Bouncy House of Language (episode #1372)

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 was reading a magazine article recently on libido, which included this line.

And one of the world’s masters of rat lust is Jim Faus, a professor of psychology and neuroscience at Concordia University in Montreal, who wears hoop earrings and used to sing in a punk band called Mold.

And Grant, I was reminded of the fact that every once in a while there’s a sentence that I come across in an article, and I just have to look up because it’s so arresting.

So you’re reading and you’re caught by it.

And you look up and look around you and see if anybody else witnessed this miraculous event.

But it was just between you and the page.

Yes, exactly.

Or it’s such a great word picture or just this arresting thought.

And I’m reminded of the fact that there’s a guy on Twitter, Sam Anderson.

He’s a writer for The New York Times.

And every day he posts the best sentence that he’s read in the last 24 hours.

And I have a really good time reading this because you come across tweets like this one from Ann Carson where she says, someone has put cries of birds on the air like jewels.

That’s nice.

I don’t know what it was about, but it’s nice.

I have no idea either, but they’re just beautiful.

I like that.

And I think it’s a great question to ask yourself.

What is the best sentence I’ve read in the last 24 hours?

I can’t answer that one, but I do keep a commonplace book of sorts.

This is where when you find something interesting, you mark it down.

And I’m coming up on thousands of lines that I’ve been collecting over the last 15 years or so and passing from program to program to computer to computer.

And one of the lines that’s in there is this line from Ezra Pound that I love a lot.

The book should be a ball of light in one’s hand.

It’s beautiful.

It suggests the brilliance of the writer coming through and penetrating your brain.

Yeah, yeah. I would look up from that.

Like a space ray coming from the book.

Well, what’s the best sentence that you’ve read in the last 24 hours?

Let us know about it.

Send it to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

Or you can send them to us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi.

This is Andrea calling from Providence, Rhode Island.

Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

Thank you.

Love the show.

Thanks for having me on.

Yeah, sure.

Sure thing.

What’s up?

So I have a question for you.

My partner came home from taking our niece to a gymnastics class a couple of months ago.

And she was describing what it was like to watch her.

And she said, you know, she sort of marches to her own beach.

She’s kind of in her own world.

She’s not really doing what the rest of the kids are doing.

And, you know, but she’s having fun nonetheless.

And I said, well, she certainly didn’t lick that off the grass.

And my partner said, what are you talking about with licking that off the grass?

And I said, you know, the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.

So we had this conversation about where in the world I heard that.

And we have no idea.

I’ve asked everyone I know.

I’ve asked my family.

I’ve asked her family.

Best friends, and nobody’s ever even heard of it.

But you’re the only one?

I’m the only one.

And you’re in Providence?

Yeah, and we’re in Providence.

And Andrea, where are you from originally?

Newport, Rhode Island.

Oh, Newport, Rhode Island.

Okay.

That’s interesting.

So to say she didn’t lick it off the grass means…

She doesn’t lick it off the grass.

How did you put it?

She doesn’t lick it…

In this case, I said she didn’t lick that off the grass, meaning this sort of march to do your own tune, sort of do your own thing, be in your own land, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, that’s my sense of the term that it’s the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree or you didn’t pick it up on the street.

You inherited it.

It came in your genes.

Yeah, your genes or you picked up a behavior from your relative or something like that.

Right, right.

And I’m not sure of the origin.

I do know that it’s often associated with the Irish.

Do you have any Irish in your background?

That is hysterical that you said that.

My partner is fully Irish, and one of the first people I asked was her brother, John, who’s a creative writing professor.

And he wrote back, I don’t know, but it’s certainly not Irish because we’re far more poetic with our metaphors.

Wait till I tell him that.

That’s funny.

I don’t think he hangs out in the pub enough.

Oh, that’s great.

Yeah, I’ve seen many, many references by people in especially Northern Ireland using that expression.

And I have a friend from Ireland who says that she uses it sort of in a sarcastic way.

Like if somebody says to her, oh, I didn’t realize you could fix that kind of broken chair, she would say, oh, well, I didn’t lick that off the grass.

Oh, I got it. Great.

What do you think?

Yeah.

Interesting. So the idea here is that you acquire something from your environment, a trait or behavior or some kind of affliction even, rather than coming to it naturally through your family.

Right. And I don’t know what it has to do with licking off the grass.

But I think it could be licking it off the table or whatever.

It certainly falls in the crasser levels, registers of slang, doesn’t it?

Well, you think it’s like a dog or something returning to…

Yeah, a dog eating its own sick, maybe.

I don’t know.

That’s great.

Yeah, we don’t have the origin, but we recognize the expression for sure.

Well, I appreciate that.

I’m not going crazy, so thank you.

No, you are not going crazy.

Thanks for calling me, Andrea.

Thanks so much, guys.

Have a good day.

Sure, take care.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

The Twitter handle Wayword, and we’re on Facebook in a couple of places.

Grant, do you know the expression, ring the doorbell with your elbow?

No.

I was introduced to this on our Facebook page by David Otto Waddell.

He writes, I went with my wife to visit one of her friends.

Her friend offered me some of her husband’s beer, which I was glad to consume.

Later on, her husband came home, and he was not too pleased.

His subtle hint to me was, next time you come, ring the door with your elbow.

Oh, it means that you have something in your hand.

You’re bringing your own.

Exactly.

Exactly.

In fact, yeah, yeah, there’s a joke about, you know, come up to 5M and ring the doorbell with your elbow, and when the door opens, push it open with your foot.

And the guy goes, why should I use my elbow and my foot?

And the person says, well, you’re not coming empty-handed, are you?

Ba-dump-bump.

Sorry.

Yeah, it was a joke.

You’re supposed to laugh.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send your favorite expression to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

This is Brian Amaral calling from Edison, New Jersey.

Hello, Brian.

Hi, Brian.

What’s going on?

So I moved to New Jersey about six months ago and started noticing that there’s a convenience store around here and all around the Mid-Atlantic called Wawa.

And it’s kind of an interesting name.

I looked at the logo, and the logo is a goose.

So, you know, being somebody who speaks a little bit of French, I figured that Wawa, in French, the word for goose is Wawa.

It’s spelled O-I-E, but it’s pronounced Wawa.

So I figured that that’s where they got it from since the goose was the logo and just sort of went on my way thinking I was pretty smart.

But then one day I decided to actually look it up on Google to see whether this was the case.

And I found out that actually it’s called Wawa because it was founded in Wawa, Pennsylvania.

But according to the Convenience Source website, the word Wawa is a Native American word for goose.

So the question that I had was, is it a coincidence that French, you know, a European language and a Native American language would have a very similar word for goose, which is not a very common word.

And it got me thinking about word origins. Can you help me?

Yeah, sure. Absolutely we can. So is there a chance that this Native American word, wah-wah, is related to the French and wah?

Right? For goose. There’s always a chance, but the odds are against it. And here’s why.

We see similarities in words when they’re borrowed from one culture into another. When culture A, for example, doesn’t have that thing and culture B does, then culture A will borrow the word for it as it borrows the thing. But we know for certain with this particular word that that existed in the Algonquin languages, Lanap, a few other languages spoken in Pennsylvania, around the Great Lakes, even up into Canada for goose, regardless of where the French were or what the French were doing in the New World.

And the goose, the geese were already here. And the Native Americans did not need to borrow that word because they had one. And it was a part of the vocabulary.

There’s actually a really interesting, I guess I’d call it a thesaurus of Native American languages from 1837 from a periodical called the Archelogia Americana. And it’s got a chart where it takes words like goose and snake and bark and leaf and moon and tree and list the words from all the languages that they can find in North America from all these different glossaries and dictionaries and lexicons. And they include this word. But the key here is not that it actually exists and that it sounds the same, the key is they didn’t need to borrow bark and leaf and tree and moon because they had those things already. And so there’s no reason to think that they would need to borrow goose.

You can also flip it around. The other thing that happens is we find unexpected coincidences because there are a limited amount of sounds that the human mouth can make. And so there are a limited amount of configurations. And so repetition, particularly for two syllable or one syllable words is incredibly common. So for example, the word B-A-D means bad in English, but it turns out something that sounds almost exactly like bad in Farsi also means bad. It’s just a coincidence.

And you have words that sound the same that don’t mean the same, like, or look the same. R-E-D is read in English. R-E-D is read in Spanish and means net. So different things there. So a lot of, I mean, you can just, thousands of these phonetic coincidences exist between languages.

Well, and in this one in particular, it almost seems onomatopoetic, doesn’t it?

That’s what I was thinking, yeah.

It could be.

Wah.

It could be.

What’s really very interesting to me, and I have it here in front of me, is that for most of the Native American languages, and it’s probably not the right thing linguistically to lump them together, but I’m going to do it anyway, it turns out that the word for egg for many other languages is similar or identical to wah-wah, which means goose in just a few languages.

So it’s entirely possible that the wawa for goose actually came from the term for egg, which would further kind of disprove the idea that it came from the French.

So which came first, the wawa or the egg?

Yeah, exactly. The goose or the egg.

So, Brian, does that help?

Yeah. I’m a little bit surprised to hear that it’s just a coincidence. I guess that makes it pretty interesting.

Google the term linguistic coincidence, and I think you’ll come up with more than a few pages that have long lists of these. Utterly coincidental with no etymological evidence there to support the connection at all.

Interesting. Well, thanks, Grant. Thanks, Martha.

It’s amazing the things you can think of when you’re filling up your tank with gas.

Well, when somebody else is doing it for you, I live in New Jersey.

Oh, yeah, New Jersey.

They’re fancy there. They have someone else do it for you.

Brian, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you very much.

Thank you, sir. Bye-bye.

I can’t not mention this. You know, there’s a famous poem by Longfellow, The Song of Hiawatha. He mentions wawa for goose in there.

Can I read this to you?

Please do.

Let’s see.

This is just a part of it.

Oh, were the water floating, flying, something in the hazy distance, something in the mists of morning loomed and lifted from the water, now seemed floating, now seemed flying, coming nearer, nearer, nearer. Was it Shingibis, the diver? Was it the pelican, the Shada? Or the heron, the Shashaga? Or the white goose, wabiwawa, with the water dripping, flashing from its glossy neck and feathers.

And there’s more of that.

That’s great.

Longfellow. How can you compete with Longfellow?

And you’re reading it, Grant.

I think we should just turn off the phones for the rest of the hour, and you just continue, please.

You flatter me, and I like it.

Okay. Instead, call us 877-929-9673. Come back for more in the bouncy house of language as The Way With Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined by Greg Pliska, our quiz guy.

Hello, Greg.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

What’s happening over there?

Hello, Greg.

You know, things are good. I’ve been busy, as always. I don’t know if you know, last summer I worked with Steve Martin on writing music for Shakespeare in the Park.

Yes.

Yes, banjo music?

All banjo music all the time. Actually, Steve wrote the banjo music and I did the orchestral stuff, but we crossed over a little bit and had a great time.

How was that? How was that working with Steve Martin?

He’s great. He’s the best. He’s one of the best collaborators I’ve ever worked with, and he plays a mean banjo, let me tell you.

Yes, he does.

And what did you tell him about us?

I said, you’re the best. You’re some of the best collaborators I know, and you play pretty pathetic banjo.

I do, actually. I got that right.

But you know, I can do puzzles, and if you’ve got one in your banjo case, I’d like to hear it.

Funny you should say that. I do. It’s called Categorical Allies.

Oh, yay. We’ve played it before. The way it works is this. I’ll give you a word, and you have to come up with a second word that’s in the same category as the first word, and that begins with the two letters that the first word ends with.

For example?

For example, if I said tuba, T-U-B-A, you might say?

Bassoon.

Baritone.

Bassoon would be good. That’s an orchestral instrument. You could say baritone, which is a kind of brass instrument. You could also say banjo.

Of course.

Oh, banjo. Should have thought of that right away.

Right away. I fed it to you in the introduction.

So you see how this works, yes?

Yes.

Yes.

All right. Well, not all the categories will be quite as obvious as that one, but I don’t want to make this too easy for you.

No, no, no.

All right, here’s your first one. Matisse.

Matisse.

Matisse.

And that’s S-E.

Seurat.

Seurat would be exactly the one I was thinking of. French painters would be the category, I think.

How about this one? Faro, F-A-R-O.

Like a lighthouse?

No, like the game, the card game.

Yeah.

What’s a card game that gives an RO?

Rum.

Gin Rummy.

You’re just thinking generally about entertainment?

Well, where do you play Pharaoh?

In a casino.

Mm—

Roulette.

Roulette.

Ooh, they’re good. Casino games, Pharaoh and roulette.

All right, how about this one? Job.

Job.

Obadiah.

Obadiah.

That’s where I was going. Obadiah, very good. Books of the Bible.

All right. How about this one? Go to jail.

Go to jail.

Illinois?

Illinois Avenue is correct. Spaces on the Monopoly board.

Oh, look at you. Very good. You could also do Community Chest and St. James Place or St. Charles Place, but I like the other one.

In this next one, just ignore leading articles. The first item is a Christmas carol. That’s the whole clue there.

Oh, so Oliver Twist?

Oliver Twist.

Yeah, so Dickens.

Absolutely. You could also do Old Curiosity Shop.

Oh, yeah. Okay, how about Omega?

Omega, Gamma.

There you go, Gamma. Greek letters.

All right. Thanks, Greg. That’s a wonderful quiz.

We’re out of here.

Woo-hoo.

No, we really appreciate it. It’s awesome, dude.

It’s a pleasure.

It’s really great to be with you.

Thanks for taking the time out of your week to entertain.

Always glad to be with you.

Thanks, Greg.

Take care.

This is the show about words and language and how we use them.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us at words@waywordradio.org.

And check us out on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amber from Connersville, Indiana.

Hello, Amber.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, Amber.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, what’s on your mind?

Well, I have a question about a word that has been bugging me for probably a dozen years.

And I was wondering if you guys could help me with it.

It’s about time you called.

It’s irregardless, right?

That’s right.

No, the word is a funny one.

It’s KOOFER, K-O-O-F-E-R.

And, Amber, how do you use this?

Well, I was sitting in my freshman class in veterinary school at Virginia Tech,

First day and the professors going over the course syllabus and the basic information,

And they would throw things out. Like, you know, one professor would say,

In this class, you can use KUFERS. And the next class, the professor would say,

In this class, you cannot use KUFERS. And use of KUFERS would be a violation of the student

Honor code. What is it? Some kind of cheating?

Well, what they ended up being, because I’m looking around like, what is this crazy word?

I’ve never heard it before. Most of my fellow classmates had also gone to Virginia Tech for their undergrad.

And so they were already hip to the lingo. They, you know, they have, they’re not, you know, perplexed by this word at all.

And what it means is copies of old texts that are available in the library for your study,

So that you can get a feel for how the professor writes questions for the course exams.

So it’s used as a noun.

Have you ever heard it used as a verb?

Kind of as more an adjective, like some classes would be cooferable,

And other classes were not cooferable or were uncooferable.

Well, what a coincidence.

Apparently it originated at Virginia Tech.

Okay.

It’s college slang that was coined actually at the Bluefield College Extension,

Which I’m not sure if that is still around.

But in the early 1940s, supposedly students coined that term

Because they had a coffer, a strong box of old tests and problems

That people could distribute to their fellow students

And let them prepare for tests that way.

So the idea was that a professor tends to be very predictable

And do some version of the same test year after year.

Yeah.

So if somebody before you was kind enough to save it

And you examined those tests,

You had a really good chance of having seen the problems on test day, on exam day.

Yes, exactly.

And they were kept in a strong box that people called a coffer, and then eventually that became KUFER.

And now, in fact, there’s a KUFERS.com, which is an online place where everybody shares tests and problems from all over the country.

I remember the sororities and fraternities at the University of Missouri did this as well.

And sometimes they would have exams going back decades because some of the professors had been there for a very long time.

And macroeconomics and microeconomics and so forth don’t change all that much at the beginning levels.

Huh.

So it made its way all the way to Missouri.

And even though I did my undergrad…

Well, the idea made its way to Missouri, not the term necessarily.

I think a variety of terms are used around the country.

And I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a lot of email from people who don’t know KUFER

But have another word for this thing.

Gotcha.

But it’s more widespread now because of the website that shares the test.

And just because Virginia Tech tends to send quality people out in the world

And they bring their lingo with them.

Right?

And you did, right?

I did, but I can’t say that it’s a word that I have much opportunity to use in my day-to-day speech now.

I wouldn’t want to bring in my dog and have you tell me.

So Kufar comes from Kaufer.

Awesome.

That makes total sense now.

How sure are we of that, Martha?

That’s the myth and lore, right?

That’s the story that Virginia Tech likes to tell.

I don’t know that we have the full story on that, but that is what they proudly have proclaimed.

Okay.

Thanks, Amber.

All right.

Thank you, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org,

And find us on Facebook and Twitter and Google Plus,

And I don’t know, I’ll wear SoundCloud, too.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Derek from Milwaukee.

Hi, Derek. Welcome to the show.

Hey, buddy, what’s up?

Oh, I had a question about the origin of a word.

Okay.

I was at my parents, and they asked me to join them to Cannes,

Annual tradition. And I declined, partly because I’ve never seen cans when we do this.

All I see are jars.

And I argued, even though it had no meaning, why it was called canning.

Or my question is, why is it called canning?

It’s not canning. It’s jarring.

And what were you putting up?

We put up peppers, hot peppers.

Ooh.

Hot peppers.

So they invited you for the annual tradition of canning hot peppers.

That sounds exciting.

It’s not exciting.

Why not?

There should be drinking, right?

It sounds like a good time.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, but it’s with your family.

Strong odor of vinegar.

It’s a long day.

A lot of heat in the kitchen.

I remember.

I helped with my grandma with some canning when I was a boy.

You know, just grapes and things.

It was, you know, making jams and jellies.

Yeah, it’s a lot of work.

Then you just have lots and lots of hot peppers.

You’re just getting bossed around by the older people.

Right?

Sure.

And did you actually use cans or did you use jars?

No, and it’s very jarring that we use jars instead of cans.

Yeah.

Can you believe it?

I can’t.

Indeed.

So there’s a really great explanation for this,

And it all involves knowing when things happened.

Sure.

A lot of the work that we do on this show in explaining things,

We can prove and dis-do things because if A is older than B, then A couldn’t have come from B.

Turns out that canning was invented in the late 1700s.

But it was first invented and they used thin glass jars for this.

Very thin, more like a drinking glass, which couldn’t withstand kind of the factory industrial environment.

You’ve got to remember this is a period when industrialization was big and canning foods actually was a practical thing that was possible.

So they switched to metal cans.

So it’s the same process.

It involves a lot of heat.

It involves kind of a vacuum packing, basically, is what happens as well.

You kill off the bacteria.

You remove the air so the other bacteria can’t get in there.

The aerobic bacteria can’t fester, and the food will last a long time.

You can put it on the shelf.

And these canned foods can make it overseas to your armies.

You can actually ship your domestic crops overseas to feed your armies who are fighting your wars, right?

So this must have been this huge discovery.

Big.

Giant.

But what happened was, you know, you can’t use the thin glass jars.

They use the cans.

But the same principles that are used in the factories found their way into the kitchen.

But in the kitchen, it’s the opposite.

Metal cans aren’t practical.

It’s hard to seal your own cans.

And they’re expensive.

Glass is cheaper.

Well, mason jars came along, oh, mid-1800s, around 1850s or so.

Mason jars are thick and sturdy.

You can actually drop a mason jar quite a few times before it breaks, and this replaced the metal cans, but the process kept its old name.

It kept the name of canning.

And so we are using the old canning process, but with a new vessel.

Anyway, so there you go.

It’s all about timing.

So, Derek, are you going to send us some of those hot peppers, or are you going to save them all for yourself?

I will pass them along happily.

Oh, okay.

Well, I’m a big fan of hot peppers, even though my digestive system doesn’t like them.

Yeah, send them to Southern California.

I hope we helped, Derek. Thank you for calling.

You did. Thank you.

All right. Cheers.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Cheers.

877-929-9673.

Grant, here’s another arresting sentence from the Twitter feed of Sam Anderson.

It’s D.H. Lawrence on the physical affection of Italians.

It goes, they pour themselves one over the other like so much melted butter over parsnips.

Ooh, nice.

Yeah, I like it.

If you happen to like parsnips.

Well, I’m thinking Italians, parsnips, I don’t know, but I like it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mary Rowling, and I’m calling from Delafield, Wisconsin.

Hi, Mary, welcome to the show.

Hi, Mary, what’s up?

Well, I have a little trouble with the word survivor.

I am a survivor of cancer, but I don’t know.

I’ve been trying to find another word, and I wish there was a noun for prevail because I think that’s about the way I feel about it.

You are the prevailer.

Yeah, because survivor smacks a victim, and I don’t like victim either.

-huh, -huh. That’s really interesting because survivor replaced victim pretty much.

Yes, it did.

Back in the early 90s, if you look at the graphs from the corpus, the word survivor came along as a sort of triumphant alternative to victim, right?

I guess maybe I associate it more with victim, and I don’t get that feeling of triumph from it.

Well, I’m fascinated that you raised this question because I have a friend who is a 32-year survivor of breast cancer.

She had a mastectomy in 1981, and she was saying the same thing to me recently, that in its day, in the early 90s, when it really started to be used a lot, survivor made a lot of sense, but now it’s become watered down, and she’s looking for a different word, too.

Well, can you make a noun out of prevail?

What would that be? Prevailer? Victor?

It would be prevailer. Victor sounds a little militant.

Yeah, and contrived.

You know, last fall, Mary, there was a piece in the New York Times, well, actually it was on its website, in the Well blog.

And it’s a blog kept by people who are undergoing cancer treatment or somehow are involved with the data of this.

And the woman named Susan Gubar, G-U-B-A-R, she also talked about survivor having problems.

And she said the term sounds too heroic to claim for ourselves.

She was unwilling to even call herself a survivor because she didn’t feel like it was all that great an accomplishment.

But there were other people in the comments who had a lot of other reasons for disliking survivors.

Some said the same thing that you said, Mary, that they felt that it smacked a victim or that there was just too much about it that had turned negative for them.

Others aren’t even sure that they are survivors.

They feel like they’re in a holding pattern and waiting for it to recur.

Others worry that, well, they’re actually not survivors because they’re still undergoing treatment.

They still have the regular doctor visits.

They still have the medicine that they take maybe to compensate for the chemo treatments and that sort of thing.

Yeah, they’re living with cancer.

They’re still living with it even though it might not actually be found in their body.

Yeah.

I agree with that.

For me, anyway, I don’t regard cancer as a great tragedy.

There’s a lot of worse things that can happen to human beings out there.

What I do see is that it’s just a blip in the road, something I have to deal with and go on.

I’ve won the battle, and none of us will ever win the war.

We’re all mortal.

Right.

Exactly.

So it’s just another thing to deal with with life.

I was interested in the comments because some of them didn’t want to use the word survivor because they thought it might jinx them.

They thought that calling themselves survivors.

And it’s that kind of childish superstition that we all have that mentioning a thing will make it happen.

And you can kind of appreciate that your mind is in a weird emotional state, right?

There are lots of things swirling around that sometimes aren’t clear and you fall back to those old ways of thinking.

The author, by the way, she did suggest other possible terms and none of them with a great deal of gusto, but I’ll read them here to you if you’re interested.

Okay.

Cancer contenders, cancer lifers, cancer dealers, cancer mavens, and grits.

G-R-I-T-S, grits.

Grits.

I like grits.

Some other people chose warrior.

They liked warrior, and that is very militant.

Yeah, the body is battlefield.

You’re mustering your resources, everything that you have, all the people at your disposal, everything that you can afford to fight this thing.

It is almost a war.

Mary, do any of those appeal to you?

I like the nuances of some of them, but there’s not one that really says it.

But I guess, I don’t know.

I don’t want to be defined by a disease.

Well, we’ll just call you Mary.

Oh, peachy, that’s great.

And we want to thank you for calling.

And Mary, I am sure that we’re going to get a lot of calls and emails about this, so stay tuned to future shows when we’ll try to offer you some other ideas, okay?

That’s great. Thank you.

Our pleasure. Thank you for calling today.

Thank you, Mary.

You’re welcome.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we were talking earlier about the best sentence you’ve read in the last 24 hours.

We got one from Kevin Weidenbaum of Oberlin, Ohio.

He was reading P.D. James’ book, A Taste for Death.

Oh, I’ve read that.

Yeah?

Well, do you remember this line?

The original tenants had been replaced by the transients of the city, the peripatetic young sharing three to a room, unmarried mothers on Social Security, foreign students, a racial mix which, like some human kaleidoscope, was continually being shaken into new and brighter colors.

Oh, nice.

He especially liked that last part about the kaleidoscope.

It’s one of the reasons I like reading P.D. James, because they’re mystery stories outside of the usual template and well-written.

Yeah, good stuff.

Send us the best sentence you’ve read in the last 24 hours, words@waywordradio.org.

More of your questions about language coming up on A Way with Words.

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.

A few weeks ago, we heard from John Swenson.

Do you remember this call, Grant?

He was asking about ishpi?

Ishpi, yes.

Yes.

He lives in Connecticut, and his family used this term ishpi to mean something that you don’t want to touch, something icky.

Forbidden.

Yeah.

Yeah, that you would tell kids.

Ishpi, right.

And we speculated that maybe it had Scandinavian origins.

And we sure had a lot of response from listeners with Scandinavian origins themselves who said that they used Ishpi or a version of Ishpi.

Sharon Harris phoned to say that her Norwegian grandmother used Ishda as a word of disgust.

And Warren Rewalt wrote to say that his Norwegian family used the term Ishipu.

Ishipu.

For the same thing.

And Mary Manor, who grew up in a small town in northeastern Ohio, wrote, I hadn’t thought about ish in a long, long time.

It’s a word my dad used to indicate that something was undesirable in a physical sense, smelly, slimy, or revolting in some way, but not usually used to describe food.

I remember he almost always smiled when he said it, so I figured he meant it more as a comment than a complaint.

Dad passed away 10 years ago, and hearing that word instantly brought him to mind and a smile to my lips.

Funny how that happens.

And I have that experience, too.

You know, sometimes every once in a while I’ll hear somebody pronounce the word A-R-E-A as area.

Area.

Area.

And that’s not very common in most parts of the country, but it’s very common in the part of Western Carolina where my dad is from.

And any time I hear the word area, it has the same effect on me.

We’d love to hear more from you about ish or ishp or related words that you have in your family for things that are taboo or shouldn’t be touched.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

This is Greg Allen, calling from Charlottesville, Virginia.

How are you doing?

Hi, Greg. Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you.

How can we help you?

Well, I am curious, I suppose, about what might be called linguistic one-upmanship and so much of the technical correctness.

I guess the most frustrating common, you know, example that I run into is saying I or me,

You know, choosing one or the other and being corrected while you’re in conversation.

And, you know, I guess my whole question is not about what’s the correct use, because I know the way to figure that out. Trust me, my mother was a teacher, so I’ve learned how to correctly figure it out.

But it’s more about, you know, the frustration is that it just, you knew what I meant. If you said, you know, oh, who’s going to the party? And I say, Alice and me, you know, or Alice and I, and I say it wrong. Why do you need to correct me? You know what I’m saying.

And so that’s really, you know, the gist of my question is, what is this with this, you know, technical correctness thing? I thought language was about communication.

Yeah, yeah. It’s so annoying, isn’t it? It just stops the whole conversation down.

Exactly. It really does. It takes it off. It gives it an unpleasant feel, and it does. It just shuts it down.

So what environments are you hearing this?

Well, generally, just honestly, I always joke my mother about it because she was a teacher. She’s retired now, but she still just has that habit of correcting, not just me, but, you know, lots of people I hear do it. And so I’m always, like, you know, lighten up.

But I actually, I’m a singer-songwriter, and I’ve got a friend who is, you know, he’s my peer. He’s the last guy on earth that I would expect to ever do that. And he consistently, when we’re talking, you know, if I use it wrong, he’ll go, you know, it’s Alice and I. Just give me that dead hand look. Now, he’s got a great sense of humor, but I’m like, Tom, shut up.

Yeah, shut your pie hole, dude. Play a song.

Exactly, yeah. Exactly.

Well, there’s a lot of ways to address this. When I give public speeches around the country about languages, sometimes I’m asked to speak about this topic or it comes up in the Q&A, and I can do two hours on this particular question alone. How much time do you have?

I want to keep this brief, but the first thing I should say is the people who really need to hear this answer are never going to ask your question. Like your friend, Alan, is not going to actually call this show and say, should I be correcting people? It’s just they’re not likely to do it.

And there are a lot of reasons for that. And I think one of them is that maybe the main one is they haven’t stopped to think about what the stakes are. The stakes are really low in these situations that you’re talking about, right? There’s nothing on the line.

I have these rules that I generally say in which it’s okay to correct other people. Your mother gets a pass. It’s okay. She can do whatever she wants. No matter how old you are, your parents and grandparents or your guardians, they’re allowed to correct your grammar even if they’re 90 and you’re 60. That’s just the way it is.

Your parents can always suck it up. Because raising children doesn’t ever stop. So they’re allowed. Your friend is only allowed to correct you if you have asked him to or if you’re paying him to. Otherwise, he should zip it. There you go. I mean, that’s generally the rule.

Now, there are some other exceptions, and I always get emails going, well, what about X? One of my favorite examples is if you’re reading a cookbook and the recipe is wrong and it’s going to turn the world’s best cookies into the world’s worst hockey pucks, then you should probably send a note to the publisher to correct that recipe. There are things like that.

If you just happen to see a legal document and you have legal expertise, and even though it’s none of your business, you realize they’re about to make a giant mistake, maybe you should insert yourself into the process or ask for an hourly fee. I don’t know.

Yeah, you know, Greg, I’ve kind of had to train myself because like you, I’m a teacher’s kid, and I was instantly corrected again and again and again. And it’s almost a reflex now, you know, when somebody says something wrong. I literally have to bite my tongue.

To not correct them, you mean?

Yeah, and I do that. I try to refrain because of exactly what Grant said. What are the stakes? Does it really do anybody any good if I just blurt that out and stop down the conversation? When I’m just an onlooker, when people don’t know that I’m, you know, radio language guy or dictionary editor, that sort of thing, and I’m listening to these kinds of circumstances where person A is correcting person B, I don’t think I’ve yet ever found the stakes to be high enough to warrant the correction. I just don’t. I just don’t find it.

And we’re probably talking about hundreds, if not thousands of times that I’ve heard this kind of correction. But there are a lot of reasons that people correct other people. And I think, and I don’t want to get too far into this because, again, it’s a long conversation. But what you might look for in your friend or people who correct you is try to get to the bottom of their reasons.

Exactly. And sometimes they may feel inferior to you and they’re trying to bring themselves back up to your level. I think that’s true for probably most of them. I think some of us, you know, it’s almost like unconsciously reaching to get lint off of somebody’s shoulder. You know, it’s just a reflex.

Yeah. But again, most—

But I’m trying to fight that.

Yeah, yeah. Most circumstances, boy, it’s hard to justify, you know.

Yeah, I agree. How do you handle it when Alan gives you a correction? You just blow it off?

I just blow it off. I mean, sometimes I just, you know, I’m like, whatever, and just try to keep going. This was a thoughtful question. I really appreciate it. This is something that comes up again and again, and I think you’ve offered a couple of really great examples of how this can go wrong. But, you know, you just got to take it when your mother dishes it out, all right?

Okay, I will keep that in mind. I will even let her know. I will let her know that you are on her side.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, thank you. Enjoy the day. Take care. Thanks a lot, Greg. All right. Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear your examples about miscorrections and how correcting you has gone wrong or your examples of how you deal with being corrected by others when it’s just not right for the moment. 877-929-9673. Email us, words@waywordradio.org. And our Twitter handle is Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Here’s a tweet I’d like to share. Nick Green, who worked at Village Voice, he says, modern society’s greatest failing has been letting application defeat appetizer in the war for what can be called an app.

Application?

Yeah, because in the restaurant jargon, app is short for appetizer. In computer jargon and phone jargon and smartphone jargon, app is short for application. Appetizer is definitely more important than application.

That’s right. There’s an appetizer for that. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, Marathon Grant. My name is Victoria Ting. I’m a geriatrics fellow at UT Southwestern Dallas, Texas. And my question is, you know, ever since I was a medical student, I’ve heard the word Goomba used colloquially to describe an impressive math noted on an imaging. So, for example, the other day, a large lung math was seen on a chest x-ray and elicited the response, oh, man, that looks like a Goomba to me.

So I was wondering if this term was used by physicians at other training institutions. Does it really mean what we’ve been using it for and what the word’s origin is?

All right, Victoria, that’s quite a mission there to figure out Goomba. So you’re looking at a CT scan results or an MRI screen or something like that, right?

That’s right. And everything is normal except there’s this blot on it. It looks like the weather channel and a storm is coming in.

That’s right.

Goomba.

Goomba.

How do you spell that? Do you ever write that down or is it just verbal?

Just verbal. Well, the first thing to do is just kind of everybody’s thinking, oh, it’s the Italian-American term for a big buffoon or a goon, a big doofy guy, right? You know that term for Goomba, right, if you ever watch The Sopranos?

That’s what Wikipedia said it was.

It’s unrelated.

Wikipedia is wrong.

It’s unrelated to that.

But that said, there’s almost no chance, as far as we can tell, that Goomba used in medical imaging comes from the Italian-American term for, it’s changed a lot over the years.

These days, a Goomba is kind of like a big, doofy Italian-American fellow.

It used to kind of just be a guy without any kind of pejorative or negative slant on it at all.

And it varies quite a bit.

But we think it comes from, it’s actually even more interesting to me, we think it comes from Super Mario Brothers.

The bad guys in Super Mario Brothers, a game that came out in 1985.

They’re mushroom-shaped dudes with evil faces.

They’re Goombas.

And if you were playing that game, you would see a Goomba on your screen.

Just like when you’re looking at a medical device and you’re looking at the live scan or the CRT or whatever, there’s a blob on your screen.

And it turns out that the medical term dates back to at least 1986.

I can’t find it earlier than 1986.

So maybe older physicians aren’t using this term, but younger ones are.

Well, no, they would be.

If they were using it in 1986, that’s almost 30 years ago.

They could easily be in their 50s or 60s and still using this term.

Right?

I mean, you have to have the, I’d assume it would be the younger doctors in the 1980s who were gaming.

Who were playing Super Mario Brothers.

That’s what I’m thinking.

Instead of taking their breaks.

How does that sound, Victoria?

Anything ring a bell there for you?

You know, what’s funny was my sister actually gave me that definition of Goomba from Super Mario.

And I was like, surely that can’t be.

But no, that makes sense.

You know, and it’s all speculation.

You listen to the show and you know that when we talk about word origins, it’s all theory and idea and speculation.

So rarely can we prove it.

But I think the Super Mario Brothers theory has a lot more going for it than the Italian-American theory.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Tons more.

The idea that it’s got young people who probably are gaming at home in their downtime, if they have any downtime.

And then they come and they spend time on these other screens.

Exactly.

That’s what I was going to say.

And you want to zap it, right?

Right.

You want to zap it.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You’re even going to zap it, right?

Victoria, thank you so much for giving us a call.

And best of luck, all right?

All right.

Thank you so much, guys.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673 or send us email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another best sentence of the day from the Twitter feed of Sam Anderson.

This is from Phil Jackson.

The quote is,

I was six foot six inches in high school,

Arms so long I could sit in the backseat of a car

And open both front doors at the same time.

Isn’t that great?

That’s nice.

That’s a visual as well.

I love it.

Send us the best sentence you’ve read in the last 24 hours, 877-929-9673,

Or put it in an email to words@waywordradio.org,

Or share it on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Stephen Powders.

I’m from Waco, Texas.

Thanks for calling.

What can we help you with?

There’s a word that I know.

The word is MacGuffin.

I’ve used it before. I’m a theater professor, and I know what it means, but I’m not sure where it comes from.

Well, tell us what it means.

Well, from what I understand, a MacGuffin is an object.

It’s usually in a film. It’s a film term, and it’s a prop or an object that drives the story forward.

So, for example, the Maltese Falcon would be a classic example.

And the way I understand it, a MacGuffin can be anything.

The story doesn’t turn on what the thing is.

It just turns on the fact that everybody wants it or everybody needs it.

It’s sort of like unobtainium in Avatar.

Yes.

It could be a silver chalice or secret documents or, I don’t know,

Magic peanut butter sandwich or whatever.

It’s just something that everybody wants, and so the whole plot turns on, you know,

Let’s get that one before everybody else does.

Exactly.

I think it could even be an idea like the 39 steps for the nuclear secret in Torn Curtain.

Well, it sounds like maybe you’ve read that Alfred Hitchcock either coined or popularized it.

It does seem to come up a lot with Hitchcock films, yeah.

He talked about the fact that he had a screenwriter who told a story about MacGuffin.

It’s this really silly, shaggy dog tale about two guys on a train,

And one of them is traveling with an odd-looking package, and the other one says,

What’s that? And the guy says, well, it’s a MacGuffin.

It’s a tool that’s used to hunt lions in the Scottish Highlands.

And the person says, well, there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands.

And the other guy says, well, then it’s not a MacGuffin.

Story makes no sense whatsoever.

The anti-joke.

Yeah.

It’s just silly.

So it’s sort of a thing that isn’t a thing.

Hitchcock was using it as early as the 1930s.

He became known for it and was constantly asked about it for the next few decades as it came out in the press that he had this term.

So there is no Mr. MacGuffin out there.

Well, there might be, but not related to this term as far as we know.

Yeah.

And I think there’s a term guffin that means sort of adult or simpleton or something,

And maybe that’s a silly name derived from it, but we don’t really know that for sure.

Yeah, in a 1939 lecture that he gave at Columbia University, my alma mater,

Hitchcock said that there’s a name in the studio, we call it the MacGuffin.

It is the mechanical element that usually crops up in any story.

In crook stories, it is almost always the necklace,

And in spy stories, it is almost always the papers.

And I think that’s a very nice way of putting it.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling, Stephen.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you very much.

Have fun.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

MacGuffin.

Film business is just filled with this stuff.

I mean, we talk about the jargon of trades.

It’s funny.

People criticize the business jargon, but there are a lot of businesses that have lively jargon,

And film business is one of them.

Yes, and it makes us hot and bothered.

So send your hot chat to words@waywordradio.org or call us on the phone, 877-929-9673.

Grant, we got another best sentence of the day.

This one was sent to us by Judy Schwartz in Dallas, Texas.

She was reading an article about William Zinser, and it quoted him saying,

Clutter is the disease of American writing.

There’s just too much stuff in too many sentences.

I agree with that.

One of the reasons I like Hemingway once in a while.

Yeah, every once in a while.

Uncluttered writing, for sure.

Yeah, once in a while.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty past.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

For more A Way with Words, including hundreds of episodes, a blog, a newsletter, a dictionary,

Mobile apps, and conversations with other listeners, go to waywordradio.org.

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Just as we do, they believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato, let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.