The One Who Brung You

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

You know what it feels like to fall in love with a book.

Maybe you open to a random page, and you trip over a beautiful passage, and before you know it, you’re head over heels.

That’s the falling in love part.

But how do you know when it’s time to break up with a book?

I mean, I look at my own bookshelves and I see lots and lots of failed relationships.

Books whose spines are wrinkled but only up to a certain point.

The point where I moved on.

It wasn’t them. It was me.

It used to be that if I started a book, I felt obliged to finish it and I’d soldier on through all the pages.

I don’t know why.

Just sort of thinking that that’s what you’re supposed to do.

You know, maybe there was some cosmic reason that the book and I ended up together.

And maybe there’s something to be said for making yourself read all the way to the end.

But, you know, more and more, I feel like I’m not obligated at all to do that.

And in fact, I feel even better reading what Samuel Johnson had to say about this.

He said that the notion that you have to finish every book is surely strange.

You may as well resolve that whatever men you happen to get acquainted with, you are to keep them for life.

A book may be good for nothing, or there may be only one thing in it worth knowing.

Are we to read it all through?

It’s a good question, right?

It’s a great question.

And in your heart, you know that somebody poured their heart into making this book,

And all the publishing people involved, and the bookseller,

And even the Amazon guy who delivered it, right?

Yeah, yeah.

And maybe they know something I don’t know that I need to know,

And I should read this book.

I mean, do you have it?

And friends recommend books, and they’ll say you must read this.

Oh, yeah, they fix you up.

Right, yeah, yeah.

Just like a date.

Exactly.

And there’ll be a chorus of people at a dinner party going, oh, I loved the book.

And you’re like, I’m on page 50.

I’m not convinced.

I can’t finish it.

I can’t finish it.

And then you have to have that uncomfortable conversation later.

How did you like the book?

And I’m like, well, I have new opinions about your taste.

But did you ever feel that you had to finish a book?

I did when I was younger.

And then as I got older and the books mounted up and I started to realize I would never finish all the books that I wanted to read ever.

I mean, I’ll have to live to be 300 or 400 years old before I finish just the books that I have now.

I know.

Exactly.

So now you get 100 pages max.

Yeah, yeah.

100.

I give you 100 pages.

If you can’t convince me that you’re worth reading in 100 pages, then I think you failed, not me.

That’s good.

I like that.

So tell us about your love life with books.

When do you decide whether to break up with that book?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Mary Kay, and I’m calling from Plano, Texas.

Hi, Mary Kay. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Mary Kay.

Thank you. Hi.

What’s cooking? What can we do for you?

So listen, I was on a business trip with my boss recently, and she overheard me use the expression and whatnot.

Later on, she mentioned that she had heard me use it occasionally and that she hated the expression.

She thought it was unprofessional to use in a business setting.

So here are my questions.

First, what is the origin of the expression?

Secondly, should it be considered unprofessional, assuming it’s not used repetitively?

And last, what’s the best way to train yourself to stop using a certain expression,

Particularly in the presence of someone who doesn’t like it?

Wow, these are all great questions, but I have one for you.

What, if you pardon the expression, is the bug up her butt about the term whatnot?

What is her complaint?

What is her peeve about?

Did she give you any evidence for it?

I’m not sure.

I’m not sure.

I think she just doesn’t like it, which, you know, that happens to all of us.

Yeah.

Can you give us an idea of what kind of business it is?

Yes.

I’m a retail store manager for Eddie Bauer, and I was doing some sales leadership workshops at some stores.

Okay.

-huh.

What would she prefer you use in those circumstances?

Well, that’s a good question. I suppose, I don’t know, I guess I should have asked her that.

Well, give us the whole sentence that you might have used, what she overheard you saying.

Perhaps I said something like, you might ask your customer how they’ll be using the clothing,

Whether it would be travel or business or whatnot.

Okay, very good.

Wow.

I don’t have a problem with that.

I don’t have a problem with it either.

There are some dictionaries that will describe whatnot as informal.

But, you know, some of the most educated speakers I’ve heard say what have you or something like that.

Yeah, which is just a slightly more highfalutin way, right?

Yeah.

And you asked about the origin.

The idea is what would not be included.

It’s sort of a shortening of that notion.

So et cetera is kind of what we’re talking about here.

Yeah.

Right.

Yeah.

And I’ve been criticized for using et cetera by teachers who say, just say what you mean.

Don’t say it’s Cedra. That’s lazy.

But she’s talking specifically about that word, whatnot.

And I guess she associates it with, I don’t know, maybe was she traumatized as a child?

I’m not sure.

Maybe a nun with a ruler in her history.

That’s possible. I’ll have to ask her about that.

So assuming you don’t use the term repetitively, which is, I think, an issue,

How would you train yourself to stop using a particular word or phrase in someone’s presence?

Well, there’s a couple ways to do it.

First, don’t train yourself in their presence.

Train yourself in the presence of people that you trust.

So somebody at home, a spouse or a child or another adult,

Somebody that will, every time you say it, they’ll do like a game show buzzer.

They’ll go, so you’ll know.

And pretty soon you’ll get tired of hearing that noise and you’ll hate your friend,

But you also stop saying whatnot.

That’s exactly right.

I once interviewed a dialect coach to the stars,

And he was trying to cure me of saying

And it worked as long as I was thinking about the fact that he was going to press the buzzer if I said the word.

If you really concentrate on it and you have somebody there following you and ready to hit the buzzer, you really do change.

So you need to train yourself in circumstances where it doesn’t matter that you’re throwing out this repetitive word.

Right, right.

So it’s sort of a behavior modification technique.

Exactly.

It works.

You’re basically a pooch who’s being taught not to stray beyond the grass.

Okay, I’ll have my husband get a newspaper then.

Well, you know, the thing is, I said somebody at home, I don’t always recommend a spouse for this because it actually can sow discord that it might not go away.

Oh, that’s interesting.

So a friend who you have a very frank relationship with who knows all of your secrets, that’s the kind of person you want.

Okay.

And the other thing is you can also substitute a pause.

This is another thing they teach you, not just to stop saying it, but when you’re going to like, well, when you’ve got your accessories and your skirts and your blouses and you feel yourself about to say whatnot, you just stop.

Okay, great.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate your time.

Our pleasure.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Grant, we had a quiz a while back from John Chaneski on aptronyms,

Like what do you call a woman standing between two buildings?

Alley.

What do you call a guy that you hang on the wall?

Art.

Well, you may remember that John gave us one question where it was, what do you call a guy standing next to a hole with a shovel?

And the answer was Doug, right?

Well, we got an email from Amanda Kruhl in Tennessee who said, I can’t believe you didn’t say Barry.

Very good, Amanda.

Yeah, yeah.

Beautiful.

Yeah, there are no right answers in that game.

That’s awesome.

Send us your email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how’s it going?

Super.

Who’s this?

This is Patrick.

I’m calling from Illinois.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

So I have a question regarding a turn of phrase that I’ve used my whole life without really thinking much about it.

And the phrase is going downhill or variations on the phrase going downhill.

I was having a conversation with a friend about my health.

I had been ill and was getting better.

And she was asking about how I was doing.

And I said, oh, you know, well, it’s all downhill from here, meaning it’s going to get gradually better and the worst is over.

She then looked at me with, you know, a lot of sympathy, and I think she thought that I was not long for the world.

She had interpreted the exact opposite.

And so I started thinking about different ways that the phrase is used, and I wondered if you had any insight as to whether the positive sense or the negative sense is predominant, or whether there are instances in which the phrase is used both ways.

Boy, there’s a great instance of when words collide, right?

When idioms collide.

Yeah, when idioms collide.

I mean, you have two completely different meanings.

And I’m not sure there’s really a way to research your question.

I would have to talk about just my own sense of it, which is if somebody’s talking about their medical condition, everything going downhill from there, I would be sympathetic as well.

But there’s a very specific thing happening here.

The word downhill exists in company with very specific words depending on the context.

If you say, I’m going downhill from here, you mean that you’re about to die.

If you say, it’s all downhill from here, you mean that all of the hard work is over and it’s easy from here on out.

If you look in the corporate, that’s exactly how it’s used almost always.

They’re very specific.

Very specific.

Yeah, and so that’s one question.

You know, I distinguish between all downhill from here, which is generally the positive one, and going downhill, which restaurant might go downhill.

Is generally the negative.

That’s right.

So the verb go with downhill is almost always negative, and it’s all downhill is almost always positive.

The all is required in there.

Oh, interesting.

All right.

Well, now I know.

Now I know when I’m talking about my health to make sure to distinguish between the two so I don’t worry anyone.

No, no.

You get more flowers and presents that way if you just confuse them.

All right.

Well, thanks, guys, very much.

I love the show, and thanks for having me on.

Take care, Patrick.

Okay, great.

Bye-bye.

Hope you’re better.

Bye-bye.

You know, I’m thinking, too, of the term going south.

Oh, that’s a great one, yeah.

His condition is going south.

I mean, I have really good feelings about the south.

Right.

But it’s a form of the idea that down on a map is the south, right?

Yeah.

So if you’re going south, you’re going down.

Yeah.

And then things are declining.

Yeah.

One of the problems that we have with downhill is that that’s part of the language also used to describe graphs.

And there’s some numbers that you want to look like a downward ski slope.

And there’s some numbers that you want to look like an upward ski slope.

So you start to use the language of up and down in business.

And they can mean very different positive or negative things depending, right?

I want the interest rates to stay down.

Yes.

Right?

But I want the profits to go up.

Exactly.

877-929-9673.

Grant, I come to you as a supplicant.

I’m apologizing in advance.

Please forgive me.

But you know those Tom Swifties, the silly sentences where you use an adverb to create a little humor?

You know, like, I manufacture tabletops, said Tom counterproductively.

Oh, good.

He laughed.

No, I do like those.

Yeah, that’s the bare edge of the acceptable pun range.

Pushing the envelope.

Well, here’s my latest that I really love that I came across.

I love reading Moby Dick, Tom said superficially.

I know it’s not a fish, but I like it.

We’ll take it.

Well, you liked it.

You really liked it.

Yes, I do.

And you need to do another Cannonball Run movie.

I’d like to thank the Academy.

Oh, no, those were smoking the bandit movies.

Whatever.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

A word game and more discussion about why we say the things we do.

Stay with us.

Thank you.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined once again by John Chaneski.

He’s our quiz guy.

John, you got some quizzes?

John, hi.

I think you’ll like this.

This one’s called Animal, Mineral, or Vegetable.

I’m going to give you some words.

Hidden within each one is an animal, a mineral, or a vegetable.

For example, the word soaking has the word, can you guess what it has in it?

Soaking.

Soaking.

Oak.

Oak, that’s right.

And 20 questions, we classify that as a vegetable.

Now, I know soaking also has the word king in it, and a king is a human, which is an animal.

But, you know, we’re not going to go that way.

We’re just looking for animal animals, okay?

Okay.

So if you get an answer, first shout out which category it falls into, and then we’ll see if you’re right.

Okay.

Okay.

Here’s the first.

Prosecutor.

Prosecutor.

You know I have to write these down, right?

Sure.

I would say mineral.

No.

Well, what mineral do you think is in there?

Tor, T-O-R.

It’s a kind of hill.

That’s pretty good.

I’m a little more specific than that.

Let’s see.

Martha, what about you?

Oh, I see vegetable.

Vegetable, what is it?

Rose.

A rose, very good.

Oh, okay, okay.

How about this one?

Millionaire.

Millionaire.

Animal, lion.

Oh, very good, very good.

Say again, what animal did you find there?

A lion.

A lion, right in the middle of the millionaire.

Very good.

How about infernal?

Infernal.

This infernal machine.

Vegetable, of course.

Vegetable, Martha?

What you got?

Of course, a fern.

Fern is right.

Very good.

Designated.

Designated.

Oh, animal.

Please pick one.

Okay.

What animal do you have?

What animal is it?

G-N-A-T.

G-N-A-T.

Oh, good.

Is correct.

Very good.

How about reappearance?

Reappearance.

Oh, vegetable.

Yes.

Pear.

Pear is correct.

How about clementine?

Well, mineral, if you count tin.

Yes, why wouldn’t you count tin?

Oh, wonderful mineral.

I’m looking for the really complicated thing.

I know, me too.

I’m thinking Pope Clementine.

A classic puzzler’s dodge where they make it really simple instead of really hard.

How about, let’s see which one this falls into.

Let’s try chaperones.

Chaperones.

Chaperones.

Oh, animal.

Ape.

Yes, that’s exactly right.

Ape.

There is an ape.

Or evaparone.

Chaperones.

Finally, let’s try the word thousandfold.

Oh, I like that word anyway.

Thousandfold.

Mineral.

What is it?

Sand.

Sand.

Right in the middle of your thousandfold.

Very good, guys.

That was great.

Nice work.

I like this one.

This is a good one.

You’ve got to bring this one back sometime, John.

Yes, I definitely will.

All right.

Super duper.

Thanks, John.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And if you have a question about language, wordplay, grammar, slang, call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike.

I’m calling from Irving, Texas.

Hi, Mike.

Welcome.

Hey there.

What’s up?

Well, we’ve got kind of a little controversy going on in the office.

One of our coworkers who I think may come from the country was talking about something, and he said, I brung the seeds.

They were talking about gardening.

And a number of our other coworkers were just incensed.

What did you say?

Where were you raised?

And that began a discussion of the word brung.

Is it really a variation on the word brought or bring?

Is it bring, brang, brung, or is it bring and brought?

And where does the word come from?

And that sort of thing.

Wow, so they all jumped on him.

They all jumped on him and thought he was from some illiterate backwater.

Where is he from?

He’s from the Dallas area.

Okay, interesting.

And you yourself don’t use brung in that way?

No, not in any serious sense, no.

And how did he react to that?

He was surprised that people were calling him on it.

That’s a good clue, by the way.

He’s always used it, and he was just really kind of surprised.

What kind of business are we talking about here?

We’re a staffing agency. We hire engineers for companies all over the country.

So he works in some kind of human resources and has to deal with people all day long?

Absolutely.

Okay.

And he’s a college graduate, so that would make one hope that he’s literate.

Well, he is literate. He is literate, and he’s speaking English, but it’s not standard English, and it’s actually not lazy or stupid or uneducated English.

It’s simply a dialect variant that has existed alongside brought for centuries.

You’ve got these two different conjugations of the verb to bring, which have each generated their own forms, and they both have moved into English along separate paths.

And brought has kind of pushed ahead in the race, and brought is still there, but it’s far behind.

And so brought seems to most of us and is considered the standard, and brung, when we hear it, sounds non-standard.

And so we can make judgments about his intelligence or his education.

But the truth is, there was a time in parts of the United Kingdom where brung was probably what you would always hear.

Well, sure. It’s preserved in that saying, dance with the one that brung you.

Yeah. In English, it’s canonized more or less in that idiom, right?

Dance with the one that brung you means you should always pay attention to who provided the goodness in your life.

Unless he’s just bad at his job, he’s not an idiot.

I didn’t think he was an idiot.

It just struck everyone as being really odd and began a small discussion.

Well, the reason I said it was a clue when you told us that he was surprised is because that’s often how dialect speakers react when they encounter a body of speakers from another dialect.

They’re like, kind of, they’re like, what do you mean? Everybody I know, where I’m from, all of my people.

Says Tom.

Yeah, yeah.

They say brung or brang.

What did you bring to the party?

I brung a tater salad, right?

So it’s a dialect.

And that’s the thing is when we get in this conversation of standard versus dialect, it’s always important to say standard English is an amorphous thing.

But it is generally agreed to be the English that you should speak to people who you work for or your parents or a judge or a police, you know, people in authority.

Yeah, it’s going to be jarring if you see it in business correspondence, for example.

On the other hand, dialect is perfectly normal at a family get-together or at church or in your neighborhood and talking to the folks down at the shopkeepers down at the store, you know, that kind of thing.

So dialect has its place and its role.

So what are you going to take back to your friend who brung the seeds?

I’m going to tell him that he doesn’t need to hide from his coworkers.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thanks.

Well, thank you very much for having me on.

Bye-bye now.

All right, take care.

Oh, the dialect language conversation is always a tough one because you want people to be authentic.

Sure.

True to their upbringing.

Proud of their dialect.

Proud of their speech.

That’s your linguistic heritage.

Make this clear.

There is not one monolithic standard English.

No, no, no.

It does not exist.

You might think it does, but your monolithic English is somebody else’s dialect.

Absolutely.

It’s diverse.

In the workplace, if he’s hiring engineers, maybe they’re judging him.

Maybe he’s not getting the best candidates or the best clients because he speaks a dialect.

It is unfortunate, so you have to take that into account.

877-929-9673.

An expression caught my eye in an article about the American Airlines pilot strike.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

Which means if you don’t pay them, they’re not going to fly.

And it turns out it was first made popular in 1983 in the book The Right Stuff.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

No bucks, no Buck Rogers.

I love it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Sarah, and I’m calling from Dresden, Germany, but I’m originally from San Diego.

Excellent.

Well, good to talk with you.

What’s up?

Well, I am currently in the process of applying to be a Foreign Service Officer with the U.S. State Department.

And while I was doing some research and kind of looking around at different articles on the web, I stumbled across an article in Wikipedia for the phrase, pinstripes cookie pusher, which was linked to a Foreign Service article on Wikipedia.

And obviously I had to click on it because I thought that was a very colorful phrase.

It refers to U.S. diplomats, or diplomats in general, but U.S. diplomats in particular.

And I think I basically understand what it means, but it just seemed like such a strange, colorful phrase that I thought that you might have something interesting to share about the history or exactly what it means.

I’ve also heard it, Sarah, as striped pants cookie pusher.

Oh, really?

Yes. I included an entry for this in my political slang dictionary I did a few years ago.

But a better entry for this is in William Sapphire’s political dictionary.

He has a whole column on this, basically half of a page on this.

And he traces it back to the 1920s between World War I and World War II.

This was a period of intense diplomatic negotiation.

And there was a lot of bickering about the way that the former allies were handling their new relationships with their past allies and their past enemies.

And a lot of hardliners and a lot of people who thought that only guns and boots were the way to handle these people or like force and strong talk thought that the diplomatic community was kind of ruining this.

That they were having all these teas and coffees and coddling these people and try to buddy up with them and basically maybe even having more in common with the enemy or the perceived enemy than they did with the United States.

And there’s another notion here, and you can find this throughout the military as well, is that the so-called cookie pushers were the kind of people who were assumed not to be doing real work.

That they were the ones who were simply like putting a rubber stamp on paper, pulling it out of the inbox, stamping it and putting it in the outbox and not doing anything meaningful to change the world or better the relationship that the country has with the rest of the planet.

The interesting thing that the pinstripe is still in there.

Even today, people use it, even though pinstripes as a fashion element aren’t really a thing that you would think of associating with diplomats.

I mean, it’s just one of the palliative options.

But at the time, a pinstripe suit was very much kind of a uniform for this type of person.

Why cookie pusher?

Well, literally, you have these receptions at the embassy or wherever for all these different people in the diplomatic community to come.

And there are little trays of sandwiches and little trays of cookies and little cups of tea and things like that.

You are literally holding a tray of cookies.

You’re not forcing people to eat them.

You’re not pushing them that way, right?

It’s like paper pusher, right?

Exactly.

Exactly.

It definitely corresponds to paper pusher.

It’s all incredibly interesting.

But there’s a third element here that I think it has to be addressed.

A lot of times, particularly in the older uses of this term, it’s a mask for calling these people homosexuals.

And it almost always refers to men who are seen as too effeminate or too effete to actually have the brass to do what needs to be done.

Well, that’s just fascinating. Thank you for all of that insight.

And I’ll definitely look at these political dictionaries to know what other phrases I should know before going into the diplomatic service.

Yeah, the late William Sapphire, his political dictionary, it’s the masterwork on political language in the United States. It’s very good.

Well, thank you guys so much for taking my question. I’ve been a fan of the show for years.

So I jumped at the opportunity to have something to comment about.

Great.

Well, best of luck with the State Department. I hope that everything goes well with your career.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

You guys take care.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Got a little bit of restaurant slang for you, Grant.

A WW?

Ooh, a witless water drinker?

I don’t know.

No, just the opposite. It’s a wine whale. W-I-N-E.

You know what this is?

I do. This is the person who will keep buying and buying and buying.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The guy who’s out to impress the gal, and so you know that he’s going to. He’s going to buy the $100 bottle of wine.

Yeah, yeah. And apparently restaurants are now making this notation in their little records to serve their customers better.

And the whale part has something in common with whales in Vegas and other gambling spots. A whale is somebody who spends a lot of money in these places.

Oh, no kidding. A whale is the guy who gets comped the room and the car service and all that kind of stuff.

Huh.

Yeah, because they were spending a lot of dough.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

And here’s a question for you. If swimming is such good exercise, how do you explain whales? Think about it.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Will Fulmer from South Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Will. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. Good to be here.

What’s going on, Will?

Well, I wanted to talk to you guys about a word that has meant something to me since childhood, and when I tell you the story, you’ll understand why, but it’s willy-nilly. You know the word, right?

Yeah.

Yeah. We hear it all over the place these days, but when I was a kid, I heard it probably when I was eight or nine years old, pulled out a dictionary, looked it up, and discovered what it meant.

And the way that people use it these days is not what that meaning was in the dictionary back then. And back then there was only one definition, not a second one.

What do you know about the slide from what it originally meant to how we use it today?

Well, Will, you were looking it up because it’s like your name?

Yep.

You don’t have a brother named Nil or anything.

No, no, but it was kind of the word that was my word when I was a kid, because most people didn’t know what it was, and so when you’d hear it and other kids would say, what does that mean, I’d be the one to say, I know, I know, you know, that kind of thing.

Yeah, so it does have a different sense from its original sense. The original sense was with or without the will of the person we’re talking about, correct?

Yep.

Yeah, like will I, Nil I. Will I, Nil I.

Yeah, being a negative. But words change, and now it’s more sort of haphazard, wouldn’t you say?

Yes, yeah, and I have looked it up over the years, and I have thoughts as to why it’s changed. I think it’s partly just because people think it sounds like other words, like hell, mel, or melter, skelter.

Yeah, hurly, burly, all those.

But it hasn’t changed within your lifetime. It changed well before you were born, unless you’re hundreds of years old, Will.

Well, let me put it this way. The dictionary that’s right here on the desk with me that I’ve had since I was a kid, which is a Merriam, no, it’s a Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary. It doesn’t say the edition because that front piece is missing now. But it only has the one definition.

Oh, really?

And when I was a kid and I would look it up in different dictionaries, I don’t ever remember seeing that other definition.

Interesting. Because you can see it slowly change over time as you look through the historical record over the centuries since even Shakespeare’s day when he used a form of it in some of his plays.

But yeah, I think you’re right. There’s some confusion about the sounding like other words that mean confusion or haphazardness.

Well, you know, am I wrong? I’ve only seen it as a secondary definition, the newer definition.

Well, it depends what kind of dictionary you’re looking at. I think that the collegiate that you have is probably wrong at the time it was published, which wouldn’t surprise me about that particular dictionary, to be honest.

And I would also say some dictionaries order their entries by age, and some order them by frequency, and it behooves you to read the front matter to find out which they’re doing.

Which no longer exists.

Which comes first isn’t necessarily good advice on which to use the most.

I got you.

That’s so interesting, because you brought it to a lot of people’s attention. I bet most people don’t know that.

It’s sort of like decimate, you know, that word that means to kill one-tenth of a group. But we don’t use it that way now. But it’s sort of an interesting historical fossil.

Right. But it is, that meaning pretty much is a fossil, Will, I’m sorry to say. You can keep using it that way, but people are likely to misunderstand you.

All right.

I can go with that. Thanks for calling. Thanks for pointing this out. I love the show.

Thank you.

Thanks a lot. Take care now.

Bye-bye, Will.

Bye-bye.

Well, that was a thoughtful, thoughtful call, right? Will really put some time into thinking about this word that had a relationship to his name.

Yeah. And it gave him kind of an allegiance to it. Do you have any words like that, Martha?

All I know was I was told at an early age that Martha meant ladylike, and it just never fit.

Come on. You know, I was up a tree. It’s not ladylike.

877-929-9673.

Grant, are you a cutty whifter?

All in on weekends.

That’s private. How did you know?

Really? You’re ambidextrous.

You’re not cutty-handed.

I’m not cutty-handed, no.

You’re not scoochie. You’re not skiffle-handed. You’re not gibble-fisted. You’re not cow-pawed. Nothing sinister about me at all.

Very good. Very good.

As you might have guessed, cutty-whifter means left-handed, and we don’t know why. It’s used in Scotland and in northern England. Cutty there does mean donkey, so I don’t know if that has anything to do with it.

But whether you’re a cutty-whifter or a right-handed, you can call us 877-929-9673.

More Lust for Lex. Stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Recently, I revisited Stephen Crane’s wonderful short story, The Open Boat. Did you read this in high school, Grant?

I didn’t, no. It’s worth reading. It’s online. You can find it. It’s this great story about a true-life experience he had when he was shipwrecked and almost died at sea.

And it’s a great story about striving and perseverance and frustration and being misunderstood and coming to terms with a vast indifference of nature.

And I was reminded of one of his poems that’s also about striving. And I think of it a whole lot. I think you’ll like it.

A man saw a ball of gold in the sky. He climbed for it. And eventually he achieved it. It was clay.

Now this is the strange part. When the man went to the earth and looked again, lo, there was the ball of gold. Now this is the strange part. It was a ball of gold. I, by the heavens, it was a ball of gold.

That’s nice. It’s beautiful. I love that, about seeing something in the distance and you think it’s going to be so great, and then you get there and it’s not, and then you get away from it, and it’s great again.

We’d love to hear about poems that you love. You can send them to words@waywordradio.org. And you can always call us about language questions, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jean Patrick. I’m from Dallas, Texas. How are you guys doing?

Doing well, how are you?

Jean Patrick?

Jean Patrick, yeah, kind of a weird French-Irish hyphenated name.

Oh, I love it.

Thank you.

What’s going on, Jean Patrick?

Well, I had some questions. I mean, I’m somewhat of a recent transplant from Iowa down to Texas. And I know you guys encounter quite a bit of calls from Texas about unusual Texasisms and things like that. But one that really kind of got on my nerves a lot lately was

I recently left the grocery industry. And the particular grocery store I worked at, we had paper plastic bags, and by default, they didn’t specify paper. You put them in the plastic bag.

What I encountered from time to time was someone who, you know, I’d start putting in the plastic, and they’d go, oh, no, I want it in a bag. And so I would clarify, I’d be like, okay, so you’d like paper. And they said, yeah, a bag, like I’d been dropped on my head as a child or something. Like, what is wrong with this guy? I said bag. Why isn’t he putting it in a paper bag? Why doesn’t he get that immediately?

So my question really is, to clarify, you know, if this is sort of a more have to do with a regional thing. What I’m thinking, the most likely possibility is that they just were frustrated that I couldn’t read their minds about what sort of bag they wanted. But more specifically, is there some kind of contextual difference between like a sack and a bag?

Yeah, Grant, I don’t know of a regional component for that kind of difference. I know that sack is used all over the country except for parts of the Northeast and part of Pennsylvania. Right. They would use bag there. But in most of the country, sack is fairly common.

Yeah. What’s really interesting, I don’t know of any resource or anywhere that data has been collected that shows that people automatically think of a bag as paper in the store. No, I’m not aware of anything like that either. Even if you go to Google Ngrams and kind of look for all these permutations, paper bag, paper sack, plastic bag, plastic sack, you know, we see them rise at about the same frequency and kind of peak at about the same frequency, and there’s not a great difference in them overall.

Right. And we could solve this whole problem if people brought their own things to carry stuff in. What percentage of people did that? I’d probably say maybe 15%.

Okay. Oh, really? Okay. They’re bringing these reusable bags, right? The recycled reusable bags.

Jean-Patrick, this is a classic call where we must ask our listeners for information, whether or not they themselves think of a bag in the store as automatically being paper, or if they have some kind of distinction that’s very clear to them. Right? I don’t have it. I don’t… No, I’m not aware of anything like that. To me, I don’t even think about it. It’s a plastic or paper, right?

Yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I have another question for you, Jean-Patrick. Does it help? I’ve always wondered this when you’re going through the line. Does it help if I speak up and say I want paper or I want plastic? Before you ask. Or does that throw you off rhythm?

Definitely. Definitely. At this particular one, we’re like by default, if they don’t say anything, we’re supposed to put it in the plastic. So my strategy was kind of, from an economic standpoint, they kind of encouraged us to use more plastic bag if they didn’t have a preference.

I did not know that. But I’d usually kind of greet the customer like, hey, how’s it going? And leave a little bit of opening there for like, do you have a bagging preference? This would be a great time to interject that. Hot enough for you?

Yeah. And if they brought their own bag and they’re hiding it somewhere, that would be an opportunity for them to bust them out and everything.

Okay, so I should volunteer. What you’re saying is I should volunteer my preference.

Yeah. Okay. All right. I didn’t know if that threw people off.

So to summarize, John Patrick, we don’t know the regional difference. We don’t think that people in this country think of the bag at the checkout as automatically being paper and then the plastic is the sack or something else. But we’re definitely going to ask and come up with more information for you, all right?

We will hear.

Okay, thank you very much. Thanks for calling. Good luck.

Thank you. Take care. Bye-bye.

So the lights are on. They’re flashing. The siren’s going. Your question for you to answer right now is, in your mind, is the bag in the store always paper? That’s what his experience says. It’s so weird to me.

Yeah. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. My name is Debbie Oleg, and I’m in Wisconsin.

Hi, Debbie. Welcome.

Hi, Debbie. We could have told you by the accent.

Yeah, where in Wisconsin?

Near Milwaukee. It’s called Pewaukee.

Okay, yeah, sure. We’ve had callers on from there before.

What’s going on in Pewaukee?

Well, it’s kind of an odd question. I don’t know. I’m a registered nurse, and I’ve been off work for a while, and I feel that my grammar skills have become somewhat lax. And some of my friends have kindly chided me about that. Sometimes I use this double word. How to explain it would be that if I’m swimming with my husband, I’ll say, we’re going to go swim, swim.

And how the question came about was, do other people in the country do this besides some of my other friends? And is there a history of this occurring elsewhere, and where did it originate from? Because what the second swim means is that you’re sort of emphasizing the word rather than using a better adjective. That’s kind of it.

So you’re distinguishing that particular event from a different kind of swimming, where you might have a kind of swimming where you go to the pool and you fool around and you splash each other, and technically you’re swimming. Or you could have the kind of swimming where you’re in the water, doing a stroke, end-to-end, doing laps, right? And that’s the swimming swimming.

Right. That’s kind of what I put down was that I was writing a little note here that we’re going to go do laps rather than just go in the warm water pool, let’s say.

Yeah, you’re not the only one. You’re not. This is ordinary English, and actually this kind of thing happens in other languages as well, including some of the Pacific Island nations, where they’ll take a word and what’s called reduplicate it. They’ll say it twice to indicate that they mean the canonical, purest, most common, most idealized form of a thing. The essence, the platonic essence.

Yeah, yeah. So as a linguist put it, a true, real, default, or prototype instance of it. So the example that I like to use is Martha might say, you know, we’ll be talking to somebody. You know, I really like that guy. I’ll be like, do you like him or do you like him like him?

I just like him. The like-like would be, does that mean that she’s feeling romantic towards him and interested and wants to go on a date? Or does it just mean that she’s like, oh, he’s a good guy or a good person and the sex and gender and romance don’t come into it at all?

Right. So these kinds of things exist throughout English. We do this all of the time and it’s very ordinary and it’s a kind of emphasis and stress. We do this because stress, what we pronounce with the most force in a word or a sentence or a paragraph, is part of the way that we communicate.

English isn’t a tonal language like Chinese, but we do have in this way, by the words that we punch or hit, as they might say, the words that we put the most oomph behind, we do have a way of indicating what’s important.

Is this something that, because I heard what you said that it’s sort of common, but I had only started hearing it a few years ago, and then it sort of fades away in our group, and then all of a sudden you’ll start using the term again or repeating the word again. And again, like people chide you for it because it’s not appropriate language.

Oh, really?

They’re wrong.

Yeah, it’s fine.

Debbie, there’s not even a question about this being wrong or right. It’s completely grammatical, normal English. Without it, if you didn’t use this kind of English, you would actually find yourself unable to express some things that were very easy to say that way.

Why should you have to say, when I say swimming, what I mean is the kind of swimming where you do laps and you actually do some exercise?

Yeah, it’s very concise.

Yeah, if I can just say, I mean swimming, swimming, why not?

That’s great. That’s great communication. It’s efficient.

Well, I will share that with my friends as well as my husband.

I appreciate that information.

Debbie, thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I forgot to mention what this is called.

The long form of this, and there’s other terms for it, but this is the one that I use.

It’s called contrastive focus reduplication.

It simply means that you are, by using a word twice, emphasizing that you mean the very purest form of a thing.

CFD. Contrastive focus reduplication.

Usually just called it reduplication, but it’s a particular kind of reduplication.

CFR.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them along an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, how’s your OH?

Eh? My oxygen hydride?

No, guess again.

I don’t know what.

Guess again.

My OH?

Yeah.

My overhead.

How’s she doing?

My other half.

Your other half.

Very good.

Oh, I see.

You know, I’m her DH.

Yes, you are.

Her dear husband.

And she’s your DW, right?

Right, dear wife.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I only learned this one recently.

OH.

Oh, apparently that’s one that the folks at Oxford are tracking for possible inclusion in the dictionary.

Yeah.

It’s funny.

When my wife and I realized that we were going to have a baby, we both spent a lot of time on these discussion forums where people were talking about, you know, raising kids.

And the paraphernalia, and breastfeeding, and that sort of thing.

And this lingo is just out there, and they’re all using it, and you’re like, I don’t even know what you people are talking about.

I know this is supposed to be about a baby and a couple, but these acronyms are throwing me.

It took quite a while.

More crazy talk from us, 877-929-9673, or send your looniness to us in words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Scott Shirley in Fort Worth, Texas.

Welcome, Scott.

Hi, Scott.

How are you doing?

Great, great.

What’s on your mind?

Love your show.

Thank you.

It makes me laugh out loud.

Good.

In a good way?

Always, yes.

Always.

Okay.

How can we help you?

Well, I grew up in South Louisiana and later Texas, and so there are a lot of things that I think are normal that folks up north might think is strange, like when we say we’re fixing to do something.

Mm—

But there’s one that’s always bothered me because I’ve never really even been sure what word was being used.

All my life I’ve heard people say, I like to die when he said that.

What are they saying?

At first I thought that the southern accent, they were using the word lack, L-A-C-K, like they lacked dying, just fell short of death.

But more recently, I believe they’re saying like as in L-I-K-E.

I’ve even seen it written that way.

So explain to me this expression, I like to die, since it’s past tense and they’re obviously not dead.

And they don’t like the idea.

Right. I don’t think they mean they enjoy dying.

Right.

So where does this come from?

It’s pervasive throughout the American South.

It does appear in pockets outside of the south, but it’s very southern.

And if you are ever taught to speak like a southerner by a dialect coach, they’ll probably throw this in there.

It’s a contraction of like to have.

I’d like to have died, or I’d have liked to die.

And it shares something in common with the like that we use to mean similar, or also, or alike, right?

It’s that kind of like.

And it just simply means I nearly did.

It’s what they call counterfactual, which means you’re making an expression of something that didn’t happen rather than an expression of something that did happen.

So this is called counterfactual like-ta.

And the people that I know that study this sort of thing that specialize in Southern American speech, they just spell it L-I-K-E-T-A, one word, because it’s so idiomatic.

It’s become its own thing.

Like-ta.

Like-ta.

Yeah, and it behaves in its own way, and it fits perfectly in a particular kind of speech.

And it’s really, if you hear somebody use lycta, there’s a really good chance they’re somewhere from somewhere south of the Mason-Dixon line.

It’s a great, strong marker of southerness.

Okay.

Yeah.

Well, I’ve always wondered that.

Thank you so much.

It does, by the way, go back to some British dialect features.

It’s got a long, long history in English, and we do find it in some of the dialects of the British Isles.

I can’t imagine someone with a British accent saying, I like to die.

Well, you know, the British Isles…

I rather prefer.

We got a hodgepodge of their particular dialect features here in the United States.

In some cases, they’re minor events over there, minor features, and then they just exploded over here and became pervasive.

So it’s very interesting to see how a tiny little term that’s a little used in one county in England becomes a big deal over here.

Well, I got a million more of them, so I’ll probably be calling you again.

Okay, Scott. Thanks for your question.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know that one from North Carolina and Kentucky, I bet.

Oh, sure.

Her skirt was so short, I like to die.

877-929-9673.

Lately, I’ve been reading the work of the great Kentucky writer Wendell Berry.

And I wanted to share one of his poems with you.

It’s called The Real Work, and it’s a poem of, I think, encouragement.

The Real Work.

It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work.

And that when we no longer know which way to go, we’ve come to our real journey.

The mind that is not baffled is not employed.

The impeded stream is the one that sings.

Oh, it’s wonderful.

The impeded stream.

Yeah, yeah. Whenever I’m having a rough day, I think of that poem.

I love it because it’s true. A smooth life is a boring life.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I don’t want a flat roller coaster. I want both hills and valleys.

A flat roller coaster. I like that.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s show, but join us online on Facebook and Twitter or sign up for our weekly newsletter for the latest in language news.

You can also leave us a message anytime, 877-929-9673.

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Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Herdell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. So long.

Ta luego.

Ta luego.

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.

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