Beefed It (episode #1580)

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. I learned a handy new term the other day, the Abilene Paradox.

As in Abilene, Texas?

As in Abilene, Texas. There’s a story behind it. It really happens. So picture this.

It’s a hot, dusty summer day in small town West Texas. And there’s a married couple and their

In-laws and they’re sitting out on a porch and they’re running a fan and sipping lemonade just

Trying to keep cool. And there’s nothing really much to do except sit there and play a lazy game

Of dominoes, just wiping the sweat from your brow. And at some point, the father-in-law pipes up with,

Let’s get in the car and go to Abilene and have dinner in the cafeteria. So it’s 53 miles away.

It’s this hot, dusty afternoon in a car with no air conditioning. And the daughter chimes in,

Oh, it sounds like a great idea. She asks her husband what he thinks. Husband says,

Sounds good. I just hope your mother wants to go. The mother-in-law says, of course I want to go. I

Haven’t been to Abilene in a long time. So they all pile into the car and it’s miserable. It’s just

Awful. The whole trip, they’re sweating. The cafeteria food is just dreadful. There’s a thin

Film of dust over everything. And four hours later, they’re back on that porch. They’re hot

And exhausted, sitting in front of the fan, trying to keep cool. And after a long silence, the son-in-law

Is trying to be sociable. So he pipes up with, that was a great trip, wasn’t it? And the mother-in-law

Says, well, I just went along because the three of you were so enthusiastic. And it turns out

Nobody wanted to go to Abilene, but the guy, and then the guy who suggested it in the first place

Says, I never wanted to go. I just thought you might be bored. Been there. Exactly. Exactly. And

Now there’s a term for it because the son-in-law was Jerry B. Harvey, who was a professor of

Management science at George Washington University. And in 1974, he coined the term

Abilene Paradox to describe that phenomenon where a group makes a collective decision that’s

Counter to the thoughts and feelings of all the individual members because everybody thinks their

Own preferences are the ones that nobody else has. So it stems from this breakdown of communication

Where no one wants to rock the boat.

And it’s something that in business school now,

They teach you to watch out for.

I really appreciate having a term for that,

The Abilene Paradox,

Because I had that happen to me recently.

Yeah, a group full of people are being so polite.

Maybe you don’t know each other very well

Or you’re all a little passive aggressive

Or you don’t really care all that much.

It’s just when you all finally get to the old buffet place,

You’re like, yeah, no,

The mushy peas weren’t what I had in mind.

Yeah, I didn’t want to go.

I just went along with you guys.

I’d have been happy with the sandwich and a little bit of Netflix.

Thanks.

Oh, well, from Abilene to Augusta, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Julie from Memphis, Tennessee.

Hi, Julie.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Julie.

Hi.

So glad to be talking to you guys.

It’s great to be talking with you as well.

What’s on your mind today?

So the other day I was doing a crossword puzzle.

And the solution for this one line I knew should be toe the line.

And I was spelling it T-O-W.

And it kept telling me that was wrong.

It was a digital crossword puzzle.

So it turned out it was supposed to be T-O-E.

So then I went into my office and I asked my coworkers, you know, the expression toe the line.

How do you spell toe?

And everybody except for this one young lady, Devin, said T-O-W, toe the line.

And she said T-O-E.

So we debated about it, and we had different meanings of it a little bit.

The ones of us who said T-O-W said, you know, like, carry your own weight, do what you’re expected kind of thing.

And then I’ll let Devin explain what she thought the T-O-E was.

Okay.

Hi.

So my name is Devin, also from Memphis, Tennessee.

So like she said, I was the only one in our room and in my family that was TOE.

And in my head, it was kind of you were doing something that you knew could get you in trouble,

But you were just enough behind the line or on it that you couldn’t technically get in trouble for it.

Basically like just using a loophole to get around a rule without actually breaking the rule.

So that’s why I was always thinking it was toe the line because in my head,

It was like the mental image of you were putting the toe on the line, but not crossing it.

So when I asked my family about that, my mom said the same thing of, you know,

It’s you’re pulling your own weight, doing this, that, the other.

My dad actually used to work on a ship, so he said he’s heard it both ways.

But his was also because you put your foot on the line for a race.

Specifically, you put the big toe of your left foot on the starting line, which is where the phrase, when we looked it up, it said that it originally started.

And then it evolved into something along the lines of you stay within the boundaries.

Oh, my goodness.

There’s so much to unpack here.

Right, but it sounds like Julie and Devin represent both sides of this, because a lot of people do think it’s T.O.W. Toe the Line, and the original was T.O.E. Toe the Line.

It was indeed. Yeah. Back in the 19th century, we see the expression to toe the line. And we know that that’s the original one because there were also other versions of this, like toe the mark or toe the scratch or toe the crack.

And the idea was, as you suggested, Devin, getting up right to that line.

And it wasn’t so much being sneaky, but rather being obedient.

You know, you want to think of military personnel all lined up in a very disciplined way where they’re all towing the line.

They’re completely aligned with no deviation whatsoever.

So if you’re towing the line, the original sense was that you were conforming to whatever the standard was.

So the traditional version, as you suggest, is T-O-E.

You get your toe right to that line.

Is there a version with the T-O-W?

Well, you’re…

No.

Yeah.

I mean, if you want to be strictly correct about it, you’re going to spell it T-O-E.

But, boy, that’s…

And it means staying within standard, not carry your own weight.

Yes, it has nothing to do with towing or pulling something with a rope.

You’re measuring up to what the standard is, as you suggested.

Yeah, you’re behaving.

You’re following the rules.

So our anomaly was the correct one.

That’s what happens when stuff is passed from ear to mouth and doesn’t show up on paper all that often.

And we interpret it like we wish.

And we develop mental images that can be really wrong.

And it’s not helped by the fact that many of the early uses of this and the variants like toe the mark and toe the scratch were in connection with the British Navy, which had, of course, lots of ropes that had to be towed or lots of lines that had to be towed.

So it can be confusing.

So it’s completely forgivable to think that it was TOW and no harm done.

Julie and Devin, thank you for calling.

Thank you, Julie.

Thank you, Devin.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Jim Markley from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

I’m tickled to be on the show.

Well, hi, Jim, from Coeur d’Alene, Idaho.

Welcome to the show.

Glad to talk to you.

Hi, Jim.

Thanks.

What’s up?

Hi.

Well, I have a question about counting time.

When I was a kid, we would play touch football,

And the rule was that you couldn’t rush until three seconds had passed.

So we would always say out loud Mississippi 1, Mississippi 2, Mississippi 3,

And then we would rush.

Were we the only ones that ever did that?

Did everyone all over the country do that, every kid?

And do they still do it, and do they say other things besides Mississippi?

And you would say Mississippi 1, huh?

Instead of putting the number before?

Yeah, we always said Mississippi 1.

How interesting.

I grew up using the word Mississippi, but I would say one Mississippi, two Mississippi.

And I think that the first time I heard it used that way, it was counting the seconds between a flash of lightning and the sound of thunder.

And it was always really.

Did you do it that way, too?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Or maybe playing hide and seek or something like that.

The Mississippi 1 version is a new one on me, but there are lots of different ways in this country to say that.

I know some people just say 1001, 1002.

Interestingly enough, across the pond in Britain, a lot of times people tend to say Piccadilly 1, Piccadilly 2.

And it’s just a delightful rhythmic way, I think, of counting time.

Do the Spaniards say one Barcelona?

I don’t have information on the Spanish, but let’s see.

What do we know?

The French sometimes count crocodiles, and actually they do sometimes say Mississippi.

English speakers, including in the U.S. And other English-speaking countries, also will use—they have a whole menagerie.

They’ll hippopotamus, chimpanzee, crocodile, alligator, elephant.

Elephant’s very common in the U.K.

The Polish use elephants as well.

The Swedes tend to say 1001, or their version of 1001 in Swedish.

1001 is also used in the U.S.

Let’s see.

Yeah, there are lots of different ways to do this.

In German, it’s interesting because they just use the numbers for 21, 22, 23.

Ein und Svansik.

Und Svansik.

And one that I really love, I’ve been told that in the Romani language,

Which is spoken by about 3 million people,

You learn it as something that translates as,

I am singing.

I’m probably mangling the language there,

But this is what I’ve been told,

Which I think is really lovely.

I am singing.

Oh, Martha, yeah, the German one,

The 21, 22, 23, the Danish,

The Dutch and Hebrew speakers do the same thing.

The Danish also do crates or cases of beer.

One case of beer.

Two cases of beer.

Yeah.

Sort of the backwards version.

Three bottles of beer on the wall.

I was going to say the backwards version of that.

Well, this is great.

I had no idea there were so many versions of it.

A ton of this stuff.

I’m sure there’s so many countries and languages that we haven’t named,

And we have so many listeners around the world who speak so many languages.

They’ve got contributions on how to approximately count off the sentences we’d love to hear about them.

So, Jim, if we come up with some more, we’ll share them on the show.

That’s great. Thank you so much. It’s been a lot of fun.

Our pleasure. Thanks for calling.

Hey, thanks for bringing back those memories.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

How do you approximately count off the seconds in the languages that you speak?

Please tell us, 877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Bye.

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 hilarious fellow, our quiz guy, the master of trivia, John Chanesky.

Hi, John.

Hey, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

How are you guys?

I have, you know, I’ve got this new attitude these days.

It’s sort of like, yeah, you know, like, whatever.

You know the phrase, haters going to hate, you know?

To wit, to wit, don’t get stressed over those who give you grief.

They’re the type of people who give grief in any situation.

You know those teens down at the mall parking lot?

The ones speeding around on their decks and pulling ollies and nollies and outside front 80s?

Yeah, skaters gonna skate.

Skaters gonna skate, man, yeah, exactly.

Now, here are a few more instances in which people or things just do what they’re gonna do.

Now, I know you have a crush on that handsome guy down at the Olive Garden,

But you can’t just request to be seated in his section and then try to flirt with him all night.

You know what they say.

Oh, boy.

The hot guy’s olive garden.

Now, you can’t just request to be seated in his section and then try to flirt with him all night.

Waiter’s going to wait?

Yeah, man.

Waiter’s going to wait.

They’re just going to wait.

Yeah.

Oh, I see they’re all rhyming with hate.

Is that it?

Pretty much.

Yeah.

Oh, okay.

You got it.

Got it.

Oh, ouch.

If you are a waiter down at the Olive Garden and someone wants cheese on their fettuccine,

You have to be really careful with that metal thingy.

You know, you can hurt yourself.

You know what they say.

Grater’s gonna grate.

Grater’s gonna grate.

And scraper’s gonna scrape.

But then, sometimes things do something you don’t necessarily expect them to do.

For example, I say, when I returned to my family’s estate from university,

I was quite surprised at how good my parents had gotten at chess.

Well, you know what they say.

Mater’s gonna mate.

Mater’s gonna mate.

She’s so good.

Oh, I love the layers in that.

Thank you, yes.

When that huge meteorite hit the moon,

Guess what we found in the center of that huge depression?

A wooden box.

No surprise.

Crater’s gonna crate.

Crater’s gonna crate, yes, that’s true.

Yeah.

I don’t know why that’s funny because it’s so ridiculous.

It’s just funny. It doesn’t make any sense.

But it doesn’t make any sense, but it’s true. It’s very true.

Here we go. Benedict Arnold.

He did that thing I guess he’s genetically predisposed to do.

Well, you know what they say.

Traitor’s going to trait?

Trait, yeah. Traitor’s going to trait.

This one’s sort of a conceptual one.

It divides the earth into northern and southern halves,

But even though those halves are not quite the same,

Somehow it makes it work.

You know what they say.

Equator’s going to equate.

Equator’s going to equate, somehow.

Finally, fans of Star Wars know that Darth Maul and Darth Sidious can tell you

That the Sith, formerly known as Anakin Skywalker, will do what he’d do.

You know what they say.

Vader’s going to vaid.

Vader’s going to vaid.

I guess it’s a thing.

Haters going to evade?

I don’t know.

Of course.

Now, of course, if you didn’t like this puzzle, hey, again, haters going to hate.

But I thought it went pretty well.

You guys are great.

Congratulations.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks, John.

Thank you, guys.

Talk to you next time.

John’s got all kinds of trivia for us.

And we think you have all kinds of language questions for us.

Send us your thoughts and ideas to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can call us toll-free in the United States and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Erica, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hi, Erica. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Erica?

So I had a question that’s not necessarily about a word or phrase,

But it’s about a sound that people make when they’re waiting, passing the time.

And usually it’s like waiting on a phone call or just waiting to get handed something.

It usually sounds something like this.

And everybody kind of makes it when they’re just waiting around.

It’s like your own personal music.

Yeah, like your own personal music, yes.

Well done.

So I wanted to know why people do that, because it seems like everybody kind of does it.

And what’s it called?

I guess my first question for you is, is this for somebody else’s benefit or might you do it when you’re by yourself?

I would say you do it more for yourself, kind of just kind of passing time.

It’s not really to entertain or anything.

It’s just something you do.

The reason I ask is because back when I was doing a lot of magazine articles and I would call experts for this or that and they would have to look something up, I was so struck by the fact that there was this period of time a few years ago when it seemed like everybody would be looking something up while they’re on the phone with me and they would say, do, do, do, or something like that.

Do you know?

Yeah, exactly.

It happens so often that I wanted to write a magazine article about that, but I couldn’t really quite figure out how to do it.

But I think that that happens as well when you call customer service or something like that.

And I think that that sort of version of it communicates a certain amount of meaning.

Don’t you think?

It’s like, you know, you’re trying to maintain contact with the person.

I’m here.

I’m here.

Hang on.

I haven’t forgotten you.

Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Gosh, Grant, I mean, it’s a kind of, yeah, right?

Is that self-soothing?

I don’t.

Yeah, it kind of is, isn’t it?

It’s kind of, I don’t know, it reminds me of the tuneless humming that people do sometimes.

And you just catch them, they’re on their own.

And they’re just like, it’s not a song.

It’s not a tune.

It’s just, it’s not words.

Yeah, it’s definitely another version. Do you know what it’s called?

No.

Well, there is a category of language called Attic Communication, P-H-A-T-I-C.

And this is language we use for the general purposes of social interaction.

This is what Martha was talking about, where instead of conveying information or asking questions,

It’s just we throw it in there in order to keep the social graces, in order to lubricate the relationship, so to speak, in order to just make sure everything is copacetic.

And this, if there are other people involved, might be part of that.

But I don’t know if you’re on your own if that still qualifies as static communication, P-H-A-T-I-C.

I don’t know.

And it’s funny.

As we talk about this, I’m thinking about a couple of things.

How is it that when you’re in a group of people and everybody has to say, take a moment to privately write an answer on a card that will be submitted, everyone automatically does the Jeopardy theme.

And those of you listening in the UK, do you guys do the theme from Countdown, which is a game show in the UK?

I don’t know.

And it also reminds me, if you remember Sesame Street, and I don’t know if they still have this, but there was this typewriter guy from Sesame Street.

It’s a typewriter on wheels with eyes and hands.

And he comes from a distance and approaches the viewer and he goes, no, no, no, no, no, no.

Yes.

And then he eventually types one key and says that letter.

What you’re doing, Erica, reminds me of him.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

It could sound like that sometimes, yeah.

I don’t know that there’s a name for it, but boy, I’ve got to dig into this and find out more.

This is a good one, Erica.

This is a first.

I don’t think we’ve ever had this question before.

Yay!

I’m a big fan, so I’m glad I brought something new around.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate it.

Take care and be well, all right?

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us and in the voicemail, what’s the waiting sound that you make?

877-929-9673.

Grant, you remember our conversation about indefinite hyperbolic numerals?

Yeah, umpteen, zillion, 5011.

It turns out that there was a similar term in ancient Greek.

It was samakosioi, which translates literally as sand hundred.

It was coined by Aristophanes and used by several writers in ancient Greek.

And I really like that, sand hundred.

You know, it’s just a vague number that is analogous to the number of grains of sand on the beach.

Oh, I like that too, sand hundred, because who’s going to count?

I’ll just take your word for it.

That’s how much sand is there.

Exactly.

I told you, sand hundred times to do that thing.

877-929-9673 or share your indefinite hyperbolic numerals on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jessica. I’m calling from Carmel, Indiana.

Hi, Jessica.

How are you doing?

Doing well.

What can we do for you?

So you were talking about terms that are used like in your industry.

In my industry and software development, there’s this term rubber duck that you use for, like if you’re trying to debug a problem that you have and you’re explaining what the problem is, then you realize what the answer is yourself without the person you’re talking to having had to give you any input.

So the idea is kind of like you might as well have been explaining it to a rubber duck.

But in my office, we always use the term cardboard dog for that instead of rubber duck.

So you might have this scenario where you’re trying to debug something, you call somebody over to help you, and then you realize the problem yourself.

And you might say, hey, thanks for being my cardboard dog.

Or they’ll say, oh, glad I could be your cardboard dog.

And I have never heard that outside of my own office.

So I wasn’t sure if that’s like a common thing in the industry or if that’s just something, you know, one person came up with and it’s carried through just for us.

Yeah, what a handy strategy, right?

I love the idea of rubber duck debugging, where you just pretend like you’re explaining the problem to somebody else, like a rubber duck in your hand.

And apparently this goes back to a book published in 1999 called The Pragmatic Programmer by Andrew Hunt and David Thomas that had a story about a programmer who kept a rubber duck handy and would just force themselves to explain the problem line by line to that little rubber duck.

And you can sometimes work out a problem that way if you’re simplifying it for somebody else, right?

You’re thinking through it aloud.

And I think, you know, whether you’re a computer programmer or just trying to write something and you can’t quite express yourself, it’s a great exercise to just go to somebody.

I mean, I used to love as a journalist saying, explain it to me like I’m in eighth grade or something like that.

Or, you know, explain to me like I’m five years old.

And that’s all kind of a piece with rubber duck debugging.

But Cardboard Dog is an interesting one, too.

Yeah, and we know a little bit about its history.

If you Google it, you might come across the site of Stephen Baker,

And he has a story about a cardboard cutout dog.

And he goes on to tell this pretty fanciful story about Jake the Yellow Labrador

Who, in exchange for dog biscuits and scratches behind the ear,

Would listen to walkthroughs of computer problems,

Unlike Tinkerbell the cat, who would not listen.

And managers and consultants and engineers cost money,

But Jake, who had a great attention span, wouldn’t get distracted and had a $0 hourly rate.

But supposedly, Jake passed on or listening to a particularly thorny software problem.

So they replaced him with the cardboard cutout dog.

And anyway, I reached out to Stephen Baker and asked him about the story.

And he says, well, the story is mostly made up.

He does believe that he coined the term cardboard cutout dog.

And it comes from some joke that he used to tell back in the old days of Usenet.

If you remember, this was discussion on the internet before there was even a web.

I’ve looked for it on Usenet.

There are archives on Google Groups, and I haven’t been able to find it.

So it’s at least as old as 2003 when he posted this story to his website.

But he says it’s probably older than that.

So Stephen Baker of Texas probably was the coin for this.

So far, there are no other claimants.

That’s fascinating.

I didn’t realize you’d be able to even find that it came from like one person.

Well, this is the nice thing about the computer world is it’s not so old that we can’t still reach out to some of the long beards, you know, and the Unix heads and get their stories.

So I guess it is not just our office then.

It’s anybody who happened to read this person’s website probably.

Yeah, it got passed around a lot and you will find it.

And even I think it’s actually linked as a footnote on the Rubber Duck Programming Wikipedia page.

Next time, I’ll remember to check the footnotes.

Thank you.

Cool.

Well, thank you so much for this question.

I just love the concept.

Thank you.

Yeah, thanks for taking my call.

Take care.

Be well.

Have a good day.

Bye.

You too.

We’d love to hear about your workplace jargon.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Josh.

I’m calling from Binghamton, New York.

Well, hello, Josh.

Yeah, I had a question.

So growing up, we had a whole bunch of sayings.

I was from Western New York, and one of them being beefed it.

We usually used it in terms of when someone fell, like slipped and fall,

They would say, oh, they beefed it.

So I was wondering if that was specific to Western New York or if that’s used more broadly.

Because I haven’t heard it since I’ve moved and all my friends haven’t heard of it before.

So beefed it. Where did that come from?

All right. Yeah, we can help you with that.

About when would that be that you would have used that?

When I was growing up. So high school, like 20, 2010, around then.

Okay. So what I’m hearing you say is beefed it.

This is maybe B-E-F-E-D, like meat beef, right?

Yeah, like meat beefed.

Okay.

But you know what I think?

I think this is connected to a slang term that is more widespread to Biffet, B-I-F-F.

And the reason I think is it’s exactly the same meaning, and it’s used in like surfing and snowboarding and mountain biking.

And I even find it glossed, that means like used as a equivalent in a small dictionary of snowboarding slang where beef is also said to be another word for biff.

And they call it a wipeout.

And so it looks like biff and beef are the same.

Sometimes it’s spelled B-I-F.

So sometimes it could just mean to fail or do badly.

And that is how I first encountered it in the early to mid-1980s, where it shows up in campus slang with a sense of failing an exam.

And also, it shows up about the same time as a sense of being clumsy.

Somebody who’s beefed it, somebody who has fallen down.

Maybe they tripped and dropped their books.

And not long after, it shows up in surfing to mean getting smacked by a wave or snowboarding to be wiped out.

Mountain biking, you have a crash.

So it’s BIF is this use that we see more commonly, B-I-F-F,

Again and again and again, and it pops up in casual text,

It pops up in these amateur dictionaries,

And it pops up in these professional dictionaries as well,

Early 1980s and onward.

Interesting, yeah.

Just thinking, we do have, like, there’s a small skiing hill,

Snowboarding hill in the area.

You know, drive a couple hours, but it’s not like we have a really profound culture around snowboarding.

So I can see that changing from biff to beef.

There’s also a biff in baseball, which means to hit a ball hard, which is way older than that.

And also to biff something, just to hit it in general is way older, like by a hundred years.

So we’ve long had in slangy English this sense of to biff, meaning to hit or to hit something hard or to punch it.

Long before this sense of to biff something, meaning to fall or to crash or to fail, to wipe out, to fall down.

So it’s possible that there’s a relationship there, but it’s hard to know because there’s a little bit of onomatopoeia happening here, right?

Biff kind of sounds like what happens when you fall, particularly on snow.

Josh, I hope this was enough information to make you feel like we connected with your past and with your memories.

Oh yeah more more than plenty is really wasn’t sure the whole history there but it’s pretty

Pretty plentiful thanks a lot thank you for calling josh thanks bud take care be well yeah

Have a good one bye-bye bye-bye 877-929-9673

More about what we say and why we say it stick around for more

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 did you ever think about why we spell the word ghost the way we do why do

We spell it G-H-O-S-T? Well, it wasn’t always that way, and here’s what happened. In the mid-15th

Century, there was an English businessman named William Caxton who moved from London to the

Wealthy city of Bruges in what’s modern-day Belgium, and there he got in on the ground

Floor of a new technology, the printing press. Eventually, he moved back to England, and in those

Days, typesetting was still really new. It was time-consuming, it was challenging to learn,

And so it made sense that Caxton would bring in workers who already knew the business,

Even if they weren’t that familiar with English spelling. So he recruited some fellow printers

Whose native language was Flemish, which is the variant of Dutch that was spoken there in Bruges.

And English spelling in those days was still a little bit unsettled, but generally the English

Spelling for ghost was G-A-S-T at that time. And in Flemish, on the other hand, the initial hard

G sound before a vowel was rendered as G-H. So in Flemish, the word for ghost was spelled G-H-E-E-S-T.

So when these Flemish-speaking typesetters came across words that resembled similar words in their

Own language, they’d often add that H after the G. And in fact, you can find books from the early

Days of printing in English that include an initial GH in words like girl and goose and guest

And guess and goat. Those spellings didn’t last, but there was one expression that appeared over

And over in a lot of the early works that Caxton printed, and that term was holy ghost. And the

Expression holy ghost appeared so often in those early works with that Flemish spelling that the

Initial GH in that word happened to become standard in English.

And that’s one of the wonderful stories that you’ll learn in the new book by linguist Erica Okrant.

It’s called Highly Irregular, Why Tough Through and Doe Don’t Rhyme and Other Oddities of the English Language.

And Grant, the book is really a lot of fun to just page through and get answers to those questions,

Those pesky questions about why English is so strange.

Yes, it really is a great book. She’s done all new research, it looks like.

It’s well-written, easy to read, and something that I think you could recommend to

Middle schoolers, high schoolers, college kids, the family, and I very much enjoyed it.

Yeah, it’s a very amiable, accessible book. It answers questions like,

You know, what’s the difference between big and large, really? Why can we say big about certain

Words and large about other ones? Or why do we say how come when we want to say why?

There are all these kinds of questions that she answers very thoroughly,

And you get a taste of the history of the English language as well.

Yeah, so this book, Highly Irregular by Erika Okrant, will be linked on our website.

We know you’re reading something interesting, too.

Tell us about it, 877-929-9673, or share your favorite books in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Verena Marlos.

Where are you calling from, Verena?

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

What can we do for you?

Well, I was wondering, you know, I’m a German living in Texas,

And I always stumbled here across a word called doofus,

Which for me as a German is very hilarious,

Because doof, written the way it is, but pronounced doof,

Is like a word for to be stupid or daft.

But, you know, children or teenagers would say this,

German. And I think it’s so funny that here you have this Latin suffix, US, you know, like doofus,

Which makes it so big. And so, and I really wonder where this comes from.

Oh, yeah. It’s good that you made the connection there. So, doofus reminds you of the word doof

In German, which means adult or a stupid man, right?

Mm-Right.

And that U.S. Suffix probably got attached to the word because it’s modeled after a word goofus,

Which has approximately the same meaning, but it’s about 50 years older.

It’s another English word for a stupid person.

We have a lot of those in English.

Interestingly, we don’t quite know how doofus got into English in the first place.

We do know that there’s a word dauf, which comes into English through Scots English,

Probably from Germanic roots, which meant listless or dull.

And this may ring some bells for you.

And this is related to a Germanic word meaning deaf, D-E-A-F, meaning that you can’t hear.

I think the modern word in German is taub.

Is that right?

Taub, yeah.

Taub.

Doof in German actually comes from taub.

In the early 20th century in Berlin,

Doof was borrowed from Low German to mean stupid

Because deaf had all these other meanings.

Because in some dialects of German,

You could say something is,

You could talk about deaf rocks.

Like if rocks are taube,

It means they have no usable minerals.

Or deaf eggs means they’re unfertilized.

Or deaf seeds means they don’t germinate.

Or soup without flavor could be called death, you know, if it’s unsavory.

And so death takes on more meanings than just can’t hear.

It’s all about kind of lacking the essential quality.

And that’s what Doof kind of borrowed from the word Taub in these dialect senses.

But interestingly, Doofus doesn’t really show up in English until the 1960s.

And yet it seems like a word that’s been in English forever.

I thought that maybe he had come here with, you know, all the immigrants who had come, especially to Texas, you know, the Verein and all this.

But maybe I’m wrong.

It’s possible.

You know, before the two world wars, Germans accounted for one of the largest immigrant groups in the United States.

And there were a lot of German speakers.

And then the two world wars meant that German stopped being spoken as a second language among a lot of people.

But it’s possible that that is how Doofus came into use in the United States,

That there were still enough German speakers in the United States,

Even after the suppression of German as a second language.

Especially here in Texas, we have this Texas German, which now it’s not spoken anymore.

We have some German words in English, like Gesundheit people say,

And Dumkopf people probably know.

But there’s also Doofkopf in German, right?

Yeah, Doofkopf is a very colloquial way of saying Dummkopf, you know, which is, you know, dumbass or whatever you would say.

Dumbhead, literally.

Yeah, dumbhead, literally, right.

But Doofkopf, I don’t think you will find it in dictionaries.

So this is really spoken language, you know, like in children and teenagers’ language.

And it’s not, you know, it really, it’s not very, I think people now don’t say doof so much anymore.

So 20 years ago they did.

Now they have much more so hipster words for this.

Yeah, that’s true.

It definitely came, you know, during the 20s when Berlin was this really big party town.

It was part, doof was part of the slang of Berlin.

And doofy as well.

Doofy kind of meaning dummy was a big term then too.

Dolfi, yeah, exactly.

This is a really interesting question.

This is just one of those, you made a really nice leap here,

A connection between these two languages that nobody else probably would have made.

And I really appreciate that, Verena.

That’s lovely that you just made that leap for us.

Yeah.

Where in Germany are you from?

From Mainz on the Rhine River.

Oh, lovely.

Well, call us again sometime when you make another connection like this.

We would really love to hear from you.

Okay.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

Thank you for calling.

Take care.

Be well.

Yeah, thank you for having me.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

How are you today?

My name is Lana, and I’m calling from southern Indiana in Evansville.

Evansville, right there on the border.

Yes.

We’re right down by Kentucky.

Right on the Ohio River.

What’s on your mind today?

Oh, it’s a name.

Gert or Gertie or Gertrude sometimes.

Used as like a term of endearment.

All the women in our family, we call each other Gert or Gertie or,

Hey, I got to thinking about this because, oh, a couple of years ago,

A coworker of mine, I think she called her mom Gertie

Or I was calling my mom Gertie or something,

And we realized that both of our families used that, just the women,

To call the other women in the family.

They called each other Gertie.

So we both thought it was kind of weird, and I wanted to know if that was a thing, if Gertie is a term that people use, and we just didn’t know it.

Gertie is a term of endearment.

Grant, shall we tell on you?

Yeah.

I’ve mentioned this on the show before, but when I was growing up, I was one of five kids in my family.

And, you know, as kids do, we just had one of these goofy conversations about what each of us would have been named had we been born a different sex.

And my siblings decided that if I had been born a girl, I would have been called Gertrude.

And so for years, my younger sister, who’s five years younger than me, called me Gertie for a long time.

She just called me Gertie.

And I never really minded all that much.

So it’s so weird, Lana, to hear you talk about this.

Yeah, Gertie meet Gertie.

Gertie meet Gertie, yeah.

It’s so interesting to hear this.

And so this is just kind of like a generic name for other women in your life.

It’s not when you’ve done something old-fashioned.

Because Gertrude is kind of an old-fashioned name.

It’s not something when you’ve done something kind of fussy or antique-y or anything like that.

No, it’s just a general name.

Basically, it’s almost like when people say, hey, man, or something like that.

Like, hey, guys.

That’s exactly what you’re making me think of.

You’re reminding me of during the war, World War II, when Joe was just a generic name for an American soldier.

A lot of people who didn’t speak English might be able to shout to American soldiers, hey, Joe,

Because just Joe was considered a common name for an American GI.

And there’s Mac is sometimes used in the same way.

Hey, Mac, just to mean guy or buddy or pal.

And we’ve had a few of these, but Gertie is a new one for me.

I love it.

And, you know, there have been other Gerties, slangy Gerties,

But none of them are very nice.

They’re all kind of naughty.

Dirty Gertie in the 20s through the 40s was slang for a sexually

Forthright woman, you know, a promiscuous woman. And there were, during World War II,

There were old cargo boats turned into fuel tankers, were known as dirty girdies. And if

You go to bingo, you know how they have those funny rhymes where the numbers will rhyme

With a little ditty? Do you ever do bingo?

Well, I don’t particularly, but I’m in a community where bingo is a very big thing.

Well, if you go, you might hear the bingo caller say,

Dirty Gertie, number 30, if 30 is one of the numbers that comes up.

And then there was the big hit song in 1943, Dirty Gertie from Buzzerdy.

And it has a lot of naughty lyrics that never really made it into the official song,

But it was played on the radio.

But some of the lyrics that I can say on the air all go something like,

Dirty Gertie from Buzzerdy, hit a mouse trap neath her skirty,

Strapped it to her kneecap purdy,

Baited it with flirty flirty.

Just Buzzerdy, by the way, is a town in,

I believe it’s in Tunisia now.

But Gertrude is pretty much an old-fashioned name.

But I just love this little thing that you’ve got going on.

I wonder if the rest of our listeners

Or any of our other listeners

Have this same thing with Gertie or another name

Where it’s just kind of like

The little kind of group nickname for everybody else.

Well, Gertie, if there are other Gerties out there who call each other Gertie, we’re going to hear about it.

They’re going to call Gertie and me.

Yeah, well, we’re interested in people whose name isn’t Gertrude or Gertie.

If it’s just kind of a little nickname that you give each other, let us know, and then we’ll share it with the world.

We’ll find out more about this, Lana, okay?

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care.

Be well.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care, Gert.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Gert.

Bye-bye.

Well, if you have a question about language, we’d love to hear about it.

So call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Marianne from Dallas.

Hey, Marianne, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Oh, thank you.

I’m happy to be here.

I have a question because my father used to say something and I’m one of eight kids and

We all know it.

And he used to use a phrase called a buck three 80.

What was happening when he used it?

He would say if he came home and you asked how much something would cost, he goes, about $3.80.

So he’d try and evade us.

And if he said something was worthless, he would also say, yeah, that’s $1.380.

Like that’s got no value.

So it was either an evading technique or telling you something had no value.

I’ve just been trying to figure this out with my family, and we’re at a loss.

So Annie’s insights would be great.

It’s funny, isn’t it, how often the good communicators in our life have these great phrases that just stick, right?

They’re like good cornbread and gravy.

They just hang on.

Yeah, and to be very truthful, none of us do it.

We just remember my dad doing it, so it hasn’t dropped to us.

But it’s just a more, oh, that was a dadism.

It is a dadism, but it’s also Americanism.

It’s something that has been used throughout the United States since at least the 1930s, for sure.

I had no idea.

Absolutely, Mary Ann.

And we’ve heard from other listeners about this, too.

We’ve had questions from Andy in Lebanon, Indiana, Sally in Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin,

Ray in Maquan, Wisconsin, and Jim in Maryville, Tennessee, as well, and probably others that I’m forgetting.

This kind of buck 380 falls in what we might call indefinite hyperbolic numerals.

These are terms used for approximate small dollar amounts.

And there are a lot of variations on this one.

Dollar 380, buck 180, buck 280, buck 380, buck 390, buck 298, buck 295.

And these are all exactly what you said.

You had it exactly right.

They’re all about kind of evading the real number.

Sometimes because you’re embarrassed that it was too high.

Sometimes because you’re embarrassed because it was so low.

Sometimes just to dismiss the thing as being important.

Which sounds like what your father sometimes did as well.

Like, it’s not your business to know.

It’s my business.

That’s exactly right.

Yeah, I was trying to do the math there and think, well, how many pennies would that be?

But $1.380?

Yeah, and I couldn’t make sense of it.

And, you know, it just didn’t make any sense to us.

We’re just like, $1.380.

Okay, Dad, sure.

Thanks for playing.

It’s not necessarily just that particular amount, whatever that amount is.

I mean, there’s also nickel 95, for example, or 117.

Yeah, these are all made up numbers.

None of these numbers are real.

They’re all completely invented.

Like whoever says it, they don’t mean it.

Yeah, he was having fun with you.

Oh, he did.

And he had a bunch of us to have fun with.

So that’s really fun to hear that there’s a lot of different ways to do it.

But yeah, we always knew just stop asking.

You’re not getting anywhere.

Well, I’d imagine a man with eight kids gets tired of questions, so he probably had a lot of evasion techniques.

Yes, he did. He did indeed.

Well, thank you so much. That’s really fun to hear, and it just will be a delight for my family to hear about it, too.

So thank you.

Well, it’s a delight to have you share your memories. We really appreciate it.

Thank you all. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Memories and language go hand in hand.

Call us with your language questions. Tell us about your memories, 877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org, or on Twitter @wayword.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler.

You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and 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, or email us 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.

Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.