If you take a job at an airline, beware if your new co-workers ask you go find them a belly stretcher—they’re playing a practical joke on you. This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Belly Stretchers”
Curly Price from Fort Worth, Texas, called us recently about our conversation about teasing a beginner on a job.
Remember, you send somebody to go look for a bucket of striped paint or something like that.
Curly said that when he started work at an airline, they told him to go find a belly stretcher.
And he said that the funny thing is that everybody gets in on the joke.
We hadn’t mentioned this part, but you get sent to one gate at the airline and you’re told to look for a belly stretcher.
And you ask somebody and they say, oh, no, no, no, it’s down at gate, you know, 34 or something.
And so you go all the way down.
And so everybody’s in on the joke and pretty soon you’re all over the place, he was saying.
And I thought that was really interesting.
I looked it up in the Dictionary of American Regional English and there’s a whole slew of stretchers.
And so beware if somebody asks you to go get something that stretches.
They have bottle stretcher, board stretcher, pipe stretcher, lumber stretcher, paper stretcher, flag stretcher.
And in restaurants, they tell you to go get the bacon stretcher.
The bacon stretcher.
But if you’re an EMT, you want to get just the plain old stretcher for sure.
That’s right.
That’s right.
Call us to talk about language, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.
