The Black Dog (episode #1536)

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.

In the Middle Ages, books were the rarest of treasures, painstakingly copied out by hand and often over many long years.

So how to protect these valuable works from theft?

Well, one way was for medieval scribes to include a curse written on the colophon, that is either the first page or the last page, to warn away would-be thieves.

Here’s one.

May whoever steals me cease ever to have a moment’s peace.

They want to just haunt these people.

And here’s one.

It’s a 16th century translation of a similar inscription in a French book.

Whoever steals this book of prayer, may he be ripped apart by swine.

His heart be splintered, this I swear, and his body dragged along the Rhine.

That’s for a book of prayer.

A little cognitive dissonance there, right?

I wonder if it rhymed in the French.

Yeah, but if you start looking for medieval book curses, you can find them.

There’s also one that’s a hoax that’s out there that somebody just made up to try to throw people off the track.

But, I mean, you think about it.

How do you keep people from stealing your books?

There were in those medieval libraries, you know, sometimes you see books that have chains connected to the shelves.

But I think the curses probably worked pretty well.

You think they would work?

I think they would.

Books were a more potent thing than they had a power about them because they were rare and filled with magic.

Well, and the curses themselves invoke divine intervention.

In fact, there are Anglo-Saxon legal documents, wills, where people invoke curses on people just to make sure that nobody changes the will.

A different time.

A different time.

I’ve always had the philosophy that if books go missing, I hope that the new owner of the book uses it for something.

That’s right, or it ends up in a little free library or something, right?

Yeah, yeah, as long as they’re using it for something that it’s meant for.

They’re reading it.

They’re caring for it, appreciating it.

Well, we’d love to hear about what you’re reading or any thoughts you have about any aspect of language.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Carol Parkey in Clay’s Ferry, Kentucky.

Hi, Carol. Welcome. What’s up?

Thank you. Thank you. I have had a pondering for years over one of my grandmother’s words, and the word is dacent.

And she used it with mild alarm when I was a child that I was out picking raspberries and not being gentle enough, or I touched the chain that was attached to a control for the furnace that dumped coal or pellets or whatever in.

And it was always a reminder to be careful and that we don’t do these things.

We doesn’t do that, is what she would say.

How long ago would this be?

It would have been in the 50s.

Okay.

Okay, that sounds about right.

Yeah, that does sound about right.

My grandmother said it, too.

She was a hillbilly from North Carolina.

And she would warn us children away from things by saying, DASN’T, you DASN’T do that.

And my dad would talk about that word, but he was joking when he used it.

He would say, your grandmother used to say dascent.

It’s just a contraction of dare not or dares not.

You dares not do that.

Oh, dares not.

Yeah.

Wow, that makes sense.

Yeah, and it makes sense, especially in dialects where you don’t have such a pronounced R.

You dares not do that.

If you say that quickly, you know, sometimes it can come out as dascent.

And I think you’re right that it’s more of an antiquated term.

I mean, Mark Twain used it.

And it’s widespread here and there east of the Mississippi, but it’s somewhat informal as well.

Would you say this is archaic now, almost obsolete?

If this is around anymore, we’re talking people in their 80s and 90s, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And that’s what I meant by my dad would use it, but he would be joking.

Right.

Well, these are Wisconsin people and 100% German.

So, you know, I didn’t think it was Southern colloquialism.

But, you know, isn’t that marvelous?

Yeah, it’s not exclusively Southern.

I mean, it’s definitely common down in the South.

Rural still in the United States in a few places it exists.

If you did a dialect survey, it might pop up.

But, boy, it is increasingly rare.

All right.

Well, I got another one that was a corrective.

Nixnutzen.

Quit Nixnutzen around.

Now that’s your German heritage showing up, right?

Yes, it is.

And my grandfather, who was very quiet but highly observant, would regale us with tales of people or kids who had done something wrong, that they were really, you know, not doing what they were supposed to, and he called them a Dunamana Nicomolus.

My goodness.

What the, what the, what the, what the?

Exactly.

And, of course, you know, kids’ ears perk up because it always went along with a good story of some sort.

Oh, yeah.

What’s that word again?

Dunamunnicamullet.

I’ve never heard that.

Dunamunnicamullet?

Like the fish or the haircuts?

I have no idea.

Oh, my.

But I’m curious.

Now, do you use dasent yourself or in a joking way?

No.

You don’t?

I just cherish it as a memory of my growing up with my grandparents.

Isn’t that so often the way with those old words?

Yeah, yeah.

I bet you’re pressing the memory button for lots of other folks right now.

Oh, good, good.

Those memories are things to cherish.

I think that in our fast-paced life, we just sort of slide by many things.

And it’s a heartwarming sort of thing to have those positive reminiscences.

Agreed.

Oh, it sure is.

We call those linguistic heirlooms.

Absolutely.

Absolutely.

Take them out of the attic, put them next to your easy chair, and look at them once in a while, right?

Well, I might start using it on my husband.

Carol, thank you so much for the memories and for the call.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

We are still getting people’s suggestions for new pangrams.

Those are those sentences that include every letter of the alphabet at least once.

And we heard from Lauren Crofts, who listens to us with her daughter Sinead in Perth, Western Australia.

And Sinead is 11 and inspired by those pangrams we’ve been sharing.

She came up with a couple of her own and I really like them.

This is a replacement for the quick brown fox jumped over the lazy sleeping dog.

The fox sneezed quickly several times while eating strawberry jam pancakes.

Perfect.

I think that’s much more vivid and evocative.

She did have another one.

King Nebuchadnezzar built the famous hanging gardens just by the river Euphrates for his wife, Queen Amethyst, granddaughter of Syaxeres.

That last word is doing a lot of work.

But I like the one particularly about the strawberry jam pancakes.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jesse Wisdom from Louisville, Kentucky.

What would you like to talk with us about?

So I went to New York City.

It’s my very first vacation.

I’m a mom as an adult earlier this year.

And I had been once before when I was about 12 or 13 years old, about 14 or 15 years ago.

And when I went as a kid, I noticed, you know, I’m from the country.

I have a country accent.

So people noticed that when I was a kid.

And nobody said things like y’all.

And people would ask where you’re from, like, you know, your accent’s really heavy.

But I went there this year, and I noticed when I was at a bar, the bartender said the word y’all.

And I was just taken aback by it a little bit just because of the experience I had when I was a kid.

And I said to her, like, y’all say y’all up here now?

So I was just wondering how that got up to New York City from down here in the south.

That’s a great question.

Do you think that perhaps she was reacting to your accent?

No, she said, how are y’all doing as we walked up to the bar?

How about that?

Turns out that there was a paper published on this exact topic in 2000 in the Journal of English Linguistics written by Jan Tillery, Guy Bailey at the UT San Antonio, and Tom Weichel at the Oklahoma State.

And this paper points out that y’all has begun to leave the American South.

And there’s a reason for this.

And I’m going to explain this.

It’s a little wonky, but I want you to bear with me.

So we’ve got a couple of pronouns that are identical in English.

They’re you, Y-O-U.

One of them is the second person plural.

So you can say you, meaning a group of people.

So you need to get on the bus, meaning a lot of people.

And we can also say you need to get on the bus, meaning one person, right?

The problem with this kind of confusion means that we’ve often sought another way to refer to multiple people in that direct address, right?

So we sometimes will say you guys need to get on the bus.

And throughout the American North and the American West, most people, not all of us, say you guys.

But in the American South, what do we say?

We say y’all or you all.

Now, the problem with you guys is it sounds gendered.

And as the years have gone on, a lot of people say, well, I don’t want to say you guys because that sounds like it’s just referring to men or boys.

And I know that a lot of people say you guys to refer to mixed groups of men and women.

Or sometimes you get often, actually, you guys can refer to just groups of women.

But I’d prefer to say something else.

And they’re casting around, looking at the dialects of American English.

What else can I say?

Like, oh, I can just say y’all.

And so y’all has popped up throughout the United States outside of the American South.

Not hugely common, but it does show up again and again in linguistic surveys, you know, in Boston and New York and Michigan and Chicago and California.

So it is actually leaving the American South.

And who knows what will be in another 20 or 30 years?

OK.

Pretty cool, right?

Yeah, pretty cool.

I had a theory about it, too.

You know, with the rise, hip-hop and rap music is a lot more popular these days than it used to be.

And the part of the AAVE is the word y’all, and that’s really prevalent in a lot of this music.

It’s more popular these days, too.

I think that is a solid theory.

No work that I know of has been done on that, but certainly hip-hop has spread a whole lot of other language into mainstream American English and outside of Black English.

And I would not be surprised since AAVE or Black English does have a lot of Southern American English features in it.

I would not be surprised if it did bring y’all to the larger mainstream American English, too.

I would not be surprised.

That’s a great theory.

Yeah.

So bottom line is it’s just so darn handy, right?

Yeah.

It solves the problem of you guys sounding gendered.

It solves the problem of these two Y-O-U’s, these two U’s sounding alike and being some confusion about whether or not you meet an individual or a group of people.

It solves some issues.

And the other thing is, and this is mentioned in that paper that was published in the Journal of English Linguistics in 2000, is y’all seems to be losing some of the stigma that it used to have.

People used to think of it as being uncouth or rustic.

And now it doesn’t quite have that so much.

Well, that’s good for me because I just can’t seem to shake not using that word.

Oh, don’t shake it.

Don’t shake it.

Be yourself, man.

Yeah, be proud.

Be proud of that dialect.

Jesse, I want to thank you for your call.

Call us again sometime.

We love these cross-cultural collisions and help them sort them out.

All right.

Yeah, no problem.

I’m really glad you guys had me on the show.

Our pleasure.

Take care.

Thanks, Jesse.

Go Cards.

All right.

Yeah, go Cards.

Y’all have a good one.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We were talking earlier about old curses scribbled into books to keep people from stealing them.

Here’s one from a book that was printed in 1632 in London.

It goes, steal not this book, my honest friend, for fear the gallows be your end.

For when you die, the Lord will say, where is the book you stole away?

That’s a pretty good security system, wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, it’s pretty good.

Call us to talk about language, 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us on the line from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

I have something very interesting to talk about today.

You know what I love?

I love Venn diagrams.

You know what they are, right?

Sure.

There are two or more circles, each representing a set, sure, that overlap where the items in those sets overlap.

For example, if I have a circle representing male radio hosts, that would include Grant,

And a circle representing female radio hosts, that would include Martha,

And where those two circles overlap represents hosts of A Way with Words.

Of course, that’s a Venn diagram.

Now, this puzzle isn’t about Venn diagrams.

This is about diagrams that rhyme with Venn diagrams.

For example, I have here in my hand a map of the nearby wetlands.

And that isn’t a Venn diagram.

It’s a Fenn diagram.

Oh, Lord. Okay.

Got it?

Yes.

I’ll describe the diagrams I have here.

You can hear them.

I have them right here.

I’m painting a word picture right here.

You just tell me what they are.

Here we go.

Now this, this is a floor plan of a specific room of a house.

A den diagram?

A den diagram, yes.

Perfect.

How about this one?

This is a chart of eggs by size, weight, and color.

A hen diagram.

A hen diagram, yes.

Very good.

Let’s look at this one.

These are the specifications for a male doll for children.

A hen diagram.

Yes, a hen diagram.

Nicely done.

Let’s see.

What do I have here?

This is the migration patterns of a small songbird.

A Renn diagram.

A Renn diagram, yes.

Let’s see what’s next.

Here’s a list comparing the box office earnings of actors Affleck, Stiller, and Kingsley.

A Ben diagram.

A Ben diagram, yeah.

Well, that’s very interesting.

Look at that.

Okay, let’s see what’s next.

Oh, this is an elevation, or rather the lack of elevation, of a long, deep valley.

A Glenn diagram?

A Glenn diagram, yes.

What’s this?

These are instructions for engraving a portrait of Alexander Hamilton for use on U.S. Currency.

A 10 diagram.

A 10 diagram, yes.

Let’s see.

This is a chart of the estimated gene counts in a human Y chromosome.

A MEN diagram?

MEN diagram, yeah.

How did I get a hold of that?

I have no idea.

Let’s see.

What’s this?

Oh, this is more like it.

This is a map of meditation centers used by practitioners of a school of Mahayana Buddhism.

A Zen diagram.

A Zen diagram, yeah.

Here’s the last one.

This is a census estimate of a certain Scandinavian boy’s name.

A Sven diagram.

A Sven diagram, yes.

Well, I have to go home and organize all my diagrams now,

So that’s it for me this week.

Nice talking to you guys.

All right.

Thanks very much.

We appreciate it, John.

It’s always a pleasure to talk with you and take your fun quizzes,

And thank you for the softball one this week.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

You can join us on the radio with your language questions,

877-929-9673.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Joanne from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Welcome, Joanne. What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question.

I grew up in England, and every summer we would go to Devon to visit my grandparents

And my mother and father and my brother and myself.

And when my brother was in a bad mood, he would get very mopey.

And my grandfather would say to him, get that black dog off your back.

And, you know, I’ve wondered about that phrase forever and ever.

And my husband seems to think it comes from Winston Churchill time, maybe the First World War.

My grandfather was actually a veteran from the First World War.

He lost his leg.

But he was very active.

So black dog for a bad mood is how it was used in your family.

Well, their family, we never used it.

Their family, gotcha.

Black dog has a long history of several hundred years being used to refer to a depression or a funk or a dark mood.

Or this unsolvable pessimistic outlook on life.

And in the modern times, it has been associated with Winston Churchill, who often would lock himself away in dark rooms with the curtains pooled.

Although apparently one source claims that he rarely used the phrase that was used in reference to him himself.

And there was one letter, I think, a private letter was only finally published in the 90s where he used it.

But we have printed citations for it back into the 1700s.

And one source, although I don’t have the citation for that, credits the idea of a black dog meaning a depression or a funk back to the Roman poet Horace back to 50 BC.

But again, I haven’t seen it.

So it’s got a long, long history.

Why a black dog?

I don’t know.

I think we may be talking about the idea of a dangerous animal, something that’s a burden to you, something a dog on your back is just not something that you want.

They’re not easy to carry.

Maybe when the dog is just sort of upset with something, he’ll slurk around or, you know, not be very happy.

Yeah, I think the Horace reference, some people mistranslated the term into black dog when it should have been something more like dark companion.

There we go.

Yeah.

In any case, so it’s got a couple hundred years.

Yeah.

So it’s all about this depression.

There have been a wide variety of films and books and poems and movies,

And it’s often a touchstone.

And throughout European culture, by the way, not just in English,

Throughout all the different languages of Europe,

The black dog is often a character in folklore and mystery.

And I think the Hound of the Baskervilles is an indirect reference

To the idea of the black dog as a figure of fear

And a figure of the ghostly things in the thin places of the world.

As someone who used to live for many years with a black Labrador retriever, I think we need to stop and say black dogs can be great.

They’re the most difficult to adopt out from shelters.

And black dogs can be fabulous.

I’ve loved some black dogs in my life.

Well, good.

Well, thank you for sorting that out for me.

Our pleasure, Joanne.

Pass it on to the rest of my family.

Call us again sometime, all right?

All right.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye.

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

Maybe everybody else already knew this one, but I just learned the term 11 o’clock number.

Do you know this term?

It’s ringing a bell.

Is that ringing a bell?

Ringing a bell, vaguely, in my aged brain.

Yeah.

The wrinkles are unwrinkling.

Help me.

It’s a theater term.

An 11 o’clock number is a big show-stopping song that occurs late in the second act.

And usually the protagonist has some kind of revelation or resolution.

It’s a turning point.

And it’s called an 11 o’clock number because it used to be that shows on Broadway started at 8:30.

And about 11 o’clock, that’s when the big song would be, before the finale usually.

Gotcha. Perfect 11 o’clock number.

So the number referring to the song is a number, right?

The song, like in Hello, Dolly, the 11 o’clock number would be So Long, Deary.

So Long, Deary. Gotcha. Okay, that’s nice. And now shows start earlier.

Exactly.

Yeah. So the 11 o’clock number is like a 10.

Something like that, yeah.

And our number is 877-929-9673. Call us to talk about language.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Trevor Summers from Waxahachie, Texas.

Hi, Trevor. Welcome.

I have a question about reading a book.

We all have books in our library that we value, that we treasure, that we like.

What should I do if I’m reading one of these valuable books that I like,

A book printed by a reputable publishing house, and I find a misspelled word?

Oh, boy.

Should I do nothing, or should I email someone or write someone?

I’m never sure what to do, because it always kind of taints the experience.

What do you think?

Is it a current book, a recent book?

Yes, current enough.

Okay.

Are you sure it’s misspelled?

Yes, the word was returned.

It was obviously misspelled, missing one letter.

Oh, wow.

The reason I ask is because there are a lot of variants.

And as somebody who used to work in publishing,

In dictionary publishing, no less,

A lot of times we got very furious messages from the public

Claiming that they’d found an error,

And 99 times out of 100, it was not an error.

It was just like, oh, yeah, there’s a variant,

British versus American or whatever,

And you’d write them back and say,

There’s the evidence. Okay, so that’s an error for sure. But no matter how many editors you add

To the process, there are always mistakes. Now, you might say to yourself, well, I read a book

And there were no errors in it. And what I’m suspecting is when I find a book doesn’t have

Errors, almost always it’s a book that I really enjoyed. It’s a book that caught me up. The

Writing was beautiful. The story was tremendous. And I was just enthralled. And I just probably

Glided over the errors and didn’t notice them because the book was so stupendous.

And so there were probably errors that I just missed.

So most books, nearly every book has an error or two or many errors in it.

And so my point is to say errors are really ordinary because we’re human and we have failings

And it’s really hard to get them out.

It’s really hard not to have errors.

Grant, I’m really glad to hear you say that because, Trevor, my first book had an error

On the third page and it was so painful.

You know, here I am, 28 years old. I’m so excited. My first book ever. And they spelled North Carolina, North Carolina. And it was three pages into the book. I was just I was devastated. It was really painful. I don’t remember anybody writing me about it. But, you know, I mean, that one just was glaring. It’s sort of like, you know, you talk to professional tennis players who don’t remember their big victories, but they remember their losses.

I used to keep a book about the history of computing, not because it was a particularly useful book to me, just because it had an error on the first page, on the first chapter, the first paragraph, and the first sentence.

Ouch.

And I just could tell because having been an editor, that was probably introduced by a last-minute edit.

Mm—

You know, they didn’t go through the usual checks.

Somebody just did it right before sending to print.

Anyway, Trevor, all this is, I’m just hoping to relieve your tension here.

Is it working?

Yes.

I mean, we need to be reminded we’re all human, and we have books that we value, some we treasure.

And whenever you see that one thing, it just kind of puts a different spin on it.

It doesn’t lessen the value, but it does make one scratch your head.

All right, so what do you do with the error when you find it?

Well, I reread it a few times to make sure I’m not missing something.

Good.

I may look at the front of the book to see when it was published, whether it was five years ago, ten years ago, or more, maybe a first edition or something.

And I may reconsider or review who the author is and what direction they were going in.

But still, if it’s just misspelled, I keep reading and I enjoy the book.

I just wonder if there’s anything I should do.

So here’s what you can do.

There’s a couple of things.

If it really galls you and you feel like you’re going to help the future editions of this book,

That this book is so good that you are going to make the world and this author better,

You can contact the publisher.

And I recommend you start.

Just go to their website.

Find maybe the publicity or the marketing people because they are used to dealing with the public and send them the super polite email.

What you want to do is say something like, I enjoyed your book.

Great fun.

What a treat.

By the way, there’s a little thing.

Thought you might want to know.

Keep them coming.

Looking forward to the next one.

You’re a faithful fan.

Blah, blah, blah.

And you got to do that whole like butter their bread a whole bunch because writers have very tender souls.

And typically the publicity people know how to reach pretty much everyone in the company because they work with everyone in the company.

Typically the publicity marketing people will get your message.

But be super polite and just say, look, I just thought you want to know if you reprint this, there’s an error that you might want to fix.

So you suggest using email rather than tweeting.

It’s sort of the same thing when you’re wondering about whether you should correct somebody’s grammar.

I mean, if you’re going to do that.

Private.

Privately.

Privately.

Yeah.

I mean, are you going to gain public points by tweeting it?

What do you get out of that?

I mean, if it’s the only way that you can reach them, but what publisher doesn’t have a website, right?

They all have a website with an email address or a contact form, right?

Yeah.

So, Trevor, do you feel an obligation then to go forth and send emails to publishers now?

No, I think I’ll do what you said.

I’ll look to see, was it a reprint?

And it might have been, but I think I’ll just take it on a case-by-case basis.

As you pointed out, it is rare.

But if there’s another printing on the horizon, on the agenda, then maybe that would help them.

So I really think I’ll just take it on a case-by-case basis.

But it’s nice to know there’s something you can do, if nothing else, just to improve the future product.

One last thing.

If you read books on Kindle, I have been told that if you highlight passages in an e-book that you buy from the Kindle store,

That publishers do see the aggregate highlighted passages,

The ones that are highlighted the most by the readers,

And do pay attention.

So if everyone highlights the errors a lot in books,

It is possible that the editors will see that

And perhaps correct the things when they notice that they’re highlighted because they’re wrong.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

Trevor, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you.

All right. Take care.

Take care.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Violet Strong, and I’m calling from Scienceville, Indiana.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, Violet.

What can we help you with?

I was born in Kentucky, and I say sprinkles, and everybody else says sprinkles.

Can you tell me more ways it’s pronounced?

All right, so let’s get this clear.

You’re from Kentucky, and you say, what do you say?

Sprinkles.

Can you spell that for me?

S-P-R-A-K-L-E-S.

So S-P-R-A-N-K-L-E-S.

Like the things that you put on top of a cupcake, right?

Yes.

Okay, great.

Okay.

But everyone else, they’re not from Kentucky.

And what do they say?

Sprinkles.

Okay.

Okay.

So, Violet, where did you grow up in Kentucky?

Lexington, Kentucky.

Okay.

Right there in the middle of the bluegrass.

And so how long ago did you move to Zionsville, Indiana?

Four years ago.

Four years ago.

Yeah, and you’ll find that sometimes when you move from one town to another,

People speak a little bit differently,

And it sounds like you learned this word about something you really like

And really care about maybe from your family or your friends in Kentucky,

And they just say it differently when you’re in different parts of the country.

So, they’re like a right or wrong answer between sprinkles and sprinkles.

Well, that’s a very good question.

Well, when you’re writing it out, you want to use the letter I and not the letter A.

It’s S-P-R-I-N-K-L-E-S.

And you and your family just pronounce it differently.

Yeah.

So, when you’re talking to your family, pronounce it the family way.

If people give you a hard time, you’re going to have to decide on the spot whether or not you want to sound like everybody else or sound like yourself.

Okay.

Yeah.

What do you think you’re going to do?

Let me just say sprinkles.

And if anybody asks about that, I say I’m from Kentucky and I say sprinkles.

There we go.

Right on.

That’s it.

That’s the answer.

Good decision.

Perfectly put.

Thank you for calling us.

Bye.

Take care of yourself.

Bye, Violet.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Well, Violet had the experience that a lot of our adult listeners have when they move across the country and they use a word or phrase.

And they always or almost always call us and say,

People looked at me like I had two heads.

Yeah, she did cross a barrier there.

If you look at the dialect maps, she moved from one dialect region to another one.

It’s a slow gradation there.

Exactly.

She didn’t just cross the Ohio River.

No, no, there was a thing that happened there.

If you’ve had an experience like Violet’s where you’ve moved across the country

And used a word or phrase and people looked at you like I had two heads,

We’d love to hear about it.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send your story to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

You know, we were talking earlier with Trevor about what one should do if one sees a mistake in a book, a typo or something like this.

And I just saw this tweet from Allison K. Williams, who tweets at Guerrilla Memoir, and she wrote,

It’s a truth universally acknowledged that a typo missed by two editors, a book designer, and a proofreader will be seen instantly upon the author opening their first copy of the printed book to a random page.

Yes! It’s true!

Allison, we feel your pain.

It’s true. So I worked in museums, a museum for a few years.

We’ve had this rule and it worked like not to open our printed materials.

Once they’re printed.

No, go to the exhibit opening and do not open the materials that you worked on for six months.

Just don’t open them.

You know, that’s really good advice.

If it’s printed, on to the next thing.

877-929-9673 or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

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.

I’m having the best time going through a book called A Velocity of Being.

It’s edited by Maria Popova and Claudia Bedrick.

And we’ve talked about this book on the show before, but I just have to talk about it again because it’s so wonderful.

It’s this dazzling book of letters to young readers.

And each letter is paired with this exquisite illustration from a whole group of different artists.

And the people who write these letters to young readers include Yo-Yo Ma and Jane Goodall, Ursula Le Guin.

Tim Ferriss talks about how he was bullied as a kid and found refuge in books.

David Byrne, Amanda Palmer, all these people from different walks of life and a lot of writers that we all know and love.

Another letter is from Shonda Rhimes, the television producer, and she writes about how, as a 12-year-old, she was the new girl in school and extremely lonely.

She wrote, I spent a lot of time alone, except I was never alone.

I always had a book in my hand.

If you have a book, you don’t need to bend and twist to fit.

You’re there.

You’re in.

You crack the spine, and you’re a welcome member of the group.

And I wanted to share the entire letter to a young reader from Anne Lamott.

It goes, hi you, I really want you to hear what I’m going to say because I think it is the truth,

Okay? I’ll make it fast. If you love to read or learn to love reading, you will have an amazing

Life, period. Life will always have hardships, pressure, and incredibly annoying people,

But books will make it all worthwhile. In books, you’ll find your North Star,

And you will find you, which is why you’re here.

Books are paper ships to all the worlds, to ancient Egypt, outer space, eternity,

Into the childhood of your favorite musician,

And the most precious, stunning journey of all into your own heart,

Your own family, your own history and future and body.

Out of these flat, almost two-dimensional boxes of paper

Will spring mountains, lions, concerts, galaxies, heroes. You will meet people who have been all but

Destroyed, who have risen up and will bring you with them. Books and stories are medicine. Plaster

Casts for broken lives and hearts, slings for weakened spirits. And in reading, you will laugh

Harder than you ever imagined laughing. And this will be magic, heaven, and salvation. I promise,

Okay?

Deal.

Love you, Anne Lamott.

Oh, that’s so nice.

What I wouldn’t have given at 10 or 11 to receive that letter from somebody like her.

Right?

Yeah.

Yeah, I really think you would love this book.

I would.

And I should say that Facing Each Page is a wonderful illustration.

The one next to Anne Lamott’s is by Andrea Dezo, who is a Romanian artist, and it’s really arresting.

This is a gift book.

I know we’re going to give holiday gift book recommendations later in the year, but I just can’t wait.

It’s called A Velocity of Being, and all the proceeds go to the New York Public Library System.

Wonderful.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Anna.

I’m calling from the San Francisco Bay Area.

Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Anna?

So my question is something that’s been discussed in my family for a while.

My sister, my mother, and I get made fun of for how we pronounce the word, what most people say, measure.

We say measure.

And living in California, everybody I’ve grown up with who’s noticed it has thought that we’re the only ones who do that.

But the other person who did it was my grandmother, who was from South Dakota.

So we are wondering what the reason might be.

Very interesting.

That’s a significant fact of South Dakota, I think.

Okay.

Are there any other words that you pronounce differently than other people that you’ve noticed?

Not that it has been pointed out to me.

No, pretty standard California English.

How do you say P-L-E-A-S-U-R-E?

Pleasure.

Pleasure.

You don’t say pleasure?

Right.

How do you say M-E-N-U?

Menu.

Yeah, you don’t say menu.

Okay, interesting.

You’re not alone in this.

There are bunches of people who say major around the United States.

It isn’t very common, and I have not found any professional work that has been done on this pronunciation.

Anecdotally, I have found a bunch of people have self-reported that they say it in parts of the Midwest, the Western Midwest, including the Dakotas and Nebraska.

But I’ve also found pockets of other people who report that they say it in South Carolina and Missouri and parts of California and other places.

I’ve also found some evidence, recorded evidence, by the way, that some famous people have said it, including Thomas Edison.

Really?

Significantly to me, anyway, is that I listen to old-time radio shows.

The announcer for the Jack Benny show, Don Wilson, says it.

And I’ve listened to him say it for years.

He would say major, but he also says main you.

And he’s originally from Nebraska, which is not all that far from South Dakota.

So I would not be surprised if your pronunciation of major is something that you inherited from someone from South Dakota, and it’s part of that regional feature.

Now, it’s just a guess.

I can’t prove it.

We would have to do some professional field work to figure it out for sure, but that’s my guess.

Okay, very interesting.

Somebody at work had mentioned that they thought that it was a Midwest thing, but I wasn’t sure if it had something more to do with my grandma’s Czech background or something more specific.

But that’s really interesting.

Yeah, it’s not that she’s from the Czech Republic.

And I want to be careful with the word Midwest because how we define the Midwest really varies in the United States.

Some people think of Ohio as the Midwest and some people wouldn’t include the Dakotas.

We’re talking about the Great Plains states.

We’re talking about the Dakotas and Nebraska mostly.

But like I said, there’s self-reported data.

If you Google this on the Internet of people from different parts of the United States who claim that they say it or they know people who say it.

So, again, I don’t know of any professional study that has been done on this pronunciation.

It may exist, but I don’t have it.

But the good news is you’re not alone.

Yeah, you’re not alone.

That’s good.

It’s not unusual to find people who have an idiolect.

The idiolect means your individual pronunciation, the collective body of how you say or how you speak.

It’s not unusual for people to have these one-off pronunciations that differ from the people around them.

It is a little unusual for it to occur kind of in family patterns.

Often our pronunciations as children come from our peers, our classmates, and our friends, and not from our parents as much.

But again, you’re not a rare beastie here.

Okay. Well, that’s good to know.

I can prove some people around who have made fun of me.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

I hope it doesn’t keep you from saying that word.

No, not at all.

Oh, good.

I do think of it most times I say it, though.

And if I’m in a new group, sometimes I say it with the E sound just so we can move on and not focus on it.

Well, Ana, thank you for your call.

We appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Measure instead of measure.

If you say measure instead of measure for M-E-A-S-U-R-E, call us, tweet us, or email us.

Ooh, data collection. We love it.

877-929-9673.

I was looking at an amethyst the other day, and I was thinking what a weird word that is, amethyst.

And as I suspected, it comes from a Greek word, amethystos, which literally translates as not intoxicating.

The A there means not.

And the methus in that Greek word means wine.

It’s a relative of English mead.

And the reason is that the amethyst in ancient times was considered to be a stone that would keep you from getting drunk if you drank too much.

Did it, actually?

I’m going to try that tonight, and I will get back to you.

Oh, a drunken Martha is something I’ve got to see.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Raffaella Strausnegel.

I’m calling from Wisconsin.

Hi, welcome, Raffaella.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m calling because I’ve noticed that my husband and myself, I should speak more for my husband, myself rather, he’s not here to defend himself.

We’ve noticed that as we learn Spanish, we’ve been learning Spanish officially since 2008, it really affects our mother tongue, which is English, and creates interesting challenges like I can’t spell as well as I used to, or sometimes I find myself transliterating from Spanish to English.

Like instead of saying I’m cold, I’ll say I have cold or something strange like that.

And I was wondering about how learning a new language affects your mother tongue.

So 2008, are you learning this just to have the language, or is it part of your work or your schooling?

It’s part of our faith.

Your faith, okay, gotcha.

We’re in a Spanish congregation.

So you speak Spanish and English on a daily basis?

Yes.

Okay, good. So these are two languages that you live in?

Yes, daily.

So that’s an important part of the conversation, right?

Mm—

Because that’s the only way that that really happens, where one language starts to intrude upon the other one.

What’s really interesting, you’ve discovered what all new language learners do, is that your first language, while it feels at first like this concrete foundation that cannot be moved, is malleable or even fragile.

It’s a thing that can easily have holes poked in it.

And that’s kind of alarming when you think about that.

You thought that it was unchangeable, and it starts to feel a little frightening sometimes.

Do you feel that way?

Sometimes, yeah, yeah.

And then like, oh, my word, I was a good speller.

What happened?

But do you feel that it’s worth it?

Oh, for sure.

Yeah, I do too.

Yeah, definitely.

For sure.

I definitely.

There’s a website I want to refer you to.

It’s called languageattrition.org.

That’s languageattrition, A-T-T-R-I-T-I-O-N.org.

And it’s run by Monica Schmid, S-C-H-M-I-D, at the University of Essex in the UK.

And she’s an expert on this stuff.

And language attrition is the idea that when you learn one language, another language kind of goes away.

Or it becomes modified or it changes.

And part of the website talks about what you can do to mitigate that language attrition.

And she debunks some common myths, some of the myths that people persist in believing even though they’re not true.

For example, some people believe that if your family moves to another country, you should only speak the new language in the new country at home.

Oh, no, I don’t agree.

I know.

But a lot of people believe, for example, if you left the United States and moved to Mexico, that you should only speak Spanish at home.

And it turns out in order to keep both languages going strong, you should speak English at home and speak Spanish everywhere else or wherever Spanish needs to be spoken because you need to learn to separate the two.

You need to learn.

You need to practice that.

And that’s the other thing.

You have to make those mistakes in order to situate yourself and situate those language identities.

It’s about those identities.

Anyway, those mistakes are normal and they’re always going to happen and they’re not going to go anyway.

So the website is languageattrition.org.

She’s going to offer you some relief, I think, about the situation that you’re in.

The other thing is, even after you go to languageattrition.org and you’ve kind of read its material and kind of exhausted what Monica Schmidt has to say,

Search that term on the Internet, language attrition, and you’ll find much deeper stuff to look at.

There are other exercises you can do, other material you can do, and more things that you can do to work on keeping your English strong while improving your Spanish.

I just think language is alive, which I’ve learned a lot from listening to your program, and it’s always changing and growing.

I speak fairly well in Spanish, but I’m always learning, and I’m always learning from those around me.

And I need to learn better street Spanish, too.

Yeah, the textbook Spanish is one thing, and the street Spanish is a whole other thing.

Oh, my goodness. That’s so true. That’s so true, right?

Rafael, it’s great to talk with you.

It’s a pleasure talking with you, too.

Okay.

Thanks so much.

Hasta luego.

You, too. Hasta luego.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Bye-bye.

If you have a question about language that you’d love to talk with us about, we’d love to talk with you.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Darcy calling from North Pole, Alaska.

From North Pole, Alaska.

Wait, didn’t we have one from there recently, too?

We did.

Oh, North Pole, Alaska.

We did.

We’re just full of questions.

I love it.

Great. So you’re near Fairbanks.

Yes.

Cool.

Well, welcome to the show, Darcy. What’s on your mind?

Well, I just had a question about a family saying that I’ve been hearing since I was a little kid,

But it sounds like, as far as I can tell, no one else that I know has ever heard of it.

It’s something that my grandparents used to say to us when we were kids.

When we’d ask for something or ask to do something that wasn’t going to be possible,

My grandpa would say, you may want horns, but you’ll die moleheaded.

And I thought it was a normal thing until recently I said it,

And people give me this quizzical look like, what are you talking about?

Where did you hear that?

So let me get this straight.

You’re doing something mischievous or demanding something?

Not necessarily mischievous, but maybe you want a piece of candy

When you haven’t had dinner yet.

Okay.

And then he says,

You may want horns, but you’ll die.

What does he say?

Mole-headed.

M-O-L-E, like the letter M is in Mike,

Letter O is in Oprah,

Letter L is in Leonard,

Letter E is in Elmore.

Well, I’m not quite clear on that

Because I’ve never seen it spelled.

Okay.

It sounds like mole, like M-U-L.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, that’s perfect.

That’s perfect.

Because I think there’s a misunderstanding here.

I think there’s been a game of telephone taking place.

Because the usual expression is either butt-headed, like B-U-T-T, or bull-headed, like B-U-L-L.

You may want horns, but you’ll die.

Butt-headed or bull-headed.

But I could totally see how bull-headed could become modified to sound like mole-headed, M-U-L-L, or mole-headed, M-O-L-E.

Okay.

Okay.

So it’s common enough that it appears in the writings of Zora Neale Hurston.

And you’ll find it pop up here and there.

It’s not that common an expression.

You can’t Google your version of it, but you can Google you’re going to die butt-headed or die bull-headed.

And you’ll find a few people have said it here and there on the Internet in books and literature and newspapers and that sort of thing.

And generally, the whole idea behind the expression is you want a thing, but it’s not going to change your basic nature.

You may want this, but you’re still going to be basically who you are and what you are.

Sure. And what does the name butt-headed or bull-headed mean?

Is it referring to an animal?

Bulls have horns.

It’s kind of a mix of metaphors here.

One of the ideas behind it supposedly is the idea of being butt-headed is that you don’t have horns.

If you talk about a cattle that is butt-headed, it means that horns have been sheared off or it doesn’t have horns to begin with.

The other idea of the idea of being bullheaded is the idea of being stubborn.

So it’s a mix of multiple expressions where it’s kind of been corrupted all along the way.

But the general idea here is that you want a thing.

You’re not going to get the thing.

You’re still going to be the basic stubborn person that you are.

Oh, it just doesn’t sound very positive.

No.

You’re kind of putting the person down when you say it.

Well, he’s calling you a buttheaded child, basically, right?

And he said it in a joking, jovial, fun, teasing way.

Yes, yes, always.

Affectionate.

Yeah.

Yes.

Okay.

I’ve got to say, I’m really surprised to see that this expression is still out there and circulating in the world.

Well, apparently only in our family.

Yeah, it’s never really been all that common.

And I think these days the people who know it are the ones who know the Zora Neale Hurston literature

And have read it and borrowed it into their own writing or into their own everyday language.

Well, thank you guys so much.

I will let my grandpa know what you guys told me.

Awesome.

Thank you.

Thanks, Darcy.

I appreciate it. Have a good day.

Well, if you know that expression, you may want horns, but you’ll die bullheaded or buttheaded,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or heck, call us about anything.

And you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Caitlin O’Connell.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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

Or send us your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

Bye.

Thank you.