Blue Streak (episode #1598)

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 aspire to own an electric car someday, but I am still trying to wrap my mind around the word frunk.

Yeah, frunk, trunk, frunk. VW bugs have frunks.

Yes, yes, frunk. It’s a portmanteau, as you suggest, of front and trunk because that’s where the trunks are.

In electric vehicles. And I read an interview in Car and Driver magazine with the woman who

Designed the front cargo area for the Ford F-150 Lightning, Nancy Reppenhagen. And she said,

It just seemed like an efficient way to say front trunk. So it didn’t bother me, which makes sense

To you and me, Grant, because, you know, it’s jargon and you’ve got to use it every day in that

Job. And so I can see why she wouldn’t have been bothered. And then I was thinking about the fact

That, of course, in the UK, the trunk of a car is called the boot. And I see that the Jaguar

Company for a while was calling its front trunk the fruit. But that looks too much like Froot Loops,

Right? Right. I just wonder if that’s going to fade and it’ll just become the trunk again.

That’s my thinking. I mean, yeah, you don’t really need… Since we’re not designing the

Ford F-150 Lightning. We don’t really need to specify. No. And also, unless you have a front

And a back storage area that look similar, you don’t need to specify front and back, right?

Oh, yeah. I didn’t think about that. A pickup has a bed and it might have a frunk,

But the bed and the trunk aren’t confusable. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, you’re making

Me feel better about it. There are new words just bubbling up around us and we know that

They’re entering your psychic awareness right now.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Candice Maverly-Lang from Berea, Kentucky.

Hi, Candice. Nice to have you.

Well, what’s on your mind today?

So my question has to do with marriage, particularly the correct verb tensing surrounding the word bride.

I’ve been married for a little over three weeks, and in the weeks leading up to my wedding, I had folks tell me, Candice, you are such a beautiful bride.

While others told me, Candice, you are going to be such a beautiful bride.

In the days following the ceremony, people commented, Candice, you are such a lovely bride.

And others had told me I had been such a lovely bride.

So in short, when does one start being a bride and when does one cease to be a bride?

Oh, my goodness.

I can already hear our listeners dialing in to weigh in on this one.

Wow.

Well, Candice, what are your thoughts about that?

Well, I am a speech-length pathologist, so I target verb tensing sometimes with the students I work with.

I honestly hadn’t thought about it until after the wedding.

And I could make a case for any one of them.

And so I thought I need to reach out to the experts and see if I can get a little more information on this.

So, you know, something else I grew up with, too, I would often hear particularly elderly gentlemen refer to their spouse of many, many years as their bride.

And so I don’t know if it’s a generational thing or a regional cultural consideration.

And I’ve tried to do some of my own homework and have not been able to come up with any answers.

Well, how do you feel?

It’s been three weeks.

Do you still feel like a bride?

I still feel like a bride.

I don’t know that I’ve really been able to wrap my head around the fact that I’m married.

Oh, my God.

What’s this thing on my finger?

Right, right. So I still feel like a bride and I was able to find out most people consider newlyweds to be up to six months after the wedding.

So I don’t know if that helps. And then to muddy the waters even more, I’m not sure if the same rules apply to being a groom.

Right. So a lot to consider.

Maybe it has to do with when you get all your thank you notes out. Maybe that’s when you stop.

Oh, so you’re going to be a bride for decades.

Right.

Oh, yeah.

So I’m just thinking about the old gentlemen who call their wives their brides.

And I’m just thinking about how some of it is a matter of perspective.

You know, there’s kind of an overlapping vision that you get with loved ones where how you first knew them and how you know them now.

And everything that’s gone on between are all smooth together.

And so one vision of them.

And so you can look at that portrait, that kind of combined portrait of them,

And you still see that bride that you first knew them as,

Even though it’s been 20, 40, 70 years.

And so I can see why the old gentleman will call them the bride

Because they still see the blushing young lady behind the veil.

And they can still see all the other important moments in between, then and now.

And so that’s the thing with bride.

Some of it is really about the perspective of the observer, and some of it is about the perspective of you.

So as long as you feel like a bride and you feel like you’re living this charmed life with someone wonderful that you love,

And it feels new and amazing, I say continue to be that bride.

Well, it is interesting that we don’t use groom in the same way at all.

I mean, I feel like a groom is a groom on the day he gets married.

Yeah, yeah.

And then it’s over.

But bride kind of has that afterglow, I think, for some people.

I think for me it’s very individual.

I mean, we had two brides at my wedding, so we shared it.

Yes, yes.

And I thought, does that harken back to the days of when brides were considered property in some places?

And is that why it continues to, they would continue to be referred to as the bride?

Because that kind of referred to that status as being someone’s property, unfortunately.

I’ve had time to think about lots of possibilities, but not really get any answers.

So I appreciate y’all, and I like the perspective piece, and that really does help contextualize it.

Well, Candice, I want to say thank you for bringing this question to our attention.

I’m with Martha.

I know we’re getting tons of emails and calls right now as we speak.

My feeling is that this is really a choose-your-own-adventure.

No, and I like that answer, too.

And give your fella a squeeze for us, all right?

I sure will.

I sure will.

So, Martha, thank you so much for your time.

Thank you, Candice.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

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Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

How are you two today?

My name is Danny.

I’m calling from Kokomo, Indiana, about an hour north of Indianapolis.

And I was calling in with the question.

I work in the catering and restaurant business.

I’m a service manager for a local restaurant catering company.

And as you well know, when you work in restaurants, sometimes there can be a lot of turnover and a lot of staffing issues, which seems to be rampant nowadays everywhere in the service industry.

And a couple months ago, I had a longtime employee not show up for their shift.

And I was sending an email to my fellow team members and said I was really surprised they left us in the lurch like that.

And that’s a term I’ve used my whole life, used often in my family.

When someone doesn’t show up or goes back on a promise, they’ve left you in the lurch.

Then I got to thinking, what is the lurch?

Where is the lurch?

The only lurch I’ve ever really known was from the Adams family, you know, the butlers.

So I thought you guys might be able to answer that for me.

What is the lurch and where is it and how do I get out of it?

Exactly.

Well, it’s nothing to do with ships or drunks that are falling down.

And the lurch, as in like walking oddly or lurching from side to side, is a different word.

And we’re not going to talk about that one today, but we will talk about in the lurch.

And this is when someone leaves you without help or they leave you in a precarious position, right?

Exactly.

There are a couple theories on this, but I think the one with the most weight behind it

Is that it comes from an old dice-based backgammon-style game

Which had the goal of trying to leave your opponent as far behind as possible.

It’s something that you still would do in the game Cribbage,

Where I think they even still use leaving someone in the lurch.

It’s when you win before your opponent even moves their pieces halfway around the board.

So you get 61 points and they get fewer than 30 points.

So they’re in the lurch, literally.

You’re like more than halfway ahead of them.

This game was spelled L-O-U-R-C-H-E, L’O-R-C-H.

And in old French, that word meant deceived, embarrassed, trapped, or duped.

The game is now called Trick Track in French.

And it looks a lot like backgammon, but it’s played a little differently.

But it’s all about moving the rolling dice and moving your pieces up and down these pointed rows.

It’s really the heart of it.

It’s about this just getting so far ahead

That the other person has no chance at all of catching up.

Now, there’s another little side note to this,

Which is there was at one point a hideout for poachers.

Say they’d go to the king’s forest and lie in wait

Looking for a game that they were not supposed to get.

This hideout would be called the lurch or the lurch.

And this probably still comes from this game as well.

Just this idea that you are in this place where you are deceiving or duping the game master, the person in charge of the king’s forest and the king’s game.

Well, how interesting comes from a game.

Never would have guessed.

Yeah, yeah.

But it’s an old, old word.

It’s, again, from the French.

So many of our words come from French.

Well, I knew you guys would have some insight on that.

Thank you so much.

Thanks, Danny.

Be well.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Absolutely.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear about the language in your workplace.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

In his biography of Leonardo da Vinci, Walter Isaacson notes that the great artist and inventor was also fond of riddles, and I’m fond of this one.

The riddle is winged creatures will support people with their feathers.

Any idea what that is?

Winged creatures will support people with their feathers.

Is this that people use quills to write in ink on the endorsement lines of checks that pay the salaries of employees?

I was going to say, using a quill to try to make a living as a writer is maybe not so much support.

But no, winged creatures will support people with their feathers.

He’s referring to feathers used to stuff mattresses.

Oh, perfect.

That’s simpler.

That’s better.

Yeah, I thought it was some kind of flying machine that he was inventing.

But no, feathers used to stuff mattresses.

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More about language and how we use it as A Way with Words continues.

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 here he is parachuting in from the cultural wonderland that is Brooklyn, New York.

It’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. I’m glad you said wonderland and not wasteland, because that’s something I hear sometimes.

That’s great.

The guanus has fish now, I heard.

That’s true. They’re cleaning it up, and it looks, you know, it’s going to be another 15, 20 years, but it’s going to be great.

So, you know, it’s funny we’re talking about Brooklyn. It kind of ties into the beginning of this quiz.

Sometimes I like to use the quiz to highlight an interesting way language is used.

This particular example we’re talking today, the names of baseball teams.

Now, I’m not talking about your humdrum major league teams.

I mean, really, who would name not one, but two baseball clubs after hosiery?

I prefer minor league ball.

In minor league ball, it’s so much more homey, it’s cheaper, and there’s a lot more creativity there.

Now, with few outliers, baseball teams are named for what I call pride in local history or industry, like the New York Yankees, or strength through association, usually with an animal, like the Arizona Diamondbacks.

Now, my local minor league team, which is a Mets affiliate, does double duty.

It sounds as if it’s named for a strong, dynamic weather phenomenon, but it’s actually named for a grand, historic wooden roller coaster on the Coney Island boardwalk.

Now, do you know this team?

Yes, I’ve seen them play.

Yeah, the Brooklyn Cyclones.

Right.

Very well-named team.

So let’s see if you know or can deduce these actual names of real minor league ball clubs affiliated with major league teams.

These are ones which I find to be interestingly christened.

Here we go.

Now, the Angels affiliate is located in the capital of Utah.

And if you know Utah’s symbol and its industrious insects, you’ll know the name.

Must be the bees.

Yes, the Salt Lake Bees.

Yeah, the Book of Mormon uses the word Deseret to translate to this, and it’s all connected.

Here’s the next one.

Now, I said local industry and strength through association with an animal.

It’s both when you’re talking about the Reds affiliate in Kentucky.

They’re located in a city that’s famous for a specific brand of baseball equipment, not so much flying mammals.

I know that one.

It’s something bats, right?

That’s the Louisville bats.

It’s the Louisville bats.

Yeah, I love names that do double duty like that.

Now, several teams combine a descriptive word and an animal,

Like the Sacramento River cats or the Midland rock hounds.

To that end, Lehigh Valley in Pennsylvania takes a two-word term for a form of crude ore,

And they switch the two words, and the result sounds like a strong, hard farm animal.

A strong?

Oh, iron pigs.

Yes, the Lehigh Valley iron pigs.

Oh, yeah, got to get the shirt.

That one’s great.

Oh, yeah, no, it’s beautiful.

It’s like an iron pig.

Now, there are several teams named for titles, like the barons, the generals, and the captains.

But what if your team wants to play off of that and also fields of a famous grain grown locally?

Now, if you’re in Cedar Rapids, there’s just one homophonic option.

The corn cones?

I don’t know.

What about the kernels?

Yes.

Oh, the kernels.

The Cedar Rapids kernels.

Nice.

It’s maybe K.

Yeah.

That’s a good one.

Yeah, that’s great.

I like that one.

I’ve decided there are worse things I can do than visit minor league ball stadiums, and

I really enjoy them.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I back that play 100%.

John, thank you for a fun quiz.

We’ll have to do the basketball teams next.

Ooh, yeah.

The Brooklyn Fishnets?

I don’t know.

I love it.

Thanks so much, John.

Thank you. Talk to you soon.

Take care.

And we’d love to talk with you about any aspect of language, so give us a call, 877-929-9673,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Jerry Dragon. I’m calling from southwest Virginia on the border of Tennessee and Virginia.

Hi, Jerry.

My question is, I play in a band, and we were at the studio, myself, the drummer Chuck Burdick, and the bass player Jimmy Eppard, and some other people, and we were discussing songs.

And we were discussing a song by Polko called Consequently So Long.

And one of the lines in the song was, now the die is cast, nothing happens in the past.

And someone asked, well, what does that mean?

And one of the gentlemen said, well, it’s when you throw a dice, you can’t change it.

So once it’s done, you can’t change it.

And I’m also a machinist.

And I said, well, there’s also a die and you cast a die in machining.

Maybe that’s the reference.

So we had a little discussion about it.

We came to the conclusion that because dice are probably much more ancient than the machining aspect of it,

That it was probably a reference to that.

And they probably referenced it to when, I guess, Julius Caesar across the Rubicon, I think he said, now the die is cast.

The die being cast in machining, is that directly taken?

And is it related to throwing dice?

And is that why it’s called that?

Oh, boy, what a great question.

There’s a lot to unpack here.

There’s a lot of dying and casting here and kind of confusing about which is which.

You’re absolutely right about the phrase, the die is cast, going back to Julius Caesar.

And just to review, I mean, Caesar had completed this successful military campaign conquering the territory of Gaul up north and west of Italy.

And then, as you suggested, he headed back south to Rome.

And at the time, there was a law that prohibited military commanders from leading their armies to Rome, lest they use their armies to take over the government.

So Caesar’s traveling south through Gaul.

And as you noted, he crosses the Rubicon, basically declaring civil war against his political rival Pompey back in Rome.

So you’re right.

It’s this pivotal moment.

And he supposedly said something to the effect of the die has been cast or the die is cast.

You know, I’m rolling the die right now.

Alia Iacta est in Latin.

You’ve already tossed that cube with the dots on it and there’s no turning back.

Yeah, you’re right also to suspect that dice are really, really old.

They definitely go back to ancient Rome where they were made of bone or metal or antlers.

But then you bring in all this other interesting line of thinking because casting as a verb historically has meant to throw.

And then later came to have the sense of the form of something that gets thrown.

So you have cast in terms of dice, of course, but you also have like a plaster cast, which is a model or casting a fishing line or even the cast of a play.

Those are the characters who are thrown into or the actors who are thrown into this or that role.

And that’s one I never thought of.

Yeah. Yeah.

So this is why we throw pottery.

I never thought of that.

I didn’t either until this very second.

But also this is why there’s cast and broadcast and podcast.

Right, right.

Casting around.

Broadcasting seeds is the agricultural metaphor that eventually gave us broadcasting sound and conversations like this one.

So the word dye is also a really interesting term.

It’s not until, I think, the late 1600s that dye comes to mean an engraved block or tool that you use to stamp a softer material or that you pour stuff into, metal into.

Well, that would be the mold, to make a dye.

Yeah, right.

So you would cast the dye in the mold.

Okay, okay.

And that’s a little tricky to sort out, but it may be because those dyes back in the 17th century were used in pairs, you know, to press both sides of a coin, for example.

But that’s a little tricky, isn’t it, Grant?

Yeah, it is hard to separate it out. But in general, it is believed that the term die used in manufacturing, such as in stamping metal or using molds and casts, although it’s later, does get its origin from the dice or the die used in numbered gaming cubes.

So it may come from that, the idea that you’re using this process to make that thing.

That’s what I suspected because once you pour a mold and you cast the die, it cannot be changed.

Just like when you throw dice, it can’t be changed.

But it’s super messy.

It’s super messy partly because these words are so common and because they’re so simple.

It’s hard to prove that the numbered gaming cue casting a die and the manufacturing casting a die are directly connected.

But it could be.

It could be.

But it looks like they are at this distance because they’re both so very old.

Well, Jerry, thank you so much for everything you brought to the show just now.

We really appreciate it.

And thanks for listening.

We really appreciate that, too.

And rock on.

Thanks, Jerry.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Whether you’re a rock and roller or a machinist or something else, you’ve got great language in your life.

And Martha and I want to share.

877-929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada.

Call us whether you’re listening by broadcast or podcast.

Or you can email us words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a phrase that’s new to me, but I am definitely adopting it into my vocabulary.

I’m the one milking this duck.

Do you know this one, Grant?

No, but I can imagine that means that I’m the one doing this wrong.

Yeah, yeah.

I don’t care if I’m doing it wrong.

I’m doing it, not you, so back off and butt out.

I’m the one milking this duck.

I know I’m doing it wrong, but I’m going to do it anyway.

Wonderful.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Ian calling from Clyde, North Carolina.

How are y’all?

Hey, Ian.

Doing well.

How are you?

Doing well.

Welcome to the show.

I’m great.

Thank you so much for having me.

I’m calling because I have lived in rural Western North Carolina in the Appalachian Mountains for about 20 years.

And in that time, I’ve come across, you know, a lot of kind of colorful turns of phrase.

But I had a coworker the other day who was talking about a previous job and having sold a lot of a particular thing at that job.

And she said, I must have sold a blue million of those of that product.

And it was something that I had just never heard before.

In the 20 years I’ve lived here, I’ve never heard the phrase blue million before.

And I thought I knew exactly who could probably shed some light on that.

Who?

The two of you, of course.

All right.

So this is another one of our hyperbolic numerals, hyperbolic quantities to add to things like zillions and a bunch,

You know, just where we talk about things and say, I’ve got a bunch of something.

I’ve got a zillion of something.

And we all know that a zillion is a lot.

And a bunch is more than a few, but it’s an indeterminate amount, right?

So blue million means a lot, but maybe not exactly a million.

Probably more than a million, I would think.

You think more than a million?

Yeah.

Yeah.

To me, it sounds like an intensifier.

Yeah, it is.

Blue is an intensifier.

Exactly right.

It comes from probably expressions like blue blazes or true blue or talk a blue streak or shout blue murder.

And all of these blue is used to emphasize and to just kind of express more, you know, just to add on to.

So that there’s more terror in screaming blue murder and there’s more talking and talking blue streak.

And there’s more loyalty into the B-True Blue,

And there’s more hell fires into blue places, you know.

It means extremely or completely in this case.

But yeah, at least 120 years old, we have blue million used this way.

And there’s actually been papers written about,

At least a couple of papers written about,

Blue used as an intensifier in this way.

Huh. So do you have any idea why it’s this specific color blue

And not, say, some other color?

Yeah, the theory that is proposed by the sociolinguist and folklorist who’ve worked on this is that all of these expressions together kind of overlapping created this kind of blues and intensifier.

But a lot of it is centered around the idea of blue blazes, blue being the hot fires of hell.

And so when you talk about blue blazes, you’re talking about this extremeness, right?

You’re talking about very hot hell.

We don’t just talk about a mild hell ever, right?

We always talk about the place where you really pay for your sins, right?

And so the blue comes away without no color attached.

The color is sapped out of it.

But what’s left behind is this extremeness, the extremity of the heat, the extremity of the ferocity.

And so that’s left behind.

And so all of these other places have this too.

So being true blue, what is there blue about being loyal?

Nobody really knows.

Or cursing a blue streak. Yeah. I mean, that’s a mouthful.

Right. So it’s not one thing that causes blue to behave this way, act like an emphasizinger.

It’s all of these things together.

That is fascinating. So does Blue Million, as far as you know, is that regional to Appalachia or do you see it in other places?

It’s never been all that common, but I would call it dated, which is not common at all anymore, and say that it was never very widespread.

And it wasn’t widespread enough to even put a geography on it.

Oh.

Yeah.

That’s fascinating.

Yeah, so little data can be gathered on it that we can’t really put a pin and say,

Oh, it’s from here, it’s from there.

But I’m not surprised that some people still use it because, as you know,

As a listener to this show, there are pockets of language hanging on around the English-speaking world,

Frankly, in any language, where people just continue to use stuff,

Unaware that the rest of the world has stopped using it.

And that’s the lovely thing about language.

And Ian, you just helped popularize it some more.

I hope so.

I love it.

And I, you know, honestly, I, you know, I want to respect the people of this area and I don’t want to step on anyone’s toes.

But I do try and incorporate some of those things into my own speech that I just think are particularly colorful.

Well, in this case, literally colorful, right?

Yeah.

Excellent.

Well, thank you guys so much.

I really appreciate your expertise.

I’ve been listening for 14 years, actually.

And I absolutely love your show.

You’ve been listening for a blue million years.

That’s right.

That’s right.

All right.

Take good care.

Thanks so much.

Thanks, Ian.

Bye-bye.

We’ve got a blue million listeners around the world who listen by podcast and radio,

And we encourage you, whether you’re listening by podcast or radio, to call us.

Toll-free line is open 24 hours a day, 877-929-9673,

And the email box never closes either.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Mary Johnson.

And I’m calling from South Pittsburgh, Tennessee.

My mom, when I was little, she always used a phrase

For whenever we would get messed up, untidy,

Just hair or clothes just messed up some way.

She would say, you look like the hind wheels of destruction.

And I have never heard anyone but my family say that.

The hind wheels of destruction.

That’s bad.

You looked bad when your mama called you behind wheels of destruction.

I bet you did.

It was usually when she was trying to get us.

There were five of us.

And it was usually when she was trying to get all of us ready for church.

And she would sit us down on the couch once she got us clean.

And if you got up and messed yourself up, you were in trouble.

And you were called behind wheels of destruction.

I love this.

It sounds almost biblical, doesn’t it?

Something out of the book of Revelation or something.

You look like the hind wheels of destruction.

Well, what’s really interesting about this expression, for one thing, it sounds so epic, like you said.

I mean, you didn’t mistake her meaning, did you?

No, ma’am.

Definitely not.

Well, there are various versions of this phrase, and they usually have to do with somebody who’s been run over by some kind of hind wheels.

And I just I love that it’s the hind wheels, you know, you know, whatever whatever the front wheels were, they they already ran over you.

And you’re all behind wheels.

Finish the job.

Yeah.

You’ve got wagon ruts on your body or, you know, you’re lying there on on the ground like Wile E.

Coyote after a steamroller or something.

But there are different versions of this.

The oldest version that I’ve seen is from 1878, which is a newspaper article talking about somebody who looked like they had run up against the hind wheels of bad luck.

And so I’ve seen that expression a little bit earlier.

Or you look like the hind wheels of bad luck have run over you.

You know, you can also find a version of this expression in the lovely book The Yearling by Marjorie Kennan Rawlings.

You look like the back of bad luck.

Which kind of sounds good.

It sounds like bad luck is left.

Is leaving.

Well, maybe you’re the scat left behind after bad luck has chewed you up and let you out.

Mary, thank you so much for your memories and bringing up this expression.

We really appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I guess the opposite of the hind wheels of destruction is the front wheels of creation.

Climb aboard with us call us 877-929-9673 we’ll talk about language toll-free u.s and canada

Or send us an email words@waywordradio.org 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 in 1975 annie

Dillard won the pulitzer prize for general non-fiction for her book pilgrim at tinker creek

And a few years later, she wrote an essay in the New York Times that was ostensibly advice for writers and artists.

But really, it’s advice for all of us.

The essay is called Write Till You Drop, and we’ll of course link to it at waywordradio.org.

But one piece of advice she offers is that when you’re looking for something to write about, don’t look for what you love best.

Because humans all basically love the same things.

So write about what you alone love at all, your own obsession.

She puts it this way.

She says, there’s something you find interesting for a reason hard to explain.

It’s hard to explain because you’ve never read it on any page.

There you begin.

You were made and set here to give voice to this, your own astonishment.

And then she goes on to say, write as if you were dying.

At the same time, assume you write for an audience consisting solely of terminal patients.

That is, after all the case.

What would you begin writing if you knew you would die soon?

What could you say to a dying person that would not enrage by its triviality?

And, Grant, I was taken aback when I first read that.

But the more I think about it, the more I really appreciate her sense of urgency.

You know, the idea of writing with a sense of urgency.

Don’t waste other people’s time and don’t waste your time and talent on trivialities.

Yeah, I love it.

And I also had a similar kind of, what?

She goes straight to death when talking about writing?

Right.

But the economy of words is for both of you.

It’s for the writer and the reader.

And we were just talking about this earlier before we started doing this show, this episode,

About tossing books aside because the writer failed to be original in the first few pages.

And I think she’s also talking about that.

You have an inner voice.

You are unique.

Why follow someone else?

Why try to be someone else?

That’s a really good point.

Here’s another part of the essay that I really appreciated.

She tells this story about a well-known writer who got collared by a university student who asked,

Do you think I could be a writer? Well, the writer said, I don’t know. Do you like sentences?

The writer could see the student’s amazement. Sentences? Do I like sentences? I’m 20 years old,

And do I like sentences? If he had liked sentences, of course, he could begin like a joyful painter I

Knew. I asked him how he came to be a painter. He said, I like the smell of paint. So you have to

Love words. You have to love arranging them and putting them together and the sensuality of all

That. And you also have to love just sitting there polishing a seat, wrestling with those words,

Wrestling them to the ground. It is the best advice for a beginning writer because so many

Beginning writers are more interested in the outcome rather than the process. They envision

Themselves with the published book rather than the unpublished book.

Right. Right. Embrace the process. It’s all about the process. I think that’s where the

Real joy is, you know, because what you write is never, ever going to be what you hope it’s

Going to be. Not completely. You know, there’s something that seeps out of whatever your

Original idea was. But maybe you find more things in the process as you’re wrestling with those

Words. I wonder if she is the kind of writer who finds her book in editing. Some writers do that.

The book isn’t there in the first draft. It’s there once they start editing themselves and

Challenging themselves. And the enemy, as she was talking about earlier, is the first draft.

The opponent is what they originally put down. Well, I think you make a good point. And I suspect

That that is the case for her because as you pointed out in a conversation we had the other day,

This essay is so tightly woven. It’s really hard to pull on a thread and see it coming apart.

I can’t imagine the editor that she had for this. They must have just stamped it with good to go.

It’s perfect. I can’t imagine cutting it for length either. I just don’t know where they

Would have done a thing that maybe there was a double space they had to remove. I have no idea.

Yeah. Yeah. So much of writing is in the editing.

So we’ll link to this piece from Annie Dillard on the website at waywordradio.org.

And we’d love to hear about your inspirations. Who do you go to for advice? Whose advice really

Rings true for you in the work that you do? Whatever kind of creativity it involves.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Polly from Issaquah, Washington.

Hey, Polly.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, about 30 plus years ago, I was talking with my friend Marcy,

And I was telling her about how we’re going shopping and that I was going to the food store.

And she started teasing me for calling it the food store, and I didn’t understand why.

And she said, no, it’s the grocery store.

And I, at that point, was in my mid-20s.

Nobody had ever corrected me or mentioned anything about that before.

So I figured, well, it must be that she grew up in Indiana and Michigan, and I grew up just outside of Washington, D.C. In Chevy Chase, Maryland, and it must be a regional thing.

And then I started polling a few of my friends back in the D.C. Area, and none of them thought food store sounded strange, but none of them called it the food store.

And so I just kind of had this floating around in my head for on and off for years.

And then a few years ago, I was listening to Terry Gross on Fresh Air, and she mentioned the term food store for grocery store.

And I started thinking, maybe this is because Terry Gross is, I believe, originally from Brooklyn, and my parents are from Brooklyn.

Then I put it on the Facebook Way With Words group, and the thing that I found there is that people from New York and Brooklyn didn’t necessarily say, yeah, they called it the food store, but people from Pittsburgh did.

And somebody said, hey, Terry Gross has lived in Pittsburgh a long time, but I don’t have any connection to Pittsburgh.

Then I thought my last guess was that maybe, coming from descendants of Ashkenazi Jews that spoke Yiddish,

Maybe this was a direct translation from Yiddish, which I don’t speak, and that that got passed along.

I can’t figure out where it comes from.

As far as I know, it doesn’t have anything to do with your Jewish or Yiddish background,

But you’ve really hit on something here with the New York connection,

And I did see that thread in our A Way with Words Facebook group.

And there was a lot of back and forth there.

And I kind of put together the different pieces.

And it really fits a pattern of this East Coast usage that kind of starts in New York, New Jersey, and Philadelphia.

Kind of make a big circle in that metropolis.

And goes down to the East Coast, along the Atlantic Coast, down to the Gulf of Mexico.

And the reason that we can say this with some certainty is that there is something called the Linguistic Atlas of Gulf States that surveyed people.

I believe it was in the 50s and 60s.

I might have my dates wrong here.

But Lee Peterson and many other researchers worked on this.

And you can find the raw data online.

But people reported using food store in the Gulf States.

And then you connect that to the data that we have collected on our own from your post on the Facebook group.

And we add on New Jersey and New York, New York metropolitan area and the Philadelphia area and probably the little westerly there in Pennsylvania.

So we have a kind of like a nice, what we might call an isolect of a region that says food store or can say food store.

And as to the why, the best guess that has ever been made, and this hasn’t been closely studied, I think Martha and I need to probably retire from the radio show and study this at full time.

Oh, please do, because it’s been on my mind for 30 years.

So I would love it if you did that.

Martha, I think Paul should.

Please retire from the radio show.

Study food store.

No, no, no.

Not that part.

Myself and my two teens love your show.

Don’t do that.

Oh, okay.

In your free time.

Spend all of it doing that.

But I want you to think back to a time when you might have gone to town and there was the hardware store.

And there was the feed store for your animals.

And there were other kinds of store.

And the food store was separate.

So you didn’t have these multi-purpose stores like we do now where you could get your medicines.

Right now when I go to the supermarket, I can get housewares.

I can get medicine.

I can get my meat, right?

The butcher even used to be separate.

Yeah, you can go to the drugstore and get lawn chairs.

Yeah, exactly.

So think about a time when there was a little more division for this stuff.

And so it made a lot of sense to say the food store because that’s all that was there for the most part was food.

Okay.

So it was being specific in the same way that, for instance, like people used to go to like the fish market if you wanted to get fish.

So would this have been produce?

Yeah.

It might have been food that was unpackaged food.

Yeah, produce.

Stuff that didn’t come prepared or pre-prepared.

Yeah, exactly.

And this is generally not always true.

Obviously, there have always been kind of general purpose stores that sold whatever they could get their hands on that people wanted.

Right.

But that’s probably the origin of this.

And again, we have some data on this.

So we know that there are people who have said this and still say this.

It’s never been all that common. The Dictionary of American Regional English doesn’t include an entry for it, but it does include one citation for it in the entry for Hoagie, where somebody is talking about going to the food store.

And it’s from the large metropolis that is, you know, Philadelphia, New Jersey and New York City.

So would you think then that this would generally have been more common in the big cities because, you know, if you were in a rural place, you might have more of a general store, whereas in the big cities, you know, you would have lots of different stores.

That’s a good guess. But like I say, I don’t know for sure, but we’re guessing here, but nobody has done a full study on this. No real extensive work, as far as I know, has ever been done on the Expression food store versus grocery store.

So congratulations, Polly. You’re not alone.

Me and Terry Gross.

Yeah. Good company.

It got me on your show.

So you know what?

This is wonderful on all accounts.

And to my friend Marcy, see, I told you, it’s not weird.

It’s me, Terry Gross.

Yeah, Marcy.

Yeah.

Yeah, Marcy.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Take care of yourself, Polly.

Be well.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Thank you, Polly.

877-929-9673.

We got an intriguing voicemail from Will Hasseltine,

Who was telling us about the first pep rally he ever attended.

It was when he was in kindergarten,

And he remembers his teacher getting the kids ready by saying,

We’re going to a pepper alley.

Or at least that’s what he told his mom later that day,

That we all went to a pepper alley.

And his mom, of course, thought that was really, really funny,

That little misunderstanding.

But he swears that that’s what his teacher said.

We’re going to a pepper alley, and Will wanted to know, is there such a thing?

And, of course, that’s what I thought was an adorable childhood misunderstanding,

But the truth is there is such a thing as pepper alley.

But it’s not the same thing as a pepper alley, which you would do at school

Where everyone gathers to cheer on the team that’s going to fight in the big game

Against their dreaded opponent.

That’s right. But if you look in slang dictionaries, you’ll see that Pepper Alley is actually a state of being beaten up.

It comes from boxing slang, where the verb to pepper, of course, means to hit somebody repeatedly.

You know, you pepper them with punches.

But it’s also a pun on a place in South London called Pepper Alley, where apparently a lot of this went on.

So Will is still convinced all these years that he heard correctly as a kindergartner.

I mean, maybe his teacher was from Britain or something.

Right, right.

But I suspect it’s just a mishearing, but it’s kind of adorable that he’s still hanging on to the belief that he heard correctly.

Absolutely.

Will, there’s probably a really good chance that you misheard.

But, you know, keep believing, brother.

Grant and I love to hear about those childhood misunderstandings.

And you can share yours by calling us 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Amelia, and I’m calling from Arlington, Virginia.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Amelia.

Thank you.

I have something that my wife said recently that I was wondering if you could help me out with.

Oh, yes, please.

She and I have been married for a number of years now.

We’re both in our mid-30s, and we’re both from the Midwest.

She’s from Iowa, and I’m from Ohio.

Every once in a while, she’ll say something that I’ve never heard before, never heard anyone else say before.

So I get to figure out, is it an Ohio thing or just something her family says or something she’s made up herself?

Most recently, she said she was talking about our neighbor who was wearing these sweatpants that had holes all the way through them.

And she said, oh, wow, he’s really getting the goody out of that pair of pants.

And I realized, yeah, I could tell that she meant she’s getting like the most out of them.

She said, get the goody out of it.

And I thought, you know, it kind of sounds like a phrase that people say, but then I

Realized I thought more about it.

I don’t know anyone else who says that.

And her mom was in town recently and she said it.

And I asked her about it.

She didn’t know where it came from.

And her sister also says it.

So it’s definitely in their family, but nobody knows where it came from.

And I tried looking it up online and there really isn’t much out there about this phrase.

So I was curious if you guys had any insight onto it.

Well, I think that that’s probably pretty straightforward.

It’s probably related to the idea of a goody being the edible kernel of a nut, particularly hickory nuts and walnuts.

Since the late 18th century or so, the term goody has been used to mean something tasty or desirable, you know, like candy or even hard to get at crab meat, you know, get the goody out of a crab shell.

Sure.

Let’s see. It’s also been used for the yolk of an egg. So the good part, I guess, of an egg if you’re into yolks.

And the flesh of an orange sometimes.

There you go.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So all those words are kind of the same. They come from the same place, like the middle of something, kind of?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah, the middle and also just the good part. You know, like a goodie bag has goodies in it or a goodie picker.

I love that term, goody picker. It’s a pointed instrument for digging the meat out of a nut.

Is it regional at all or all over?

Goody is kind of scattered throughout much of the United States, the South and a little bit in the Midwest.

So I’m not surprised that your wife picked that up there.

That’s interesting about the nut because her mother, my mother-in-law, grew up on a farm and her dad had a bunch of black walnut trees and would like harvest them.

And there’s stories about her, like the basement being full of walnuts.

So I wonder if they…

I know that we had a walnut tree at one of our houses. I know that feeling.

Yeah. They are all a bit scarred about it, I think, because of how much it stains them.

Well, that’s really interesting.

Well, I’ll pass it along to them.

I think they’ll be interested to hear.

All right, Amelia, thank you for helping us get the goody out of this question.

Yeah, absolutely.

Thanks so much.

Take care.

Thanks a lot.

Best to your wife.

Thanks.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

When you marry into a family, you don’t just marry your spouse.

You marry their language.

And there’s a lot that you might not understand.

Martha and I can help you sort that out.

877-929-9673.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine,

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And quiz guide John Chaneski.

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

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A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.,

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Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.