A Gazelle on the Lawn

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Martha, ever since there was a fire in our building, the language of fires and firefighters have been on my mind.

You knew about the fire, right?

Well, not in our building.

In my building, in my home, there were nine people in my building who were forced out into the street at 3 a.m. one morning because an apartment downstairs caught fire.

Everybody was fine, although I’m afraid their place was gutted and we were out of ours for a few days.

But it was interesting to see and to hear the language of the firemen on the job, constant radio crackle and talk and chatter, and they have their own lingo and stuff.

But I was really kind of thinking about the fundamental parts of English, the sayings that we have that are related to fires that I kind of didn’t even realize that it played such an important part in the lexicon.

Even things like fire in the hole, right? That’s what you’d say before you do something dramatic, but it originally comes from setting off dynamite, right? You drill.

Oh, is that right?

Yeah, you put dynamite in there, you light it, and you go, fire in the hole!

And then everybody’s going to addle so they don’t get blown up.

But in the modern world, you send a flame email, right?

A flaming email?

Right, a flame email.

You have a flame war with somebody.

You send vicious, angry messages back and forth.

You can fight fire with fire by using somebody’s own tactics against themselves.

You can burn something up.

You can burn it down.

You can burn it off.

You can burn it out.

You can burn it in.

It’s like all these different ways that we’ve built into English kind of clues to the importance that fire has or has had to us.

Right, right.

And I assume all languages are the same because fire is one of those things that we share with the entirety of the human race.

Right, right.

Keep the home fires burning.

To have fire in the belly, to play with fire.

You’re fired on fire.

A firestorm.

And more and more I’m hearing people say he was on fire for this or he was on fire for that, you know?

Mm—

Yeah, it means that he’s really passionate for it and wanted it a great deal, right?

And if somebody’s on fire, say a sports star is on fire, that means that they’re doing particularly well.

Right. They’re probably not going to get fired from the team.

Grant, I love the image of you standing out there, you know, your most precious possessions around you.

And here you are in your underwear.

Yes, I had my computer and my cell phone. No, I’m kidding.

And you’re taking notes. You’re following the firefighters around, taking notes on their jargon and slang.

How much do I love that?

I took a few pictures, too.

Well, fire up your email program and drop us a line if you have a question about grammar or the origin of a word or phrase or regional dialects or slang.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

You can also call us.

That number is 1-877-WAYWORD.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Well, hi.

Hi, this is John Burnap calling from our nation’s capital.

Well, welcome to the program.

John, what’s going on?

Yeah, what can we do for you?

All kinds of stuff.

You know, I got a question.

You guys have such an awesome, fun show, and I’ve learned a lot, which is good, because my mom said I was supposed to learn at least one new thing every day.

All right.

Have you guys ever heard of the term gazelle on the lawn?

Gazelle on the lawn?

Gazelle, like an animal with antlers it leaps about.

Is that like pants on the ground?

Pants on the ground.

Pants on the ground.

Have you ever heard that term?

That’s part of a rugby song, I think.

No, so it’s nothing to do, it’s not like pink flamingos, like maybe in the south they do flamingos, in the north they do gazelles? I don’t know.

Now, let me tell you how my family used it.

This is something that my family would use when we were eating dinner, typically a Sunday dinner.

The house I grew up in, or the house I got older in, actually, I hope not to grow up, had a large glass window in the dining room.

And when guests were over, our parents taught us that instead of pointing out to someone in your family that they had left something on their face from the last bite, they would say very politely and subtly, excuse me, mom, gazelle on the lawn.

And then the guests at the table would look up and look outside, and it would draw their attention away from the fact that my mom could then pick up her napkin and wipe her face.

-ha, very good, yes.

Don’t tell me that’s a burn app only thing.

Well, I’m delighted to be able to tell you that it is not a burn app only thing.

Cool.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s at least 100 years old.

Oh, no.

Actually, maybe I should wait to be excited and figure out where exactly it comes from.

It may not be good.

Well, you know, I can do a little bit of digging right here on the spot.

And I’ve come up with a couple of things to tell you.

First of all, if you want some background on this term, I highly recommend the Family Words book by Paul Dixon.

He has an entry for this.

It’s always the same story.

You’re at the dinner table.

Somebody has got some food on their face in an awkward place.

And so just a polite way of nudging them and saying, you’ve got food on your face, you say, there’s a gazelle in the garden.

I assume this is when you’re having dinner with the minister and you don’t want to, you know, you’re putting on your best behavior.

I don’t know.

Something like that.

Actually, that’s exactly right because our next door neighbor was the minister.

There we go.

How did I know?

You’re really good.

Listen, how about a lottery ticket number for next week’s Powerball?

But, John, this would only work one time.

And I could see, you know, saying, oh, is that the mailman or something?

But gazelle on the lawn, I mean, that’s so ridiculous.

Doesn’t it call attention to the crumbs in the beard anyway?

Wait, wait.

You say it would only work one time.

That assumes that we only had one guest that we would invite over?

Well, no.

I’m just saying how weird is it?

We had friends.

Whatever those other people have said about my family was not true.

We had friends who would come over to eat.

The late night digging in the yard meant nothing.

John, I can imagine saying, hey, look, a golden retriever, but gazelle on the lawn?

Wait, a lot of our euphemisms work this way.

We all know what they mean.

We all know, right?

We say the F word instead of actually saying the actual word.

And everyone knows what we mean, but we get away with it because we didn’t actually go all the way.

We went 99% of the way.

I don’t know.

We got a lot of pretty strange looks when we would say gazelle on the lawn.

That’s nice.

I bet you did.

That’s nice.

There’s a retriever in the tree.

There’s a retriever in the tree.

Let me share something with you, and I don’t know that this is the origin of it, but I love this little anecdote that I found.

This is in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, the November 1906 issue.

He has this right.

There’s a story here from the southern part of the Arabian Peninsula, which is basically now Yemen and part of Oman, I think.

Here’s the story.

It’s a short version of the story.

There are two men and their sons eating at a table.

And the father of one of the men gets some rice in his beard.

And the son says to him, Father, there’s a gazelle in the garden.

And his father says in response, We have sent after it the five expert shots.

And he takes his hand and he brushes the rice away from his beard.

So that was the response that he basically calling his hand, his five fingers, the five expert shots to go get the gazelle to shoot it.

Very interesting.

And so the other father sees this and later he tells his son, well, why don’t you say that the next time this happens at our dinner table?

Then everyone will think that you are clever and that I have raised a clever son.

Unfortunately, the next time that happens, the other little boy says, father, you know that thing you said yesterday?

Oh, it’s in your beard.

The father says, no, no, no.

Your mother’s an ox because, you know, the son didn’t get it right.

You know, he kind of ruined this whole, you know,

They wanted to look incredibly clever and incredibly, you know,

Mannered and cultured and stuff.

What’s interesting about this story to me, most interesting,

Is that in Arabic, the word for garden is often used as a simile for the beard.

And so it actually works very well in Arabic in a way that might not be obvious in English.

Oh, that’s really interesting.

You get a double layer there.

But then again, this is exactly the same thing that you use, only it’s a story translated from Arabic into English more than 100 years ago.

That’s very cool.

Yeah, isn’t it?

Now, I’m going to go share this with my family, and they’re going to think I’m really bright and clever.

Well, our pleasure.

That’s the idea.

You don’t have to tell them about us.

No, I will.

I will.

I’ll tell them about you because I think plagiarism is the highest form of flattery, and I’ll tell them that you guys were the smart ones that dug it all up.

Well, you know, whoever wrote this article for the journal 100 plus years ago, they get all the credit.

John, this has been fun.

Keep doing what you’re doing and keep edumacating us with those words.

Thank you for your call.

You have a great day.

You too, John.

Bye-bye.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Grant, the Tom Swifties keep coming into our mailbox, and I have a couple of others from listeners that are just great.

Let me tell you one, or you guess what it is.

How about that?

Okay.

I have a spotless driving record, Martha said, recklessly.

Oh.

Call us with your Tom Swifties, 1-877-929-9673, or send them to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Cassandra from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Cassandra. Welcome.

Hi, Cassandra.

Hi. I have a question for you.

Good.

We just had a baby, and we didn’t want to have a shower or a sprinkle, I guess, with your second child.

A sprinkle?

And we wanted to know, we wanted everybody to come over and meet the baby, but we can’t find a word for a party like that.

First of all, congratulations. Babies are wonderful.

What’s the baby’s name?

The baby’s name is Nicholas.

Nicholas.

Okay.

So you want to know what you’d call that party.

Something other, I assume, than a welcome home party.

Welcome baby party.

Show and tell.

A kiss and cry.

A kiss and cry.

A kiss and cry is cool.

That’s the Olympics.

Yeah.

I’ll tell you, there is a name for this event where you have people, family and friends, come over to the house to meet the baby.

Of course, you can call it a newborn party or a meet the baby party.

But a lot of people call it a sip and see, as in sipping wine and seeing the baby, a sip and see.

Or sipping coffee.

Or sipping coffee or sipping tea or milk or what have you.

Well, yeah, the baby will be sipping milk, I guess.

Yeah.

So there’s a word out there.

A lot of people use it.

If you Google this, you’ll actually find a lot of great instructions on how to throw a really successful sip and see without stressing the new mother and without stressing the new baby.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

We looked everywhere and we couldn’t find anything.

And so is this your first child or do you have a couple?

This is our second child.

Second, okay, very good.

And how is it with two?

My wife and I are discussing this, and I really want to know.

Two’s not as bad.

Well, we spaced them about four years apart.

Not as bad, you say?

Not as bad as everybody has led me to expect.

Oh, I bet it’s beautiful, right?

Yeah, they’re really great.

Well, congratulations on the baby, Cassandra,

And thank you for giving us a call today.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate that.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, bye.

Well, if you need a word, call us 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, I have a riddle for you.

Please.

The lazy schoolboy hates my name, yet eats me every day.

But those who seek scholastic fame to hunt me never delay.

What am I?

Oh, the lazy schoolboy.

It’s not candy bar.

It’s thyme?

Is it thyme?

No, no.

It’s roots, but two meanings of roots.

Roots of words and roots you can eat.

Oh, man.

That’s an old-fashioned one.

That’s from more than 100 years ago.

Send us your questions about language to words@waywordradio.org

Or give us a ring-a-ding on the telephone to 1-877-929-9673.

Coming up, can our quiz guy outsmart us this time?

Nah.

Stay tuned for a puzzle on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Hiya, Greg.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

Hi.

Hello, buddy.

What’s going on there?

You know, I’m coming out of my obsession with the Olympics.

Yeah.

Trying to recover.

Yeah.

It’s like being in the 12-step program.

I have it all on DVR so I can watch it over and over and over again.

Oh, that’s scary.

We have a quiz there for us, a puzzle, something amusing.

This week we’re going to have twice as much fun because the quiz is all about words with two sets of the same double letter.

Okay.

Basically, I’ll give you a clue for a word or a phrase that has two sets of double letters in it, and you guess the answer.

Okay.

Okay.

For example, I might say the place where you learned the three R.

Wait, are the letters next to each other, right?

No, the pairs of letters are next to each other.

So a pair of letters in one place and a pair of letters in the other.

Okay, very good, right.

Okay, well school has one L.

Oh, no, maybe it’s school something.

You’re right, school something.

It’s not the new school.

School door.

No, that’s spelled N-E-W.

School room.

Oh, school room.

School room.

Oh, okay, school room.

Oh, this is going to be tough for him.

It’s going to be good.

All right, so let’s try some of these.

Okay.

All right, here’s your first one.

A flighty person.

The letter is B as in boy.

A flighty person is a…

Jabber, jibber, jibber jabber.

That’s another good one I almost used.

Boy.

Jibber jabber.

Flighty.

Fliberty jibbit?

Fliberty jibbit.

Oh, crazy.

All right, here’s one that’s a hyphenated word, meaning spontaneous or informal.

I can tell you that the letter that’s doubled twice is F.

Daffy D…

Boy, this is tough.

You mean spontaneous or what?

Or informal.

It’s not riffraff.

It’s not…

Like you go, you know, you have a conversation with a reporter and there’s on the record.

Off the cuff.

Off the cuff.

Oh, there we go.

Oh, excellent.

All right.

Here’s one you’ll get quickly.

It’s the name of a Rossini opera whose overture was used for the Lone Ranger theme song.

Well, tell.

William Tell.

William Tell.

There you go.

Two double L’s in his name.

How about this 1960s expression of approval used in response to an attractive man or woman?

Hippie dippie.

No, that’s not right.

No?

Cool.

Cool daddy-o.

Oh.

That’s nice.

No, that doesn’t work.

That’s nice.

It doesn’t have double.

It has three Ds and three Os, but not four of any of them.

Hubba hubba.

Oh.

Hubba hubba.

Hubba hubba.

There you go.

Brings you back, doesn’t it, Martha?

That’s from the 1960s?

Yeah.

All right.

Here’s a couple more.

Here’s one with a double, double P in it.

And the clue is fen-phen and similar drugs.

Okay.

Fen-phen is a weight loss drug.

But it’s also illegal.

And how does it help you lose weight?

PP.

It makes you pee.

Yeah.

PP a lot.

It’s a diuretic, right?

I don’t know if it does that.

It does something else that involves lots of peas.

Really?

Four peas.

If you want to lose weight, one way to do it is to stop eating so much.

Right.

So in order to stop eating so much, you need to do what?

Suppress your desire to eat.

Suppress appetite.

Appetite suppressant.

Appetite suppressant.

Oh, there we go.

There you go.

Wow.

Here’s a proper noun.

It’s the name of a certain hairless bear.

A hairless bear?

No, grizzly isn’t hairless.

It’s a proper noun.

It’s the name of a certain hairless bear.

Who has a hairless bear?

Fuzzy Wuzzy.

Fuzzy Wuzzy, of course.

Fuzzy Wuzzy was a bear.

Fuzzy Wuzzy had no hair.

Oh, of course.

I knew you’d finally be on a roll if we went back to, like, children’s rhymes.

All right, I’ve got another set of these that I call double, double, doubles.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

This sounds like the Olympics.

Exactly.

Speaking of the Olympics, there are two answers to each clue.

Two possible answers.

Okay.

And each of them has the same double pair of double letters.

Oh, Lord have mercy.

Let’s have it then.

Okay.

How about two answers for this one?

A word meaning gossip that has two pairs of double Ts.

Scuttlebutt.

Scuttlebutt.

Oh, good.

One.

Prattle.

No.

Scuttlebutt.

Very good.

The other one is a little less common.

Might also mean someone who tells on somebody.

Tattletail.

No.

I like that.

Tattletailing.

Tattler.

Tattle.

I’m looking for tittle-tattle.

Tittle-tattle.

Okay.

Very good.

A word for gossip.

Mm—

All right.

And let’s finish off, if we may, with some triple doubles.

Oh.

These are phrases, actually in one case a word, but also phrases that have three pairs of the same double letter.

Wow.

Never before attempted on the radio.

Yeah, exactly.

This is the Sean White of puzzling right here.

This is going to be massive.

Yeah.

Epic.

Epic, dude.

Epic.

Here’s your clue.

Pardon me, but have you seen this?

The Chattanooga Choo Choo.

Chattanooga Choo Choo.

Oh, wow.

Three double O’s in that phrase.

Wow, that was massive, Grant.

Epic.

Hide me, but I’ll hide it.

And this one, I’ll give you one more.

This is a single word, three pairs of double S’s, what poker players try to exhibit facially.

Poker players?

You want to have a poker face?

You don’t want to give any tells, any clues?

You want to look cluelessness?

Oh, you’re on the right track.

Really?

Yeah.

Lessness at the end is really good.

Oh.

A smile is an example of a facial blank.

Expressionlessness.

Expressionlessness.

There we go.

Yeah.

Woo!

Wow, this was a hard one.

We’re just going to change this to the comeuppance section of the show.

I’m sorry.

I haven’t a clue.

Everyone thought you were experts until now.

Totally destroyed that illusion.

Oh, man.

Yeah, but I’m sure some of our listeners did really well on this.

Greg, this was huge.

This was hard, but it was fun.

It was massive and epic.

You guys are good sports.

Thank you.

If you’d like to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation, or words and how we use them, the number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And don’t forget, you can stay in touch with us all week on Twitter.

We’re there under the username WayWord.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Elizabeth, and I live in Tallahassee, Florida.

Well, welcome to the program, Elizabeth. We’re glad to have you.

Thank you. I’m calling because I have a pet peeve with the word realty.

-huh.

Most people mispronounce it, and it just drives me a little nutty.

Do you think we should change the spelling?

Absolutely not.

Just wondered.

I know.

I know what you mean.

Give me some examples.

Okay, I have this friend who owns a real estate company, and I called him up one day, and he answers the phone, Smith Realty.

I said, John, you’re a realtor, and you don’t even know how to pronounce the word.

Can you pull out your business card and look at the word realty?

You know, and he, of course, he’s never changed saying it.

And then I have this girlfriend, and she always mispronounces it, realty, real-a-dor.

And I’m Karen.

The word is real-tor, realty.

And she says, well, I’m from North Carolina, and that’s the way we pronounce it.

I said, Karen, it’s not a colloquialism.

It’s mispronounced.

But I just thought it was funny.

I heard your show one evening a couple of weeks ago.

I said, I’ve got to call somebody about realty.

Do you feel better now, Elizabeth?

I really do.

I finally got someone that will listen to me.

Most people go, yeah, yeah, whatever.

I guess we better not say that, Grant.

No, no.

No, seriously, I feel your pain.

It’s not a regional kind of thing as far as I can tell.

It’s just people misunderstanding, mispronouncing the word.

Well, I understand why they do it.

It’s because real estate, you know, two different words.

And so they just transfer that over to the singular word, you know.

And what’s going on there linguistically is what we call metathesis, where the letters, they do a do-si-do right there in the middle of the word in terms of the pronunciation.

And you know what?

I used to drive every day past a realty college.

Yeah.

Every time I would look at it, I would think it said reality college.

And I was thinking, I know some people who need to go there.

In fact, I need to go to reality college.

I think I do, too.

It’s a tricky word, right?

Yes.

Well, you know, words change over the years, you know.

You’re right.

They get by how they’re, you know, used.

And they’ll just say, well, let’s just change it.

You’re right.

And we all have different pronunciations for things.

In fact, I think you and I pronounce the word R-E-A-L a little bit differently.

Real?

Yeah, I was just sitting here listening to you.

You’re cracking up to myself because it sounds a little more like real than it does real.

Well, now see, that could be my southern accent.

Yeah.

It’s a fine line between mispronunciation and an accent, though.

Right.

Oh.

Right, right.

You’re fine.

It’s a legitimate pronunciation.

Actually, there are pockets of that.

I call it the meal-mill merger.

You’ll find that around the country where people, those vowels are starting to become more like each other.

And there’s an interesting thing to be said about Realty and Realtor, and that is that Realtor has two, at least two, legitimate pronunciations, Realtor and Realtor.

And so it’s already made the transformation to having two different legitimate ways to be said.

Realty probably is, as you say, Elizabeth, not far behind in having two legitimate pronunciations.

But the thing is there’s that schwa sound before the L that tends to get transposed with the L, as Martha was saying, the metathesis.

And that’s what’s throwing people.

It’s just it sounds more natural in the mouth.

It feels more right for the L to precede that schwa sound.

I see.

Elizabeth, I’m glad that you’re relieved and you’re feeling better.

You should go and have some cake and ice cream.

I think I will.

Top it off, you know, have a good day.

A few cherries on top and maybe a stiff drink.

Oh, yeah. All of the above.

All of the above.

Thank you for calling. Thanks for listening.

We’re glad to talk to you.

Okay. Thank you.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Sometimes you just got to get that stuff off your chest.

You do.

And you can do that by calling 1-877-929-9673.

They can also send an email to words@waywordradio.org, and they can talk to other listeners on our discussion forums at waywordradio.org/discussion.

Hi. You have A Way with Words.

Good morning. This is Paris Romero in Fallbrook, California.

Hello, Paris.

What’s on your mind today? What can we do for you?

My mother and I are having an argument that’s lasted more than a year.

Wow.

Are you still speaking?

You must be tired.

We’re still speaking. We love each other, so arguments are just for fun.

Okay, okay.

My mother is multilinguistic.

She was born and raised in Denmark and then moved to the United States when she married my father.

So words and using words and the content of them is a frequent conversation with us.

And the current argument is about the word text.

We have cell phone plans with me and my children, and we are texting each other.

But when I just completed a text, mother says that I just text.

And I say, no, I texted.

So for her, text is both the present and the past tense of the verb to text.

Correct.

Right.

There’s no E-D there for her.

Correct.

Well, the thing is, we’ve got a dilemma here.

We have a problem.

You now have to tell your mother that she’s wrong.

Yay.

Maybe text her.

Yeah, maybe text her.

Just break it to her.

So she doesn’t swat you or something.

Here’s the thing.

She’s not the only one to make this claim.

The problem with text is it ends with that T sound that sounds a little bit like it already has the past tense affixed to it.

It already sounds like an ED word kind of, right?

And for a lot of people, the sound of the word alone is sufficient to make it feel and act like the past tense form.

And so I can get it.

And there are many people since text messaging and texting became popular who’ve made the same argument that she’s made.

She’s definitely not alone in that.

But if you look at the evidence and you look at all of the authorities on the subject, the dictionaries and the grammarians and so on and so forth,

And even if you just look at the popular usage of this verb, by far and away to something like a value of five nines, as they say in the science world and the computing world,

That is 99.999% of the time people prefer the ED form.

But in any case, so your mother’s wrong in this.

Now your dilemma is how do you tell your mother you’re wrong so that she feels like she won?

Well, I’m not going to send it to her in a text because then she’ll just hit delete.

She won’t get it.

More than likely, I’m going to do it, and I’m going to do the happy dance,

But I’ll probably first tell her you’re number two, which is our family slogan.

We’re number two.

We’re number two.

So I’ll have her do the chant and do the happy dance,

And then I’ll tell her she’s wrong, and that’s why she’s number two and I’m number one.

Well, Paris, thank you so much for calling today.

Thank you so much for helping us end the argument.

Okay, stretch before you do that happy dance, okay?

Yes, I will.

Okay.

Thank you, Paris.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Good day.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us with your arguments.

We’ll make your house and home a happy place.

1-877-929-9673.

Or at least we’ll sow some more discord.

You can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have another Tom Swifty for you.

Yes.

Go to the back of the boat, the captain said.

I don’t know.

The back of the boat is called the…

Aft?

No.

I don’t know.

Sternly.

Oh, sternly.

I was trying to give you a clue.

Go to the back of the boat.

Yeah, I know.

I know.

Send us your Tom Swifties, words@waywordradio.org, or call us 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Wally from New York City.

Hi, Wally. Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

Where are you calling from in New York?

Queens.

Queens. Where in Queens?

Jackson Heights.

There we go. I know Jackson Heights. I lived in Astoria for a while myself.

I like Astoria.

Do you have Astoria for us?

Yeah. I’m originally from outside of Athens, Georgia.

Oh, okay.

And I have a question about a word my mother uses.

And the word is swanee.

And how would she use it?

She would say, well, I, Swanee.

And she would use it to express mild surprise or mild disbelief.

It’s very similar to phrases like I declare or I never or you don’t say along those lines.

Do you use it yourself?

I never have.

You know, thinking back, maybe my mother is the only person I’ve ever heard use it.

You don’t hear it in New York?

I’ve never heard it in New York.

They don’t use that in Hindi in Jackson Heights.

They don’t.

What’s up with those New Yorkers?

I heard this all the time growing up from my Virginia-born mother.

Really?

I swan him off, Anne.

And she used it exactly the way you do.

It’s a very Southern expression.

And the idea there is, I swear, but it’s a little bit more delicate than I swear.

A little more polite.

A little more polite.

That’s right.

And the idea there is probably that it goes back to a dialectal term in England,

I swan ye.

It’s short for I shall warrant you.

That is sort of like I swear, right?

I swan ye.

I warrant you that this is the truth.

So just a corruption over time, let it turn out to be swan-y?

Yeah, and I love it.

Nothing to do with the river, of course.

No, no, nothing to do with the swan-y river.

I wondered.

Yeah, yeah.

So if somebody said that to you in a deli or something there, what would that do?

How would that feel?

That would be out of place.

Yeah, I just…

Oh, definitely.

Yeah, yeah.

I remember moving from Kentucky to upstate New York to go to college,

And it was such a culture shock.

I’m sure you experienced the same thing, huh?

Absolutely.

Well, how did we do?

Well, is that enough?

That’s perfect.

Okay, great.

That’s great.

Thank you for calling us.

Thanks for bringing back those memories.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you’ve got a question about something that your mother said,

Something old-fashioned, something quaint, something that makes you think of home,

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for more of your calls about language, next on A Way with Words.

A Way with Words is sponsored in part by iUniverse, supported self-publishing.

Is there a book in you?

Information available at 1-800-AUTHORS or online at iUniverse.com.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back we had a call about false friends,

You know, those words and phrases in other languages that look like English words,

But they aren’t really, like the fact that the word gift in German, G-I-F-T, means poison,

And the word in French for bread looks like the English word pain, P-A-I-N.

Well, that prompted some lively letters from listeners.

Kathy wrote from the University of Maryland to say,

As a cataloger, I sometimes notice what is awaiting processing at another person’s desk.

More than a decade ago, I was surprised to see a book with the title, Die Marx Brothers.

Imagine my relief when I realized the title was in German.

And Hope wrote to us from St. Paul, Minnesota.

She said, when my college-age son returned from visiting Armenia, he was delighted to show us his favorite purchase, a box of soap powder called Barf.

Now, this sounded too good to be true, Grant.

So I did some digging, and it turns out that there is indeed a detergent named barf.

What?

Yes, yes.

No way.

Yes, and if you go online, you can find all sorts of photos of barf detergent.

And it turns out that the reason is because the Farsi word for snow is barf.

So it makes sense that something that’s supposed to get your clothes nice and clean is going to be called by the word that means snow.

In this case, barf.

Very good.

And supposedly this is a popular detergent in the Middle East,

And something tells me that the manufacturer is probably also doing a booming business

Among tourists who buy the detergent just so they can go home with a box of barf.

Smell my clothes.

I wash them in barf.

But, you know, I’m also sure that turnabout is fair play,

And they’re probably English words that cause no end of hilarity for people who speak other languages as a first language.

So we’d love to hear about those.

Or if you brought home a souvenir from another country because you were so tickled by a box of barf or something else,

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email about it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nancy Gratch from Danville, California.

Hi, Nancy.

Well, hello, Nancy. Welcome to the program.

Oh, thank you. I’m tickled to be talking with you both.

Great. What’s up?

Well, I have been wondering, as I’ve been trying to expand my culinary skills,

Why when some foods are dried, their name completely changes.

Case in point, grapes to raisins and plums to prunes,

And actually a whole host of other products, but those are my two big ones.

Are you discussing this with family and friends, or how did this?

Well, I have been visiting this foodie website for recipes. And there’s a little place where you can blog about this, that, and the other. And I started off thinking about this when I was making enchilada sauce. And it turns out that most chilies, when they’re dried, in fact, virtually all chilies when they’re dried, changes names. And so I started blogging about this, and everybody started piping in. Apparently, this is confusing to a lot of people.

Okay. Right, right. Yeah. Yeah, I could see that being a problem. And what about food that is the same food item, but it has a different name? Remember our famous green pepper and mango call, Martha?

Oh, yeah. Oh, yes. Yes, I had that discussion about garbanzo beans and chickpeas. Mm— another thing as well. They’re not the same thing, garbanzo beans and chickpeas?

I think they are. Okay. But so many recipes. I guess it’s regional. I hope you can tell me a little more about that. But when I started blogging about it, there were a lot of people that either said, I didn’t know garbanzo beans were chickpeas, or if they were on the east, it was, I didn’t know chickpeas were garbanzo beans.

Well, the grape and raisin thing, I think, and the plum and prune thing, we can talk. That’s definitely a language answer there, right, Martha? We get raisin and prune from the French. And in French, a grape is a raisin. It’s spelled the same way, just pronounced differently. And in French, a plum is a prune. It’s spelled the same way. And when we borrowed the words for grape and raisin, and we borrowed the words for plum and prune, we borrowed them at different times through different paths and different language channels. And so when they showed up in English, they became kind of differentiated for two different names for the same food item in kind of two different conditions.

And it’s kind of the same thing that’s happening with peppers. The peppers have an extra element, though. When peppers are cured, when they’re sun-dried, a lot of times other things are done to them, and they take on the name of the process by which they are dried, or they take on the name of the place which started that particular kind of drying for that particular kind of pepper. They’re different ingredients, right? That’s the key is. A dried pepper is a very different thing from a whole fresh pepper.

Yeah, and think about cucumbers and pickles. Right, exactly. Yeah. So all these different reasons. But the key is I think what solved this for me years ago is just treating them as separate ingredients. And they are not the same thing. You would almost never use a dried pepper in the same place that you would use a fresh pepper. Or a dried grape. Very good. Almost never, right? Plums and prunes, the same story. You’d almost never use them.

So in my house, we have a joke that garlic powder is an ingredient because we use garlic powder all the time, but would never substitute it for a recipe that requires whole, fresh, crushed garlic or roasted garlic or any other kind of garlic because it’s an incredibly different ingredient. It does a different thing and serves a different purpose. And it comes into the dish in a different part of the cooking process. And peppers, it’s very important to add them at the right part of the process, the right part of the cooking, so that you get the right results.

And, Nancy, I think you’ve keyed in on something that’s very true for food names and flower names. Sometimes they’re just kind of squishy, and people call different foods different things around the country. Same with flower names. A lot of times the names aren’t consistent across the botanical world. And I guess since we’re plants, all life is like that.

Yeah. Some of the birds, there’s a bird out here in California called Stellar’s Jay. It’s a beautiful blue bird. It’s not as raucous as the ones you find in the Midwest. And it has something like 11 different common names. And that’s the other trap, is trying to make sure you’re always talking about the same plant or the same ingredient by the same name.

Yeah, and certainly as these websites develop, we learn a little bit about each other on each side of the coast. Yeah. So, Nancy, good luck with your cooking.

Yes, well, I feel so much better informed that I won’t be so resentful now when I have to call something a raisin. Because I understand it a little bit better. So thank you very much.

Excellent. Thank you for calling, Nancy. It was a pleasure to talk to you. All right. Thanks for helping out. Okay. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about food words we’d love to answer, then we always do. 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D. Or send an email. We’ll both read it to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi. You have A Way with Words. Hi. This is Kara Foster from Rockwood, Tennessee. Well, hi, Kara. Hello. How are you? Welcome to the program. Hi, Rob.

Well, I have this question my husband and I have been wondering about. I’d like to know where we get the notion of the boogeyman. Oh, the notion or the term for it? Well, the term for it, what’s the history behind that, if you know any of that? Where did people start picking up the boogeyman will get you? Or that’s something I grew up hearing. -huh. And why were you and your husband talking about it?

Well, I think I have an idea from some traveling about where it came from. Somebody once told me, this person told me while I was in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, I was looking at a statue of one of the slave leaders, and someone told me that the expression, the boogeyman, comes from him, his name being Bokman, I think, and he started with one of the leaders in the slave revolt that led to Haiti’s freedom. I hadn’t even heard that one.

Yeah, I haven’t heard that either. What year would that be? Do you remember? I think probably late 1700s, close to 1800. Sounds a little late, doesn’t it? Yeah, it’s late. There are a wide variety of terms that are like bogeyman, bogeyman, bogey, boggart. Actually, if you know the Harry Potter stories, you know what a boggart is, right?

Right. There are a wide variety of terms that are all very similar, one-syllable or two-syllable. Bogle, bogey, boggart, boogie, bogeyman, bogeyman. They’re all probably related. They all have these generally negative contexts. A lot of them are used to refer to some vague, mysterious demon or imp or some kind of evil in the darkness that you don’t really know about this thing that might somehow get you. And it’s usually pretty ill-defined, although you do find it pop up with a lot of terrifying description and folk tales and folk stories. There’s some speculation that it goes back to some Welsh words and perhaps that the roots of this lie in the deepest parts of the Celtic and the Anglo-Saxon origins of some of the British dialects of the British Isles. I think it’s important to note that we have this group of words with the B and the G sounds and even hobgoblin fits into this.

And goblin itself, a lot of these words have these same sounds and it wouldn’t surprise me to find that somewhere along the way they’re all related to the thing that might get you in the dark that preyed upon people. I don’t know. So Kira, bottom line is we don’t know, but we know it’s earlier than the revolt in Haiti.

Okay. Okay. Well, thanks. You’ve cleared up something, though. It’s good to know. Yeah. Sometimes that’s all we can do. Yeah. Well, thank you. Well, thanks a lot. Our pleasure, Kira. And be good because you know who will get you if you don’t.

Thank you. I appreciate it. Okay. Bye-bye. Okay. Bye.

Well, if there’s a word that’s tickled your curiosity, we’d love to hear about it. 1-877-929-9673. Or you can ask us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, I have a riddle for you in Spanish and English. Que bueno. Sure. Okay. ¿Qué es lo que va de aquí hasta California sin moverse? What is it that goes from here to California without moving itself? The highway? Yes, exactly. It’s the road. El camino. Autopista. Of course, you and I live in California, but for the rest of the country. Sí. El camino real. Sí, me encanta.

Send us your riddles in any language, as long as you’ve got an English version, to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call on the telephone, 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ethan from Reedsburg.

I have a question about the word hanyak. It’s a word that I heard a lot when I was younger, when my parents used to sometimes call my sister and me hanyak. And years later when I was in college studying to be a teacher, I was working with a middle school teacher who told a group of her students that they were acting like a bunch of hunyaks. And I couldn’t believe what I was hearing because here was someone using a word that I had always thought that my parents had just made up, and I hadn’t heard it since I was a kid.

And since then, I’ve asked numerous people whether or not they had ever heard the word before or if they knew what it was, and I have never met another person who has ever even heard of the word. And so it really made me wonder what the word meant, what its history was, and just how it could have possibly made itself into my family’s vocabulary.

What did you think it meant based on the context of how you heard it?

Well, usually my parents used it when my sister and I were being kind of silly or goofy, which is, I guess, how the students, when the teacher I was working with, how they were acting, too, I guess, at the time.

And do you have any idea how they would have spelled it?

Well, I don’t know exactly the spelling. I guess I’ve spelled it just as it’s pronounced phonetically as H-O-N-Y-O-C-K.

Yep, that’s one example of this word. There are lots of different variants of it, but you will find this word in your part of the country and especially out west. And it comes from an old word, hunyak, H-U-N-Y-A-K, which was kind of a pejorative. I mean for a while it was a very pejorative term for immigrants to this country from Central or Eastern Europe, especially people from Hungary or Poland.

And over time it became a much more innocent sounding term. People would call little rascally kids hanyakers and that kind of thing.

Yeah, it’s at least 100 years old in English and it’s well attested across a wide variety of literature. There are a lot of forms, hunyak, hunyak, hunky, bohunk, hunyaker, a lot of different stuff here.

For a long time, and even kind of currently, it’s been used to mean a rube or a yokel, or even just like a layabout kind of person, just a lazy lout.

Right. Well, it’s very interesting. I’ve always wondered because it’s just a word. Seriously, when I was a kid, I thought it was a word my parents had just made up.

Right, your own personal word.

Right.

Anyway, Ethan, you old hognocker, thank you for calling.

Well, thank you very much for helping. Now it all makes sense, and it explains just what a hognock is now, and it can put a location with it now.

Yeah.

Sure.

Well, excellent. The light bulb’s on.

Right. Thank you for calling.

Thank you for having me.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’re curious about a word that your family used that you’ve heard no one else on earth use, give us a call. Maybe we can help you with it. 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, why is O the noisiest of all the vowels?

The noisiest?

It’s in the middle of noise?

It’s in… It’s close.

Oh, it’s between N and…

No. What’s it between?

Because you can’t make a horrid, loud noise without it while all the others are inaudible.

Oh, all the other vowels are in the word audible.

Well, also inaudible means you can’t hear them.

Right.

Share your riddles with us, your jokes, your pranks, and whatever else to 1-877-929-9673 or send them along an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tori Cosgrove calling from Fort Worth.

Hi, Tori, welcome. How are you doing?

I have a question I hope you can answer. It is, what is the difference between a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith?

So a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith walk into a bar and…

I was going to say.

Why are you thinking about this?

Well, my husband and I caught the tail end of an interview with, I think it was a lexicographer, and got talking about, well, I thought that was a linguist who did that. And we were, you know, going back and forth and figured, well, Martha and Grant will know. We’ll ask them.

Well, is there a lexicographer in the house?

Yes, as a matter of fact. There is, right there. I am a practicing lexicographer. It’s not a religion. It’s not a pastime. It’s a profession. And what it means is that I compile and edit dictionaries. And that is the basic definition of a lexicographer, or thesauruses. But that’s the basic definition of a lexicographer.

A linguist, on the other hand, is somebody who almost always has some schooling. If they want to get work as a professional linguist of any stripe, they have professional schooling and probably a doctorate or even more schooling than that, if possible. They study and analyze language or languages and all aspects of it. The body of linguists in North America probably numbers on the order of 10,000 or more. I think the Linguistic Society of America itself has more than 2,000 members. And so there are a ton of these.

Now, you probably know the non-academic meaning of linguist as somebody who speaks a lot of languages, right? Linguists actually are more interested in people misspeaking and just discovering why people make errors than they are in actually hearing people speak well. Right. They’re into the mechanics rather than prescribing that one should do this or that.

And so the third thing that you asked about, Tori, the third person, was that a wordsmith?

Yeah.

Yeah. A wordsmith is somebody who is simply good at writing or editing writing, editing the printed word. Anyone can be one, and there are probably, what, a million of these in the United States. A lot of people are really great with language, and I would call all of them wordsmith.

Wordsmith, however, is something that’s best applied to you rather than you applying the term to yourself. Tori, so I hope we’ve helped you kind of work out the distinctions on lexicographer, linguist, and wordsmith.

You have. Thank you so much.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

That’s our show for this week. If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime. That number is 1-877-929-9255.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org. And you can stay in touch with us all week by following us on Twitter. We’re there under the username wayword.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer. Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten. We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hurdell and Jennifer Powell. From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette. And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett. Thanks to Howard Gellman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Adios.

I’ll see ya.

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Thanks.