Blind Tiger

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.

The date, March 14th, is always a special one for math geeks.

It’s 314.

Oh, pi.

Exactly.

It’s pi day.

And in a year that ends in 1-5, like 2015, it’s even more exciting for math geeks because it’s 3-1-4-1-5, which is some more.

3.141.

Right.

5-9-2-6.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right.

And think about at 926 and 53 seconds, then it’s 3141592653, which is thrilling, right?

For that fraction of a second.

Yes.

And for the, right, for that fraction of a second and for those math geeks.

But there’s fun for word enthusiasts, too.

Oh, please.

Because there’s a whole branch of linguistic play known as Pylish.

Pylish?

Yes, people write pyems instead of poems, and they do it in a way where the words represent pi by the number of letters that they have.

Oh, boy. You’re going to have to illustrate for me.

Okay. All right. Well, like there’s, for example, one sentence,

How I need a drink, alcoholic in nature, after the heavy lectures involving quantum mechanics.

So each word has the same number of letters as the appropriate digit for pi.

Yes, exactly. And there are people who have carried this to extremes, Grant. There’s a 10,000 word novel called Not Awake. Not a wake, three words. That’s, you know, N-O-T-A-W-A-K-E.

Another person wrote, and you can find this online, a version of Poe’s Raven that’s actually very good.

And it starts out Poe, comma, E, and then the title is Near a Raven.

Those letters correspond to the numbers of pi, and it goes on and on and on for stanzas, and it’s really great.

Let’s hear a couple lines.

Okay.

Poe, E, Near a Raven.

Midnight so dreary, tired and weary, silently pondering volumes extolling all by now obsolete lore.

During my rather long nap, the weirdest tap, an ominous vibrating sound disturbing my chamber’s antidore.

This, I whispered quietly, I ignore.

Ooh, so that’s really good.

It’s really good.

So it’s not Poe’s Raven.

No, no, this is written by a guy named Mike Keith.

Shout out to Mike.

Well done, Mike.

Yeah, corresponding to the numbers in pi.

This is wonderful.

I had no idea about pi-lish, this language about words with the same number of characters as each appropriate digit of pi.

It’s crazy, right?

It’s kind of insane, actually.

Yes, a little bit.

But somebody’s got to do it.

But you know you’re forgetting the whole important thing about pi day.

Pi.

You get pi.

I’ll take some Blackberry, please.

That’s right.

You do, right?

Pi day.

Cut that little radius in there, right?

Give me a piece of pi.

We know the world is full of people that have hobbies that have to do with language that we’ve never heard of.

Share them with us.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

This is Sherry Grunder in Fairfield, Maine.

Hello, Sherry.

How are you doing?

Hey, Sherry.

Hi, Martha.

What’s happening?

I’m homeschooling some children here in Maine.

I’ve got two that are remaining at home, teenage young ladies.

And can they say hi to you first?

Yeah, sure.

Sure, put them on.

Okay.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

Hello.

Hello.

How are you doing?

Nice to meet you, ladies.

Who is this?

Okay, well, that was Gretchen and Abigail.

Okay.

Hello.

Great.

They’re teenagers in ninth and eighth grade, respectively, there.

And we listen to a lot of music here at home, a lot of different genres.

And unsurprisingly for our household, a few days ago, my girls were actually country line dancing to big band music.

Okay.

Of course.

Why not?

And they were listening to Glenn Miller Orchestra, and we heard a song with some interesting words.

And the girls and I would like to share the words with you first, okay?

Okay.

K-A-L-A-M-A-Z-O-O-O, what a gal.

A real piperoo.

That’s impressive.

Nice.

Well rehearsed.

It would be more impressive if we weren’t losing sleep because we have no idea what a piperoo is.

We’ve tried looking it up online.

I went to all the definition sources that I could come up with.

We kind of speculate and think we know the meaning of it, but really, what is a piperoo and where did that come from?

You’re going to sleep well tonight.

Oh, God.

Yeah, what do you think it means from that context?

From that context, we would say, because everything he says in the entire song about this young woman he’s talking about is very positive.

So we would assume it means something like she’s really awesome or neat or something along those lines.

Yep, that’s exactly right.

It’s something really excellent.

We can break it down for you.

The eroo there is a jokey artificial ending that you see on other words like switcheroo or floparoo.

And it sort of intensifies them but also makes them funny, right?

It’s just something even more than what it was before you put that suffix on there.

And piperoo comes from pippin, which is a particularly excellent kind of apple.

It’s a really prized kind of apple.

And the term goes back to the 19th century where it was applied to things that were excellent or pleasing, a beautiful person, beautiful thing.

It’s sort of like saying you’re a peach.

Oh, wow. That’s cool. All right. I didn’t know that. I never made the pip, pip and apple connection.

Yeah, the word pip means a lot of different things in English, and it’s sort of convoluted,

But I think that that’s probably the simplest explanation.

Yeah, most likely. The oldest form that I can find has it as piparino,

And arino is another one of those kind of goofy suffixes that makes the word funny and exaggerates its qualities.

Wow. Thank you so much.

That’s great. So you’re going to be country line dancing and singing the song and knowing what it means now.

That’ll be perfect. And next time when we do an opera song and we line dance to that, we may have to call you back.

Please do.

Tell your two peperinos that we were happy to talk with them, all right?

I will. Thank you so much.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Sherry. Bye-bye.

How sweet is that, right?

That’s awesome.

A line dancing, country line dancing.

With two people.

With two people. Well, three of them.

Well, yeah.

It’s a big band music.

This is a show about words and language and sometimes family.

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I was reading an interview in the Paris Review recently with the 16th Poet Laureate of the United States, Kay Ryan.

And she was talking about how she feels that a poem should act like an empty suitcase.

And she puts it this way.

It’s a clown suitcase.

The clown flips open the suitcase and pulls out a ton of stuff.

A poem is an empty suitcase that you can never quit emptying.

Oh, that’s beautiful.

Isn’t that a great image?

That’s nice.

Yeah.

A clown suitcase, though.

That’s important that it belonged to a clown.

Right.

Couldn’t be something serious, right?

That sounds like some of her poetry.

This is the show about words and language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Deedee from East Tennessee.

Hey, Deedee, welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, I moved here from Florida about 13 years ago.

And I live in East Tennessee, which is a beautiful area.

And it is considered Appalachia. And one of the first things I noticed here was the very different dialect they have here.

I wanted to relate a funny story. This happened to me when I first moved here before I really got a hang of the dialect. I have a neighbor who has grandchildren, and I was, I just ran into her one day, and I was passing the time, and I asked her how her family was doing, and how are the kids, how are the grandkids, and she said, well, the grandchildren were sick.

Now, they don’t say ill here, but if you’re ill here, that means you’re upset, you’re angry, you’re cross.

You have an attitude problem.

But she said her grandkids were sick.

And I said, well, I’m sorry to hear it.

And I said, what’s going on with them?

I’m a nurse.

Of course, I have to know.

And she said, well, they got sick at the fire.

And I went, they got sick at the fire?

What fire?

I didn’t know we’d had a fire.

She said, well, yeah, we had a fire in Greenville.

You know, last week, and I went, well, I did not see anything in the paper.

I didn’t hear about it on the radio.

Well, she said, well, yeah, it was in the paper.

She said, it’s been on the radio, and there’s signs all over town.

And I gave it a minute, and I thought about it, and I thought, oh, the county fair had come to town.

There were signs all over town.

They got sick at the fire.

They got sick at the fire.

All that greasy food.

This is wonderful.

F-A-I-R-R.

So, yeah, the tilt-a-whirl and the hot dogs.

Sick at the far.

And it wasn’t just me because there was another time, and I’ll make it brief,

But I had some friends up from Florida.

It was the year they had the three hurricanes in a row.

And when the third hurricane looked like it was going to hit central Florida,

I had a couple call up and say, we’ve had enough.

Can we come up for a visit?

And I said, sure.

So they loaded up their horses and dogs and came up for a visit.

I had to go to work, but they were at the house.

And that morning my neighbor pulled up to the back of the house,

Knocked on the door, and he asked for me.

And they said, no, she’s gone to work.

Can we help you?

And he said, well, I just thought Jens would like some pyres.

And Becky said, pyres?

And he said, well, yeah.

I’ve got more than enough.

They’re laying all over the ground.

And she said, well, I don’t know.

She was completely confused.

She said, well, what’s a pyre?

And he said, well, you know, a pyre.

He said, well, come look in the truck.

So they walked out to his truck, and there he had buckets of pears in the back of the truck.

And she said, oh, pears, oh, pears.

Anyway, it’s a different language here, and it’s delightful.

Oh, isn’t it?

And it’s plain, and it’s beautiful, and I love it, and I learn something new with it all the time.

That’s wonderful.

I love your response today.

That is the only healthy response.

When you hear language, it’s a little different than yours.

Yeah, just embrace it.

Thank you so much for sharing the stories, DeeDee.

This is wonderful.

This is exactly the kind of stuff that we’re here for.

Thank you for sharing.

All right.

Thank you for your time.

Take care now.

Thanks, DeeDee.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call.

We know you’ve got stories like that about language.

We’d love to hear them.

Share them with the world, 877-929-9673, or email us, words at raywardradio.org.

A new German expression I just learned is Merkel-Rauter.

So Angela Merkel something.

Yes, yes, yes.

Rauter?

Yes, Rauter.

Rauter’s path?

I don’t know.

I have no idea.

Rauter means rhombus.

Rhombus?

Or like a diamond shape.

I have no idea what this is.

The shape of her lectern when she gives speeches?

You’re so close.

She stands there.

She’s got this gesture that’s been widely, widely reproduced and parodied.

And it’s the Merkel rauta or the Merkel rhombus.

And it’s her fingers together pointing down and the thumbs together.

They form sort of this little parallelogram.

And she holds them just sort of in front of her belly there.

And she’s been asked about it and said, yeah, it’s difficult to know what to do with your hands.

Just a rhombus for all of us.

She needs some business, like a cup or something, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Bob Dole in his pen.

Yeah, that would work.

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Don’t hold back.

We want the whole linguistic story.

Stay with us.

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 who is that handsome man?

It’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

It’s me.

Two handsome men right here.

You’re the puzzle guy.

You have puzzles for us.

That’s the thing.

I do.

Yeah.

I have actually, I don’t know if you guys know this, by the way, I co-host a trivia, a pub trivia night in New York.

I did know that over on 10th Avenue or something, right?

Yeah, it’s actually closer to 7th Avenue.

But we call it bad trivia.

But it’s through Trivia NYC.

And Trivia NYC does trivia nights all over town.

Tony Hightower, who’s the president, he and I co-host this trivia.

And one of our rounds every Saturday night we have at One Star Bar,

We do something called Name Three.

And the Name Three is very similar to something you may have played called Tribond.

Do you remember that board game?

You get a list of three things, and you have to figure out what those three things have in common.

Oh, interesting.

So I’ve come up with a Name Three round for you guys.

Okay.

For example, if I said a violinist, Cupid, and a Christmas present,

All of those things have…

Bows.

Bows, right.

Very good.

Now, these dozen or so name threes that I’ve come up with for you, they’re mostly word-related.

Okay.

Okay?

Okay.

That would be good because we do a show about words.

You do.

That’s great.

I’d like to hear about it sometime.

Okay.

We’ll talk.

Yeah, we’ll talk.

Let’s try these.

Number one, Bob, Tom, Allie.

Cat.

Cat.

Very good.

Oh, look at you.

Bob Cat.

Right out of the gate.

Tom Cat.

Martha.

And Allie Cat.

Allie Cat.

Very good.

Yeah.

Bread, ground, records.

Bread, ground, records.

Something you break.

Break bread.

Things you break.

Yeah, there we go.

Nice.

Break bread, break ground, break a record.

All right.

Blog, motel, Groupon.

They’re all portmanteau words.

Yeah, they’re all portmanteau words.

Okay, here’s the next one.

Water, finger, oil.

Paint.

Water paint.

Finger paint and oil paint.

Good.

Here’s another one.

Bulb, silver, month.

Bulb, silver, month.

Silver, light, light, month.

You can usually find these words in a very short list

That gets passed around of words that have this similar feature.

They don’t rhyme?

No.

Yes.

Really?

Yes, that’s it.

These are three words, a handful of words that don’t really have any rhyme.

Nicely done.

How about code, proper, given?

Code, proper, name?

Name, yeah, name.

Yes, name is right.

Code name, proper name, given name.

How about ritzy, boycott, sideburns?

Oh, these are all eponyms.

Yes, those are eponyms, all named for people.

Okay, two more.

Rain, fan, tap.

Rain, fan, tap.

I was going to say water, but fan water.

Because of shoes.

Oh, tap shoes, fan shoes.

That’s a way in.

Is it?

Mm—

Dance.

Rain dance, fan dance, tap dance.

Yes.

There you go.

Very good, Grant.

Rain dance, fan dance, and tap dance.

Finally, nails, cars,

Cattle.

Nails, cars,

Cattle.

Think about what you do with cars.

Drive.

Oh, drive them all.

I see.

Drive, nails, drive cars, drive cattle.

Different kinds of driving, though.

That’s right.

Different kinds of driving.

That’s good brain exercises.

Yeah, those were chewy, my friend.

Yeah, that was nice.

That was like a little parlor game.

We had a little parlor game right here.

It was nice.

Thanks, John.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

Bye-bye.

And we want to talk to you now, so call us, 877-929-9673,

Or send your questions and comments about language to words@waywordradio.org

And find us on Twitter at WayWord.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Sarah, and I’m calling from Watertown, Wisconsin.

Hey, Sarah, welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

Yeah, I just have a question.

I have a word that I grew up and it was super familiar to me,

But now I moved to Wisconsin and nobody seems to know it.

Okay.

Oh, good.

What is it?

It is a duck snort.

A duck snort.

A duck snort.

All right.

Where does this come up?

Is this a nickname for you?

No.

I grew up playing softball in the Chicagoland area,

And a duck snort was always known to be a ball that was hit between the infielder and an outfielder.

So it’s a base hit, but it’s not necessarily a hit that you’re proud of, but it got you on base.

So it’s like, hey, nice duck snort.

Perfect.

That is exactly what it is.

I mean, not that I doubt you at all.

I just want to say that.

That’s what I was going to say.

You beat me to it.

It’s a bloop.

It’s a bloop single, right?

It falls between infield and outfield, and everybody’s got to scramble to get it, right?

Move away from their positions a little bit.

And it’s bound to get you on base.

And supposedly, originally, this was called the duck fart because the sound of the bat hitting that particular ball that would land in that particular way supposedly made a sound that sounded like a flatulent duck. Not that I’ve ever heard one, but…

And it’s supposedly… I’m getting a lot of this from Dixon’s baseball dictionary. Paul Dixon’s got the definitive work on baseball language. It’s a big volume. And he credits the term duck fart to Chicago White Sox announcer Ken Harrelson and then says it was later turned into duck snort because people didn’t want to say the word fart on the air, which I’m doing now repeatedly.

Yeah, I guess that’s a little more appropriate.

Yeah.

But it’s also a bloop, right? Do you use the term bloop or bloop single?

Yeah, a little blooper. Do you ever call it like a dying quail or dying swan?

No, I’ve never heard that one.

Yeah, so these are all kind of variations in the same thing. There’s a little bit of nuance around the edges, but dying quail, dying seagull, dying swan. We’re not killing birds here, but that is what they sometimes call it in baseball because it just looks like it was going up, and then it just kind of drops like a little weight.

I like duck snort. It sounds just soft and, yeah. I don’t know. Do ducks snort? I guess it sounds like that.

Yeah, I was just surprised because in Chicago, you know, my dad and my coaches and everybody always used it. And even, like, baseball enthusiasts up here in Wisconsin, they’re like, what are you talking about?

Oh, okay. Well, you’re one up on them because you got the lingo, Sarah. You’re all set.

Okay. I guess so.

Yeah. Teach them a thing or two. Clearly, they need to catch up.

Yeah. But if you do want an amazing work about baseball and softball, of course, borrows a lot of its language from baseball, it’s the Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary. It’s really fantastic.

Yeah, it’s great.

Yeah, I’ll have to look into that.

Check it out.

Cool. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Thanks for calling.

Yeah, thank you. Take care now.

Bye.

Bye, Sarah.

Bye.

Give us a call about language. We’d love to talk to you about sports or your hobbies and what you say to get the point across. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Speaking of words, did you see this list of the most common passwords used on the Internet? I’ve been following those lists for years.

It is. Isn’t it? Oh, my gosh. And they don’t change that much.

No, no. There have been some changes. I mean, these are the worst passwords in the world, right? 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4, password1, password01. Password, yeah. There’s some new ones on that list this year. One of them is baseball. Okay. Another one is dragon. Another one is football and Mustang. Why? I wonder why those changes.

Well, I think that the advice that password security experts give is don’t use the name of your car.

Right.

Don’t use the name of your favorite sports team. And there are a lot of human names, too.

Right.

Your kids’ names, your mother’s names.

Yeah.

Michael, Jennifer, Thomas, Jordan, Hunter, Michelle, Charlie, Andrew, and Daniel are all in the top 50. Don’t use those for passwords.

What’s your password? What do you use?

Oh, you sly dog.

Well, actually, I’m—

Actually.

No, but I’ll tell you my social security number.

Okay.

No, 3.14.

No.

Call us with your language questions. She’s that old. The Social Security number is 3. 877-99-9673 is the number to call us to talk about language.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. This is John Cooler from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hey, John. Welcome.

Thank you. It’s a pleasure to talk to you and Grant today. How are you doing there?

Well, I have an ancestor that was inducted into the South Carolina Law Enforcement Hall of Fame. He was gunned down in March of 1913, and the paper of the day wrote that he was assassinated by the Blind Tigers. And in that article, it’s unclear whether they’re referring to the sellers of illegal alcohol, whether they’re referring to the product itself or whether that’s a production and distribution rate. So I’m wondering what you can tell me about the term blind tigers.

Where was he gunned down?

This is in coastal South Carolina. We’re from the low country of South Carolina, and this was on St. Helena Island.

Okay. We always ask about geography on the show because sometimes it matters.

I don’t think it does here. Just to catch everyone else up, a blind tiger was basically a kind of speakeasy. And there’s a really excellent quotation that’s been uncovered from the newspapers. A variety of different sources have it. I got it from the Oxford English Dictionary, but you can find it a bunch of other places. It really describes the blind tiger perfectly. So I want to read this to you.

I seize a kinder pigeon hole cut in the side of a house and over the hole in big writing, blind tiger, 10 cents a sight. That blind tiger was an arrangement to evade the law, which won’t let him sell liquor there except by the gallon. So the whole point, it was a place with literally a hole in the wall, and supposedly you were going over there to see a blind tiger, and you’d put your money in and they’d hand you liquor back out through the hole. Basically an old-fashioned walk-up liquor store.

But later the term was generalized to mean any kind of speakeasy that was hidden from the authorities or sold homemade rot gut. There’s always kind of the notion there with the blind that sometimes this liquor was so bad it’d make you blind. I don’t know if that was actually true, but that was always the joke about it. And you’ll see that come up again and again.

Now, whether or not these folks who assassinated your relative were the bootleggers themselves, I wouldn’t know. But it’s entirely possible. It was a violent trade. But what it sounds a little bit to me, the reason I asked about geography, it sounds a little bit like some of those classic gang names that showed up in Boston and New York and Chicago and Philadelphia in the 1800s. And then through the early 1900s, where they all took these fanciful names and sometimes would wear some kind of symbol or mark to show that they belonged to this game, like a particular color of top hat or a patch of ribbon or carry a rabbit’s foot or that sort of thing. And Blind Tiger easily, I could easily see that becoming the name of a gang.

Excellent. Well, I did see it on the name of a bar and restaurant in Bay St. Louis, Mississippi. And so that’s kind of what rekindled my interest in the name.

Yeah, it’s an interesting… Also, blind pig is another variation. The people who run a blind pig were called blind piggers, and I suspect that’s kind of by variation of blind tiger. So anyway, that’s the most that we know about this. By the 1930s and 1940s blind tiger to refer to the alcohol itself and the place that it was sold, they both existed, but it becomes so generalized that you would find it in glossaries of slang included inside the sleeves of records that teenagers were buying. It was no longer really this back alley thing where it was only known to the police and the criminals themselves.

So, John, is your relative really in a Hall of Fame, or was that a figure of speech?

No, they just did an induction ceremony about a year and a half ago, and I think he and several others were inducted into the Hall of Fame. Like I say, his death was in 1913, so it was almost 100 years that they went back to put those folks into the Hall of Fame.

Wow, well, that’s fascinating stuff. Thanks for calling, John. Really appreciate it, all right?

Well, thank you so much. Your information has been invaluable, and I love the show.

Thank you.

Great.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Speaking of blind pig, I found this old sheet music from 1908 that has lyrics involving a blind pig and a spelling bee. May I share them with you?

Yes, please.

Okay, this is a song about a spelling bee, and the teacher asks the kid to spell the term blind pig. And so it goes, B-L-N-D and P-G. That spells blind pig, don’t you see? Teacher said with some surprise, oh my, you’ve left out both eyes.

So then I whispered, teacher dear, will you kindly listen here?

Blind pig has no eyes, you see.

You’re right, the teacher said to me.

It’s like that joke, you know.

What do you call a deer with no eyes?

What?

No idea.

Terrible.

I thought you’d like that.

I do.

For once.

A little bit.

Because it’s coming from you.

Once a week I have to take it.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Chris from Wisconsin.

Hey there, Chris.

Welcome to the show.

How are you doing today?

We’re doing well.

Nice to talk to you.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I have this saying that just came to me.

We used to say it growing up.

It’s a goose just walked over my grave.

We’d say it when you have a big involuntary shake of your whole body.

I have no idea where it came from.

So this is a shiver from being cold, maybe?

No, it’s just an involuntary shake.

Oh, wow.

Oh, wow.

When you’re cold, I understand that your body shivers to warm you up.

But this is just one big rush shake.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

Yeah, a lot of people use this expression when, as Grant said, they have a sudden chill, you know, just a shiver or shudder just comes out of nowhere.

And there are lots of different versions of this.

Sometimes it’s a rabbit walked over my grave or sometimes it’s somebody walked over my grave.

And it goes back to an old superstition that that’s exactly what’s happening, that there’s some kind of weird premonition that is going on when you get that chill.

And somewhere, wherever your grave is going to be, somebody or something is walking over it.

As if you’re connected to your final destination.

Yeah, it is dark.

That’s true.

Yeah, yeah, it’s very dark.

And probably the earliest reference that we have for this is in a book by Jonathan Swift back in 1738,

where somebody shudders and then she says, Lord, there’s somebody walking over my grave.

There’s a variation on this, by the way.

Some people say that a goose walked over the grave when there’s an uncomfortable silence in the conversation.

Yes.

So there’s just like this awkward moment.

These days, everyone would just go, awkward turtle or awkward.

But you might also say, oh, I think a goose just walked over our grave.

How does that feel, though, to have like 300 years of history behind words that come out of your mouth without thinking about them?

Isn’t that crazy?

Oh, I think it’s fantastic.

It’s wonderful.

I think so, too.

I can’t wait to tell my niece.

Thanks for calling.

You’re welcome.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call with your questions about things you’ve heard and said.

Or you can send them to words@waywordradio.org or find us on Twitter.

Our handle there is WayWord.

I learned a new word this week.

Grant, you may already know it, but this was sent to us by Aaron Harmon of Sacramento, California, who learned the term retcon while playing role-playing games.

Do you know this term?

I do, yeah.

Retroactive continuity?

Retroactive continuity.

You go back and you change a previous storyline so that new things can happen to your characters.

Yes.

Aaron says soap operas are notorious for this when writers reveal that the character who died in Season 5 actually didn’t die but really moved to Guatemala and had plastic surgery.

And that is how it makes sense that he is able to interrupt Susan and Doug’s wedding in season eight while being played by a different actor.

They do it in comic books as well.

They explain it with the multiverse, many universes where there are multiple Earths with similar versions of all the superheroes.

And different things can happen on different Earths.

And you’re like, oh, it turns out that when he died, that was a different verse.

So he’s actually alive.

That’s it.

Very similar, the comic book world and the soap opera world.

Right.

And improv, you know, you’re justifying what just happened.

A more complicated version of retconning is when you go back to real history of the world and you do a big what if.

What if the cavemen had never left Africa?

Something like that.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

Historical retconning, is that the way you would say it?

I think they have a better term for it, but I can’t remember it right now.

Historical retconning?

Something like that.

The concept’s the same, though.

Okay.

Yeah, and Aaron also says that an especially blatant example might also be described as having used the Rhett Cannon to blow up the problem.

Nice!

The Rhett Cannon.

I would like to take a Rhett Cannon to certain things in my life.

Bring out the Rhett Cannon.

877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org.

And find past episodes on SoundCloud and iTunes.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned.

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.

It’s not often that I read a review of a book that’s so beautifully written that I have to put it down and share the book review itself with somebody.

Oh, really?

Yeah, but I did that recently when I was reading a review about a book by Neil Rudenstein about Shakespeare’s sonnets.

And it’s called Ideas of Order.

And this review was written by a poet named Glenn Maxwell.

And he’s talking in the review about how odd it is really to read a lot of sonnets altogether in a collection.

He suggests that the sonnets were just sort of written individually and not meant to be grouped together.

And here’s how he puts it.

What howls around our hearing of a great sonnet is not silence, but a voice dying into silence, its last utterance clinging to memory.

There are reasons for its length, its shape, its balance.

In a Shakespearean sonnet taken on its own, that final couplet functions like two hands touching,

a prayer breathed into oblivion on a trembling ledge of thought,

a hope, a resolution of the contradictions that have thronged the three quatrains.

These couplets always rhyme, but they frequently invert, repeat, recast, recur,

knit words together like a spell or the weaving of chain mail.

And then later he says,

the Shakespearean sonnet doesn’t lend itself to a sequential narrative because the rhymed couplet

without its paired feet trembling at that abysm of time has to settle instead for the sound of

sighing resolution at regular intervals over and over before taking a deep breath and returning

usually, for better or worse, to the same subject.

And Grant, that had me thinking about how I read

books of poetry.

I used to try to read them all the way through and thinking that that was some

kind of accomplishment.

But more and more when I read a book of poetry, I sort of let my eyes go

out of focus when I look at the page to see how long the poem is.

And then more and more, I read just one and put it down.

I mean, Rilke’s poem about the panther, that’s all you need for a week.

It’s like a meal, right?

It’s like a whole meal and there’s no need to gorge.

You’re the python that ate the pig.

You don’t need to feed for a while.

Do you have that same experience?

Do you?

I have a strange relationship with poetry.

We’ve talked about this before, but maybe it bears repeating.

The older I get, the more I

understand poetry because I feel like my understanding of the world is clearer and

I have a distance to go, but I’m seeing that I’m not the 20-year-old kid trying to read Langston Hughes again.

But if I turn back to the Langston Hughes book, and since I’ve bought Langston Hughes, I’ve always had a copy of his collected poems.

I find new things there.

And I’m particularly astonished when I read a poem, maybe not Hughes, but somebody else that’s supposed to rhyme, that if I don’t follow what I call the tyranny of the meter,

if I choose not to read it in that rhythm that the author intended, I will frequently get more out of it than if I obey what they are trying to make me do by where the stress falls, where the line ends, where the words rhyme.

Oh, that’s interesting.

You’re a poetry rebel.

And do you get a different meaning from it?

I do.

I feel like I’m picking up more.

And maybe that’s a weakness on my part as the reader, because I require that sometimes that it be more like prose and less like poetry for me to understand what is intended or to feel like I’m getting what was intended.

Yeah. Yeah. And so you read them like several in a sitting?

Well, when I read poetry, I do it like the I Ching. I just flip through and let the pages fall where they may and wait for my eyes to light on a word or a shape of lines or just something that leaps out at me.

And I read it. And amazingly often, something in that poem speaks to me and has a synchronicity that matches what’s going on in my head or in my life.

I love that. The I Ching method of poetry reading. I like that.

We’d love to hear your experiences about reading poetry. We know it’s so personal and sometimes it’s even hard to relate.

You can hear Martha and I trying to struggle our way through to put into words these feelings that we have about the poetry that we love.

But give it a try, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Bill Thomas. I’m calling from Spotswood, Virginia.

Great. Well, what would you like to talk with us about today, Bill?

I ran into a term that I thought was a Southern colloquialism.

I thought it sort of resided with us here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, but I’ve run into it in West Texas and up on the New York State Canadian line.

And it’s the term stepping and fetching.

And I wondered about the genesis of that term and why it was so widespread.

And what kind of context do you hear it in and what does it mean?

Well, one of the most profound examples would be when we were watching Secretariat years and years ago run in the Kentucky Derby.

And I heard this man say, man, that big horse is just stepping and fetching.

You know, I don’t know exactly how to apply the term other than just slang, but it’s always intrigued me.

That’s interesting.

Stepping and fetching.

I mean, literally, it means going and getting, right?

Yeah, going and doing.

I would suppose, but it seems to pass beyond language definitions.

It doesn’t seem to be a southern term.

It doesn’t seem to be a West Texas term.

I just thought maybe it had some profound genesis.

Very interesting.

And so in the context you hear it, it’s very positive then.

Oh, yeah, like one going to procure or one going to get something.

But I was very surprised to hear this little Hispanic lady use it at mass in Eagle Pass, Texas.

How did she do it?

She said it was in her prayer, and I offer this with every respect, but she said, Lord, please look after us in our stepping and fashion.

Wow.

Right, just the going and getting and doing, right?

Yeah, I would suppose.

But it was such a shock because the only places I’d heard it was either the aforementioned matter of secretariat or at our local stockyard.

So I was very surprised to hear that there.

That’s really fascinating.

I mean, both Grant and I are looking at each other with some surprise because we think of it in a different context.

Yeah, we’re sending secret signals here across the room because there’s another whole component to this.

Maybe you’ve heard of the actor Step and Fetch It, who’s an African-American fellow who was kind of his whole character was about being lazy.

And there’s huge racial undertones with that character.

And often Step and Fetch was used to refer to a handyman or a slave or a servant.

Like that’s what they did for you.

They stepped and fetch for you.

You’ll find it’s sometimes referred to Native Americans that were treated as indentured servants by the early arrivals, you know, the Spaniards and so forth.

So there’s this whole huge centuries of step and fetch being directly associated with a really unhappy part of American life.

It’s really surprising to me to find that it’s out there floating around in an ameliorated, a more positive context.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

That is.

Well, thank you very much. I very much enjoy listening to you. I think you exemplify Mark Plain’s term that language is our basic art. So practice on.

Perfect. And we appreciate your contemplation of these complicated issues and bringing them to our attention.

You may be overestimating my intelligence, but other than that, I do enjoy listening to you very much and do keep on carrying on.

All right.

Thank you very much, Bill. Take care now.

Thank you, Bill.

Thank you. So good to talk to you.

Great talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Very interesting.

We’ll have to make a note of that.

Yeah, to keep an eye out for step and fetch, where you use it to describe yourself or something in a neutral or positive context.

Yeah, in a really positive way.

If you look back in books in the 1800s, step and fetch, even before the actor came along and made the movies in the 1900s, was used to refer to people of a lower class who were your servants or your slaves even.

And there’s a lot of baggage with that.

Yeah, yeah.

And the documentary that I keep recommending to people about that baggage is called Ethnic Notions.

And it’s something that you can watch online.

But it gives you a richer, more powerful sense of those kinds of racial stereotypes and how deeply they’re ingrained in the American psyche.

You said that was Ethnic Notions, a documentary online.

Yeah, you can find it online.

Well, we’ll try to tackle the complicated questions or the simple ones.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

I’ve been reading a cool book lately called Ciao Carpaccio, An Infatuation.

It’s by the veteran travel writer Jan Morris.

And it’s about the Venetian painter Carpaccio who painted in the late 1400s and early 1500s.

It’s got a lot of beautiful reproductions of his paintings.

And many of them have a whole lot of red in the paintings.

It’s really distinctive.

And I was reminded reading that that that’s why we have tuna Carpaccio or veal Carpaccio.

Why? Because it looks like his paintings?

Yeah, because it’s got the red in the middle because it’s almost raw.

What a strange connection that is.

Yeah, well, apparently the owner of Harry’s Bar there, the famous Harry’s Bar in Venice that Hemingway was a fan of, named his Carpaccio dishes after this painter.

Big fan of painting.

Yes.

And food.

Yes.

Well, and the tourists who came to see it, that’s also where the Bellini was invented, the little champagne with peach.

I see. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Karen Linick from Vista, California.

Hey, Karen. Welcome.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the program. What can we help you with?

Well, I’ve long wondered what the difference is between an orchard and a grove.

The dictionaries I’ve consulted haven’t been very helpful.

I always thought that a grove was for citrus, but my husband, who grew up in Orange County, says orange orchard, which sounds like fingernails on a chalkboard to me.

Oh, interesting.

I’ve heard that before because those two words beginning with the or kind of just don’t seem right.

Yeah, it’s weird.

So it kind of orange groves easier.

It’s much easier.

Much easier.

So your dictionaries weren’t very helpful.

I’m really surprised.

Maybe you need a better dictionary because they should have this sorted out for us.

Well, it had something to do with the organization of the trees and whether it was natural or planted, but that didn’t seem to make sense either.

Oh, you know what I think happened here, and I apologize on behalf of my lexicographical colleagues, is they probably wrote it in dictionaries to be as brief as possible, which sometimes means it’s really hard to untangle their meanings.

I think we can unpack this, right, Martha?

You’re going to untangle it, aren’t you?

Yeah, you know what? There is something to that. An orchard is planted and a grove probably isn’t.

An orchard is always a planted tree.

Humans put it there.

And it’s a fruit tree or a nut tree.

It bears food for humans.

So a grove is any kind of collection of trees of the same sort that are together in an area of small size.

So not a forest, not a wood, but a grove.

And then an orchard is fruit-bearing or nut-bearing trees that are planted in order to grow food.

Yeah, orchard goes back to the Latin word for garden.

It’s related to horticulture.

And originally, orchard was a garden, not just a place for trees, but a place for any kind of plants, especially those that grew food.

Yeah.

But now it’s restricted.

And I see orange orchard every once in a while, but far and away the more common term is orange grove.

Yeah, if you look at, and I don’t know if you did this, Karen, and you’re digging around,

But if you look at the orange growers associations, you rarely find the word orchard there in their materials.

It’s grove.

Grove is it’s friendlier. It sounds more natural for some reason than orchard. I don’t know what

That is exactly. By the way, I don’t know what dictionary you’re using, but we can make a bunch

Of recommendations. If you look on the reference section of our website, there’s quite a few.

If you’re in the market for a dictionary that will help you sort this kind of thing out.

Thank you. Yeah, sure. Thanks for calling, Karen. Really appreciate it.

Sure. Take care now. Bye-bye. Thanks for the answer.

All right. Bye. Bye-bye.

And we welcome your calls about language, 877-929-9673. You can call us anytime,

And you can send us email, too, at words@waywordradio.org.

Spent on tracking a new portmanteau word, a blend of two different words, and it is shrilk.

Shrilk?

You know what shrilk is?

Silk milk, made out of silk.

You’re close.

I have no idea.

It’s this new substance that’s being used instead of plastic, and it’s made out of shrimp shells and silk.

Does it smell fishy?

It’s called shrilk.

I don’t know.

I think I eat a ramen brand called shrilk.

The real shrimp flavor.

Keep an eye out for this term, shrilk.

It’s been used with 3D printing, I believe.

We’ll take your calls, 877-929-9673, or try us on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Holly.

I’m calling from snowy Schenectady, New York.

Hello there, Holly.

So here’s what happened.

I was posting on Facebook, and I wanted to express that gesture of satisfied completion that you get when you go,

When you slap your hands past each other in that kind of, you know,

I’m a carpenter knocking the dust off my hands kind of way.

And I realized there’s not really a word for that or a phrase for that that is, you know, can express that in any kind of economy.

And so I thought maybe you guys could think of one.

Or maybe if that gesture has currency in other cultures, maybe other cultures have a word for it.

Wow.

That’s a big one.

So I’ve just done something or I’m like, I’m all finished with this situation.

I’ve had enough of this.

And I’m like wiping my hands against each other as if there’s dust to remove.

And then I’m walking away from the scene.

Yeah.

And there’s a sense of like really satisfied, you know, job well done, that kind of thing.

And I think actually I was thinking about it recently that there is particularly in the way I was about to use it on Facebook.

I think there’s sort of an element of kind of irony about it, of sort of self-deprecation.

That kind of like, you know, where the denotation is or the connotation is kind of undercutting the denotation a little bit.

Interesting.

I don’t know of a term for that.

I really don’t.

I would just call it the all done hand gesture.

Yeah.

And what I actually ended up using on Facebook was all done clappy hands, which I thought, you know, it’s not really a particularly elegant phrase, but at least people would know what I was talking about.

I like it.

I like it.

And it’s kind of got that same sense that you’re talking about, about sort of self-deprecating but also really satisfied.

All done, clappy hands.

And I don’t know of a term in ASL for this.

I mean, they have gestures for done and finished in some other American sign language.

Sorry.

They have gestures for done and finished, but I don’t know that they have a special name for those gestures.

It’s just done and finished.

Well, and the other thing, I mean, I love all done, clappy hands.

I can’t think of anything better.

I was thinking of Pontius Piloting, but that’s not exactly it.

What is the washroom?

There’s a nice rhythm, all-done clappy hands.

Yeah, all-done clappy hands.

You’re right.

There’s something nice about that.

It’s got a really great rhythm.

But you were mentioning using it on Facebook.

I mean, how would we, is there an emoji for that?

How would you come up with an emoticon for that?

Get cracking.

Figure it out.

Holly, do you think you can do one?

A-D-C-H?

Maybe it’s just A-D-C-H.

What’s that?

All-done clappy hands.

The phrase would have to gain some currency before we could shorten it and have anyone have any hope of understanding what we were talking about.

You’re right.

You’re right.

If you’re writing in text, you’re just going to put, I’m done or done or finito.

But I love all done clappy hands.

I’m glad you like it so much, Martha.

I do.

I like it, too.

But in text, you’ve got words that already exist that you can use.

Exactly.

I would be curious to know if anybody listening has another term for it, or alternatively, if we can just publicize the heck out of this and popularize it.

All done. Clap your hands.

Holly, we’re going to try to make this catch on. What do you think?

Awesome.

All right.

All right. Thanks a lot.

Thanks, Colin Halle.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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The show’s coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

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