inadvertently, apparently, used the same word, like really characteristic kind of like atypical word, three times on a single page.

And I was like, this guy, he needs to get a thesaurus because, no.

I’ve heard worse.

You have this aversion, right, to repetition.

Exactly.

It just feels wrong.

Sure.

Yeah.

So are you trying things like house of worship or house of prayer?

Or just temple?

Or does temples speak too much of specific religions?

I think it does.

Yeah, I feel like you say temple, and you automatically think of a certain denomination.

So I think we just try and say church on a first reference and then work our way around it usually.

But it just kind of got us thinking, and so we’re all sitting in the newsroom kind of throwing out different words,

synagogue, tabernacle, and so I was like, well, instead of going to the Taurus,

I heard you guys on the radio later and thought I’d give you a call.

Right. Oh, House of Divinity.

House of Divinity.

What about this super old-fashioned, archaic word that you personally, Jessica, can repopularize?

Fane, F-A-N-E.

What?

Fane.

Yeah, it’s archaic and old.

But you could be the one.

You could start it.

Yeah.

I could start the trend.

I like it.

Fane for church could be the new on fleek.

You could be the one, Jessica.

Well, you could also explain that fane, in the sense of church or temple, also gives us the word profane, outside of the church or temple.

Here we go.

But that’s not.

We can’t do it.

No, no, no.

She’s got a practical question.

A many grammar lesson in the newscast.

Yeah, that’s not going to work either.

Here’s the thing, Jessica.

You have basically defined yourself out of a good answer.

I guess, yeah.

We had a wonderful call the other day from a woman talking about the word plant.

She’s a gardener.

She does a TV show and, like, books and everything about plants.

And she was like, oh, my God, I’m tired of the word plant.

So we get you.

We understand.

But maybe it’s time to switch beats.

Talk to your editor.

Maybe.

Maybe that’s what I’ll do.

Whoever’s signing you all these stories in churches, like, for once, I want to go to an arena, or I want to go to a Congress.

Well, yeah, and you may be hearing it more than your listeners or your viewers.

Oh, that’s a good point.

I’ve got my eyes on it maybe too much, more than the average person.

But if you’re—I don’t know.

It’s hard.

I think House of Worship is a decent synonym, but again, you would wear that one real quick, right?

Yeah.

I mean, interchangeably.

If I make the story short enough, I suppose I can get around it.

Maybe our listeners would have some ideas.

Sure.

What should Jessica use, besides using the word church over and over, for a place of worship, for any kind of place of worship, not just for one particular religion?

Jessica, we’re going to crowdsource this and get back to you, okay?

I like it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So if you’ve got a word for Jessica, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or if you think that you know a synonym for a place of worship that can be used for any place of worship,

send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Have a riddle for you, Grant.

What flies when it’s born, lies when it’s alive, and runs when it’s dead.

I don’t know. Runs when it’s dead?

Mm—

I don’t know. What is it?

I puzzled over this one for a long time.

A snowflake.

Ooh.

So read it again.

What flies when it’s born, lies when it’s alive, and runs when it’s dead.

A snowflake.

Runs because it’s melting.

Okay, got it.

Okay, a snowflake.

Nice.

877-929-9673.

Stay tuned for more A Way with Words in just a minute.

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 look who it is, that handsome gentleman, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi-dee-ho, Grant and Martha.

What’s up, dude?

I just shaved.

This must be what you’re responding to.

Yep.

This is my summer look.

And your back looks great.

Thank you.

So I have a little puzzle for you guys here today.

It’s very simple.

These are phrases with and in the middle of them.

We’ve done something similar before, but these are and phrases in which both halves of the phrase rhyme.

For example, this is the nickname of a controversial flag in the news.

Stars and bars?

Yeah, stars and bars.

So now you have the setup, the conceit, how it works, okay?

Okay, sounds easy.

First word and second word are going to be different from each other and they are going to rhyme.

Okay, great.

Good, let’s do this.

This is an American comedy drama series about teens in the 80s

that gained a cult following when it was released in 1999.

Freaks and Geeks.

Freaks and Geeks is right.

And We Helped is enough to remind most older folks.

Oh, wait.

Yes.

Of a famous commercial for this flavored crumb coating for chicken and pork.

You had to frame it that way, John.

I did.

Shake and bake, and I helped.

Shake and bake, and we helped.

This is another way of saying on the up and up.

Or without fakery.

Fair and square.

Fair and square is right.

These are famous cartoon magpies from Terry Toons.

They’ve been around since the 1940s.

Heckle and Jekyll.

Heckle and Jekyll.

And by the way, for you trivia freaks out there who need, you know,

or studying up, heckle is the one who speaks with the New York accent,

and Jekyll is the one who speaks with the English accent.

Oh.

You’re welcome.

I did not know that.

Yes.

This is a strategy for winning somebody over on a first date.

Scooch and smooch.

Hey, all right.

Scooch and smooch.

Not what I was going for, but if it works for you.

I don’t know.

It did, actually.

I’m married nine years now.

Good for you.

Scooch and smooch works.

No, it references your plans for the evening.

I’m going to take her off.

Oh, wine and dine.

Oh, gosh.

Yes, wine and dine.

Very good.

This adjective denotes the fraudulent practice of encouraging investors to buy shares in a company in order to inflate the price artificially and then selling one’s own shares when the price is high.

Pump and dump.

Pump and dump.

That’s right.

Still going, even in the Internet age.

Yeah, yeah, unbelievable.

This is to breathe heavily with exhaustion, like at the end of a marathon.

Huff and puff.

Huff and puff.

Very good.

This actually, I think, is the hardest of them all.

Oh.

Finally, this describes the damage that occurs to an object or a person in the natural course of its use or aging.

Wear and tear.

Wear and tear.

Wear and tear.

Yes.

Very good.

I was going to say bump and dump.

Buy new.

Fry and buy.

Thank you, John.

This was genius.

I had fun.

Got a lot of them right.

So therefore, it was a good quiz.

That’s how it always works.

Thanks, guys.

I’ll see you next time.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You know, you might have a quiz question for us, a joke, a riddle, a rhyme, something funny.

This is the place for it.

We’d love to hear it.

We’ll share it with everyone else.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sean McDonald from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Sean. How are you doing?

Hey, Sean.

Well, I am a teacher here in Dallas, and the student population, most of them are bilingual, Spanish obviously being their first language.

And so I decided to start learning Spanish to better communicate with my students.

And I was just wondering if you guys had any tips on learning a second language as an adult.

How are you doing this? Are you using an app or going to classes or what?

I use an app called Duolingo.

Yep, Duolingo.

And then I also have a couple workbooks that I work out of if I have the free time.

I think when you’re trying to learn a language as an adult, it’s important to focus on what your purpose is.

You know, it’s sort of like there comes a point in your life where you realize you’re never going to be an Olympic athlete.

So you kind of have to scale down your expectations.

And so I wanted to zero in on what your focus is.

What’s your purpose in learning?

Well, I mean, I guess it’s just to communicate better with those students, specifically the younger students, because they don’t have a handle on English at all.

So I have to use more Spanish with them if I want them to understand.

Okay. You’re talking about having problems with the grammar and you’re using a workbook and an app.

I’m just wondering if it wouldn’t be better to try to learn it on a conversational basis, either with a tutor or in some kind of conversational class.

Yeah, and there are a few services online that let you do video conversation, and some of them are free.

You might just Google that, video conversation practice.

So you just fire up Skype or Google Hangouts, and you just trade a language with somebody else.

You speak English to them, they speak Spanish to you, and work it out.

Martha’s point is Duolingo is great, but it’s teaching you things like apple and dress.

And you don’t need apple and dress.

You need words like homework and book and lesson and due date, right?

Yeah.

And so you also need to find that specialized vocabulary that’s useful for the class.

Exactly.

The other thing I would add to this is how deep are you submitting yourself into the process?

I mean, how deep is your immersion?

Just the app or a workbook or even video chat aren’t going to do it either.

Are you listening to Spanish language radio?

Yes, all the time.

Awesome. Perfect.

Like sports or something, something like really easy and conversational, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think Grant makes a really good point in that at this point, you should focus on what you like.

Yeah.

If you like to listen to sports news, then try listening to it in Spanish.

Or if you like People magazine, read it in Spanish.

When you get farther along, that can be really helpful.

Yeah, because if people torture themselves with Cervantes when they learn Spanish, there’s no point to that.

Right.

Yeah.

Sean, one more question.

Do you work out at all?

Are you into fitness or weightlifting?

I do.

Then I think you should think about this as a fitness program because there are a lot of different things that are the same when you’re learning a language as an adult and working on a fitness program.

It’s a lifelong commitment, first of all.

Yeah.

You may not get results right away, but you can’t lift 50 pounds necessarily right away.

But you will make progress.

It’s often good to exercise with a buddy or with a trainer.

And I think that that can be really good when you’re doing language learning as well.

So we hope that helps.

Yeah, we hope it helps.

Duolingo is great.

Thank you.

But I think you need a lot more than that.

The first like 20 lesson plans are still going to be like this basic household vocabulary, this basic, not the classroom stuff that you need.

The other thing I would say is don’t forget to seek out vocabulary lists of classroom words so you have those very strongly in your brain.

All right?

Yeah.

All righty.

Cool.

Okay.

Buena suerte.

Thank you so much.

Sean, let us know how it goes, okay?

Okay.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Call us 877-99-9673 or send your questions to words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before on the show about childhood misunderstandings of words, and we got a great example from Tracy Fletcher in Tallahassee.

Tracy writes, growing up, I would ride past a motel on the way to and from school every day.

As I was learning to read, I always liked the idea that it was named the Bud Get In, as in, hey, bud, get in here.

It was until I used it as a landmark reference for something else that my mom informed me it was the budget inn.

Not necessarily friendly, just a cheap place to stay.

Bud, get in.

Hey, bud, get in.

Why not?

It kind of takes you back, right, to when you’re a kid and you’re parsing out all these words and they don’t quite make sense.

My wife and I both had the really common one of hors d’oeuvres.

Oh, yeah, of course.

Running, what are the hors d’oeuvres?

Never taking years to connect them to hors d’oeuvres.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, yes. My name is Owen. I’m from western Pennsylvania.

And I have a question.

Based on a previous segment, a question arose.

Why has rhyming slang not taken better hold in the United States as compared to other English-speaking countries?

It’s interesting that you use the word better.

So that means that you know that it has taken some hold here, right?

Well, actually, only among certain people who are used to speaking it in that manner.

So let’s say, why has it not taken hold at all?

Well, it has taken hold, and it used to be more common than it is now.

It’s just not that common anymore, even in the U.K.

At this point, it’s kind of an artifact more than it is an ongoing form of language.

But Owen, I think your point is that Cockney rhyming slang is really well known.

Is that what you’re talking about?

That was what I was speaking about, although I would say probably Australian rhyming slang might have been the rationale for it, but I would say it was more cocky than anything else.

And give us a couple of examples.

Well, I guess one of the hallmark rhyming slangs I have known is a well-known movie from the 1990s, I believe, wherein a typically British individual says, if something goes wrong, we’re in Barney.

And the Americans behind him would look at each other and say, I don’t understand what that is.

Right.

They’re in trouble.

We’re in trouble.

And so that was one of the reasons why rhyming slang actually has some recognizable aspects in popular culture.

But there was also another situation where there was a British spy television show, and somebody was called, I believe, a cricket.

-huh.

Cricket.

And it was based on a changing of a rhyme from, I think, perpetrator or perp, which would be chirp, which would be something which chirps is a cricket.

Interesting.

I believe that that’s where it was coming from.

But most of the times that you hear this probably is going to be in popular culture, right?

You’re going to see it in movies and television shows and read it in books.

At this point, yeah.

At this point, because it’s mostly a performance.

It’s color that they throw in.

But as I understand it from my British colleagues, there is some of this happening on the street, but the new production of rhyming slang is almost completely stopped.

It’s almost all the stuff that’s slowly becoming old fashioned and falling out of use.

But yeah, there was a time in the United States where you could actually find it among certain groups.

And we’re talking Western prisons around San Francisco, particularly in California, where there was a large influx of Australians who brought it with them.

And they tended to be underworld types.

And so they brought their underworld lingo with them.

So the way rhyming slang works is that if you say Barney, it’s short for Barney Rubble.

Yeah.

And that rhymes with trouble.

Right.

So you’re supposed to know that Barney equals trouble.

Right.

Right.

Or dustbin lids for however the wife and kids, I believe.

Yeah.

Most of these have never caught on in American English.

The only one that I think people might have heard of, but even then it’s old fashioned, is a twist for a girl, which would be a twist and a twirl.

It rhymes with girl and then you use the word twist to mean girl.

It’s fun. It’s cool. I don’t know why it’s not more widespread.

Because things fall out of fashion. Slang falls out of fashion.

And also it’s kind of self-conscious in a really kind of annoying way that I think it goes against the understated grain of most slang today, which is supposed to be opaque to outsiders, even more opaque than the rhyme would be.

I don’t understand why somebody would purposefully obfuscate our communication. It’s odd. Who knows?

Yeah, there’s plenty of accidental obfuscation, right? Yes, of course.

So, excellent. But thank you very much for the analysis, and I’m grateful to be listening, and I’ll keep up the good work, guys.

Thanks, Owen. Bye, Owen. Thank you guys very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Thanks.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Rachel, and I’m calling from New York.

Hi, where in New York are you? I’m in Brooklyn.

Rachel, what’s on your mind? I have a reoccurring need for a word. It’s kind of when you think you’ve heard everything or you’ve fathomed everything and then someone tells you something or you witness something that is just completely out of your previous realm of conception, if that makes sense.

It’s kind of like when your mind is blown, but that seems kind of clunky. I’m sure there’s something. There’s got to be something out there.

You’re looking for a verb or a noun? I feel like it should be a verb.

Okay. Can you give us a concrete example of something that would prompt you to have that kind of reaction?

The, you know, the only example I could think of is kind of funny, but I was 16. I’m from Seattle, so I’m kind of a hippie, and I was invited to my brother’s birth.

And I was prepared. I know where babies come from. But being in a room with five people and then there was this sixth person that just appeared and it was mind-blowing.

It’s not awe, it’s not wonder, it’s not befuddlement. It’s more of an experience because if someone tells you something kind of unbelievable, you’re like, wow.

You know, and you kind of think about it, but to experience it is kind of, you know, children probably feel this all the time, like their mind is constantly being blown because they’re learning so quickly, but it happens less so with adults where you’re going along thinking that you know everything kind of, and then something out of your realm of conception happens.

Yeah, words are so inadequate for that kind of experience. I mean, what you’re describing makes sense, that kind of visceral experiencing of something rather than being told about it or reading about it. It’s in your marrow, isn’t it? It’s a hair-raising tooth, for sure.

Any words you try to put to that kind of experience just seem inadequate, don’t they? I mean, mind-blowing is such a cliche now. It’s sort of watered down.

And epiphany is kind of something you find out for yourself more than it is just something that happens to you or around you, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, maybe in the religious sense, an epiphany is external, kind of. There’s a word that I learned a long time ago.

I don’t remember who wrote it, but it was a world beater. Something amazing is a world beater.

Or you might say that’s a world beating event, which meaning it’s the best of its kind or the beatingest kind in the whole world. It’s better than everything.

World beater makes me think of marmalade dropper, you know, which is you’re sitting there with your jam and toast and reading the newspaper in the morning, or as you used to, and you would just drop your marmalade at something in the newspaper because it was so amazing or horrifying.

Yeah. I mean, in some ways, I mean, we’re looking for some kind of grandiose word, and I’m thinking of ineffable or something like that, like something you literally can’t really say. But in some ways, I’m thinking something really mundane like marmalade dropper might be justice.

You said phenomenon earlier. It’s not quite phenomenon, though. You’d almost need an adjective in front of that. Doosie is too gentle. Humdinger is too small.

Something unfathomable I love because it’s got the image of outstretched arms, if you go back to the etymology. But, I mean, isn’t the point that you can’t find a word for that?

Yeah, maybe. I mean, how do you describe in one word a sudden shift in your worldview? Special. Special.

Really special. Maybe the best thing that can be said about it is a paragraph and not a single word. Maybe a single word would always shortchange the whole feeling that you’re having.

And I find that when people struggle to find one word to encapsulate a concept, they discard whole important features of the idea that they’re thinking about in order to get to that one word.

It’s like they’re shaving off the corners of the object to get it to fit into the box. Rachel, I don’t know that we’ve helped.

No, you have. And I think that that’s a beautiful thing that you said. It’s experiential, and that’s why we communicate and use words, is because we want to share experiences that maybe can’t be shaved down to a tweet or just one word.

So thank you so much. Rachel, thank you so much. Thanks again. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

What’s the noun or verb that you would use in a situation where your whole life experience was suddenly turned around and forever after you saw the world differently?

You know, I did have a Spanish speaker once say to me, you moved my floor. Oh, nice.

In English, you moved my floor. You moved my floor. Which meant I just totally turned this person’s world upside down.

Yeah, maybe you’ve got a better word for it. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you probably already know this term, but it’s new to me, Twitter canoe.

Oh, yeah. So a Twitter canoe is a public conversation between two people on Twitter.

And usually if you come in from the outside and join in that conversation, you are overturning their canoe, right?

Yeah, yeah. It gets loaded with so many of the usernames in that one tweet that is like a canoe.

Yeah, just too much people. And there’s no room for text. It just spills off the end.

Right, exactly. Twitter canoe.

Yeah, Twitter doesn’t handle lots of conversation very well at all. No.

Twitter canoe and Way With Words 2. Yes, we’d love to have a conversation with you.

877-929-9673. Or you can tweet us at WayWord. More conversation about language from Way With Words in just a minute.

You’re listening to Way With Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Sojourner Truth was born around 1797 near Kingston, New York, and she became a powerful orator and advocate for racial equality and women’s rights.

But what a lot of people don’t know about her, Grant, is the fact that for the first nine or ten years of her life, she spoke only Dutch.

Dutch. And in fact, as late as the mid-18th century in New York and New Jersey, as many as 20% of enslaved Africans there spoke Dutch because they were in these little communities of Dutch people.

And that was all they knew. It’s a great example of language reflecting settlement patterns, the kinds of things that we talk about on the show all the time.

In the case of Sojourner Truth, she was well aware that a lot of people thought her accent was funny. And so she would disarm her audiences by exaggerating it a little bit at first and kind of putting audiences at ease because they were all laughing.

And then at the end, she would come in with these terrific rhetorical zingers. She really used it to her advantage.

I learned about this and a whole lot more in a fantastic article in the May issue of American Speech. It’s by Jeroen DeWolf, who is the head of Dutch studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

And among other things, the article raises the question as to whether there are some words in English that may have been popularized by Africans who spoke Dutch.

It’s possible that enslaved Africans in those areas were using the term boss, having picked it up from Dutch. We know that Bas comes from Dutch, and we know that it originally showed up in the Americas, but it may be that African slaves living in those areas helped to move that word along into the English language.

That’s incredible. And so this is in the Journal of American Speech. Yes. And the article is called?

A strong barbaric accent, America’s Dutch-speaking Black community from 17th-century New Netherland to 19th-century New York and New Jersey.

And the strong barbaric accent is actually the phrase that Harriet Beecher Stowe, who met with Sojourner Truth, used to describe her accent.

Like it was this exotic African accent.

When in fact she grew up speaking Dutch.

That’s awesome.

That’s a new depth to the woman.

I had no idea.

This is amazing.

Yeah, it’s a terrific article.

I highly recommend it.

This is a show about all aspects of language.

We welcome your calls, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara from Oceanside, California.

Hey, Barbara, welcome.

Hello, Barbara, what’s up?

So I was curious about a phrase.

My mom was writing some checks the other morning, and I was just asking her if she had cut a check for the gardener.

And so the phrase, you know, to cut a check, I was just curious where that comes from.

Oh, the cutting part?

Yeah, because it’s just, you know, usually you write a check.

So, yeah, the cut part.

You didn’t get out the scissors, right?

It was already perforated in the checkbook, right?

Well, it was the gardener.

It was probably those big blades, right?

Yeah, yeah.

So it’s just such an interesting phrase.

And I don’t know if it comes from, like, the banking industry or because it sounds so, like, professional and formal.

Yeah, that’s it.

It’s the banking industry.

And it’s old-fashioned. It comes from the 1800s when you didn’t have perforated checks.

And you maybe had a big sheet of checks and you would literally cut them.

Sometimes there’d be a metal rod bar or kind of like a metal ruler that you would just throw across the checks and then tear the paper across the hard edge and that’s how you would cut the check.

Sometimes the cutting the check just simply meant that when you were producing a lot of checks all at once, saying paying all of your employees or paying all of your vendors.

And well into the 1950s, it still pretty much stayed jargon.

And then shortly thereafter, it starts to pop up in everyday language where you can now say, heck, I cut checks online where it never reaches paper.

I cut a check to a company and it just goes from account to account.

Oh, interesting.

And the checks that they would cut would just be like, would they be small in size like they are now?

Oh, they were a wide variety of sizes.

They hadn’t yet standardized.

Some of the old checks actually looked more like stock certificates with beautiful scroll work and stuff.

They were a little more formal because you’ve got to remember they didn’t have all these security features.

And to make a check seem really important and powerful and something not to be messed with, they would put all of the weight of the printing industry and all the weight of the baking industry into these documents to make them like, whoa, that’s really fancy scroll work and fancy inks and beautiful writing and gorgeous fonts and whatever that they could do.

So, yeah, they were sometimes very different from what we see now.

But they have the same purpose, to get money from person to person without having to carry cash.

Well, great.

Well, Gus, thanks so much for answering the curiosity.

Barbara, thank you very much.

Thank you.

Have a good one.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us about your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Joe in South Burlington, Vermont.

Hello, Joe.

How are you doing?

I’m doing well, thank you.

And you?

Excellent.

What’s on your mind, Joe?

Well, I’m wondering about the origin and propriety of the saying that a person has kicked the bucket when the person has died.

I sense that the expression is not a solemn regard for the deceased.

The expression is commonplace in the vernacular where I live in Vermont, and I wonder whether this is a universal expression or peculiar to us in northern New England or what the scope of this expression is.

I’d say it’s quite widespread, wouldn’t you, Grant?

Yeah, it’s all over. It’s kind of like bite the dust.

Just so universal. Television and books and movies have just made these things have no regional component at all.

You will probably be surprised to find that the bucket in kick the bucket isn’t the bucket that you’re thinking about.

It’s not the bucket that you might carry water or stones in.

Instead, it’s another bucket, a different word altogether that refers to a beam, say, in a roof of a barn or a house or a shed.

And in this particular case, it’s the beam on which you would hang the carcass of an animal when you would slaughter it.

And it comes from a different French word than the other bucket.

So it’s a very unusual, a little rare, apparently in parts of Norfolk in the UK, they still say this particular bucket to refer to this type of beam.

But when you would slaughter an animal, they might kick in the throes of death and literally kick this beam known as a bucket.

Yeah, they’d be hung upside down for the blood to drain.

That’s right.

And what’s really interesting about this is it kind of goes against the language historian’s general belief that anytime something has such a pat story to it, it’s probably false.

In this particular case, it’s the beam.

It has nothing to do with the metal pail with a handle that you might carry water or milk or something else in.

Well, you’ve educated me.

Well, we’re glad to help.

Thank you very much.

Thanks, Joe.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot for calling, Joe.

Thank you.

Take care.

Okay.

Bye now.

So kick the bucket falls firmly into this class of euphemisms that we have for difficult subjects.

There’s a quote by the writer Quentin Crisp that I like.

He says euphemisms are unpleasant truths wearing diplomatic cologne.

Diplomatic cologne.

Yeah.

I like that.

But we do this in order to avoid feeling uncomfortable, right?

Sure.

So it might be a little flippant to say kick the bucket, but on the other hand, we don’t have to say he died.

Right.

We do that weird thing where we whisper a word when it’s difficult.

Right.

We do.

And it’s done in so many different languages.

There are all kinds of euphemisms in other languages.

There’s one in Dutch that translates as he turned the little corner.

Oh, the little corner.

Is that like side the little death?

No.

No, no, quite different.

Quite different.

Or in German, you can exhale life or close the curtains.

There are all kinds of these.

It’s going to be curtains for you, kid.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re on Twitter @wayword.

We’ve talked on the show before about words for various types of rain, like toad strangler, gully washer, that kind of thing, which prompted Judy Einboden to write us.

She lives in the dry Mojave Desert here in California.

And she writes, my dad used to describe our sparse rainstorms by letting you know how far apart the raindrops were.

So we could have a very light rain, which would be, we had a 12-inch rain or extremely sparse.

We had a three-foot rain, meaning the drops were 12 inches apart or three feet apart or not 12 inches of rain.

Interesting.

So not depth, but the space between the falling drops.

Yeah.

She said it always makes people think twice when you describe rainfall that way.

Three feet of rain.

Yeah.

We wish in Northern California, right?

Maybe it would spread out over a week.

Not all at once.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Find us on Facebook. We’ve got a great Facebook group, and you can talk to us on Twitter at WayWord.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marcy, and I’m calling from Winterville, Georgia.

Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I grew up actually in Levittown, New York, and my grandparents were immigrants.

My mother was born in this country, and I have a brother who is currently 6’7″.

He grew really quickly, and he was like maybe six feet by the time he was 13, so he was always really thin.

And my mother used to call him a skinny marink.

It’s a funny word, and I don’t think it’s Yiddish.

My grandparents spoke Yiddish, as my mother did, but it doesn’t sound like a Yiddish word, and I’ve never heard anybody else use it.

So I was wondering if you knew where it came from.

Yeah, it’s a Scots word, just in short, yeah, from the Scottish version of English and Scots dialect of English.

You’ll find it as far back as the 1870s throughout the United States and in Scotland.

If you want to find some cool information on it, look in the Dictionary of Scots Language, DSL as it’s called, and you’ll just Google that.

It’s open. It’s free to anyone. Full, great access to some awesome historical facts.

Online, right?

Yeah, online. Yeah, it’s amazing.

And what you’ll find, first of all, is a ton of spellings for this word.

Seven or eight at least, maybe even more, because it’s primarily transmitted mouth to ear.

And so skinny malink or skinny marink and skinnamaring and things like that.

But basically, it comes from the idea that someone is as thin as the link in a chain.

Oh, like a link.

Yeah, so you’re just straight and thin and that’s it. That’s all there is to you.

That’s pretty thin. And I’m not surprised that you grew up in Levittown because, according to the Dictionary of American Regional English, it’s especially located in New York in this country.

The neighborhood I grew up in was principally Italian and Irish.

So how she would—oh, she grew up in Far Rockaway, actually, which may have been more diverse.

I have, you know, no memory. I know all my relatives lived on the same street that she lived on.

But that she would have, you know, come to use a Scottish word, that seems kind of strange to me.

Well, I mean, people borrow out.

Obviously, she speaks English, as do you, which are outside your cultural heritage, right?

So if you got that language, you might bring other words in as well from the people around you.

Okay, I guess that tells the whole story.

But again, there’s tons of information in the Dictionary of the Scots language online.

Check it out.

It’s a great dictionary to browse around, and you will be surprised what you find there and how familiar and friendly some of it seems, even if it’s not language that you use every day.

Okay, great.

Cool. Thanks for calling.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you probably know these nicknames.

Stop me when you’ve got it.

The Kentucky Waterfall.

The North Carolina Neck Warmer.

The swimming methods.

Tennessee Top Hat.

Camaro Hair.

Oh, Mullets.

Yes.

These are all haircuts.

Yes.

Hairstyles.

Business in the front, party in the back.

Are these all mullets or just different kind of things?

They’re all nicknames for this.

Same thing.

They’re all mullets.

Yeah.

Wow.

The mullet haircut.

Yep, the 1090.

May it ever wave.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Melanie Vinovich.

I’m calling from San Francisco, California.

Hello, Melanie.

How are you doing?

Hello.

I’m doing well, thanks.

How are you?

All right.

Super duper.

Welcome to the show.

You’re great.

What’s going on?

Well, so my question is this.

I grew up in Indianapolis, Indiana, and there was a phrase that we always used to mean really far away.

We would say it was behind God’s back.

And when I moved to California, I sort of assumed this was a thing everyone said, and then one day I used it in front of some friends, and they had no idea what I was talking about.

And so I thought it was an Indiana thing, so I reached out to some Indiana friends through Facebook, and no one else from Indiana had ever heard of this.

Really?

So now I’m kind of confused about this phrase.

My brother says that my mom always used it because he knows it.

But I don’t know if it’s just a family thing or, you know, where it comes from.

Let’s do a little diagnosis here for a second.

I’m going to ask you some questions.

Did your mother ever live or come from the Caribbean?

She did not, though she was a flight attendant.

Okay.

Do you have a strong religious tradition in your family?

Are you the kind of people who do Sunday school and go to church a couple times a week and do summer Bible camps and that sort of thing?

You know, we did a few of those when I was a kid, but it wasn’t really something we did a lot of, though my mom herself was quite religious.

Okay, that could have part of it.

There’s this passage in the Bible—I’m not a big Bible scholar, and I just know this from my reading—but it’s from Isaiah 38, 17.

For thou hast cast all my sins behind thy back.

And there’s a suggestion in some of the literature that I’ve read that this particular line from the Bible is what influenced the parts of the English-speaking world where this expression behind God’s back to mean very far away or out of the sight of God is used.

So, for example, there’s a dictionary of Caribbean English, which I highly recommend because it’s so interesting.

It’s called the Dictionary of the English slash Creole of Trinidad and Tobago by Lisa Weiner.

And she has a really nice entry on behind God’s back.

And it pops up not only in those two islands, but it pops up in Jamaica.

It pops up in all the other English-speaking islands as well.

It’s used in an incredible number of sermon titles and book titles and journal article titles by religious scholars or people of the cloth who are writing about the things that we do, that we think are out of the sight of the God versus the fact that God is all-knowing and therefore there is nothing out of the sight of God.

It’s kind of that contradiction of being human versus understanding that your God can see you no matter what you’re doing.

So you would hear it more in the Caribbean than you would in this country?

I mean, I grew up in a religious tradition, and I don’t remember hearing this.

Yeah.

Well, in the Caribbean, it’s part of the idiomatic discourse.

So it’s just something that anyone might say.

Right. Whereas in this country, if you find it, it’s probably a carefully chosen phrase in a particular position of prestige, like I was saying, like a book title or article title or sermon title, that sort of thing.

Melanie, does that make sense?

Yeah, that is so fascinating. And it sort of makes sense because the people who I mentioned it to in San Francisco, one of them was particularly religious and he had never heard of it before.

So he was a layperson.

So perhaps this is something that people maybe in the clergy or in some sort of leadership role may be more familiar with.

Well, I guess my question for you is, did they understand it even if they’d never heard it before?

Good question.

They kind of looked at me funny, like they had no idea what I was talking about.

And to me, it was something that, you know, it meant far away.

Yeah.

I just didn’t.

It was kind of an interesting moment.

But no, they really didn’t get what it meant.

Yeah, it seems pretty self-explanatory, don’t you think?

Does it?

I think so.

If you’re not from a religious tradition at all, maybe not.

But I do, I like the imagery that you are from such a backwater rustic place that even God can’t see it, basically.

Yeah, yeah.

Anyway, I still use it, but I wanted to make sure I wasn’t offending people, particularly religious people.

And so now that you’ve explained it to me, I realize that it’s actually not at all offensive.

It’s from religious literature.

Yeah, probably.

Most likely, yeah.

Great. Well, thank you all so much.

Sure, Melanie. We appreciate your calling.

Thanks, Melanie. Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk about language.

Or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Want more of A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Or find the show in any podcast app or iTunes.

The toll-free line is always open, so leave a message at 877-929-9673, and we’ll take a listen.

We love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org, or hit us up on Twitter @wayword, and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Martha and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, and director and editor Tim Felten in San Diego.

In New York, we thank production wizard James Ramsey, quiz guy John Chaneski.

And that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Track Recording Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

So long.