Walkie Talkie (episode #1541)

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. Do you remember the first big word you learned, the one that you just

Couldn’t stop saying after you learned it? Gerald Blondin asked that question on our Facebook group,

And he said that for him, he was about four or five years old, and the word was conflagration,

Meaning a big fire. His grandmother taught him that word. And I was thinking about that, Grant,

The first big word that I learned was logical.

Logical.

To me, I was a tiny kid, and I think it was from Sylvester the Cat, the cartoons where he would say, that sounds logical.

And so I would walk around, you know, I think in diapers, you know, saying, that sounds logical.

And then my dad was a professor at a theological seminary, so theological came very quickly after that.

So I would just, you know, walk around little things saying theological.

Little Martha saying theological.

Yeah.

How about you?

Do you remember your first big word?

I don’t.

I remember my first four-letter word.

Taught to me on the back of the school bus by another naughty child.

Oh, that’s a whole other segment, isn’t it?

Yeah.

The one beginning with F.

We’ll talk about that person to person.

One of our live shows, maybe.

But if you’d like to talk to us about the long word that you learned and what it meant to you, 877-929-9673.

Or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter at W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant.

This is Erica Smith.

Hi, Erica.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Troy, Tennessee.

I’m curious to know if the phrase out in the boonies and the word boondocks originated

Or have anything to do with Daniel Boone, especially since this is kind of a common

Phrase in the South. Is there any correlation?

Well, Erica, we can tell you that that is just a coincidence. They just sound similar.

Well, I guess I can ask, do the word boonies and boondocks mean the same thing?

Yes, yes. And bundoks comes from the Tagalog language of the Philippines.

And in Tagalog, bundok means a mountain and came to mean a remote or wild place.

And during the Philippine-American War, which was 1899 to 1902,

U.S. Service members picked up the word and started using it.

Wow. Okay. Do you hear that word often, boonies and boondocks, or is that just commonly used in the South?

Oh, we hear it out in California.

Yeah, I do.

Really?

But Martha and I maybe aren’t good samples because we’re both kind of half, I’m half Southern, Martha’s full Southern,

And San Diego’s a military community, lots of Marines and stuff.

It’s always had a Marine connection, by the way, boondock and boonies.

It’s got a long history of being tied to Marines and constantly shows up in glossaries and dictionaries connected to the Marines.

Wow.

That’s so interesting.

I have since bought a Southern Slang dictionary for the doctor that I work with so she can kind of keep up with our lingo around here.

Yeah.

I bet that was appreciated.

Yes.

Much appreciated.

Yep.

So there you go, Erica.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate your time.

All right, take care now.

And I love your show.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Okay, bye, Erica.

Bye.

Bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or tell us about that word in email, words@waywordradio.org,

Or talk to us on Twitter at W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

My name is Gwen, and I am in Rosalia, Washington.

Hello, Gwen.

Welcome to the show.

Thanks for calling.

What can we do for you?

So I have a question about the word indifferent.

So I’m kind of confused here because I have three different definitions of the word.

Okay.

So first, there’s my definition, which is not any different, completely ordinary, like indifferent, like the prefix and the base word.

And then there’s my dad’s definition, which is not caring.

I don’t see where that definition came from, but that might just be my vocabulary limits.

And last is my cousin’s definition, which is like in the different, like in the uniques.

So I was wondering which definition is correct and where did the word come from?

What’s its origin?

Your father’s definition is the one that’s widely accepted.

Indifferent is a complicated word, though, because it’s so often used in circumstances where it’s not clear from context what is meant.

And it’s widely misunderstood and widely misused.

And so you might even be reading it in published works where the authors haven’t really used it correctly or themselves haven’t really understood what they’re about when they put it in print in the first place.

And so I’m kind of giving you a pass here.

But go ahead with your father’s definition and you’ll be okay.

It means something like apathetic or having no particular concern or not having a care one way or the other for or against something or not mattering one way or the other.

Something like that.

It’s like not making a difference.

Not making a difference.

It doesn’t make any difference to me.

Yeah.

One way or another.

It doesn’t really matter.

Mm—

Yeah.

You’re going to be in a good place if you just stick with your father’s definition.

Yeah, so the in there, meaning not, has to do with not really making a difference.

Yeah.

Oh, I see that now.

Got it?

Yeah.

Do you all have conversations in the car about language a lot?

Sometimes, because we listen to your show a lot, so.

Right on.

Nice.

Right on.

And how old are you, Gwen?

I’m 10.

Super cool.

We hope you’ll call us again sometime with a question.

I will.

Okay.

Say hi to your dad.

All right. Take care.

Bye.

So just to be clear, that in prefix, that in just means not.

Right.

But it means not different.

It doesn’t mean that it isn’t different.

It means that it’s not differentiated.

It means that there’s no separation between the two sides.

You don’t care if A or B, one or the other.

Right.

We love getting those questions from young folks.

They often ask the best ones.

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

A couple more examples from our Facebook discussion about the first big word you remember learning.

A couple of people talked about words that they learned when they were studying something around the house,

And they didn’t really know what it meant.

Like Olivia Duenelle said that when she was five, she learned the word concentrate,

Which came from Prell concentrate shampoo.

She said, I studied the bottle until I could say and spell that word with no clue what it meant.

And Linda Lohr said that her first word like that was physician.

She said, I was preschool age and it was on the label of the canned milk that was put on the dinner table,

Probably said of the number of physicians who recommend this milk.

She said, I read boxes and cans while conversations of older sisters and parents did not appeal to me.

I had to ask what the word was and then loved the mush of the letters.

Mush of the letters.

Yeah, I can’t tell you the number of cereal boxes that I read as a kid.

And I remember reading the word physician and understanding it as Physican.

I think I was also looking at something that was talking about physician recommended,

And I kept thinking Physican.

It was a long time before I figured out that was physician.

You were reminding me, I had a conversation with my son about breaks,

Holiday breaks and summer breaks and not having books because there was no public library near us

And you couldn’t check books out from school over the breaks.

And reading the backs of boxes and bottles and things.

And he didn’t understand that because, of course, his room is loaded with books.

I’m like, it was just different for me growing up.

I read everything else.

I read my father’s newspapers.

I read his police magazines.

I read my whatever.

I read the mail.

I read whatever I could read.

The calendar, you know.

The inspirational quotes on my mom’s word of the day calendar over the, you know, the prayer of the day over the kitchen sink, whatever it was.

Exactly.

I remember holding a spoon in my fist eating Froot Loops.

And looking at all these cereal boxes that talked about contents may have settled during shipping and handling.

That was like burned into my memory.

I didn’t know what it meant.

Oh, and the other thing, when we bought the new kind of instant oatmeal,

Where the inside of the box had printed games and puzzles on the inside of the box and not just the outside.

What a wonderful day that was.

There was so much more to read at breakfast.

Those were the days, weren’t they?

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Adriana. I’m calling from Miami, Florida.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

In Miami, there’s a big Cuban population.

My family’s Cuban-American.

And we have this word that’s similar to John Doe in English.

And it’s fulanito or fulano.

Some people also say fulanito de tal.

And it basically means John Doe, you know, why are you hanging out with fulano all the time?

And I was just wondering where that came from, since it doesn’t really sound like a name.

Fulano, F-U-L-A-N-O, right?

-huh.

Yeah.

So you’ve known this probably your whole life.

Yeah, my whole life.

Yeah.

And you’ve probably heard it from other Spanish speakers, not just Cubans and Cubans Americans.

Okay.

And you’ve perfectly explained it.

It’s pretty much like John Doe in English, right?

Mm—

Yeah.

This has an incredible history.

It shows the richness and the depth of the Spanish language because it not only goes back to Arabic, it goes back to Egyptian.

Yeah.

It’s one of those great…

Wow, I love knowing this.

Yes.

Yes.

I’m excited.

I’m very excited about this.

So it basically means so-and-so.

Like we use this in English.

We’re like, yeah, so-and-so over there.

He’s going to.

We just mean that a person that we can’t really name because either we don’t want to name them or we don’t know their name or it’s not important to give their name, that sort of thing.

Right.

And so it comes from the Arabic Fulan, probably originally from an Egyptian word meaning this name.

And it’s related to words throughout the Western Semitic language group.

So it’s got this connection to languages that are still spoken throughout North Africa.

Wow.

Yeah, pretty cool.

Also, there’s connections to a word used in Portuguese and the smaller, similar languages used throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

Do you know, let me ask you, Adriana, do you know the Spanish version of Tom, Dick, and Harry when we’re talking about like, yeah, there you were partying on the street with any Tom, Dick, and Harry’s if you didn’t have homework to do?

Do you know what the Spanish version of that is?

I don’t.

I mean, there’s obviously some names that are common in Spanish, like Andres and Jose and Juan.

Have you ever heard of Fulano, Mengano y Zutano?

No, I haven’t.

Or Zutano, Peringano y Perencejo?

No.

Is that what that is?

Yeah, so those are the ones that you might say.

Those might be more Iberian Spanish, like in Spain.

Interesting.

And not so much throughout the Latin American Spanish.

So Fulano, Mengano y Zutano was the Tom, Dick, and Harry.

Yeah, what I always heard in Argentina was Fulano, Fulani.

Oh, Fulano Fulani, yeah. So that’s the first and last name. So there’s a bunch of those. That’s just some of what we know about Fulano. So yeah, it’s a cool word used throughout the Spanish-speaking world, just kind of like the, it’s a placeholder word. But it’s one of those core words that came into Spanish from when the Iberian Peninsula was controlled by the Moors.

Yeah, and that’s really interesting because usually those words start with A-L, right?

Yeah.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you.

This has been great to hear you guys on the other end of my song.

Thanks for calling.

Call again sometime.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

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 we’re joined by that master of daring do with a pen and paper, our quiz guide, John Chinesky.

Hi, John.

How are you doing?

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Coming to you from the flying trapeze high above New York.

Yes, with my daring quizzes.

Here we go.

Every once in a while, I get a quiz idea from Away With Words social media presence.

And this one definitely counts as a sort of by popular request.

Now, there’s this funny list going around titled,

What if the guy who named walkie-talkies named everything else?

Maybe you’ve seen it.

It’s self-explanatory.

Walkie-talkies.

You walk, you talk.

Seems pretty on the nose.

Now, so what if that lazy dude who named them named other things?

Like, for example, socks.

They’re on your feet.

They keep you warm.

They’re not socks.

They’re feety-heeties.

Got it.

Put your feety-heeties on.

Let’s get going.

Here we go.

I’ll describe an item you’re probably familiar with.

I’ll describe its usage.

And you should be able to figure out what the walkie-talkie guy would have called it.

Okay.

For example, a car battery.

It stores electricity, and it’s among the biggest of the things that do.

What would a walkie-talkie guy call it?

Parkie, sparkie.

A large charge?

Largy-chargy.

It’s got to be EE, right?

Largy-chargy, but you’re on the right track, yeah.

So here we go.

A spoon, often used to pick up hot broth-like foods.

Soupy-scoopy.

Soupy Scoopy.

Yes, very good.

Soupy Scoopy, right?

Yeah.

Okay.

A garbage compactor.

It takes refuse and it applies pressure.

Trashy Mashy.

Trashy Mashy.

Yes.

A pillow.

It cradles your noggin when you’re on your mattress.

Betty Heady.

Heady Betty?

No.

Heady Betty Betty Heady.

I’ll take either one of those.

That works.

Yeah.

A defibrillator.

It takes one of your organs and gets it going.

Hearty Starty.

Hearty-starty, right?

Here’s another one.

An oven window.

You use it to keep an eye on what you’re making.

Cookie-looky.

Cookie-looky, yes.

Mortar.

Used to attach building material to other building material.

Sticky-bricky, bricky-sticky.

Sticky-bricky, yes, very good.

Ballet.

The entirety of ballet.

People moving to music in a very elaborate and sophisticated manner.

Dancy francy.

Fancy dancy.

Fancy dancy is right, yes.

How about a perfume shop?

A place where odiferous items are offered in exchange for money.

Smelly celly?

Smelly celly, yes.

My friend works in a smelly celly.

Yeah.

Finally, yeast.

Used to make flour and water get bigger and bigger.

Doughy something.

Doughy goey.

Doughy blowy.

Doughy showy.

Doughy.

Growy.

Growy.

Doughy, guys.

Yes, there you go.

Doughy, growy is another name for yeast.

Nice teamwork there, you guys.

All right.

Thanks, John.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, guys.

If you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your whole story to us an email that addresses words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Cynthia Roemaker from Rancho Santa Fe, California.

Hey, Cynthia. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thank you.

So here’s my thing.

I’m wondering whether movie sets, film sets, have something during production called a linguistic consultant.

And the reason I’m asking is because I recently heard that there, nowadays, probably since the Me Too movement,

There seems to be something called an intimacy consultant on set, which presumably is someone to make sure the actor’s privacy and personal space is respected and so on.

And I was wondering if there might be something similar for linguistics, because admittedly, I’m a linguist and terrible words now.

I was watching a series recently called The Irishman.

This is just one example.

And it takes place, I think, in the 50s.

And they used not just words but several expressions that I personally don’t believe could have been in use at the time.

And the examples I kept track of in my mind were at one point somebody said, it is what it is, hopefully, which is the most inane expression ever.

But I don’t think it might have been in use back then.

Another one was, let’s give it up for so-and-so.

People are applauding.

And the third one, I’ve forgotten right now.

It’ll come back to me.

But at the time, it was just like, it was such an anachronism.

I just thought, no, people didn’t say that then.

So is anybody watching out for that?

So you’re talking about the Irishman, the Martin Scorsese movie that’s on Netflix.

Yes.

I watched some of that.

The movie, it covers a bunch of different time periods.

It hops around historically.

I haven’t watched the whole three and a half hour movie, but that’s a lot to take in one sitting.

And so your question about a linguistic consultant, yes, they do. They have dialect coaches. It just depends on the type of entertainment that they’re making. It depends on the type of movie and TV show. Sometimes the actors themselves will get dialect coaching, individual coaching to get an accent right or to get a mode of speech correct. Sometimes they have to learn a whole new language, for example, for Game of Thrones, that sort of thing.

They do do period work on scripts to make sure that they can iron out real discrepancies and anachronisms, just get that stuff out of there.

But I got to tell you, the big thing about this is it’s still fantasy.

I mean, it’s all fiction.

It’s an approximation of the past.

How could it ever really be exact?

Let me just address the larger point.

You’re expecting your 100% accuracy when it comes to your entertainment.

Yeah, I guess I really am.

Why?

You know, for me, it’s like when you come across a word in a book and it makes you stop in your tracks because for some reason that just doesn’t seem right.

And I feel like it interrupts my flow.

I get distracted by this linguistic thing that I’m thinking, instead of following the trail of the story, I’m going, wait, whoa, no.

Yeah, I understand what you’re saying.

It can be jarring.

And I know that people have had the experience, for example, of watching Downton Abbey and hearing phrases on that series where they think that it’s an anachronism.

And they think, oh, well, that couldn’t have been a phrase that was floating around in the 1920s.

But the truth is that that series is fairly accurate.

And so a lot of times so many words and phrases that we hear that we think are really recent go back a lot farther than we think.

I don’t know about these.

I know you’re right.

Yeah, our intuition is really poor on this.

But I want to get back to this other point is this is all the fakiest fakery that there ever was.

Like, these people are all good looking.

Their lives are very, their lives are interesting, more interesting than your life and my life, right?

It’s all extraordinarily fake.

Like, you can’t expect reality at this.

You can’t expect perfection.

I’m in the time period.

You know, when I’m watching it, I’m like right there.

And I’m thinking, yes, the costumes and, you know, that particular series is all the sort of classic.

Italian-type mobby guy.

Yeah, yeah.

Cynthia, I think what you’re looking for is what I like to call seamlessness.

You know, you want to be completely…

Right, exactly.

Yeah, you want to be completely immersed in that world, however fake the supporting trappings might be.

You want to be completely immersed in that world and not distracted by something that sounds a lot more modern than…

It does, yeah.

It seems, you’re right, jarring is exactly the word.

And I’m not so much, you’re right, looking for perfection as seamlessness.

But I think the other thing is it doesn’t seem to me that it would be that difficult to have a linguistic consultant on the script or on the program, the show, the film, that would just look out for that thing.

I am available.

They can call me 1-877-929-9673.

I have reasonable rates.

They can call me and I will date all of their material for them.

I will figure it out.

I like it.

For the expressions that you gave us, just so you know, let me see if I got these right.

One of them was, let’s give it up for us.

So this was a stage setting where they were a host or was trying to convince the audience to applaud a performer or something like that.

Yeah, or a boxing match maybe.

Yeah, you’re probably right.

Actually, that one, the earliest that I know of is the 1990s for that.

It’s not much earlier than that.

Now, we’ve always asked audiences to applaud people.

But used to, we would say, give a hand, give so-and-so a hand.

But the it now is the hand.

We just don’t say a hand anymore.

And actually probably came around through shows like the Arsenio Hall show.

So, yeah, earlier than 90s probably existed, but it’s not much older than that.

It is what it is.

Oh, right.

So this is the one that people had a real hard time with in the early 2000s.

People just loved to hate on it.

I’ve got to tell you, the earliest use that we found in print,

I say we meaning the people who do word history searches, is 1949.

So it’s got a long history.

And the thing is, it actually holds up very well.

Even if you examine it for tautology, it actually is really good.

It’s a very effective, efficient little phrase that does its job.

Yeah, I’ve seen it in German, too, Es ist Fostig.

Well, I’ve seen it in cartoons.

I am what I am.

Popeye says it.

Oh, yeah.

It’s a real take it or leave it is basically what it’s saying.

It does its job.

I mean, I know people think of it as empty, but it’s in a very effective phrase.

Well, it’s so great to hear both your voices.

Love your show so much.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thank you, Cynthia.

Thank you very much.

Great talking with you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Beth from Spring Hill, Tennessee.

How are you?

Excellent.

How are you doing, Beth?

Welcome to the show.

Good.

I’ve got a question about the word sweet, S-U-I-T-E.

I was born and raised in New Jersey.

I moved down to Georgia when I was about 28 and got into a conversation about bedroom furniture, and a friend called it a suit.

And I’m now living in Tennessee, and I’ve also heard the word bedroom suit in Tennessee, and it just bothers me.

A suit is something a man wears to work.

A suite is a bedroom suite or a suite of furniture.

So I was wondering about the origination of that pronunciation.

So in New Jersey, they say suite for a bunch of bedroom furniture.

Yeah.

Well, that fits pretty much with what we know about the difference between suit and suite.

Both of those terms are applied to a set of bedroom furniture.

And particularly in the South, you’ll see suit, S-U-I-T, applied to that.

And it’s interesting because both of those words go way back to a Latin word that means to follow.

Okay.

And that kind of explains how both of them developed because they both have to do with things that go together, things that are connected.

I mean, as you said, a suit is like a set of clothing that all fits together.

And a suite is, you know, you usually think of that as a group of rooms that are connected and a hotel.

And I’m not sure why those differences occurred in terms of regional differences, but I’m betting it had to do with people coming from different parts of England to this country.

Would that be your guess, Grant?

Yeah, it’s something like that.

There’s an interesting fact that the suit pronunciation used to be one of the old pronunciations of S-U-I-T-E.

So you did have two pronunciations of that word, but they both coexisted and they fixed themselves in different parts of the English-speaking world.

The other thing is the sweet pronunciation is kind of marked as fancy.

It’s Frenchified.

So if you want to seem a little sophisticated, you might say sweet.

I’m sophisticated if I’m from New Jersey.

Well, some people will take the sweet pronunciation just because they want to show that they’re educated.

You know what I’m saying?

But generally, there’s a regional difference here, and you can map it out.

You can literally put pins on a map and show that at least these days that the people who say bedroom suite tend to be everywhere but the South.

And the people who say bedroom suit tend to be in the American South.

So when you can map something like that and show that there’s a regionality to it, you can generally show that it has to do with patterns of settlement and has to do with historical migrations of people from certain parts of the English-speaking world.

Awesome.

Yeah, it’s pretty cool, right?

Well, thank you so much for clearing that up.

Happy to help.

One thing I should say, if you feel like you’re being judged for saying suit or suite, there’s an out.

Just say set instead.

Bedroom set.

A set.

Okay.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure.

All righty.

Very interesting.

I appreciate your time.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling, Vette.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jennifer.

I’m calling from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hey, Jennifer, what’s up?

Well, I have a question.

My mom, ever since I was little and growing up, especially when my brother and I might be fighting or something like that,

She would always say, you better be careful.

You’re going to be in the soup.

And she said that whenever we might get in trouble.

Yeah.

And I have no idea where that comes from.

I know that her mom used to tell that to her as well.

But I understand, like in the doghouse, that means you’re outside with a dog.

But in the soup, I have no idea.

Right.

She didn’t say what kind of soup or anything like that.

No, she never said what kind of soup, just the soup.

So what are we talking about?

Are you serious trouble or just a little bit of trouble?

No, it’s just kind of a little bit of trouble.

Like we were being a little ornery maybe, not being as nice as we should.

So we’re going to be in the soup.

Yeah.

A lot of people think it has to do with a fly in the soup because you think the fly lands there and he dies because it’s hot, right?

Right.

But it’s not the origin as far as we know.

So the whole idea of the fly in the soup is kind of a joke, kind of this trope, really is a modern one, like 1950s or something like that, 1940s.

But it goes back further. The first use we have of being in the soup meaning to be in trouble is the 1880s, 1888 exact.

And the reason we know this is there was a political campaign where Benjamin Harrison defeated incumbent Grover Cleveland for the presidency.

And it was a political catchphrase of that year.

And it kind of caught on that year.

Now, why it came out that year, we don’t know for sure.

But one of the stories is there was a really swanky club.

Think of a gentleman’s club in New York City.

It was called the Hoffman House.

And there was an incident that happened where a waiter spilled soup all over himself, all over his face and his head.

And he ran from the room.

And it was kind of a big deal.

And as he ran from the room in great pain, somebody who didn’t see what happened said, you know, what happened?

And, you know, they were wondering.

And there was this Texas politician named Tom Ochiltree who said with a straight face, he’s in the soup.

Now, this guy apparently was known for his great wit.

And I know that doesn’t sound particularly funny to you, but there was a dryness about it, I guess, that caught people’s whimsy and caught their fancy.

And so this was a line that was repeated widely and for years, I guess.

Supposedly that’s the story but there’s another story this one i like more the word researcher

Barry poppick turned this up george and marie nelson were a comedy team they performed for

Many decades and they had this routine where there’s a family that is a joke they put everything

In the soup they put razor blades in the soup they put human bones in the soup and so this is

Like this vaudeville routine the stage routine and so this sketch comedy act is played for years

And years and years, well before the scene at the Hoffman House. And so there’s this story in the

Newspaper from 1888 that put it this way. The Nelsons are very funny people, and their pet phrase

Soon furnished another byword to the members of a profession who were always ready to catch

Gags from one another. In the soup became a green room synonym for dejection, despondency, defeat.

In time, it leaked out into the big world. So this is 1888. So when this expression popped up

Because during the time of the political campaign,

People immediately said, wait a second,

Why are we all saying this right now?

And the newspapers tried to explain it,

And they caught on to the Nelsons

And this comedy routine that they had going.

So we don’t really know for sure,

But it could have come from either this incident

At the Hoffman House or from George Marie Nelson

And their sketch that was playing everywhere.

Well, how interesting.

I would have never guessed either of those.

Not even close.

I thought maybe in the suit meant you were going overboard

Off the ship’s edge or something like that.

I would have never guessed.

It’s funny because many years later,

In the subsequent years since 1888,

That joke has been made repeatedly

To say that when somebody falls overboard,

They are in the soup

Because obviously they’re in some kind of liquid.

And so a lot of people do assume

That it comes from falling overboard,

But it’s the reverse.

Being in the soup isn’t from falling overboard.

Falling overboard borrowed in the soup

As a kind of secondary meaning of being in the soup.

Does that make sense?

Yeah.

So people made the joke after the soup already existed.

Yeah.

Well, very good.

Thank you so much.

I look forward to talking with my family and letting them know that.

That’s interesting.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thanks, Jennifer.

Yeah.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Stay tuned for more Away With Words.

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.

One of the most powerful and poignant words that I’ve ever come across

Is one that you won’t find in standard dictionaries, not yet at least,

But I’m betting it’s going to end up in some of them eventually.

And that word is endling, E-N-D-L-I-N-G.

And it means the last surviving individual of a species or animal or plant.

And it’s a word with a great story behind it.

Back in the mid-1990s, a physician named Robert Webster was working in a Georgia convalescent center,

And he found himself talking with a patient who mentioned that she was the last surviving member of her family.

Well, he thought about this and the fact that in English, we really lack a word for being at the end of your family line.

So Dr. Webster and a colleague decided to come up with a word for that,

And they thought about last-a-line, like last of the line, or ender, and a few others.

But eventually they settled on the word endling, E-N-D-L-I-N-G.

He liked this word so much that he actually called the editors of Merriam-Webster to say,

Hey, we’ve come up with this word that English needs, and you should include it in the dictionary.

But Grant, as you can imagine, he was turned down.

Right, because it takes more than that phone call.

Right. But in 1996, Webster and his colleague published a letter about this word in the journal Nature, and they expanded on the idea.

They wrote, we need a word to designate the last person, animal, or other species in his, her, or its lineage.

And readers were intrigued, and they wrote in with other suggestions, like ender or terminarch.

And some of them wrote in to say that we already have the word relict that scientists use,

But usually that refers to an entire population of a species, not one individual.

But a few years later, a curator at the National Museum of Australia in Sydney

Was working on an exhibit about the thylacine.

Now, that’s an extinct marsupial that’s also known as the Tasmanian tiger,

That’s spelled T-H-Y-L-A-C-I-N-E. It’s pronounced thylacine or thylacine. And it’s this striking

Looking animal. You can see pictures of it online. It sort of looks like a dog with tiger stripes.

And the last known thylacine died in captivity in 1936. And as it happened, that museum curator

Remembered the exchange in Nature magazine. And in the exhibit, he included the word endling.

And the exhibit and the word caught the imagination of artists and writers.

After that, there was an Australian choreographer who wrote a ballet called Endling.

And then composer Andrew Schultz wrote an orchestral composition called Endling Opus 72 for the Tasmanian Symphony Orchestra.

And he said, this piece flows from a feeling of immense regret and sorrow about all that has been lost from the face of the earth.

And science fiction writers ended up picking up on the idea.

And more recently, historian Dolly Jorgensen has written about the power and attraction of that word endling.

And you’ll appreciate this.

She talks about the attractiveness of the Tolkien-esque suffix and the way it evokes something that’s young and vulnerable, like foundling or duckling.

And in her wonderful book of essays, Animals Strike Curious Poses, Oregon writer Elena Passarello writes of the word endling, the little sound of it jingles like a newborn rattle, which makes it doubly sad.

Oh, how lovely.

Isn’t that something?

And what I think is really interesting is that artists and writers have been picking up on this word and it’s starting to seep into the larger culture.

But it never did come to mean exactly what Dr. Webster had intended it to mean early on, which was the last surviving person.

But there’s something I think about the word endling that is really powerful.

It defines an individual.

It gives an individuality to that last member of a species.

I remember when I was a kid and went to the Smithsonian Institution, and there was a display about Martha, the last passenger pigeon.

And I was kind of rattled to see that.

But giving that pigeon a name really made a difference, I think.

Yeah, and I’m thinking about Ishii, the Native American who was at the University of California, Berkeley, for a long time, showing people how he made arrows, but he was the last of his people.

He was the endling.

He was the endling, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

I like this word, and I bet it’s going to end up in dictionaries.

You think it has a chance?

Yeah, it does, particularly showing up in all those different works from all those different people.

And not as an orchestrated campaign, no pun intended.

But it’s the orchestrated campaigns that tend to fail.

But when it naturally propagates, those are the ones that succeed and has a reason to succeed.

Plus, it does seem perfectly coined, doesn’t it?

I think so.

And the Tolkien-esque part of it, I get.

There was intlings, the children of the ints.

Oh, right.

And then also from the Star Wars universe, there’s the younglings, which are the young Jedi.

The young Jedi are called the younglings.

There you go.

Well, we’ll have to watch and wait.

I know there’s words that you’ve encountered in your reading, something that you came across and you thought,

Well, I think the wider world needs to know this word.

I wonder how I can get that out there.

Well, here’s the show.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Or tell us about that word in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter at W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Shona. I’m calling from San Diego.

Oh, great. Well, what can we do for you?

So I know that the English language has a lot of anomalies,

But I was trying to understand why the number two is pronounced T-O-O

And doesn’t have that wah sound,

Whereas almost every other word in the English language that has a T and a W,

Like twang or tweed, you hear the W.

Oh, interesting.

How did you get to thinking about this?

So I’ve studied a few languages.

I speak Spanish, Hungarian, and Dutch.

And I was speaking with my cousin who’s living in Israel right now.

He’s studying Hebrew.

So we were sort of talking back and forth about all the weird things about the English language

Because it must be so hard to learn as a foreigner.

Oh, my gosh.

Can you imagine?

Yes, absolutely.

Yeah.

And you got to thinking about the two.

Yeah, so the numbers in English are some of the oldest words, and they really have some artifacts in them, don’t they?

They’re these little archaeological projects when you get to looking at them really closely.

So two, T-W-O is a weird one.

You’re right.

It’s got that W.

What is the W doing there?

Any ideas?

We did not come up with any ideas.

We just thought, why isn’t it pronounced TOS, or why isn’t there a second way to say the number two?

Okay.

So as somebody who speaks a bunch of languages, one thing you know about English already is that English has got weird spelling.

The spelling and the pronunciation don’t match very well for a lot of words, right?

Right.

Okay.

So what happened was our spelling didn’t change nearly as fast as our pronunciation.

And that’s one of the things with two.

So it used to be that two was spelled T-W-A, like that.

And the spelling and the pronunciation changed over time.

But when we have that W sound, the wah, wah, wah, and it’s followed by certain vowel sounds,

Sometimes that W sound collapses into the vowel.

It’s just a mechanical thing that’s easier for mouths to do, even for careful, educated speakers.

So it also happened with WHO, with who?

Where did that W go?

We don’t say that W anymore, right?

So that’s why the W sound disappeared, even though the W letter is still in the spelling.

And so we also had something else happen in English, which was the great vowel shift,

Where a lot of vowels just moved around in the whole palette that has changed,

And a lot of vowels moved, and here we are.

I don’t want to get into the great vowel shift and explain that at length,

But just know that at some point over several hundred years,

Vowels moved in English substantially.

You can Google great vowel shift and find out more.

But in any case, the other thing that you should know about two is that W isn’t really useful to say.

It’s not useful for the pronunciation, but it gives us an incredible etymological clue.

It is a phenomenal clue when it comes to finding out about the roots of English,

Because it shows us that the number two is related to all of the Indo-European languages.

It is related to dozens of dozens of languages.

So it is related to zwei, which means two in German, and duo, which means two in Latin.

And again, dozens and dozens of other languages, all descended from an original word and a long lost language that meant two.

Yeah.

Yeah. And so it’s part of this one word to this three letters is part of this small set of words that prove that English is related to this long lost language that most of the European languages and many of the Indo-European languages are descended from.

It’s pretty cool.

Fascinating. Thank you so much. I’m definitely going to Google the Great Vowelship.

Well, thank you so much for answering my question.

I love your show.

It’s the best for us linguist nerds.

Yeah, our pleasure.

Thank you so much for your call.

Call us again sometime.

Okay, I will.

Thank you both so much.

All right, take care.

It’s such an honor to be on the show.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Martin Norheim.

I’m calling from Bostonia in Southern California.

Hey, Martin, welcome.

What can we do for you?

A long time ago, I’ve been working at a machine shop for many years, and I noticed on one of the machines a safety warning to beware of coolant and swarf.

I should not inhale, ingest, or, in other words, get too close to this stuff.

And I’m just kind of curious what in the world the word swarf means and where it comes from.

I can kind of get an idea from the context, but I’m curious to know more about it.

Beware coolant and swarf.

If the word coolant wasn’t in there, I’d be looking for some kind of ogre or some kind of…

Or a law firm.

Yeah, coolant and swarf.

Yeah.

So a machine shop, but you know what swarf is because you work in a machine shop, right?

Yes, I work in a machine shop.

All right, so you tell us.

I can look it up, but I want an expert’s opinion.

Going from the context, I can only assume that it’s some sort of mixture of the coolant,

The particulate that comes from machining a part.

It’s kind of suspended in the air.

Yeah, if you take out the coolant.

Swarf is just the dust created from machine work.

So it’s the filings or the dust from grinding, the powder, the grits,

Stuff that coats your workbench at the end of the day after you’ve been doing production.

Yes.

That’s swarf.

Interesting stuff.

It gets in your lungs.

You can’t have that swarf in your lungs.

It’s deadly.

It was such a funny word.

I can remember laughing out loud when I first read it.

And it’s a verb sometimes, too.

So sometimes you do swarfing on purpose.

You can swarf something because you want to make that dust because it is part of the production process.

And you want something to be covered in the dust or the grit or the powder.

Interesting.

Yeah.

So in any case, it comes to us from a verb that’s connected to the verb to swerve, S-W-E-R-V.

And they both come from an old English verb meaning to rub or to scour,

Basically talking about the going back and forth.

Right.

Yeah.

So and related to old words in a variety of Scandinavian languages.

It’s a very, very old word.

I was wondering about that.

Yeah.

Well, that’s answered a question for me.

Yeah.

Very good.

Thank you so much for your call, Martin.

Glad to talk to you.

I appreciate your help.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye now.

Bye-bye.

SWARF, S-W-A-R-F.

And there was another SWARF, which means to faint or to pass out.

And you might find this in, you know, old Victorian novels, that sort of thing.

I guess all Victorian novels are old.

I kind of like SWARF.

I like SWARF, though.

And I like the idea of the detritus, you know, the stuff that’s left over.

It sounds like a good word for poets.

Concrete dust. If you’ve ever been around drilling or sawing of concrete, that’s a kind of swarf.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Olivia calling from Denver, Colorado.

Olivia, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Hi, Olivia.

Hi. I have been wondering recently about a phrase that I’ve noticed myself using,

Saying that such and such person is good people,

And rather than saying, like, this person is a good person.

And I’m not really sure where that phrase came from

Or kind of why it slipped into my vocabulary,

But I’ve noticed that it kind of has a different meaning

From saying that someone is a good person.

And so I was just wondering what you could tell me about that phrase

And kind of where it’s used and why it’s used.

Ooh, well, tell us about the different sense you have

When you use that phrase as opposed to she’s a good person?

It seems to have more to do with that person being like a cool person

Or a person that’s easy to get along with,

Where I think if you say that someone is a good person,

Then it kind of has to do with their character or their morality or something.

But then using the phrase like she’s good people has to do,

I think more with whether we jive with each other, if that makes sense.

Would you say it’s a little bit more affectionate or a little warmer?

Yeah, I think that’s a good way to put it.

It’s sort of like she’s family.

Yeah, yeah.

Like there’s a kindred spirit almost between me and the other person.

Yeah, there definitely is a different shade of meaning for she’s good people as opposed to she’s a good person.

And we call this an extra grammatical idiom because if you think about it, if you break it down, Sarah’s good people doesn’t really make sense, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

And we have something similar in Spanish, buena gente, which is also plural.

But you could say Juan is buena gente, meaning Juan is good people.

Same thing.

And it’s been around for a long time, actually.

And it’s commonly used in the African-American community.

It’s been used there quite a bit.

And there’s a use without the adjective at all, which is just people, which sometimes is associated with criminal enterprises.

Oh, what do you mean?

So you might say that he’s people.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

Yeah, he’s one of the in group.

Oh, he’s people.

Yeah, he’s people.

By the way, good isn’t the only adjective that goes along with this.

You also find real, great, nice, she’s nice people, she’s great people, she’s real people, and these all go hand in hand.

But also no adjective at all.

She’s people.

I mean, she’s one of us.

She’s our kind.

She’s somebody that you can respect and trust.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah.

Yeah, I find it almost a little bit more self-conscious, too.

If you’re saying she’s good people, you’re making an extra effort to talk about how you feel about that person.

Yeah, I’m thinking about the context in which I’ve used it.

And a lot of times it’s me trying to relay my relationship with person A to person B who doesn’t know them.

Yes, exactly.

I’m trying to transfer this whole complicated feeling at once.

And maybe it’s a new employee has come aboard and need them to know this is somebody that you can get along with.

And I don’t want to have to have them work for months to figure this out.

I need them to get along right away.

She’s good people.

You’ll get along.

Yeah.

That’s basically what I’m saying.

Yeah.

It’s also saying something about your relationship to the other person, right?

Right.

Besides the person you’re introducing.

Right.

Yeah.

Whether or not you know it or not, this is one of my people.

Yeah.

So you need to respect them and trust them because—

They’re one of us.

You need to get along with them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

This is the only way this is going to work out.

Yeah.

That is really interesting.

I hadn’t thought of it that way, but it makes a lot of sense to me.

Olivia, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

We can tell you’re good people.

Yeah, thank you both.

It was great talking with you.

Take care.

Call us again sometime.

Okay, thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, you’re all our good people.

We hope that you good people give us a call at 877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter at W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Thanks to senior producer Stephanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felton,

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.

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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.