All That and a Bag of Chips (episode #1595)

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. When you answer the phone, do you have a favorite word or phrase that’s a little bit out of the ordinary, or maybe you know somebody who does that?

We asked readers of our email newsletter that question, and they had some surprising responses.

We heard from Matt on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts, who told us that when he picks up the phone, he says, “front desk.” He says he does that in an attempt to stop the caller’s brain, if only for a nanosecond, and adds, “it often works.”

We heard from Anne Lynn in Ithaca, New York, who wrote that her grandfather, who was born in the late 1800s and lived in Ontario, Canada, used to pick up the phone and say, “commence.” Just “commence.”

And then for Marlene Dryden, this question brought back memories of her great aunt Eula McQuade of Salisbury, North Carolina. She says, “Miss Eula would hear her phone ring from a little alcove in the wall of her foyer, and she’d slowly walk over there, pick it up calmly and holler, ‘all right, all right.'”

That’s fantastic. Isn’t that great? She says that beautiful nearly Tidewater accent and the smell of cornbread are the most vivid memories I have of her.

And, I mean, I wonder if that’s a vestige of, you know, when you had operators plugging in the cords. Right, right. When you did need to make sure that the line was okay before you began your conversation.

Huh. We would love to hear more about how you answer the phone. What do you say? Is it funny? Is it old-fashioned? Is it something cool or weird? 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And the lines are open to talk about anything related to language.

You can talk to us on Twitter, too, @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Marianne. I’m calling from Valdosta, Georgia.

Hi, Marianne.

Hi. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, what would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I want to know the proper way to pronounce the word spelled B-O-N-A-F-I-D-E-S. I’m not sure if the B-O-N is pronounced bone or bon, and I’m not sure if the F-I-D-E-S is pronounced fides, fides, or one-syllable fides.

Oh, boy. Marianne, where have you run across this expression spelled B-O-N-A-F-I-D-E-S?

I read every night before I go to sleep, and I ran across it in a book, and it’s one of those words that I have no trouble reading, but if I try to say it, it sticks in my throat because no way I tried to pronounce it sounded correct.

And I looked it up and listened to several pronunciations, and I got even more confused because there seemed to be multiple so-called acceptable ways to pronounce this term.

And I thought, I have to take a stand on this, kind of like when you take a stand on which way you’re going to put the toilet paper on the toilet paper holder, either over or under.

I had to find out the best way to pronounce it. So I’m prevailing upon you to solve this for me.

Oh, boy.

Well, the answer is over, right?

Over.

For the toilet paper?

Of course.

Right.

Yes.

Thank you.

And this term means something like authentic credentials, right? Isn’t that the sense that you have when you’re reading and you come across this expression?

Authentic credentials.

Okay.

I tell you, Marianne, I have always pronounced it bona fides, bona fides. But, you know, there are some authorities who have sneered at that pronunciation, and they say it should be bona fides.

But anyway, bona fides and bona fides are usually the pronunciations heard in the United States. It was borrowed intact from Latin, and it’s spelled the same way, B-O-N-A, and then a separate word, F-I-D-E-S.

And in Latin, you pronounce it bona fides, and that literally means good faith. So the fides means faith. It’s like our word fidelity.

And the bona means good. It’s like our word bonus.

So bona fides in Latin, and somebody who’s trying to show off that they’ve had a little Latin may say bona fides. But, you know, that’s pretentious.

I mean, we’re speaking English and not Latin. And if we’re going to be that strict about pronouncing words from Latin, then we shouldn’t be talking about quoting somebody verbatim.

Because in Latin, it’s where bottom. And we shouldn’t be talking about things ad infinitum.

Because in Latin, it would be ad infinitum.

And Marianne, the other thing that complicates this is the fact that the fides in Latin, bona fides, is actually one of those rare Latin nouns that end in S, but they’re actually singular.

They’re not that many of those. That means that when this term was adopted whole into English in the 17th century, people might say something like, “that person’s bona fides is impeccable,” meaning their good faith or their sincerity is impeccable.

And it was only later that people started saying “that person’s bona fides” or “that person’s bona fides are impeccable.”

So I come down on the side of just saying, find a different word, credentials, good faith, sincerity, something like that.

Well, I like that recommendation. That simplifies my life tremendously.

However, I am going to practice saying bona fides. So if I am forced to say it in a conversation, I will know with certainty the way I’m supposed to pronounce it.

And I like the clean contemporary sound of bona fides instead of the Latin, which, as you say, sounds a little pretentious.

Exactly. So bona fides or bona fides.

Or, as you suggested earlier, avoid using it and say something like good faith or credibility or credentials or authenticity.

Right.

I like that.

Bye, Marianne. Take care. Be well.

Thank you, Marianne.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or let’s chat on Twitter @wayword.

Grant, you remember our conversation about pigeon pairs. Those aren’t birds. They’re people.

Right. That’s when family has both a boy and a girl and no more, no less.

Right. That conversation prompted a response from Jessie Ravage, who lives in Cooperstown, New York.

And she writes, “my mother was told when my brother was born that now she had a millionaire’s family. She figured it was because there would be no handing down of clothes from Jessie to her brother. You know, it was really expensive to have two kids like that.”

But it sounds like it’s more like an ideal. I found lots of instances of the term millionaire’s family or million-dollar family, which is also one boy and one girl.

Or some people refer to two million-dollar families, which are two boys and two girls.

Oh.

And so the idea is just that, just like the pigeon pair is sometimes called the royal pair or the king’s pair.

It’s just the idea that this is just what you would really want if you are a great family.

Just one to marry off and one to take over.

Right.

You can pick which one is which.

Yeah, supposedly the ideal.

But, of course, families come in all different shapes and sizes.

Yes, they do.

And tell us about your family and the language you use.

You can tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nathan from San Antonio.

Hey, Nathan. Welcome.

Yeah. So I have a question for you all about a word that I heard all the time growing up, and the word is Chris.

And I thought I’d tell you a little bit about when I would hear it.

So I grew up in Chicago and my parents would often take us on road trips down to Florida to go to like Disney World or something like that.

And we’d get up really early in the morning to leave at about like 4 a.m.

And so everyone would be really tired and cranky. And they would use the word crisp to basically mean that.

So for example, if I was bothering my sister, my parents might say, “you know, Nathan, leave her alone. She’s really crisp.”

Or if I sniffed at my parents, I would say, “oh, I’m sorry. I was just being crisp.”

And I’ve used this word many times since then, and no one knows what I’m talking about.

And when I asked my parents about it, they said that they heard it growing up, but all my friends in Chicago haven’t heard of it.

And I’ve tried to look it up and I just don’t know where it’s coming from or if this is a real thing or just a family thing.

And, Nathan, you’re spelling it C-R-I-S-P?

Crisp.

That’s right.

Crisp.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think we can help you with this.

So just to recap here, it’s early in the morning. Everyone’s gotten up at 4 a.m. And you and your sister are just not morning people. You are still tired and cranky and just not with it.

Right.

Yeah.

And my brother. So it would be a big fight.

Yeah.

So there’s three little monsters that your parents are having to keep together, and you’re all crisp. I think it might make your parents crisp.

Yeah, parents are probably crisp too, but they’ve got to suffer through it. That’s parenthood.

We can probably help you with this. I think this is probably a form of a crisp adjective that I know that is in Green’s Dictionary of Slang. Jonathan Green has put this together, and he takes this back to the late 70s. And the definition that he has is suffering from an excess of drugs, drink, fast living, and stress. And obviously, that doesn’t fully apply to three children on their way to Disney World. But I think the suffering from an excess and the stress part too, because we’re talking about somebody that is burned out. And that’s what crisp is. It’s literally a synonym for other slang expressions like fried or baked or burned out, where you are just exhausted. You have nothing left in the tank. There’s no energy to spare.

Huh, cool. Yeah, that absolutely sounds about right. Is there any, like, regional thing to it? Like, you know what I mean?

Some of the earliest uses come up from slang collected on college campuses. So it’s not regional, but it might be what’s called age graded, where it started with young people. And I don’t know how old your parents are, but if they were in college in, say, the mid to late 70s, perhaps that’s where they learned it.

Yeah, that totally checks out.

Wow.

Well, yeah, that’s absolutely it. I can’t wait to tell my folks that they didn’t just make it up.

Yeah.

Not just your family.

Not just your family.

Well, Nathan, thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thanks, Martha and Grant. Y’all are great. I love the show. Thanks for having me.

Oh, yeah, of course. Go again sometime. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

In parts of the southern United States, if you really like the food you’re eating, you can say so with your feet. Specifically, you say something like, I could eat this with my toe in the fire. Or, I could eat this with one foot in the milk bucket.

Oh, how about that? I don’t think I knew that. You know, suggesting that the food is so delicious that you can ignore the circumstances. You could also do it with your feet by walking up to the counter and putting in another order.

Right. I’ll have some more of that fried catfish, please.

That’s right. Burn a few calories between the chair and the counter. Hit us up, words, at waywordradio.org. More about what you say and why you say it. Stick around for more of A Way with Words.

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, who is this guy?

It’s John Janeski.

What? I haven’t seen you in a whole week, and you look very different, John. John Janeski, our quiz guy.

Thank you. I did shave. I had a beard. I had a beard last week, and I shaved. I don’t know how you picked that up. In any case, let’s move on to this puzzle here, this quiz I have for you. You know, very often creativity is born out of love. For example, many performers, actors, singers, and works of fiction, TV shows, movies, have such a dedicated fan base that the group adopts a unique name to identify them to each other and the outside world.

Now, one of the most famous, of course, is Trekkies, to refer to fans of the Star Trek TV and movie franchise. And perhaps you know that fans of the singer Justin Bieber are called…

Bieber… Beliebers?

Believers, right, exactly. So we’re going to take a trip through some hardcore fandoms, and let’s see if you can answer these questions about the fans of different performers or things, okay?

Oh, yeah.

All right.

Good, good. Now, you might know that fans of Taylor Swift use what name? It sounds as if they might be fans of funny adverbs, Tom said vocally.

Swifties.

Swifties, yes, exactly. They are Swifties. Now, these two are similar and simple. He writes the songs like Copacabana and Could It Be Magic, but his followers just changed the first letter of his last name and pluralized it to get their fandom. What are they?

Menelos?

Right, but they changed the first letter to get…

Fanelos.

Fanelos, yes. I thought you meant plural of man.

Oh, like Menelos. No. No, Fanelos, yeah. Actors, too, have fandoms. Actor Chris Pine has a devoted following. It may be a simply constructed fandom name, but I like how it reminds me of delicious seeds used to make pesto.

Pine nuts.

Pine nuts.

Pine nuts, yes, pretty simple. Similarly, what longtime talk show hosts’ followers call themselves coconuts?

Oh, what’s his face? Red hair, tall, Irish.

That’s his face.

Conan O’Brien fans.

Conan O’Brien, that’s right. Of course, fans of Jimmy Buffett are parrot heads, and fans of the Grateful Dead are dead heads. If you make a fist, you might figure out the fandom name for fans of the band Five Finger Death Punch.

Fist heads?

Punch heads?

No, when you make a fist, what do you highlight on your hand? You make a fist, you highlight knuckleheads.

Knuckleheads.

Knuckleheads, yes, for five-fingered death punch. I like that one. Finally, he does things differently and funnily, so not surprisingly, what comedians fandom call themselves, or were likely dubbed by the man himself, Close Personal Friends of Al.

Weirdos?

No, no, no, that’s the actual name of the fandom, is Close Personal Friends of Al. But I think you know the person. Who is it?

It’s Weird Al Yankovic.

It is Weird Al Yankovic. Yeah, it’s one of my favorite fandom names. Close personal friends of Al. So perfect.

Well, listen, I’m a fan of you two guys, and I think you did a great job on that puzzle.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, John.

Thank you, John. We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

This show does puzzles, and we’d like to talk to you about the puzzles you have over language. What’s the question you’ve been asking yourself? Where did that come from? Why does it mean that? What’s the real answer? Well, we’d like to help you sort it out.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Carolyn Vargo from Milwaukee, and I just wanted to tell you about my grandchildren and some ways they like to tease their grandpa, and their grandpa likes to tease them. What they do is they do all kinds of teasing, but I’ve given them some ammunition, and one of the things I gave them were some gestures that they can use with Grandpa. They come from a book called Beaugest, A Guide to French Body Language by Lawrence Wiley and Rick Stafford.

One of the gestures that is most useful to them is called Mon Oye, which means my eye in French. And it means, my eye, you can’t fool me. And they pointed their finger to their eye, and that’s their way of saying, Grandpa, really.

Right. They expressed this doubt or even a refusal to acknowledge anything that he said. Often you’ll see the French people, they’ll pull down the lower eyelid so that the socket is exposed. They’ll go, mon oi! So that’s the most useful one that they’ve got.

There are other, I’m not sure how much you want to know about the other gestures that are in the book.

Let’s hear one more.

Yeah, give us another one.

Okay. So if you do marmo, which means silly or funny, and you act like a monkey, that’s another one that they can use. And it just means you think you’re really funny, Grandpa.

That’s good.

Oh, but you’re not, huh? And these are all from this book. And do you have any French heritage or you just found it amusing so you decided to use it?

No, I just took French in college. And so that’s where I got this book. And as I traveled to France and things, I saw a lot of really interesting conversations going on in the subways and stuff.

But those you wouldn’t teach to your grandchildren, but they had two people would be signaling to each other across the tracks and that kind of thing.

But yeah, and so this book is really helpful.

You have to be a little bit careful because there’s some things that if you’re not part of the culture, you might not get.

Yeah, context is everything.

So you have to be careful.

Thank you so much for sharing that with us and your story about amusing your grandkids and your father with this book.

And call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you. Thank you. It was a pleasure.

Bye-bye.

Share your stories and experiences about language, 877-929-9673, or send them to us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

We talked not long ago about the word ort, O-R-T, meaning a small bite of food that’s left on one’s dinner plate.

And some people learn that word when they’re reading Virginia Woolf or D.H. Lawrence, and other people pick it up when they’re doing crossword puzzles because it’s such a handy word.

But apparently, a lot of people learn this word at summer camp.

We heard from Linda Hahn of New York City, who wrote to say that the first time she heard the word ort was when she chaperoned her daughter’s sixth grade class to a sleepaway camp in the Poconos.

And at the end of the camper’s first meal there, the camp counselors pointed out some buckets at the end of the dining hall, and they called these the ort buckets, and they told the kids to scrape all the excess food off their plates into those buckets and then go back to their seats.

Those scraps of food almost filled one of the buckets, and that’s when the counselors told them that the ort buckets should remind them to be mindful of food waste.

And they challenged the kids to make sure that by the end of the week, those ort buckets were empty.

And sure enough, it worked.

And Linda says, I wonder if these camp people go to some kind of group meetings to figure out new strategies to engage preteens at these camps.

Someone was like, hey, how about we focus on food waste this year?

And some word nerd at the table says, I know, we’ll call it the ort report.

And Grant, apparently this was a thing because we heard from another listener about daily ort reports at a camp in New England.

So I’m figuring that maybe a lot of English majors were working summer jobs up there in the mountains.

And summer camps have been a thing for a very long time.

So they’ve had an incredible amount of experience at putting together all these different opportunities to teach and make it more than about hikes and canoeing.

By the way, I was telling my son about our conversation about orts, and he said, oh, isn’t that a baby orc?

Yeah, when they’re just born, they’re called ortlets.

Ortlets, little ort.

Call us up, 877-929-9673.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is Stephen from East Roar, New York.

Hey, Stephen.

So I was inquiring about the word Dutchman.

I’m a furniture maker, and I’ve come across it when I was working in New England and worked for a relatively high-end maker making bespoke furniture.

And essentially what it is is a patch.

But my understanding of a Dutchman is that it’s a patch of a much higher level than just sort of a spackle it over kind of thing.

Where it would come about would be, we would be shaping the edging on a table, and you would do your best to select very clear stock.

But inevitably, as you profiled down into something, you’d find like a little what’s called cat’s paw or a little mineral streak or something like that, which didn’t look good.

So you had to make a little Dutchman.

You would square out the joint and then let in a piece of salad stock that was much cleaner or didn’t have a defect in it.

And that was called a Dutchman.

And my, you know, limited Googling on it has sort of led me to that it was, it’s work of a lesser quality.

And that’s not what I understand it to me, but I guess I sort of wondered from whence, you know, comes the etymology or the origin of it.

You know, why a Dutchman?

Wow. Yeah, thank you for the backstory on how you use that, because that word really has gone through some changes since it first pops up in English.

At least 150 years ago.

So you use Dutchman in woodworking.

It’s not really a mistake, is it?

You’re patching an imperfection perfectly so that people can’t tell.

Right.

I mean, you match the grain and the color and everything else.

I mean, certainly it has been used.

When you bought your job or nick an edge or something like that, it’s like, okay, then it is also with Dutchman, obviously.

There’s a lot more to say on this because folklorists and researchers have looked into this.

As a matter of fact, Archie Green was one researcher who wrote about this in the 1960s in the Journal of American Speech.

And he talked to woodworkers all over the country at the time about this.

And the overall point that he makes about Dutchman is that it’s one of a very large set of slangy terms used in blue-collar physical labor professions that refer to ethnic or national origin.

And they can be negative or positive or neutral.

But they all reflect this integration of immigrants into the workplace and the friction that that can generate.

And so sometimes it comes out as humor or sometimes dark humor, bittersweet humor, but it comes out in these little terms like Dutchman.

And so there are all these terms and sometimes they’re outside the workplace.

So they represent these nations and ethnicities on the world stage and they show up in these little ways.

In this case, Archie Green thinks it has to do with the huge number of German immigrants who came to the U.S. during the 1800s, many of them bringing this prized woodworking skill.

And as you may know, the German Deutsch, Deutsch means German in German, was often termed as Dutch in English.

And so people, it’s possible the Dutchman just refers to this very careful way of fixing or replacing an imperfection and a bit of wood in the very skilled way that a German would do it.

You know, if they were the workers of the highest caliber, that’s what they brought to it.

That’s his theory. It’s about solving your problems and finding a good outcome, even in the face of a less than ideal situation.

A Dutchman is about solving a problem.

And what’s interesting is the older uses of Dutchman were about just even fillers or space holders, not necessarily a perfect one and not necessarily to fix a mistake.

It might just be the woods a little uneven, so you have to plane it some.

And that could be a Dutchman or you smooth out a hollow.

And it was used in typesetting, masonry, metalwork, shipbuilding, theater.

In order to make two sets match, they would use a Dutchman of canvas or cloth.

All of these different fields used the term Dutchman in a lot of different ways.

In typesetting, they would take toothpicks and wedge the lead type to get it exactly where they wanted.

And that was a Dutchman.

Interesting to see what trait was sort of the birth of it, but I suppose we’ll never know.

Well, I do believe that it was from shipbuilding.

That’s the earliest uses that we find.

Okay, okay.

Well, Steve, thanks so much for sharing some of your own work with us.

It sounds like a fascinating thing you do.

Well, thank you so much.

All right, take care.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bring us your words and phrases from your work or from your hobbies.

We’d love to hear about them.

877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Madeline from the Manistee National Forest.

Now, where is that?

Well, if you look at the back of your left hand, at the base of your little fingernail on the shores of Lake Michigan.

What can we do for you today?

Well, I have a question about a word.

You know, in the 1930s, we were wearing overalls, denim overalls.

In the 1940s, we wore dungarees.

In the 1950s, we wore Levi’s.

In the 1960s, I wore blue jeans. In the 1970s, I was wearing bell bottoms. Now we have jeans or flares.

And the question I have is the word dungarees. I had associated it with either the ocean or the barn, and I didn’t know whether that was correct or not.

With the barn?

Yep. The dung part of it.

Oh. Wearing those to muck out the stalls, huh?

Right. Right.

Okay.

No, it doesn’t have to do with oceans or barns, really.

Well, maybe oceans a little bit since it has to do with the export of fabric from India.

The term dungarees is actually a relic of the British colonial presence in India.

And dungaree was the name of a kind of cotton cloth that was exported from India to England in the 1600s.

And it came from this place that in the Marathi language, and that’s a language of west central India, sounds sort of like dungaree keela.

It means hill fort. And it was this fortification in a port near what is now Mumbai.

And this dungaree fabric that was produced there was originally used to make sails and tents, but it was adapted for sturdy work clothes.

And so dungarees became the word for trousers made from this material that was produced in that village.

And then since the late 16th century, the English were importing another kind of fabric, a cotton twill from another port city, that is the Italian port city of Genoa.

And this fabric from Genoa eventually became known as jean, jean fabric.

In the same way that the dungaree fabric was used to make dungarees, trousers made from this fabric eventually called jean from Genoa were called jeans.

And the list goes on.

You asked about Levi’s.

I imagine you know that one.

Yeah.

And, you know, during the war in the 1940s, I was a three-year-old running around San Diego.

And that’s when I first heard dungarees, and we used it for a while, and then it changed through the years.

It’s interesting, too, because in the U.K., the term dungarees now refers to what we in this country call bib overalls, your dungarees.

Yeah, that’s right.

I was just puzzled because, you know, my dad was in the Navy, and that was why I associated it with the mariners.

But that’s wrong when it comes from India.

It does indeed.

So I appreciate you finding it out.

I’ve been wondering about it for some time.

And thank you so much.

I sure enjoy your show.

Madeline, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Okay, you’re welcome.

Take care now.

Take care.

There are puzzles in everyday life, whether you put them on your body or put them in your mouth.

There’s a story behind every word.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

In parts of Appalachia, if you want to describe coffee that’s really weak, you can describe it as scared water.

I love that.

Scared water.

Don’t give me any of that scared water.

I like that. A whole bunch.

I do too.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you’re reading a book with an index, you probably take that index for granted.

But it turns out that indexes and their history are far more interesting than you might think.

And their story is told in a delightfully nerdy new book by Dennis Duncan.

It’s called, appropriately enough, Index, A History of Thee.

And it turns out that the history of the index is really about the history of writing and the history of books themselves.

Even in antiquity, Plato worried that the new technology of the time, that is writing and reading, was going to make people stupid because they’d stop memorizing things and they’d be dependent on the written word.

And even in the Middle Ages, as scribes started using indexes, these new contrivances were not entirely welcome, surprisingly enough.

Indexes provoked similar concerns.

People worried, well, if a book has an index, why would anybody actually read a book?

And in the early 18th century, Jonathan Swift worried that people would pretend to understand a book, quote, by scouting through the index as if a traveler should go about to describe a palace when he has seen nothing but the privy.

And it’s also a hearty appreciation of professional indexers.

In fact, the author gives a shout out specifically to Paula Clark Bain, who is the professional who wrote an index to this book.

And she shows how authorial and even playful a good indexer can be.

He also includes a computer-generated index.

And it’s just not as good.

It’s just not as interesting.

It’s not as alive as the one that Paula Clark Bain produced.

I looked at that computer index, and I agree.

It was fine.

I could use it, but it was lifeless.

It didn’t have the extra knowledge, the pragmatics that a human would bring to the job, understanding that A was a part of B and that you should include it as a sub-index item.

Computerized stuff just isn’t quite there yet for that.

The other thing I was thinking as I browsed this book and I didn’t read it, nor did I do what is called a Washington read.

Do you remember what that term is?

It’s when you take a book, you look for your name in the index, and if you don’t find it, you put it back.

Right, right.

There’s a famous story about William F. Buckley sending a copy of his latest book to Norman Mailer.

And in the index where Norman Mailer’s name is listed, Buckley wrote, hi.

Well, that book again is called Index, A History of Thee.

And it’s by Dennis Duncan.

I’m looking forward to finishing the book.

We’d love to hear about what you’re reading.

We are so delighted, and our bedside tables are stacked with the books that you send us and the books that you recommend.

877-929-9673.

And send your recommendations to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Andrew from Lexington, South Carolina.

Hey, Andrew.

Welcome.

Hi, Andrew.

What’s up?

So I guess I’ll just jump right into it.

My question would be, or, you know, just growing up, my mom and my grandma used to both say to me, like, whenever I wanted to put something in the microwave or reheat something, they would always say, you know, just nuke it or, oh, just nuke it in the microwave.

And I just kind of wanted to know, you know, where that word came from and, you know, how it relates to microwaving something.

Okay.

So when would this be?

What decade are we talking?

I was born in the late 90s.

So I would say, you know, early 2000s is mostly when I would hear it.

The first place that we have print records and print versus spoken, because obviously we can’t track what people say, but if they write it down, we can match the words to dates.

And that first match that we have is from the Daily Tar Heel, which is a student newspaper of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1982 of students.

This long jokey piece about students nuking food on a college campus, talking about melting things in the microwave, which is really interesting because obviously nuking things and nuclear weapons is terrible.

And, you know, we’re talking about going from the idea of nuclear bombs and nuclear weapons to microwaving food.

It’s just a really big leap, right?

But there is a path there.

There is a path.

And part of it has to do with how we got from the word nuclear to the word nuke in UKE.

And it happened almost immediately, you know, after the nuclear weapons were used during World War II by the United States on Japan.

The idea of nuclear weapons was pervasive throughout the Western world.

And by the late 50s, nuke as a shorthand for weapons themselves was common in the popular press.

And in the military in the 1960s, nuke could be used to mean a nuclear-powered sea craft, like a submarine, or a sailor that was assigned to such a ship.

And in the public sphere, nuke was used as a shorthand for a nuclear power station.

So there’s this period in the 1960s where you could see a protest where people would be chanting no nukes.

And you might not know whether or not they were talking about no nuclear power stations or no nuclear weapons, because they could be protesting against either or both, I guess.

Pretty interesting.

But also at the same time that verb to nuke was growing and the obvious use of to attack with nuclear weapons was there.

But even almost immediately, it starts to be used hyperbolically, which is the great American way with language, where we exaggerate or understate to just a ridiculous level.

We used it almost immediately to mean to punish or destroy to ruin. There’s one quote from the early 1960s talking about getting revenge on a fellow Air Force cadet. It’s called nuking them and this is called semantic bleaching, which is a kind of amelioration where something goes from really negative to fairly positive. Wow, that is that’s really cool. Yeah, and then it just kept going.

I went from there until we get to the idea where you can nuke your nachos to warm them up. Of course, the main problem is there’s nothing nuclear about a microwave. It’s radio waves in there.

Right.

That’s what I thought as well. So I didn’t see the connection before, but it’s starting to make sense now.

Yeah.

When the microwaves popped up in the mid-1970s, I think it was, even though the name of how the food is cooked is right there. The machine is called by the method. I think it was and maybe still is mysterious to people. I mean, you can see through the little window the food bubbling, and the food is hot when you take it out, but the device itself is cool. It’s kind of like magic.

So I think in people’s minds, you know, this mysteriousness of nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the mysteriousness of microwaves just kind of went hand in hand. Just a weird, mysterious technology to people. So amelioration, yeah, that’s what happened with that one. Something terrible becomes something mundane.

Yeah.

Now I know.

That’s awesome.

Thank you guys so much.

Yeah, you’re welcome, Andrew. Call us again sometime, all right?

All righty.

Sounds good. Y’all have a good day. Take care. Bye-bye. Take care.

877-929-9673.

We continue to gather more terms from around the world to denote somebody who’s stingy, the person who never picks up the check in the restaurant. And Rick from San Antonio sent us two expressions that he learned in Brazil. One is maljivaca, and the other is pau-duru. And maljivaca literally means the hand of the cow. So if you have a cow’s hand, you are literally tight-fisted. You have no fingers to pick things up. Definitely no opposable thumb. And then pal dudo is hard bread, and that’s somebody who is so miserly that they hoard their bread, nibbling at it for so long that it just gets rock hard. So hand of the cow and hard bread. Lovely. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Brendan Martin here. How are you doing?

All right. Where are you calling from, Brendan?

I’m calling from Louis, Delaware.

Lewis Delaware. Well, welcome to the show. So I am a recent graduate of Northern Arizona University. And with this freshly minted degree, you know, I decided to get into the job market. So as such, I’ve been going on a lot of interviews, applying for a lot of positions. And I noticed that a lot of these interviews, they kind of, you know, in the corporate world, they kind of are handled in a similar fashion. So a lot of the same questions, a lot of the same answers, you know, one of which being, you know, they kind of want to gauge the individual’s ambition and sort of like their lack of complacency, if you will. So one of the questions that they always ask is, you know, where do you see yourself in a few years? Or, you know, tell us about something that motivates you to which, you know, I usually respond something like, you know, I’m very concerned with career trajectory or, you know, upward mobility or a phrase I’ve been using was a path to ascension. So for each of these interviews, I usually prepare a little script, kind of like a dossier that I can reference while I’m on the phone. So I was writing down path to ascension the other day and, you know, I spelled it correctly or so I thought, and it occurred to me that ascension was spelled differently than it sounded to me. You know, I was like, why is it not T-I-O-N and why is it spelled S-I-O-N? And I thought to myself, who better than to answer such a question than my friends from the West Coast?

So by path to ascension, you mean advancing your career by moving up the ladder?

Or advancing to godhood, maybe.

No, no. Well, you know, while I do aspire to do both at some point, right now I’m kind of more or less focused on my career.

Now? Okay. Yeah, the reason that Grant and I are scratching our heads a little bit is that when the word ascension came into English, it specifically referred to the ascension of Christ, you know, the story of Christ going up from earth into heaven on the 40th day after the resurrection. And the reason that it has that S is that it comes from Latin ascensionem, which means a going up. It’s related to words like ascend. And it first appears, as I said, in English in the 14th century. And it was borrowed into English directly from Latin in that religious sense. And so today you’ll still hear people talking about the ascension of Christ, or maybe if they’re talking about royalty, an earthly monarch, they might talk about that person’s ascension to the throne. But I’m not sure it’s used so much in a career sense. And it sounded like you were also interested in not just the appropriateness for a job hunt, but also why S-I-O-N versus T-I-O-N at the end.

Yeah, yeah. That was the initial, I wouldn’t say concern, but that was the initial thing that piqued my interest.

Well, yeah. As I said, it was borrowed directly into English from the Latin ascensionim. More often today, the word that replaces it is the word ascent. And you may wonder why the word ascent has that T in it rather than an S. And that’s because it showed up in the 1600s. And it was formed by analogy with another word that had already been floating around for 300 years, which was descent. And the reason that that word has the T is that it didn’t come directly from Latin into English. It passed through Old French, where descent meant your genealogical lineage, you know, what you descended from. So that’s why those have those T’s. But in terms of ascension rather than ascension, that’s because it was borrowed whole from the Latin word that did have an S in it.

Gotcha. So descent is just a little more well-traveled in its path to current usage.

That’s a good way to put it.

Yeah, yeah. We don’t want that for your career, for sure.

Oh, well, I appreciate that.

I appreciate that. Advancement might be the better word there.

It will be.

Okay, cool.

Advancement.

So this is going in the script now.

It’s going on the doc yet. Well, good luck, Brendan, in the new job, and congratulations. That’s a big moment in anyone’s life.

Hey, thanks a lot. I appreciate you taking the time out to take the call. And I’ve been a longtime listener. You guys are the greatest. And can’t wait to hear what else you guys come up with.

Same goes for you, too. You sound like somebody to watch.

All right. Hey, well, you know, we’ll see.

All right. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Brendan.

All right. Thanks, guys.

Yeah, see you.

We’d love to hear the language that you’re using at your workplace, whether you’re new or been there 40 years. What are the little dilemmas that you have about putting something together, whether it’s a presentation for the whole company or just something that you put together for yourself? You have these little questions, and we have answers. And, hey, let’s talk about it. 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Kyla calling you from Maryland.

Hey, Kyla, welcome. What’s up?

I’m actually originally from British Columbia, and my husband is from upstate New York, which I think is relevant for this question. I often will say things like, you know, so-and-so thinks they’re all that in a bag of chips, or, you know, he’s really not all that in a bag of chips. And my husband has no idea what I’m talking about. So I’m wondering where this comes from, and I’m assuming it’s regional, but I’m wondering if you can tell me.

So yeah, this has been used since the late 80s for sure, and it may go back a little earlier than that. And it’s an extension of the older slangy expression, just plain old all that. And this comes from Black American English. And just, again, like you used it, Kyla, was often used in the negative.

You ain’t all that or you’re not all that.

And that might have been a shortening of all that great.

And just really a way to just kind of summarize just everything that they are or not.

Just from top to bottom, from head to toe, you are not all that you think that you are.

And then all that in a bag of chips was just a fun way of extending that.

And it really took off in the early 90s, very early 90s.

In 1991, there was a Baltimore Sun story about new slang that was widely reprinted.

I went coast to coast.

And after that, the term was just everywhere.

I think lots of people picked it up from there.

I’m not saying that the average person on the street, but certainly authors and people who are attentive to new language did.

And interestingly, I can’t find all that and a bag of chips in the lyrics of any hip-hop song before that date.

Although, you know, the lyrics websites don’t have everything.

But I didn’t look.

But it’s kind of like all that and the kitchen sink.

It’s kind of like throwing everything in there that’s conceivable, you know?

Right. Okay.

Because I’ve only ever heard that.

And then once I was watching an English show, a British TV show recently.

And they said that so-and-so thought he was all that in a plate of rich crackers.

I thought that that was completely amazing.

Yeah, there are other people.

People have played around with it.

A plate of fries, a plate of chips, a plate of green beans, a plate of biscuits and gravy.

They’ve done a variety of different things.

But usually all that in a bag of chips is the more common.

But yeah, it comes from Black American English.

And like a lot of terms, left the speech of black Americans and entered the mainstream through the usual channels of popular culture.

And it’s a little dated now, just so you know.

And it’s not that used, but it’s out there.

Well, slang has a way of coming back around, too.

Yeah, who knows?

Maybe much younger people will start saying it, thanks to you, Kylie.

I was going to say, maybe we’re transcending right now.

As we speak.

Maybe.

Maybe not.

We are all that in a jumbo bag of chips.

Thank you so much.

That was very helpful.

All right.

Take care, Kyla.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Well, if your slang is new or your slang is old, we’d love to talk about it.

877-929-9673.

Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weissler, and quiz guide John Chaneski.

We’d love to hear from you, no matter where you are in the world.

Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Subscribe to the podcast, hear hundreds of past episodes, and get the newsletter at waywordradio.org.

Whenever you have a language story or question, our toll-free line is open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

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

Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.