Today I Learned (episode #1578)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Today, we’re listening back to some of our favorite discussions with some of our youngest listeners.

Kids do have a way of making you take a new look at words and phrases you’ve taken for granted your whole life.

Martha, do you remember that call we had from John, the fifth grader, who was curious about…

Oh my gosh, John. Oh gosh, how could I forget?

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m John and I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Well, welcome to the show, John.

Hi, John. We’re glad to talk with you. What’s going on?

Well, first, I’m honored to talk to the Duchess of Dictionaries and the Sultan of Slang.

The what of slang?

The Sultan of Slang and the Duchess of Dictionaries.

Well, I’m happy to talk with the Wizard of Words on the line. What do you call us for, Wizard?

I was watching TV and, well, they described a character as a loose cannon.

I know it has something to do with a real smart trap, i.e. Someone who’s a little bit of a smart aleck, but that’s all I can think of.

Oh, wow. Okay, so somebody was described as a loose cannon.

Yeah, they were a little bit of a hothead, always making sarcastic remarks.

So that gave me a clue.

So what were you watching? What was happening on the show?

Well, an announcer was like describing a character.

And this wasn’t a live action show. It was like an anime.

And well, they were just describing a classic announcer character, as they called them.

Was like describing a character as they were stepping onto the stage.

Oh, I see. Okay. Gotcha.

Well, you know, if we tell you a little bit about the history of this expression, it might make more sense to you.

Would you like to hear that?

Sure. That would be very handy.

Well, think back to those old wooden ships hundreds of years ago.

You know, the ones with the tall sails.

Like they might need to have cannons in case like pirates try to invade their ship.

They can knock them out before the pirates get there.

Yes, sir. Some of those ships had cannons on board to fire at other ships or enemies.

And in those days, John, the cannons were mounted on wheels so they could be moved back and forth on the deck while you were shooting them and then loading them and shooting them and loading them.

Oh, I got it.

So it was like constantly, so those cannons were constantly firing off.

And I think that was used as like a metaphor for like a constantly firing off mouth.

Because he was, you know, constantly firing everything out.

That’s a great guess.

Like all those cannons on that ship.

Well, you’re right that it’s a metaphor.

But, you know, usually when they weren’t using the cannons, those cannons were securely fastened to the ship.

But imagine if they came loose.

If, say, the ship got into a bad storm at sea and, you know, just riding the seas like a roller coaster.

You don’t want that cannon to become loose because if it does, you can imagine what would happen, right?

Kaboom, kaboom, kaboom, the sun.

Pretty much.

Pretty much.

Even if the cannons aren’t loaded, they could go rolling along and hurt somebody or slam into another part of the ship and damage it.

And so you’re absolutely right, John.

It’s a metaphor for somebody who’s unpredictable or uncontrollable, just like a cannon rolling around on one of those ships when it’s not supposed to.

You never know if it’s going to accidentally fire, what it’s going to crash into next, and who is going to get bumped into and knocked over.

Bingo.

Who’s going to get knocked over.

That’s right.

So, yeah, don’t be a loose cannon if you can help it.

Yeah, try not to.

John, you really do seem to have A Way with Words.

Absolutely.

I get that a lot.

I just have a large vocabulary.

Sounds like it.

I kind of always have.

Yeah, sounds like it.

Sounds like you definitely are a word wizard.

I really appreciate you calling us.

And you know what?

I invite you to call us again sometime, okay?

Plus, I have stereotypical word nerd glasses.

Oh, those are…

That kind of gives it away.

Yeah, me too.

It kind of gives it away.

Me too.

Nerds unite.

So do I.

That’s how we hide our secret identities.

All right.

Take care of yourself, John.

It was a real delight to talk to you.

See you.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

Grant, I feel like I just got off a storm-tossed ship myself.

Absolutely.

A little bit of a loose cannon there all the way around, I think.

Well, here’s something else that’ll make you do a double-take when it comes to familiar words and phrases.

When an adult shares a term that they misunderstood when they were a kid.

Tracy Jo Kala in Madison, Wisconsin, wrote us to say that when her mom was growing up in the 1960s, she always assumed there must be some city called Random, and that Random, wherever it was, was the home of all sweepstakes and contests.

And that’s, of course, because announcers were always talking about how the winners were going to be chosen at Random.

Random, Oklahoma, a great, well-known city.

Yeah, Random’s a weird word.

Originally in English, it referred to a great speed or force in motion, kind of a headlong rush, probably from an old French word that means to run fast or gallop like on a horse.

Well, later we’ll share some more questions from young listeners and more stories from adults about childhood misunderstandings.

We’ll be back with more in a moment.

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Thank you.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Today we’re looking back at questions from kids.

And one nice thing about hearing from our younger listeners is that they often ask about linguistic mysteries that you may have thought about once or twice, but then never got around to figuring out.

Hi, this is Katie Fuller. I’m calling from Texas.

Hi, Katie. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Katie.

I was wondering, is it pronounced caramel or caramel?

You mean like the brown, sweet, sticky stuff that you might put on an apple?

Yeah.

And what got you to wondering about that, Katie?

Okay, so my dad is from Nebraska, right?

So he calls it caramel.

So I call it caramel.

But my mom calls it caramel.

So I’m like, what?

-huh.

And where’s your mom from?

My mom’s from Texas.

Okay, so dad pronounces it with three syllables and she pronounces it with two?

Yes.

And you take your dad’s pronunciation?

Yes, I do.

Why?

I’m not sure, actually.

I kind of switch between them mostly, but, like, I usually say caramel, so I don’t know why, honestly.

You know what?

That’s exactly what I do.

I grew up in Kentucky, and I go back and forth between those two pronunciations.

But get this, Katie, there are at least seven different ways to pronounce this word.

Can you believe that?

Seven what?

Yeah, so that first syllable alone, Martha, what is it, three different ways to say that first syllable?

Yeah, I mean, we’re talking about the word C-A-R-A-M-E-L, which looks like it has three syllables.

But in the United States, some people say caramel, some people say caramel, some people say caramel, and some people actually say car-a-mel.

And that’s just in the United States.

There are three other pronunciations in England.

That’s crazy.

The three-syllable pronunciation is one you hear mostly along the east coast of the U.S., all the way from Maine to Florida and into parts of Texas.

But I’m not surprised that there’s some difference because sort of the rest of the United States tends to pronounce it the other way.

Yeah.

There’s no one place that pronounces it only one way.

There’s always a scattering of both pronunciations no matter wherever you go, no matter where you go.

Yeah.

I think I say caramel.

My wife and I talked about this recently.

I think I say caramel most of the time.

And when you add it on to another word like caramel corn, I can’t imagine saying caramel corn. It just doesn’t sound right. Caramel corn sounds right.

Yeah, that’s a good point.

Do you eat caramel apples or caramel apples?

I eat caramel apples.

Yeah, yeah, me too.

Me too.

But when I’m talking about other things, like caramel.

Right, do you want a caramel sounds better than do you want a caramel.

Mm—

Yeah.

Yeah, this tastes like caramel.

But your family is representative of the same differences that we hear all across the country. There are all these different ways to pronounce it, and there’s no one correct way.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So how do you feel about that?

I think that’s cool.

I love the really three. You know, that first syllable can be care, cur, car. The last syllable can be male, mill, or mel. And that middle syllable can either be a or not pronounced. And so mix them up and you get a lot of different pronunciations.

Yeah.

You know, Grant, I realize I’m still all over the map when it comes to the pronunciation of this word.

I don’t know about the pronunciation, but I’m all over caramel when it’s all over an apple. And then it’s all over your teeth. All over my shirt, my fingers.

Well, another youngster’s question got us thinking about the long history of some abbreviations we use today.

Hi, my name is Vivian. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome, Vivian. What can we do for you?

I had a question. Why is the abbreviation for the word number, which is spelled N-U-M-B-E-R, N-O, if the letter O isn’t anywhere in the original word?

Oh, so you’re thinking maybe it should be N-U instead of N-O as an abbreviation, huh?

Right? I mean, like, probably.

It’s part of a set of abbreviations we have that are basically older than English, or at least modern English. It goes back to the Latin form of the word number. One form of it was numero, very much like in Spanish and Italian today, N-U-M-E-R-O. And Latin scribes abbreviated a lot of their writing, and the way that they abbreviated that word was in O, with a little mark, or maybe they raised O with a line above it to indicate that the word had been shortened. And so that’s it. And so we’ve just kept that Latin abbreviation through the millennia.

Oh, wow. That’s so cool.

Yeah, and there’s a few others, like that pound is a classic example of that, like the weight LB for pound.

Yeah, and the original Latin word is numerous, but that particular case, the ablative case, means in or with.

Yeah, we don’t really have cases in English in that way, so it’s kind of lost on us, but yeah.

Oh, cool. Thank you for telling me.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Vivian raised a great question. We take those abbreviations for granted, but then you start thinking, but wait, why do we abbreviate number as N-O or pound as L-B? But once you know the linguistic roots of those abbreviations, the answer is perfectly clear. The history is right there.

You know, come to think of it, another example is the abbreviation for the English word ounce. Ounce comes from the Latin uncia, U-N-C-I-A, which is a unit of measurement. And this ended up in medieval Italian as onza. And that word onza was abbreviated as O-Z. And we borrowed that into English as our abbreviation for ounce, O-Z.

That makes a lot of sense. I can just see the Italian traders not only giving goods to English speakers, but also language.

Right. All that Italian wine.

We’ll be back with more calls for you in a moment. But first, help us keep bringing you more episodes with a gift to the nonprofit that produces this show. Go to waywordradio.org, click on those three pink hearts, and give what you can.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Today we’re celebrating the things we learn from kids and their curiosity about language. Many times kids often have a perfectly logical guess about the origin of a word or phrase, even if it’s not the right one.

Hi, I’m Harry Evans from Charlotte, Vermont.

Hi, Harry.

Hi.

So the other day I was cleaning my room and my dad said, I want it as clean as a whistle. I thought about that phrase a little bit. I was like, wouldn’t a whistle be sort of like gross almost from like people blowing into it and like all the spit building up in it?

Yeah, like the spit from a trombone, right?

Yeah.

I was just curious about the origin of it.

So, Harry, you’re in Charlotte, Vermont, which we talked about on the show and we know it’s pronounced that way. And you’re how old?

I’m 14.

So that puts you in high school?

Eighth grade.

Eighth grade.

I graduate tomorrow.

Graduate tomorrow.

Well, congratulations.

Congrats.

Thank you.

And do you keep your room as clean as a whistle?

No, not at all.

What do you get from dad if you do make it clean as a whistle?

Probably video games.

Okay, that’s not bad.

So you’re like, this is gross, it’s covered in spit, why would I want my room like that?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Excellent question.

Harry, the answer is that the kind of whistle that we’re talking about in this phrase isn’t the kind of physical whistle that you might buy in a store like a slide whistle or the kind of whistle that your PE teacher might wear around his neck. It’s the sound of the whistle itself, you know, when you whistle and it’s just so clear and pure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I guess that sort of makes sense.

Yeah, it’s that kind of whistle. And the clean is a little bit different, too. It’s not so much the idea of something that’s not dirty, but you know how sometimes you use the word clean to mean completely, like cut clean through a piece of wood or something like that?

Yeah.

So it’s a little bit different sense for both of those words. But clean as a whistle is just as pure as the whistle of a bird. So the sharp sound that you make rather than the little thing that you blow into.

Yeah, and when it first shows up in the 19th century in English, it’s used interchangeably with clear as a whistle. Sometimes you say clear as a whistle rather than clean as a whistle.

Cool. That’s interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, we think so too.

Harry, thanks for your call. We really appreciate it. Congratulations on finishing eighth grade.

Thank you.

All right. Take care now.

Bye.

Bye, Harry.

Perfectly reasonable to wonder why we’d say clean as a whistle when a whistle is going to collect some spit and gunk, right?

Perfectly reasonable. Here’s another childhood memory along those same lines.

Tommy Carberry lives in Lexington, Kentucky. He emailed us to say that when he was a kid, his dad took him on a sightseeing trip to Washington, D.C. And they had this map, and right in the middle was a section that said National Mall. And Tommy writes, at this point in my tweens, in the late 80s, early 90s, I was obsessed with shopping malls, as most of us were at that point. The idea of getting to see the National Mall was just so thrilling. So Tommy insisted that they go early so they’d have enough time to see everything. My dad was thoroughly confused, he writes. His dad said, well, we’ll go by it and even walk around it, but there’s really not that much to see there. It’s more about the monuments nearby. And Tommy says, clearly my dad had no idea of the amount of time I would need to see all the stores at the National Mall. It must have everything, even a Banana Republic.

I can just imagine him waiting to see the naughty T-shirts at the Spencer’s Gifts on the National Mall. You know, the ones making fun of the president or whatever. Saving up his money, setting some aside.

Right, right. You know, looking cool for the attractive hotties that are walking by at the National Mall.

Right, probably bringing an extra suitcase just to haul all that stuff home.

There’s lots more to come, but first, there’s nothing we’d like better than to fill your podcast feed with lots more episodes of A Way with Words. To do that, we need your help.

Go to waywordradio.org.

Click on the three pink hearts and give what you can to help us keep bringing you shows that offer new ideas and fresh perspectives about language.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Today we’re remembering some of our favorite conversations with some of our youngest listeners and with their parents.

Yet we often hear from parents and kids who listen to the show together.

Maybe the family’s listening in the car while they’re out running errands.

Or maybe they’re discussing words on the way to or from school.

That can lead to some very revealing conversations.

Hello, my name is Matt.

And Simon. We’re from Waukesha, Wisconsin.

Simon and Matt, hello. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, we had a question. We were walking to school.

This was actually a couple years ago, and we’ve been waiting to call.

We finally did it.

So we were walking to school and we had a question.

Simon, do you remember what words we were wondering about?

The difference between barely and nearly.

I was trying to think about it for a minute because they seem similar.

But then I used sort of my dad kind of approach was like, well, if you, pardon my bluntness, but if you nearly poop your pants, then you almost did, but you’re in the clear.

If you barely pooped your pants, it seemed like you’d just a little bit not good, better go change.

So that was my dad’s approach at translating it and putting it in a very clearly painted sort of setup for Simon.

And we’ve kind of explored that because there’s sort of subtle opposites.

But Simon, you had one too, right?

What was your thought on it?

Like if you nearly fell off a cliff, you barely hung on.

And then if you barely fell off, you nearly hung on.

Yeah, kind of.

Yeah, yeah, it’s true.

It’s all about those circumstances, right?

So you might almost think about it as a timeline where there’s an event and nearly is before the event and barely is after the event, right?

Right, right.

It seems like it gets, because when we were trying to look at opposites, you couldn’t say, like, I nearly died versus I barely died.

Right.

There’s a completeness.

You know, it works if there’s, it seems to work only if there were, like, shades of something, in a sense.

Or, yeah, timing-wise, it seems to fit that.

Yeah, so it’s more about chronological, it’s more about time than it is about them being opposites.

That’s so interesting because I think of it in terms of space.

I’m thinking visually.

Like if I reach my finger out and I nearly tap you on the shoulder, I didn’t really tap you on the shoulder, but if I barely tap you on the shoulder, I’ve crossed a line.

But it’s the lightest of touches.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, yeah, time and space are the keys here, I think.

I love it that Dad immediately went to the bodily functions for the explanation.

And the son’s got the classy one.

He’s talking about cliffs and falling.

Nice going, Simon. Way to be the adult, kid.

You know, Grant, putting aside the part about pooping in one’s pants, Simon really did ask a nuanced question, didn’t he?

Yes, he did. Bravely asked it, indeed.

Well, we’ve been talking about how questions from kids often make us stop and think about why we say the things we do.

And then there are those funny childhood misunderstandings we still remember.

Joshua Minton left us a voicemail and he said, I couldn’t have been older than four or five playing baseball with all the older neighborhood kids.

They let me have a quote unquote home run.

So all the kids were yelling at me to go home, run home.

My house happened to be across the street, so I thought they all wanted me to leave.

I literally turned around and ran home instead of running the bases.

I think I’ve seen that in a movie.

Well, you know, I had something somewhat similar happen to me when I was probably in junior high and I was on the church basketball team and I had warmed the bench during the first half of the game.

And they put me in in the second half and I had forgotten that they changed which goal you’re supposed to go to at halftime.

And so I stole the ball and I was so proud of myself.

I was running and running and I heard people on the sidelines saying, go, go, go.

And so I kept going to the basket.

I made a layup.

But, of course, what they were saying was, no, no, no.

Oh, no.

Well, at least my team was.

I guess the other team was saying go, go, go.

You scored in the wrong basket.

How long did it take to live that one down, I guess?

I wonder.

I still haven’t.

Nightmare fodder when you can’t sleep.

And when I do sleep, I dream about it.

Yeah, when you do sleep.

You know, I could also identify with this story from Sam in Nichols, New York.

He wrote to say that he was confused as a kid when he heard the song Home on the Range.

You know, it has that line about where seldom is heard a discouraging word.

And little Sam wondered why in the world being out on the range made that word seldom discouraging to cowboys, where seldom is heard a discouraging word.

And I thought the same thing.

I could not for the life of me figure out why that particular word seldom was such a bummer for cowboys.

That’s wonderful.

What an odd parsing of that sentence.

But I get it because it’s an odd phrasing for a child.

It is.

It’s poetic phrasing or literary phrasing.

And we’d love to hear some encouraging words from you.

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