The Last Straw (episode #1486)

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. Think back to New Year’s Day last year. Do you remember who the first person was to walk into your home? No, I don’t. That year or the year before? Never, really. The year before that? No. I recently learned that there is a word for that person, the first person to walk into your home in the new year. Yes. And that word is Qualtuk. Now let me explain. It’s spelled a little bit strangely. It’s Q-U-A-A-L-T-A-G-H. Qualtuk. Yes. And the reason it looks weird is because it’s Manx. It comes from the Isle of Man, where there was a tradition of keeping track of the first person to enter your house on New Year’s Day. And in fact, there are superstitions involved in which person that was. You didn’t want the person to be light-complected for one thing.

Oh, interesting. So dark-complected people mean good luck for the year?

Yes, apparently, according to some 19th century texts. And I wanted to recommend a book of a lot of really interesting words like that. It’s called The Cabinet of Linguistic Curiosities, A Yearbook of Forgotten Words. It’s by Paul Anthony Jones.

That’s excellent. And you know, we will be talking about other books we recommend later in the show. But if you’ve got books that you’re reading and enjoying and would like to share with us and have us share with our listeners, give us a call 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or tell the Facebook group about it.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lila Allen, and I’m calling in from Miami.

Hi, Lila. Welcome.

Hey, what’s up?

Hi. So my husband and I were blaring the AC as we pretty much do year round out here in Miami. And we got to talking about the terms that we use for temperature manipulation, specifically heating and air conditioning.

So I was wondering, why is it that we call the device that warms the air a heater, but the thing that cools the air an air conditioner? It seems that changing the condition of the air would go both ways. You can make it warmer, you can make it cooler. So aren’t both the heater and air conditioner conditioning the air?

They are.

Why does the one that cools the air get the distinction of being a conditioner?

Yes, it’s true that when you’re heating the air, you’re also conditioning it. But when air conditioning was first invented, the word conditioning was borrowed from the textile industry. There is something that you do to textiles to condition it. It involves controlling the humidity, controlling contaminants, controlling the temperature of the room, and other things because you want your mills to operate efficiently. And you want the conditions for the cloth to be sufficient so that things don’t stretch or shrink or basically the product is consistent. So what comes out is what you want. In 1909, there was a guy by the name of Stuart Kramer. He was from North Carolina. And at a convention, he presented a paper called Recent Development in Air Conditioning. And he was the guy who coined the word air conditioning. But what his paper was about was textile mills. It was about dehumidifying. It was about cooling. It was about filtering the air. And he says in one of his later papers, he says, I coined this word specifically from the notion that we were conditioning the textiles. He didn’t necessarily care very much about making the room or the factory cool for the workers. He was more concerned about the product.

So this speech that he gave, titled Recent Developments in Air Conditioning, then became republished and different versions were put out there. And he kind of became known for it. And these machines, and he wasn’t the one who invented air conditioning, not at all. He only coined the term. But these machines later caught on in other kinds of manufacturing. They showed up in movie theaters and other places where you have a lot of people and it’s hot. But what’s really interesting to me is we still have a very strong reason to use the word conditioning to refer to the device that cools our house. Because it isn’t only cooling our house. It is actually still conditioning in the original sense that Kramer meant it. It is reducing the humidity and even to a small degree, but it does it. It filters the air of contaminants and particles.

Oh, interesting.

Okay, that makes sense.

Yeah.

What about hot water heaters?

That’s another whole conversation for a different radio show.

Right. We were thinking that it was because it was a cooler term, and since air conditioning probably came about after heating, that it was more of an advertising method. But this makes sense, actually, the way that it was defined. So thank you.

Yeah, you’re welcome. You did say you were right on one respect. The word heating and heater, all that had already existed for a long time. The idea of cooling the air in that way is really recent. I mean, people used to do things with blocks of ice and fans blowing across them. But the idea of having a machine that was powered by kerosene or gas or electricity, they would cool your business or your factory, your home. This is really, really recent. We’re talking 140 years maybe, maybe 150.

And revolutionary.

Revolutionary.

You can read whole books about the effect of air conditioning on the South.

Yeah, staggeringly interesting stuff.

Yeah, and this was in the American South. I don’t know how people lived out here ever without air conditioning. It is so hot in the summer.

They suffered.

No kidding.

And humid where you are.

Oh, my gosh.

Right.

Yeah.

Alila, anyway, so that’s the story. Air conditioning, Stuart Kramer, 1909, started in the textile mills of North Carolina.

Nice.

Well, thank you. I’m glad that there was a solid answer and reference for this. I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Sure thing.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So there we go. I know when she brought that question up, there were a huge number of people going like, yeah, I’ve always wondered because I always wondered. And the first time I looked into it, I was like, this is great. There’s a guy. And he even in his first use of the word air conditioning in print, he talks about why he chose the word. So he explains his coinage. And so we know from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, why the word is conditioning.

My ears perked up, of course, when you were talking about textile mills in North Carolina because that’s where my dad worked before child labor laws.

Right.

And they were called lint heads.

Lint heads.

They came home with all this lint in their hair everywhere.

Yeah, that’s the thing. When you read the history of Stuart Kramer and the textile mills, he was one of many men that was working in the air conditioning business and many people who started these cooling businesses. But nobody at the time was really paying attention to the fact that there were all these workers who were in that hot room with these textiles that they were trying to condition. And so you have pictures from this exact same era, like early 1900s, of children standing at the loom.

Oh, yes.

My dad used to have that photo on his wall because that was his memory. And until he died, he had nightmares about trying to escape the mill.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

Regular nightmares.

There’s lots to say about word origins. I know there’s a question that’s been bothering you, right? A burr under your saddle. This is the show where we’re going to answer it. 877-929-9673.

A new word for me, snuba.

This is a snorkel scuba.

Yes.

Yeah.

I ran across that recently, too.

Did you?

Yeah.

In the Wall Street Journal?

It might have been. I added it to my Word file. I added it to my word file.

Our bulging word files.

Our commonplace books, right?

That’s right.

So I don’t remember, though. Snorkel plus scuba, how do they combine the two where you can actually go down with the snorkel? You can dive up to 20 feet while breathing through a hose tethered to a raft.

Snuba.

Snuba.

Snorkel and scuba.

That’s a nice word, snuba.

Right.

I love that it’s the second generation. So we have self-contained underwater breathing apparatus, which is called scuba. And most people don’t know the original acronym. And now it’s spinning off these other words.

Right.

And what will come out of snooba?

Snoobics?

Snooba-ing?

Snooba-ing?

Snooba-dude?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Caitlin.

I’m in San Diego.

Excellent.

Well, what can we do for you?

So this was a couple weeks ago. My boyfriend and I took our dog down on a hike down Sunset Cliff to take him to the beach. We were playing with the dog, and my boyfriend was messing around with him. He said, oh, Finn, that’s the last draw. I paused for a second, and I thought, oh, I said you meant the final straw, correct? He said, no, the final draw, like gunslingers in the Wild West. And I said, I thought that it was the final straw. And then that brought us to the straw that broke the camel’s back. And he said that there were two different things. So I was wondering if you could clear that up for us.

One thing I’ll say is we all have, how shall I put this, disfluencies, production errors where things come out of our mouths that are grammatical, but they’re not exactly the thing that we were supposed to say or meant to say. And maybe that’s what happened with him. Because final draw isn’t what almost anybody in the whole world would say when they meant that you’ve just done the very last thing that changes this all forever and kind of like, you know, is going to mean your doom. The final straw is what most, or the last straw is what most people say.

Okay, that’s what I thought. But he did have a whole explanation about the Wild West and, you know, when they say draw and pull their guns out. I mean, I get that. Humans are very good at making rationalizations for the mistakes that we’ve made. And it sounds like that’s what he’s done here. But it’s the final straw or the last straw, and it does come from the idea that, you know, you can put so much straw on a camel’s back and you can keep adding one straw at a time until it’s just too many straws and the animal collapses. But you never know exactly when it’s going to be because each straw is so small and so light. But you know there’s an amount that will do the animal in.

But the older version of it, interestingly enough, is feathers on a horse. Oh, interesting. Yeah, the last feather breaking a horse’s back is even older and goes back to the 17th century. Huh. Yeah. That’s cool, right? Well, thank you for clearing that up. Yeah. But it’s all about, the notion is it’s all about these incremental changes or these incremental additions where any one of them is fine, but all of them together is too much.

Mm— Okay. Yeah, and I think you can take that back to your boyfriend in a way that lets him know that you think it is so cute the way he says the final draw. And maybe it’ll be a thing between you that will always be adorable. Oh, maybe. Well, after I told him that I called into you guys, he was like, well, you’re probably right. Okay. Don’t mention my name on the radio. What’s his name? His name’s Jordan. Jordan, all right. And the dog is Finn? Mm— All right. Well, it was really nice to talk to you, Caitlin. Let Jordan know that he’s welcome to call us with your errors anytime. All right. Okay. I will. Thank you so much. Take care. Bye-bye. Thanks. Take care. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword. We’ve talked before on the show about when kids reach for words that are a little bit beyond them, a little bit too sophisticated for them. And we heard from Jeff Downing in Dallas. He says, when I was little and being introduced to people like friends of my parents or people we would meet on the street, instead of asking something like, who are you or how are you? I would say, who do you think you are? And they would look at me perplexed like I was trying to be confrontational. I just didn’t understand exactly how to phrase the question. Can you imagine this little kid being introduced to you and saying, who do you think you are? And actually meaning it. Yeah, yeah, thinking they were saying exactly the right thing. Hit us up on Twitter @wayword. This show is about language examined through family history and culture. Stay with us.

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 on the line is our quiz guy, John Chaneski from New York City. Hi, John. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. I was gonna do a quiz about how cold it’s getting here, but you know what? It’s not getting cold, so I’m going to do something completely different. You guys are awfully smart. If I gave you a crossword clue like, I don’t know, fencing equipment, and told you the answer began with E, you would easily guess. Epe. Epe, right? It’s a classic. So I figured let’s make it a little more challenging. Let’s work from the inside out. If I gave you the clue a holiday and told you that the middle contained K-S-G-I, what might you guess? Thanksgiving. Yes, Thanksgiving. Very good. So that’s how we’re going to work this. We’re going to work from the inside out. I’ll give you the middle two letters of a word, and if you don’t get it, I’ll give you two more working out, and we’ll go further and further out, see how fast you get it.

I can name that word in one letter. Wow. Oh, very nice. Here’s the first one. She checks figures. K-E. Bookkeeper? Bookkeeper. Yeah, that’s all you needed. It’s right there in the middle. Oh, these are all, by the way, these are all 10 letters long, all of them. Okay. Okay, here’s the next one. Hacker. E-R. E-R. Hacker. How about B-E-R-J? B-E-R-J? Lumberjack. Yes, Lumberjack. Oh, very good. Got to remember, it’s the crossword style puns and clues and double meanings. Here’s another one. Risk. A-R. Leopard. If you stand in front of a leopard, that’s very risky. It sure is a risk if you stand… Jeopardy. Oh, yeah, there we go. You’re close. Make it 10 letters long. Yeah, yeah. Jeopardize. Jeopardize, yes. Very good. How about zoo denizen? Speaking of animals, zoo denizen. P-A. Leopard. Somebody’s on a leopard kick. That’s fine. Camel leopard. Yeah. From Twain, right? Camel leopard. Right. How about M-P-A-N? Hippopotam. M-P-A-N? M-P-A-N. Chimpanzee. Yes, chimpanzee. Good. How about subway shark? P-O. Is that like pizza rat? This is not even close. I know this is close to pizza rat. Subway shark? Is that somebody who eats a sandwich? Really, really fast. We’ll see when we find the answer how it works out. Okay, how about K-P-O-C? Yeah. Something, pickpocket? Oh, there it is. Oh, hello, pickpocket. Very nice. Subway Sharp. Oh, that’s nice. Finally, A. Just A. Now, that’s the clue. And the letters are F-I. They sure are. F-I. Okay. Alphabetism. Yes. Let’s try E-F-I-N. Definite. Indefinite? Indefinite. Indefinite is right. Oh, Lord. Congratulations. That’s great. It’s hard. That is what that is. Of course. Indefinite. Wow. Indefinite article. Indeed. Hey, the indefinite article. You guys are fantastic. You worked your way from the inside to the outside and every way in between. Some were harder than others. That was quite challenging. Quite challenging. John, thanks, bud. We’ll talk to you again next week. Thanks. Talk to you then. All right. Cheers. Bye.

The show tackles all aspects of language, whether it’s slang, new words, an argument you had about how to do something at work. Did you write the right thing? Did somebody make a mistake and then a customer saw it? We’d like to talk about it, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword. Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hey guys, this is Andy calling from Surprise, Arizona. Well, what’s the surprise for us? What do you have for us? Something nicely wrapped? So I was playing in the pool with the kids, and we were all jumping in and doing cannonballs and stuff. And normally when I jump in, I shout something like, cannonball or cowabunga. And this time I jumped in and I went, Geronimo! And it was just something that came out of me, and I remember it was something that I would say a lot when I was younger, doing things like that. But I was like, gosh, I don’t even know if it’s appropriate to say that anymore. What was the story behind jumping into the fray or something and screaming Geronimo? And I looked on Wikipedia briefly just to try, and I saw something about, like,

In I think it was World War II, like, paratroopers would shout it when they were jumping out of the airplanes.

But I didn’t say why, and I was like, what is the story behind this?

Well, there’s more than one story, and I’m going to tell you the one that I think has the most credibility.

So in 1941, there was a story printed in the New York Herald Tribune which talks about soldiers shouting Geronimo as they parachuted out of planes.

And they credit the 501st Parachute Battalion in October of 1940 doing this.

So it was really interesting.

So 1940 is the earliest use that we have at all.

And this news story is from 1941, May of 1941.

And the reason they might have shouted Geronimo is it was a, I believe it was a 1939 film about the Apache warrior Geronimo that was widely seen and widely shown at military bases.

And he’s a little bit of a folk hero.

Even at that point, he had this legend about him, about his ability to withstand the travails of war and still like come up on top.

So a lot of people respected him and his story as a warrior.

And the two different versions of the story don’t really matter very much.

But a lot of people credit this guy by the name of Eberhard, Aubrey Eberhard, apparently at Fort Benning, Georgia in 1940, was challenged by his peers to jump out of this airplane and demonstrate to them that they have he had a presence of mind.

That is that he wasn’t completely overtaken by fear and unable unable like you can you can blindly jump out of a plane but that’s not a courageous act unless you can demonstrate that you did it like with full body control and full mental awareness and that it wasn’t really a big deal and so apparently as the story goes he shouted Geronimo the name of this warrior in the name of this film to show his peers that that he you know he had he could think about something else other than the fear of dying from falling and smacking into the earth.

So one guy.

One guy, supposedly.

And it’s a really concrete story.

Actually, Aubrey Eberhardt was interviewed many years later, and he confirmed the basic bones of that story and kind of pinned down the dates with his term of military service and so forth.

And do you think it’s still politically correct to shout it out?

Because I was like, gosh, I’m not sure if it’s not okay anymore.

Yeah, that’s a fair question.

It is a good question.

In my personal opinion, based on what I’ve seen from the Indian American community, they have no thoughts one way or the other about it.

Because it does look like it started out as a term of respect for the warrior, for this Apache warrior who could fight.

And like I said, even when he lost, he looked like he won.

The movie, of course, aggrandized the character quite a bit and built up the legend quite a bit.

So it started pretty much, as far as I understand it, as a term of respect.

Yeah, I’d like to see that movie.

And there’s, well, the movie is pretty terrible, actually, but it’s, you know, 1930s.

But what’s really interesting is, although Geronimo, shouting Geronimo, when you jump out of planes is no longer really a thing in the U.S. Military, not supposed to be a thing officially, it does still appear on a variety of logos and patches and veterans groups that are former parachutists or airborne.

They still use it in a variety of different ways.

So Geronimo is still out there in the military community and still associated with jumping from airplanes.

Very cool.

Well, that is just absolutely fascinating.

I appreciate you taking the time to fill me in on it.

Andy, thanks so much for calling.

Thank you.

Awesome.

Thanks, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

You know, when you hear about controversies over zoning or where to put something, you hear the term NIMBY, right?

Oh, for building and urban planning.

Right.

And NIMBY stands for not in my backyard.

But there’s an even stronger version of that, which I didn’t realize until the other day, and that’s banana.

Build absolutely nothing anywhere near anyone.

Banana.

Right.

What I have is enough, and anyone who comes after can just suffer.

Yeah, NIMBY and banana.

And, of course, there’s the YIMBY, which is the positive.

The people’s like, all right, I’m willing to take a compromise on my neighborhood and get this thing built.

YIMBY?

YIMBY, yes, in my backyard.

Oh, I didn’t know that one.

I guess I don’t hear it that often, right?

The NIMBY voices are somehow louder and more frequent.

Not to mention the banana voices.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Bruce from Dallas.

Hi, Bruce, welcome to the show.

Hi, Bruce, what’s going on?

My great-grandmother, I always used to say they were falling to staves, and I grew up with that all my life, and they said it meant they were starving to death.

But I never understood how they derived that meaning from that phrase.

And I’ve never talked to anybody that’s ever even heard that.

And I was just wondering if you guys knew the answer.

So falling to staves, like S-T-A-V-E-S, falling to staves?

Yes.

Okay.

That’s my understanding.

You know, I asked my mom to spell it out for me years ago, so that’s what she said.

Okay.

-huh.

And by that they meant really hungry or just otherwise in a bad way?

I’m falling to staves, Grandma?

The way I took it was that they were just starving to death, like just famished.

Okay.

Okay.

Well, I can see how you would use it in that way, because to fall to staves means to fall to pieces, literally.

You know how a barrel has those staves, those slats of wood that are curved and they’re held together by metal?

Yeah.

On a barrel or a butter churn or even silos, those big long strips are called staves.

And so if you’re falling to staves, it’s just like the metal part that holds everything together has come off.

The bands have come loose?

Yeah, the bands have come loose and all these pieces just fall apart.

So it goes some barrel to boards in like a minute.

In a second.

Yeah, they just go crashing to the ground.

Are you familiar with the word staves in that sense?

Yeah, you know, doing the research, you know, I discovered that a stave was part of a barrel, but I never correlated that with anything about being hungry.

Yeah.

So, you know, I was always confused, but it was kind of a going joke in my household because my mom used to use it a lot, and, of course, I picked it up and started using it.

And I use it with my boys now.

But I think my generation is going to be the last one because they didn’t pick it up.

Oh, shoot.

I hope not.

Yeah.

Yeah, I think it’s great.

It’s been around since the 19th century.

And there’s something wonderful about that image of just these pieces of wood just kind of clattering to the floor.

You’re just completely falling apart.

You’re so hungry.

Right.

So in the family sense, they’re hungry and maybe they’re starting to look like thieves, stick thin.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It seems like a reach, but, you know, I just always just, it seemed like it rolled off the tongue really nice.

And, you know, we always had a good laugh about it, you know, after, you know, it was said.

So, you know, that’s what’s left with me and my life is, you know, it’s just a good memory.

That’s excellent.

And Bruce, I’ve got to tell you, you might be surprised that when your children grow up, they might start talking a lot more like you.

They might use that phrase.

Oh, that would be very daring.

Bruce, thank you so much for your call.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thank you so much.

All righty, Bruce.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, speaking of hunger, when you stave off hunger, you’re sort of holding it at bay as if it’s with a stick.

You’re holding a stave and fighting off this hungry beast.

Yeah.

The beast of hunger.

Yeah, apparently that goes back to the old practice of dog baiting or bear baiting.

Oh, interesting.

Holding a stick and keeping that animal away.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Chris Lenning.

I’m calling from Plaza, North Dakota.

How are you all?

Excellent, Chris.

Hi, Chris.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Hey, I’ve been thinking about something that I’ve experienced. I live in small-town America, and I work with youth. And I was thinking about it several years ago. I was trying to connect with some of my youth. They were driving around town, cruising the loop, as we used to call it, when I was a youth, and trying to get their attention and motion for them to come over to me, and I wanted to talk with them. And so I made a gesture where I kind of took my fist and swung it around several times, which I knew means roll down your window. But I found out quickly that’s an anachronistic gesture. So I wanted to ask a little bit about anachronistic gestures. I know that’s not necessarily your total bailiwick, but it’s a part of communication, and it just fascinates me.

Yeah, they had no idea what I was talking about because you all probably remember rolling down a window.

Yes, we do.

Sure.

But they had no idea. They literally didn’t know.

They just rolled on and didn’t do anything?

They just gave me a strange look.

Said what? They thought it was some obscene gesture you were doing?

Yeah, I think so. Yeah.

Do you bite your thumb at me, sir?

So if you’re impatient and you’re tapping your wrist with one finger, do they get that?

You know, thanks to, I don’t want to say the brand name, but to our fitness monitors, I think they get that now. But for a while, that was gone.

Yeah, what is a watch? Who knows?

Right. Like maybe you’re asking them their heart rate or something.

Right, right, exactly.

Stepping out Morse code.

Yeah, yeah, because it seems like fewer and fewer people are wearing watches. But, yeah, I mean, that’s sort of another anachronistic gesture.

Chris, how would you gesture to tell someone to press the button to have the automatic window go down? Would that even work?

I don’t know. I talked with those young people, and luckily one of them had grown up on the farm, and so they had driven their grandpa’s pickup truck with both windows. And they said, well, could you just kind of pull back as if you’re going to flick a marble? They knew about marbles, but they didn’t know about roll-down windows. That was, you know, the flicking motion was the one that they mentioned maybe would work.

Wait, they flick their windows down?

Yeah.

That little switch that you pull back on or push forward on?

I feel like it’s an index finger motion. I just press it or pull it, but it doesn’t feel like marble flicking to me. But, of course, the gesture has to be bigger, more dramatic.

Yeah, that’s right. That’s the difficulty here, right?

Absolutely.

So did you feel old? Were you like a dinosaur?

I think I was only like 35 at the time. So I guess in their eyes, I was certainly at the very least Fred Flintstone age.

Yeah, I’m trying to think of other gestures. I mean, sort of pointing to your wrist and asking the time is one. Rolling down the window. I mean, even the phrase rolling down the window. I mean, we don’t really roll it anymore. I mean, you see that more in the language, I think, rather than gestures.

Like turn up the TV? I mean, when’s the last time you actually turned a knob to turn up the TV?

Absolutely, absolutely.

Yeah, or you talk about a blow-by-blow account of something. You describe it as the tick-tock. What are we going to do in this meeting? What’s the tick-tock?

Journalism jargon.

Yeah, who listens to a clock ticking anymore?

Well, maybe hipsters will help us recover some of these gestures.

Yeah, that’s true. One of the ones that stayed around, though, is, you know, making the sign like surfs up or hang loose and holding it to your ear. That’s survived even with all the technology and changes in phones.

Well, and another one you see, at least I see people saying, text me, and they’re acting it out.

Oh, the two thumbs, yeah.

Yeah, text me your phone number or whatever.

Oh, sure.

Yeah, but that’s a new one. There’s so much we do on a small screen that that could be about anything.

I know, right?

That’s true.

And pretty soon we’ll be dictating it anyway. I wonder if people, when they were asking people to call them back in the olden days, if they held one fist up in front of them and another fist to their ear, I didn’t know what they did back then.

Yeah, to make the dialing motion.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah, exactly.

Dialing a phone. Who does that anymore?

Very few people.

So it’s more preserved in the language than in gestures. But Chris, thank you so much for these thoughts.

Thank you very much for having me on. And we really enjoy your show. My sister is a San Diego transplant, and so what a great opportunity for me to talk with you both.

Thank you, Chris.

Take care now.

Glad to hear from you.

All right, blessings.

Goodbye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I didn’t notice our producer making that tornado.

Oh, yeah.

The wrap rounded up, right?

The other one is the hand on the neck that means cut it off.

Right, right.

She really does the okay and the thumbs up.

I don’t know why.

I know.

What is that about?

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

And talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

More of why we say what we say and how we say it. Stay tuned.

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. You know, once a year we do a show where we recommend books as gifts to other people. One of the books that I want to recommend this year is All the Birds in the Sky by Charlie Jane Anders. Charlie is a woman. This book has a familiar premise, a little bit fantasy, a little bit science fiction. It’s where magic and technology compete head to head. They kind of coexist. And in the end, there’s a confrontation between the two and a fight over the future. I really enjoyed this book. It was a super fast read. One of the things that I liked about it is it’s about whether or not we will be controlled by artificial intelligence, an intelligence that knows our every move, or will our behavior be controlled and influenced, perhaps punished by a secret group of magical people.

And that’s an adult book?

That is an adult book, yeah.

Okay.

But I do have a kid’s book to recommend.

Okay.

I know that because I read books with my son and so does my wife. This book is called It Ain’t So Awful Falafel by Farouze Dumas. This is a story about a teenage Iranian girl who lives in California. It starts in 1979. And she finds herself kind of having to explain what is going on in Iran to her classmates and friends. And she also has this crisis of identity. Is she Zomorad Yusvezadeh or is she Cindy, the name she decided to call herself? And this funny and poignant book not only shows what it’s like to be a teenage girl in America, but talks about the immigrant experience, talks about straddling two worlds, talks about California in a lot of ways and what California 30 some odd years ago went through to become this state that it is today. Really, really loved this book. And I liked the way that the author Dumas, D-U-M-A-S, just like the famous French author, though she’s not related. I really like the way that history shows up in this book, but it’s not too didactic. We get just enough taste of the Ayatollah and the Shah and the crisis and the hostages and that whole thing, if you remember that. So she’s got this problem. Should she know enough about the Shah to explain it to her classmates? Should she become the expert? I mean, teachers keep asking her, for example, to stand in front of the class and tell people about what’s happening in Iran. But she’s just a teenage girl in California. Although that’s my main recommendation from the author, Firouze Dumas. She also has two really interesting books for adults. They’re nonfiction called Funny and Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent. And they’re about her own life directly. They’re even more autobiographical where she talks about language and culture and the funny stories about living life here as an outsider who’s becoming an insider. And they’re both wonderful.

I think I want to read all three.

Her name, by the way, I should spell this, Firouze Dumas is F-I-R-O-O-Z-E-H and D-U-M-A-S.

So let’s have those titles again.

So her books are It Ain’t So Awful Falafel and Funny and Farsi and Laughing Without an Accent.

And then the first one I mentioned by Charlie Jane Anders is All the Birds in the Sky.

And I would just add the books that I’ve been giving as gifts are books that we’ve talked about before, one of which is Corey Stamper’s Word by Word, which I keep hearing from listeners about people loving this introduction to lexicography and the life of a lexicographer and also the life of the English language. It’s a fantastic introduction for anybody who’s interested in English. And then the other one is Whiteout. And that is a collection of poems by Jessica Goodfellow that are about mountaineering, but they’re also about life. We know that you’re big readers and you want to share your books with us, send us the titles. Tell us what’s up. Tell us what you think we should be reading. And perhaps we’ll share that with the rest of the listeners.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, I’m Kristen Maurer calling from Virginia Beach, Virginia. Hello, Kristen. Welcome. What’s up? What can we help with? Thanks for having me. I’m actually, I’m calling because my grandmother was born in the mountains of eastern Kentucky. And if you’ve ever met anybody who was raised in the mountains of Appalachia, you’ll typically find that they have like this very unique way with words. They have like lots of earthy and sort of humorous figurative language similes, metaphors, that sort of thing. And when I was a little girl, she always raised gardens. And I remember at least a few times or a couple times per season, she would make a comment about how it was time to string the leather britches, to string up the leather britches or hang the leather britches. And like, I know that that has something to do with a form of preservation for green beans, but I guess what I’m really curious about is first of all, like where on earth did this terminology evolve from? But then specifically, was she referring to like a certain variety of green beans or was this just sort of a blanket term for the preservation process of any type of bean?

Yeah, this was a way to dry beans so that you could use them later. These days, most people think of green beans as something you pluck from the garden and you have to use them, you know, before they spoil in the next few days or a week or so. But you could run a string through the end of the beans, hang them on the wall or out in the sun so that they dried, and then you would always have beans on hand that you would then soak like regular dried beans and then cook with, you know, mix with your hog fat and your potatoes and onions or whatever.

And I do remember seeing that in her home. I remember seeing her doing that. But I guess the biggest thing that I’ve always been thinking about is that why leather britches? Like, I mean, I guess I’m curious to where that evolved from.

Well, they look, they’re brown, right? The beans, once they dry are brown. Do you remember that?

Well, that’s true. Yeah. And they’re kind of coarse and rough and they look a lot like leather. Don’t think of like the leather pants, the sexy leather pants that someone might wear now, but more like the Cowboys chaps or something like that.

Right. Well, that makes sense. Yeah. Rough and brown and coarse and kind of shaped like that.

Well, it’s funny because I actually called a couple seed companies because I also garden. And a couple of years ago, I thought, well, I’m going to call around and see if I can try to find this type of green bean that my granny used to grow. And what was amusing about it is I said, you know, I’m looking for this bean. I believe it’s called leather britches. And the people were just like baffled. They’re like, this lady’s off a rocker because they’re like, what is she talking about? So they obviously didn’t know that this was a form of food preservation either.

Yeah, that’s super interesting. It’s regular green beans as far as I know, as far as I’ve ever read. It shows up in a ton of folklore. Do you know the Foxfire books? There’s a long passage in there where people describe in detail how they preserve their beans in this way. And it sounds like regular old green beans or string beans. And interestingly, they’re not called string beans because you string them up and dry them. They’re called string beans because they have a string on them that you tear off before you cook them.

Right. Okay. Well, I’ve heard of those Foxfire books. I’ve always wanted to read them.

Yeah, they’re good. Look them up. There’s people talking in natural, regular voices in that, a lot of times, in that Appalachian English that you mentioned.

Yes. Well, I’m going to do that. Well, I really appreciate you guys taking my call. I just love your show. Thanks for sharing your family memories, too. Have a great day. Take care. Bye-bye.

Leather britches. They’re not the only ones, by the way, just to make that clear. Leather britches for dried beans that you kind of hang on the wall until you need them is widespread throughout the United States.

I did not realize that. It’s not common, but it exists enough that it shows up in dialect dictionaries. And like I said, you can see it in books of folklore and old recipe books. And in church suppers and dinners on the ground.

Oh, my gosh. I don’t eat meat now, but I’m drooling. I am too. I’m just thinking about that. When you’re the lucky one who gets that big piece of fatback or salt pork in your spoon, in your spoon of beans. Your spoon of beans. Your spoon of leather bridges.

877-929-9673. If you’re living with a chronic illness or an invisible disability, you start to see the world in a different way. You have to ration your energy and plan your day in a way that you don’t if you’re just, say, a little kid who’s popping out of bed and you just have boundless energy. And that’s led to a term that I’m seeing more and more, and that term is spoonie. Do you know this term?

I think I saw it and passed it by and did not record it. Tell me about spoonie.

It’s really interesting. Christine Miseradino has a website called But You Don’t Look Sick. And on that website, she describes trying to explain to a friend of hers what it’s like to live with a couple of chronic conditions. And she talked about how you think of each day as a collection of spoons. And you have to plan out your day and think about how you’re going to spend your energy. Because maybe you can do this one activity today, but maybe you can’t do another. And the term spoonie has arisen from this. And there’s a whole community of people online who refer to themselves as spoonies. That is, people who have to ration out their energy and find workarounds to work around those conditions, disabilities, that kind of thing.

So the metaphor about the spoons has to do with you have a certain number of spoons to use throughout the day. And when you’re done, there’s no more scooping out the energy for yet another event or another conversation.

Right. So you have to think about how are you going to spend that limited number of spoons you have. It’s a really interesting way, I think, to explain to other people what that is like. And there’s this whole community that’s arising referring to themselves as spoonies.

So if I’m a spoonie, I’m somebody who has a hidden chronic condition that lowers my energy and my ability to lead what other people would consider to be a normal life.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Brian from Elizabeth City, North Carolina.

Hi, Brian. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Brian.

What’s up?

So I have a Fraser saying, my grandfather used to say when I was a kid, and whenever he would be in conversation or have to just leave a room or something, he would say, well, I have to go see a man about a horse. And he would leave.

But as a kid, I would notice he’d never go see a man about a horse.

He would normally just make it to the restroom.

And so I was just curious to know why that has always meant going to the restroom and not seeing a man about a horse.

Why do you not actually come back with a horse?

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s one of many euphemisms for doing that, for going off and doing your business.

But I think the older version was see a man about a dog.

Yeah, as far back as the 1860s.

Yeah, yeah.

And it applied not only to using the restroom, but it could apply to, especially during Prohibition, going off to have a little nip of something.

Or to go meet your lady friend on the slide.

Go meet your lady friend or man friend, yes.

Yeah, it was mostly men saying it, though.

Right.

As to why that particular animal, a dog or a horse, we don’t know.

It’s just one of those euphemisms.

I know that ladies of that era also said, I’m going to go pluck a rose.

For going to the restroom.

Or you could go see Miss White.

I remember that one.

There’s all things that you say in order to not have to say the real thing.

Yeah, I don’t hear it as often.

Do you, Grant?

No, I don’t,

But it’s familiar to me from my reading.

It’s the kind of color that fiction writers like to throw in when they’ve got a folksy character.

Wow.

Well, cool, Brian.

Thank you for your call.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you.

It was very interesting.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks, Brian.

You too.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eric George calling from Burlington, Vermont.

Hello, Eric. Welcome.

What’s up? What can we help with?

So right now I have three dictionaries open on my desk.

All two.

The three words they start on are greenbacker, gratify, and greet.

And the word I’m trying to find out about is gregarious.

Gregarious.

Yes.

And so this came up because I was on the phone with my partner,

And my family was in the background and having a good time.

Everyone was laughing.

She said, yes, I can hear, you know, the gregarious laughter.

And for some reason, it didn’t sit right.

And I realized that I’d only ever heard gregarious used to describe, you know, a person or a type of way of being for an organism, you know, like a gregarious walk of animals, that kind of thing.

But I’d never heard it used in that way before.

And we started talking about it, and we realized that we disagreed about the word gregarious, and some bets were made, and here I am on the phone with you.

Bets were made.

You made bets? What’s on the line?

Maple creamies.

You know, Martha, you know.

So my dog.

Wait, your dog?

What?

You bet an animal?

It’s a long-running joke.

Okay.

He’s a good yes.

I would never part with him.

And we’ll probably end up taking care of him together at some point anyway.

Okay.

Might as well just put him up.

He doesn’t know.

I haven’t told him.

And here’s the thing is I, over the past few weeks, I’ve been starting to question myself

And wondering, am I, you know, is my idea of this word too strict?

You know, I love writing and reading poetry and I love flexibility with language.

And so I’m sort of wondering about the cultural implications of being so strict about this word.

So I’m very excited to hear what you have to say.

Gregarious laughter, is it a thing? That’s what you’re asking, right?

And what did she mean by gregarious laughter?

Yeah, so people were, we were merry.

We were just having a good time and it sounded, and the reason I thought that it worked is it sounds inviting.

You know, it’s welcoming, as in, you know, a gregarious person is welcoming and sociable and easy to talk to.

The gregarious laughter, I’d imagined, may have been inviting.

You know, I’m kind of on the fence about this.

If I were editing someone else’s text, I would definitely, as a copy editor, put a note in the side pointing to the word gregarious and say, did you mean gregarious or did you mean contagious or some other word?

I would query.

But on the other hand, if the author steaded the change and wanted to leave it, I think I would let it go.

Because I think it does, as you very aptly put it, I think it does say this is the kind of laughter that wants you to join.

This isn’t the kind of laughter that excludes and alienates.

It strikes my ear a little odd.

Yeah.

Because you think of a gregarious person being somebody who’s super sociable and gregarious left.

I mean, maybe a gregarious dog.

If you’re just speaking aloud, it’s kind of one of those things.

I’ll give you literary license for it, right?

But if you were writing it, I think I might, like I said, call it into question and say, are you sure?

So what would you say?

Group laughter? You said contagious?

Contagious, maybe.

Yeah, yeah. She was trying to connote the idea of the whole group, just uproarious.

Or somehow rewrite the phrase if it were in print and indicate that the laughter was happening and they were inviting us into the group and making us feel welcome.

You’re talking about poetry, really.

It’s a poetic.

Yeah, literary or poetic license really lets us, this is one of the ways that we toy with language and we’re all always experimenting and trying new things.

And I think it sounds like you knew what she meant, but it did strike your ear, which definitely warrants a conversation with us, I think.

Anytime something is like, what?

And you have to call Martha and Grant and find out.

I would say that you both get to keep the dog and you have to move in together.

Count me in.

Okay.

All right.

Well, thank you so much, Tatuia.

I really appreciate it.

Eric, thank you so much.

Give us a call sometime.

Give that dog some pets and treats for us, all right?

Thanks, Eric.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Eric mentioned a herd and a flock,

And of course that’s the root of the word gregarious.

It comes from the Latin grex.

So congregation, maybe?

Possibly, possibly.

I know that the term egregious comes from the same root,

G-R-E-X in Latin.

So it means outside of the group?

Yeah, outside of the flock.

Because the E means absent from or removed from.

Exactly.

Interesting.

Cool, right?

Yeah, cool, right.

There’s all this underlying tango.

I always imagine, you ever heard about these giant fungi who, like, they have roots spreading over acres of land?

Yes, yes, yes, that’s a great analogy.

And you don’t realize that the one five miles over there is actually the same plant that’s over there?

Welcome to my brain, yes.

Language is like that.

Underneath, it’s all connected.

It is, and it’s gorgeous.

Let’s talk about it.

877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

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Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine,

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Director Colin Tedeschi,

And production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski

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

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego,

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.