Buckle Down (episode #1412)

If 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 couple of weeks ago, we put the call out to you to find out what you call an abbreviated bath.

That’s the kind of bath where you just sort of stand there and sponge off in the key parts.

Yeah, the important places.

Yeah, yeah.

And Grant, I don’t know what it says about our listeners, but we got a ton of responses.

Ooh, do tell.

Well, we heard from Nancy K. Kemp from Cairo, Georgia, who said,

If you don’t have time for an actual bath or shower, a quick splash of water, a quicker rub down with a wet cloth, soap optional, and a spritz of something that smells better than you did, that’s what we call taking a bird bath.

Bird bath. That makes a lot of sense.

We heard bird bath from a lot of people, including Samadi Jones from Tallahassee, who said her friend from Alabama calls it a bird bath.

And she says, when I asked what it was, he told me to imagine someone splashing and fluffing around a little, but not really getting clean.

And I have some more for you.

Oh, yeah.

Sarah Corey wrote to say that her mom always called the quickie bath a cat bath.

And I like this one, too, from Adelaide Young.

She’s from Ramona, California.

She says she grew up in San Diego in the 40s and 50s, and they had a pedestal bathroom sink.

And Adelaide writes, my mother would give me a kitty bath and call me her frog in a thimble.

Oh, that’s sweet.

Isn’t that nice?

That’s super sweet.

Thank you for taking me on a trip down memory lane.

A frog in a thimble.

Well, if you take a bath and you give it a weird name, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or if the details are just too salacious to speak aloud, send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello there, this is Stacey, and I’m calling from Menasha, Wisconsin.

Hello, Stacey, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

Thanks.

Well, my husband and my son were driving home from school one day,

And they saw a boy on a skateboard, and he hit a rock or something and just went tumbling.

And my husband said, wow, he went ass over tea kettle.

And my son, who’s 12, said, what are you talking about?

And my husband said, you know, he rolled, he tumbled, he went ass over tea kettle.

And my son said, that’s not a real thing.

And he came home and said, Mom, is that a real thing?

And I said, well, I’ve heard it before.

And I said, yeah, I think it’s a real thing.

So I called my parents, and I’m actually from northern Minnesota, and that’s where they grew up as well.

And I said, Mom, you’ve heard this, right?

And she said, oh, yeah.

And same with my dad.

And I said, do you remember when the first time or where you heard it?

And they just said, nope, just, you know, people around the farm, people that would stop over.

I’ve just heard it before.

So I’m wondering where it came from.

Great question. It’s a really good question. There’s a lot of variations of this,

And they’re all lost. Their origins are lost to the mists of time. But I can tell you the first

Use that I find of ass over tea kettle, meaning head over heels, is in a story from the 1930s by

William Carlos Williams called The White Mule. And so it’s really significant that it should appear

In the writing of such a great writer. But we’ve also got things like head over tin kettle,

Head over tin cups, dolly over tea kettles, ace over apex, some British ones that we can’t say on the air.

Because they involve other body parts, crude words for other body parts.

And the whole suggestion is that your head is where your bottom is supposed to be and your bottom is where your head is supposed to be.

Plus, it sounds noisy to me.

Oh, the tea kettle one.

Yeah.

Yeah, I could see the clatter and the bang.

Yeah.

I thought maybe the tea kettle was standing in for the person’s head.

It looks vaguely like a head with a nose and a mouth.

Yeah, like a pot.

Yeah.

So it has nothing to do with a kitchen accident?

No, they’re all just a clever, funny way of talking about people falling down.

Yeah, no one famous kitchen accident from 1907 or anything like that.

Now, the earliest version of this whole idea, an idiomatic expression that talks about falling over in this way is from 1800s, late 1800s.

And then suddenly there’s a flurry of variations in the 20s and the 30s and the 40s

Until we kind of get to the modern era when we’re all more boring

And don’t come up with new expressions all the time.

Well, okay.

I will make my kids listen to this, and I will make sure they know it’s a real thing.

Make them.

Make them, Stacy.

Well, you know, moms on the radio, they don’t care.

Oh, right, right, right.

They’re like, whatever, mom.

You could be the first woman on Mars and be like, whatever, mom.

Great. Well, Stacey, thank you so much for calling.

Yeah, and thank you. Have a good day.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We do try to solve these family mysteries, at least tell you a little bit more than you came in with.

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

Browsing Google Books, I came across a poem that I wanted to share with you.

Great.

This is from 1878 from a journal called the Elocutionist Journal.

And the poem is called The Age of Sling.

Now you can see why it attracted me.

And I’m going to skip some of the verses, but it’s basically a complaint about kids today

And the slang they use.

Kids today in 1871?

1878.

1878.

Here’s some of the lines from it.

Age of Sling.

It wasn’t so when I was young.

We used plainer language then.

We didn’t speak of them galoots when meaning boys are men.

And when we saw a girl we liked who never failed to please,

We called her pretty, neat, and good, but not about the cheese.

Once, when a youth was turned away by her, he held most dear.

He walked upon his feet, but now he walks off on his ear.

It’s rather sad that children now are learning all such talk.

They’ve learned to chin instead of chat and waltz instead of walk.

Boy.

The complaints don’t really change.

The slang changes, but the complaints are exactly the same.

Yeah.

Some of that slang I don’t even know.

Yeah.

Now, with the cheese, though, we know about the big cheese, and this is related to that.

Okay, right, right, right.

Yeah, if you say something was the cheese, it’s the best thing ever.

Yeah.

Possibly from Hindi.

Right, right.

And then chinwag.

Chinwag, we know.

Yeah, to chin or to jaw, to jawbone.

Those are all kind of…

But walking off on your ear?

Yeah, walking.

Well, it’s kind of like tossing somebody out on their ear, I think.

Oh, okay.

I think it’s related to that.

All right, all right.

Wait, it’s a little bit of a sling puzzle, right?

That’s right.

Kids those days, our great-grandparents.

We’ll post a link to the whole poem on our webpage.

If you’ve got something fun to share from 100 years ago, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kathleen.

Where are you calling from, Kathleen?

Well, I live in Urbana, Illinois, but I’m calling from Duluth, Minnesota.

Okay, great.

Welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Well, a few weeks ago I was listening and you asked people to call in with their pet peeves.

And my dad has a lifelong pet peeve of people pronouncing the phrase short-lived as short-lived.

What do you say?

I say short-lived because it’s been beaten into me my entire life.

But his argument is, and I guess it makes sense to me, is that the lived in short-lived is not a past participle of to live, but an adjective form of life.

So he’s convinced me, so I go with store live.

Is it a peeve for you or it’s a peeve for him?

It’s a peeve for him.

So he left the peeve with you for the weekend and you’re just giving us a call to tell us all about it.

She’s a peeve sitter.

Exactly. And to see what you think for validation for him.

For validation for him.

This is not a hotel I’m not going to validate as parking.

Not on this one. That peeve needs to be parked somewhere else.

Yeah, I tell you, if your dad were running around in the 1600s,

He would have a lot of folks to back him up because that was the original formation of the word.

It was from life, like short.

It had a short life.

And Shakespeare used it that way and people back then.

But these days, the other pronunciation is much more prevalent.

Like ridiculously more prevalent in all of the English-speaking world.

And so he can hang on to the past, but that means he needs, in order to be consistent,

He needs to hang on to everything else from the 1600s, and I bet you he’s not doing that.

Yeah, or hang out with people.

Probably not, but you know, you could probably convince him to.

Oh, you think?

You think so?

He’s flexible then.

I’ve heard this before.

People think it should be short-lived, but that isn’t the prevailing pronunciation.

People at all levels of education and professional background and even linguistic authority

Unanimously say short-lived or long-lived is the prevailing pronunciation,

Even among the elite classes in all of the English-speaking world.

I mean, it’s kind of hard to argue with that.

Well, there you go.

When did it change, out of curiosity?

It’s only been changing since the 1600s.

We have a really long…

We know this, by the way.

We know about the ancient pronunciations, the old pronunciations, because of poems.

We will have the words supposedly rhyming,

And in the modern era, if they don’t rhyme, we’re like,

Oh, wait a second.

That’s weird.

That’s supposed to rhyme.

Yeah, and early on,

Sometimes it was spelled short-lifed

With an F rather than a V.

Mm—

Very cool.

Anyway, he’s fine.

He can coddle his peeve baby at all he wants,

But it’s not one that we can endorse.

There you go.

Well, I will tell him,

And he will probably go to his grave

Saying short-lifed.

Yeah, it’s fine.

No harm, no foul.

Well, we hope he’s long-lived.

I hope so, too.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

All right.

Bye-bye, Kathleen.

And this is one of those things where you had a school teacher or somebody of authority who spanked you or hit you with a ruler or just embarrassed you in front of the class with a big red F because you said the wrong thing.

Well, yeah, I said short-lived all my life until I was a young adult.

And then I read a book that said you must say short-lived.

And I tried to change, but it always felt weird.

It does. It still feels weird.

I don’t know that I’ve ever heard it and not had it sound pretentious even.

Right. So if you want to point to traditional authorities a while back, you would say it that way with the long eye, but not today.

But that’s a little bit of the trap of the etymological fallacy, right?

We don’t hew to the rules of 400 years ago because we have new rules now.

Right. Give us a call with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you’re an illurophile.

How dare you?

That’s not an insult.

In fact, it’s something wonderful.

I mean, thank you.

Yes, you’re an illurophile, meaning you’re a cat lover.

Oh, absolutely.

Yeah, you have a couple of them, right?

I do.

Whopper and Bianca.

Whopper and Bianca.

That’s right.

Well, then you will appreciate this email from Audra Yoder in Dallas, Texas.

She writes,

One of our cats has a hobby of climbing around in our closets, slithering between boxes, snuffling in our shoes, poking her nose between clothes that are hanging up, and sometimes finding a hidden place deep inside a closet to hide and or take a nap.

The more progress she can make vertically, the better.

We call this activity closeteering.

A secondary meaning of the word could be digging around in an overcrowded closet in search of something you’re pretty sure you own but haven’t seen in a decade or so.

My cat does the same. Bianca does that. We call it height-seeking, which is not as much fun as closeteering.

Yeah, kind of like closeteering. It reminds me of having a little compass or a GPS or something and finding your way.

But they do that, right?

They do, yeah. They get in the closet and you won’t even know they’re in there until they start meowing later at dinnertime.

Right.

How long have you been in there, cat?

Open the door, right?

Yeah.

And I think there should be another word for the practice that cats have when they just choose a spot and it’s their spot for a few weeks.

Yeah.

And then they move on to something else.

And never go back.

Yeah.

Yeah, they totally do that.

I don’t understand what it is.

I assume they’ve just gotten their scent all over the place and they want something unscented.

I don’t really know.

Yeah, I don’t know either.

But I’ve always thought that there should be a word for that.

What is that?

Let us know.

777-929-9673 or send your suggestions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And who is that handsome man?

Why, it’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

John.

Hi, John.

Hey, it’s me.

Hi, Grant.

What’s up, buddy?

How are you doing?

What’s going on in New York City?

Well, you know, not many people know this, but right now you can’t see me and I can’t see you.

Correct.

Right?

However, if we did need to see each other while we communicated, we could use a peer-to-peer system

That allows video conferencing through the sky.

Sky Peer to Peer is the original source of the name Skype.

Sky Peer to Peer.

Okay, good.

Now, there are some great stories behind brand names,

And your knowledge of language should help you figure out

Which brand names I’m looking for from the following clues.

Okay.

Okay.

This footwear company took its name from the Greek goddess of victory,

And it seems all you have to do to win is wear their sneakers and just do it.

Nike.

Nike, right.

Green and Nikkei, yes.

Nikkei, very good.

The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company changed its name to this when it began to develop innovative products.

Like Post-its, yep.

Like 3M, like Post-its.

Minnesota Mining, Manufacturing, those are the 3Ms in 3M.

Yep.

These places are almost never closed, but you wouldn’t know it from their brand name, which advertises the hours they were open in 1946.

Oh, 7-Eleven.

That’s right, 7-Eleven.

Oh, very good.

They were open from 7 to 11.

This beverage is simply derived from the names of the leaves and nuts used to flavor it.

Oh, Coca-Cola.

Right.

Coca leaves and cola nuts.

When the owner of the Echo Bay Technology Group attempted to register a website for his new pet project,

He found that a gold mining company already took echobay.com, so he just shortened it to this.

EBay.

EBay, right.

So if anybody asks you what the E stands for in eBay, it’s Echo.

That’s funny because you would assume it means electronic, right?

Right.

No.

Yeah, like E-Hyphen-Bay or something.

An employee of NCR, or National Cash Register, started his own company to make machines for business.

He decided to one-up his former employers, so he chose this name.

IBM.

IBM.

Now, how is that one-upping National Cash Register?

Because each letter is one additional, one letter higher in the alphabet.

No.

You’re thinking of PAL.

Oh, that’s right.

I’m thinking of PAL.

IBM.

No, but what does IBM stand for?

International Business Machines.

Oh, so international.

International.

He’s like, oh, wow.

Yeah, national.

I’m going to go one more than those guys.

And the next one’s universal.

Interstellar Business Machines.

The Danish words for play well were combined to make the brand name of this popular toy.

It’s just a coincidence that the name is also Latin for I put together.

Lego.

Lego.

From Leggut.

Very good.

Martin Bromley started a company to import pinball machines to Japan for use on military bases.

Now, this Service Games of Japan company morphed into a brand renowned for video games.

Sega?

Sega, yes, very good.

Service Games, nice.

Hedgehog.

That’s right, there you go.

This Japanese electronics brand is derived from the Latin word for sound

And an American slang term for a bright youngster.

Sony.

Sony, right.

Yeah, from Soan and Sunny.

Sony, very good.

Now, this is easily the most famous brand named after a character

In Herman Melville’s novel, Moby Dick.

I have no idea, actually.

What?

No, come on.

Wee Quig.

It’s not Wee Quig.

Ahab.

Almost there.

Ahab’s Harpoons.

Moby.

How about Moby?

What’s the company?

What is the company?

Yeah.

You want the answer?

I can tell you their field.

Oh, no.

What kind of company is it?

What industry?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

They sell coffee.

Lots and lots of coffee.

Starbucks, duh.

Starbucks is great.

That’s it.

Perfect.

Oh, that was hard.

It’s been such a long time.

I know, right?

Well, I saved the hard one for last, and that was it, guys.

You were great.

Oh, okay.

Wow.

Okay, good.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Okay, bye-bye.

Talk to you next week.

Bye, Greta.

Bye, Martha.

If you want to talk about any aspect of language whatsoever, call us, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org, and you can always find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Carol.

I’m calling from Cardiff-by-the-Sea, California.

Hey, Carol. I know Cardiff very well. How are you doing?

I’m well. How are you today?

Doing well. Grant’s here, too.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, I have a question that I was wondering about.

I work at a school, and I was talking to a co-worker,

And we were talking about people that are kind of whiny

And, you know, can’t seem to get things together,

And I said they need to buck up.

And my co-worker said I use the same term.

And so we were wondering, where does this come from?

Is it from like bucking bronco or buckskin or something like that?

Because I always took it to mean, you know, toughen up, get it together and move on, get some gumption.

Interesting.

So if I bucked up, what did I do?

What am I doing?

If you buck up, it means you suck it up, get yourself pulled together and move on.

Okay, good.

Yeah, that’s my thinking about it as well, right?

It’s just like grow up a little bit, just have some stick-to-itiveness, and carry on no matter what happens.

Good advice.

It’s good life advice for anything, right?

Persevere, basically.

Right.

And I actually even asked my daughter what she thought it meant, and she said, yeah, it means to toughen up.

Yeah, there we go.

There are a lot of crass terms for that in military slang, but the less crass ones are like to cowboy up or to man up.

We also have in English, basically kind of the same thing.

Right.

Although it’s gendered, so both of those are gendered.

Right.

Buck up’s better.

Yeah.

So what about that verb?

Well, it’s interesting.

It comes from the verb to buckle, buckle up, buckle down, buckle to.

And there are a variety of meanings for this.

Now, phrasal verbs often do this.

A phrasal verb is when you have, say, the buckle part, and then you’ve got a preposition after it.

So that preposition is often very variable.

So we don’t care too much that it was on or to or down or up.

So speak up, speak out.

Exactly.

And sometimes the meanings are the same regardless of what the preposition is.

It just depends on the period of English that you’re talking about here.

So it has meant at one point to have courage and to go forth.

And other times it’s meant to woo someone, to actually flirt with them and try to pursue them romantically.

And other times it’s meant to kind of defy the odds or to defy authority, to resist whatever is trying to be put upon you.

And all these meanings of buckle up, buckle down, buckle to all have this idea of just finding your courage and doing what it takes to get the job done.

Now, imagine, if you will, a traveling trunk with a lid and a lock.

These in the old times had buckles around them because the locks, frankly, weren’t very good.

And you also wanted to stop vagabonds and people from prying into the trunk when you weren’t around.

They have buckles.

You tighten those buckles.

You’re keeping everything firm and in place.

I don’t know that it literally came from these buckles, but buckles are the thing that hold up your pants.

They hold the lid on the trunk down.

They can hold your school books together while you’re climbing up the hill to the one-room schoolhouse.

So a buckle is a fastener that keeps things secure.

So anyway.

Yeah, a strengthener in other words.

A strengthener.

Buckle, it was shortened to buck, and it got fixed into English as buck up.

It could have easily just been to buck to or to buck at or to buck on, but instead we got buck up.

That is really interesting.

And is it a regional thing, or is it all across the board?

It’s everywhere, yeah.

I would argue that it’s mostly American, but I do see it pop up in British speech as well.

At this point, the cross-Atlantic pollution of English is thoroughly enmeshed, and it’s very hard to disentangle.

Well, yeah, you would think in the land of stiff upper lips, too.

Yeah, yeah.

Right, exactly.

And is it an old term?

Yeah, we’ve got variations on it back to the 1830s.

Oh, my God.

Well, that is really great.

We were just so curious because we both use it and we come from different parts of the United States.

We were just wondering how this came to be.

All right. Thank you, Carol. Bye-bye.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Carol. Bye-bye.

This is the show about language and how we use it.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we were talking earlier about quickie baths where you don’t really get in the tub or the shower.

Energy efficient baths, right?

Not very much water, not very much time.

Conserving water.

Here are a couple of other examples of names.

Dane in Traverse City wrote, I’ve always called this a pit stop.

My grandmother, however, called this a PTA.

I’ll leave that to the imagination.

Oh, it’s an initialism.

As we will, too.

It stands for things.

That’s right.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Henry Nieberg.

I’m calling from San Diego.

Hi, Henry.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

Well, I’m a high school student in San Diego, and it’s kind of like an inner city school.

But there’s also kind of like a mix with a lot of kids from around San Diego.

And there’s a term called chopping, and it means flirting.

But a lot of the inner city kids use it, but it kind of got started spreading around the school.

But when I ask other people from around the city, they’ve never heard of the term.

Chopping, as in C-H-O-P-P-I-N-G, chopping?

Yes.

For flirting with somebody.

So how would I use this in a sentence?

If I wanted to flirt with a young lady, what would I say that I was going to do?

Well, if I see, like, two people, I’d be, oh, they’re chopping.

You know, and sometimes, you know, you forget the G where it’s just chopping.

Chopping, yeah.

Yeah, and a lot of times there’s hand gestures that go along with it, you know,

Where people will chop with their hands, saying, oh, they’re chopping it right now.

Oh, really?

That’s interesting.

Is it more like a karate chop or a vegetable chop?

What kind of chop is this?

You know, you usually get your left hand, and it’s flat.

And then, yeah, it’s like a karate chop on the left hand.

You know, there is some evidence for this term actually being spread further than San Diego.

There were a few entries for it on Urban Dictionary going back as far as 2002.

And then there’s a small collection of slang that I have, also from 2002,

Which seems to indicate that this is a West Coast term,

But it is thoroughly West Coast, and it’s pretty widespread.

It’s not like it’s just San Diego at all.

But very little evidence on this.

And I’m actually surprised, to be honest, that you’re still using it

Because it is at least 12 years old.

Well, no, it’s very, very, very evident in my school.

You know, it’s used interchangeably.

I don’t know if I’ve actually ever heard flirting at my school because everyone uses chopping.

Oh, right.

Maybe flirting.

Is flirting seen, is that word seen as old-fashioned?

Or does it sound like courting or wooing to the young kids today?

I don’t know.

I’m not sure.

You know, at other schools, they might use flirting.

It’s just at my school.

You know, I don’t know.

It’s never been used as far as I’ve known.

I’ll tell you what we’re going to do, Henry.

I know that we’ve got a bunch of young folks in high school listening to the show.

I need evidence that this term is or is not used elsewhere in the country.

Do you use to chop or chopping to mean to flirt or flirting?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

I really want to know this.

Or send your answer an email to words@waywordradio.org

Or to Twitter under the handle Wayword.

So we’re going to find out, Henry, all right?

All right. Thanks so much.

Yeah, take care. Good luck with your studies, all right?

All right. Thank you so much.

Sure. Bye-bye.

I have a couple more examples of abbreviated baths sent in to us by our listeners.

Lee in Arcadia, Indiana wrote to say,

My mother used to give us spit baths before we went out in public.

A spit bath consists of moistening a Kleenex or paper napkin and wiping off anything on our face.

You remember those?

Very familiar.

Yeah, I got sleepy wiped from my eyes that way all the time.

And then David Aiken wrote to say that he used a term at the University of Tennessee in the late 1950s.

He says, I was a member of the Sigma Chi fraternity, and we had a term for the cursory cleanup using deodorant and aftershave.

It was called taking an SAE shower, and that was a snide reference to their biggest rival, the Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity.

This is a show about words and language and the things we say, how we say them, and why.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marlene. I live in Indianapolis, Indiana.

What can we do for you?

I have a question about the word pink. It’s spelled P-A-N-K.

I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

And the word was used mainly in the content of patting something down.

For example, tanking down snow to get the hill ready for skiing.

Was the way it was mainly used.

And I always thought it was a word until I left the Upper Peninsula

And I would talk about panking something,

And nobody knew what I was talking about.

So I just wondered about the word and its origins,

And if you’ve ever heard it used anywhere else.

Yeah, how interesting.

I grew up in Kentucky, and when we talked about pank,

We were talking about a very light reddish color.

That’s a pank shirt.

Really? You have a pink shirt?

Yeah, exactly. No, I never heard pink until I was talking with a youper like you, somebody from the Upper Peninsula of Michigan.

A youper?

Yes.

Yes, it’s very common in that area, also in Pennsylvania, upstate New York, but it’s pretty particular to that area.

And it means exactly what you said.

It may be a combination of spank and pack, although it also may be related to a word from Scandinavian languages.

I know you have a lot of Swedish influence there and a lot of Finnish influence.

We do.

Yes.

Yes.

But it’s used in exactly the way that you describe it.

And honestly, I think if anybody from any part of the country heard somebody talking about panking down snow, I mean, it makes sense to me.

Does it make sense to you?

Yeah, you’d get it.

You know that it meant to tamp down and to firm up the snow.

It sounds like what it is, but it’s pretty particular to your part of the country.

We used it in other ways, too, though, which to mean patting something down.

Like in the 60s, you know how you’d tease your hair up?

And you would pank it down before you would spray it with Aquanet.

It was used to pat down everything.

Is that right?

So you did that, Marlene.

You put the Aquanet on your hair and panked it down?

Oh, yes.

Definitely.

Did you use Dippity-Doo?

I also used Dippity-Doo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

You’re bringing back memories.

For sure.

Yeah, my mom did that.

It was crazy how big she could make her hair in that particular kind of motion with the comb to get it higher than the…

In fact, they reached the ceiling.

But did she pank it down?

Well, she didn’t use that word.

She’s from St. Louis, so no doubt.

So what did she use?

I don’t know.

Mesh?

We would have mashed it down.

No, St. Louis isn’t very southern, nor is it anything like, you know, Youperville.

We would tamp it, Pat.

Firm it up.

Tamp, probably.

Mush it down.

Yeah.

Pat.

So there you go.

Well, thank you.

I was just wondering, you know, if it was used elsewhere, so you’ve answered my question.

Thanks, Marlene.

Take care now.

You too.

Thanks a lot.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I guess she was saying that she doesn’t do that to her hair anymore.

She doesn’t.

But, you know, it might come back in style.

You do that.

Let’s see it.

The headphones do that for me.

Next week, I want to see that for you.

877-929-9673 is the number to call about the dialect in your part of the country.

Or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, are you familiar with the term satisficer?

Yeah.

Yes, I am.

Versus a maximizer?

Yeah, satisficer versus maximizer.

Yes.

So a satisficer is somebody when given many choices will take the first or maybe the second thing that really just meets their basic requirements and go forward.

Right.

So they walk into a store that sells televisions.

They look at all their options.

They pretty much go with the first one that’s the right size and the right cost and they walk out.

The maximizer, before they even walk into the store, has already done a full web search, has already talked to family, has asked on a couple of discussion forums, has done some measurements of the space in the living room.

Right.

And then when they walk into the store, they will look at every model and try a bunch of channels on each, talk to several different staff members, and then make their purchase.

That’s it. How did you know that?

Guess which one I am.

I think we’re both maximizers.

Yeah, a little bit.

Yeah, but I never heard that term until the other day.

And satisficer comes from back in the 1950s.

Yeah, so the maximizer-satisficer thing is something that they discuss in business school when you’re trying to figure out how people get to a buying decision.

And it’s also, by the way, something that comes up in family therapy because it sometimes explains differences of opinion about how a household is managed.

Right, right.

Some people are perfectly fine if the dishes are in the kitchen, but maybe not clean.

That’s close enough.

And other people are like, no, they have to actually be washed and end up in the cabinet clean.

Right.

And a balance of that is really good.

But I think we’re both maximizers, aren’t we?

Yeah, I think so too, yeah.

We’re doing okay.

We’re doing all right.

877-929-9673.

Twitter handle is Wayword.

We’re on Facebook on a page and a group.

And you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

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

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And it’s time for our annual list of book recommendations.

These are books that I’m going to be giving to people probably for years to come.

One of them is Letters of Note.

We’ve talked about that before.

That’s this gorgeous collection of 125 of the world’s most entertaining, inspiring, and unusual letters.

Everything from Virginia Woolf’s suicide letter to Leonardo da Vinci’s job application that he once wrote to somebody.

I love that book and will continue to recommend that.

I co-sign.

You sign off on that one?

Yeah.

And, of course, Steven Pinker’s book, The Sense of Style, The Thinking Person’s Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.

I think you’re with me on that one.

Co-sign that one as well.

Gorgeous, gorgeous book about how to write well in English.

And one more that I’ve been enjoying lately is by David Crystal.

It’s called Wordsmiths and Warriors, the English Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain.

What David Crystal does in this book is he takes 57 places in Britain that somehow have significance to the English language,

Whether it’s where the Vikings first landed on the shores or Canterbury, the destination of Chaucer’s characters,

Or Oxford where James Murray and the team created the Oxford English Dictionary.

He actually went on a tour with his wife all around England to all of these places.

And if you’re an Anglophile or you’re planning a trip to England,

Or if you just want to have a vicarious trip in your armchair,

It’s a terrific introduction to England via places that are significant to the English language.

And that book again is?

It’s called Wordsmiths and Warriors, the English Language Tourist’s Guide to Britain.

I’ve got two books to recommend as well.

It’s become a tradition that I will recommend children’s books because I have a child and we spend a great deal of time in the library.

The two books I want to mention this time are kind of very different from each other, but they’re both Newbery Award winners, it turns out.

One you’ve probably heard of from The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler.

Yes, I read that in sixth grade.

It was published in 1967.

This book is about two young kids who run away and they go to stay at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.

And for children to read this book and put themselves in the shoes of this boy and this girl who do this unthinkable act.

And they have a great deal of fun and it’s laden with learning.

And it’s got a lot of different textures on how they relate to each other, how they relate to their families, the adults around them.

And actually the Met doesn’t feel that different in 1967 in the book than it would today.

A lot of it is still there.

Yeah, yeah.

I loved that book.

It was exploring someplace forbidden.

I remember that very well.

So that’s from The Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler by E.L. Konigsberg.

The other book I have to mention is called The One and Only Ivan by Catherine Applegate.

This is a, how should I put this, a little more moody of a book.

This is about a gorilla who lives in a shopping mall zoo that’s very run down and doesn’t have a lot of animals.

And the guy who owns it isn’t very nice.

And the crux of the story, if I can tell you without giving it away, is that Ivan turns out to be remarkable because he saves the future of a young elephant.

And in his incredible act, by pure force of will, he does amazing things to get her in a place where she needs to be and have a full, well-rounded life as an elephant.

And so it’s a little dark in places and a little moody.

And my family read this book, and it’s very different than the comic hijinks that we like in many other books.

But yet, if you’ve got this heart for animals, if you’ve got a heart for stories of saving anybody, of somebody sacrificing themselves to rescue someone else, this is that book.

And it’s beautiful.

Very well written.

Almost poetry in places.

And I just want to read you one tiny part.

This is how the book starts.

Hello.

I am Ivan.

I am a gorilla.

It’s not as easy as it looks.

And so there’s a little bit of that throughout.

So there’s a dog and some other animals.

So this is The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate.

It’s not as easy as it looks. That’s terrific.

We’ll post links to these books on our website.

And, you know, we’re always interested in the books that you’re reading that you recommend to us.

And we often get those and we’re willing to share them with others.

So send your book recommendations to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, my name is John Freeman. I’m calling from Asheville, North Carolina.

Hi, John.

Hi, John.

How are you doing?

I’m doing well.

I’ve always, I don’t know, been a little thrown off by the word discombobulated,

And I was wondering exactly, like, where it came from, how it came about.

Discombobulated by the word discombobulated.

Yes, exactly.

Yeah, and it’s one of several words that arose during a period of great linguistic exuberance in this country in the 1830s.

There was a fashion for making up silly words like discombobulate and goshbustified, which means really happy, or blustrification, which is what might happen before you get discombobulated.

Absquatulate, which means to leave in a hurry.

Right, right. After your blustrification, which is partying and that kind of thing.

Oh, great.

Yeah.

So they were intentionally making these words that sounded fancy, but they were all artificial.

Right, right. Sort of trying to sound Latinate, but not really.

And the original apparently was discombobricate.

Oh, okay. Discombobricate.

Yeah.

So if I’m doing well and everything is fine, then would I say I am convobulated?

I think you should.

You won’t find a whole lot of examples of that in dictionaries or anything like that.

And it’s not really a natural formation, right, Grant?

I mean, it’s not something that you would naturally use.

Although, you know what? If you ever fly into Milwaukee, there’s a sign after you go through security that says recombobulation area.

Yeah, we talked about that like in 2008.

Yeah, yeah. It was just kind of a joke that they used in the airport to sort of put travelers at ease.

Right. The opposite of discombobulate is recombobulate. Makes sense.

Yeah.

All right, John. Well, here’s to you being completely combobulated at all times.

Very good. I hope to stay convobulated today, or if I get discombobulated, hopefully I will re-combobulate myself.

Perfect.

Thank you. Take care now.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

If language has you discombobulated, this is the place to re-combobulate.

877-929-9673 or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Angela.

Hiya, Angela. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Wolcott, Vermont.

Walcott, Vermont.

Welcome to the show, Angela.

How can we help?

Well, I have been wondering for the past couple of years,

Periodically, where the word hoodlum came from.

Hoodlum as in like a thug or bad guy?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I was kind of thinking that

It was more of like kind of kids that would cause trouble.

And I remember this came up when I was in college.

And it’s something that I’ve never looked up on my own before, surprisingly.

And it’s come up periodically over the past couple of years.

So, yeah, I was thinking it was like kids that would kind of go around and cause trouble

Or, yeah, I guess someone, anyone that would really cause trouble.

So we have a couple of different things happening here.

We’ve got hood, which is short for hoodlum, and they both mean the same thing.

They refer to a bad guy or a thug or a troublemaker.

And then we’ve got hood, like the thing that you wear on your head.

It comes from some Germanic words, probably Dutch, meaning hat.

And we know that’s a very clear, perfectly traced etymological path.

We know that’s true.

The question that we have is where hoodlum itself comes from.

It pops up in the western part of the United States in the 1870s in San Francisco

And is literally from day one used to refer to exactly the same kind of people it refers to now,

These guys who are up to no good, just troublemakers, almost always a man.

Somebody maybe either actually breaking the law or threatening to break the law

Or somehow disturbing the peace.

Where it gets murky is that the word popped up with such ferocity.

I mean, it just suddenly pops up in all the periodicals and journals of the day

And starts to be talked about and used coast to coast

Because the newspapers all borrowed from each other.

And everybody came up with these wild theories.

It came from Swedish, it came from German, it came from this, it came from that.

And everybody’s sure that they’re absolutely right.

So even today when you look at dictionaries, some of them just say origin unknown.

And some of them say, oh, Swedish, it comes from the Swedish word meaning disorderly.

And some will say it’s German, it comes from a German word meaning ragged good for nothing.

But the problem with these supposed Swedish and German origins is that we don’t actually have strong Swedish or German communities in the places where this word first appeared.

It just wasn’t a community there that would actually make this word stick.

And it’s weird that it just pops up.

Yeah, it was super slangy.

Oh, that is so funny because, you know, I’ve never tried to Google it, which is surprising because I Google everything on my phone.

But that’s really bizarre.

I wouldn’t have been able to find anything anyway.

If you want something to Google, if your Google-fu is unstoppable, as they say,

Google hoodlum and the words notes and queries.

There’s this famous journal that’s existed for a million years

Where people would, scientists and thinkers and philosophers of the previous age,

Would write to each other and post their queries in this journal,

And then other people would reply in the next issue.

And so there’s tons of speculation in notes and queries about hoodlum.

I mean, these are all armchair linguists, all armchair etymologists,

All of them absolutely sure that they’re completely correct and everyone else is wrong,

Just in that way that people can be.

So that would be a lot of fun reading for you.

It sounds like old-fashioned Twitter.

Yeah.

You know, it’s funny.

It reminds me very much of, and it’s all white dudes.

It’s all old, educated white dudes, just used to being right in their universe,

Everyone letting them pretend that they’re right,

And so they’re convinced that they still are right about everything else.

If it just occurs to them, it must be true.

Well, that could be amusing reading.

Yeah, a little bit.

Thank you so much for trying to answer my question.

Sure, Angela.

Easy peasy.

Thank you for calling.

Okay, thank you very much.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, sometimes the search is as much fun as finding the answer, right?

Right.

And, you know, the truth is, as much as I belittle the armchair linguists,

Occasionally they get it right.

And what etymologists do is they gather all of these theories, every single one,

And one by one they try to prove them right or prove them wrong.

Actually, they do both.

They prove them wrong and right.

And at the end of all their study and all their research,

Then they come up with the most likely theory, and that’s what gets printed in the dictionary.

Well, if there’s a word that’s caught your ear, call us, 877-929-9673.

And if you’re curious about the origin of a word or phrase, you can always email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org, or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Brent, remember when we were talking about the French term for pie chart?

Yeah, but I don’t remember what the word was.

It was le camembert.

Oh, yeah.

Like the cheese.

Little wheel of cheese.

Yeah, yeah, with a little wedge out of it.

That’s the best.

That reminded Sarah Ford in Bozeman, Montana, of a French term that she had come across that was another great example of looking at a common thing in a different way.

And that’s the French word for paperclip.

What is it?

It’s le trombone.

Oh, that’s right, yeah.

It’s like a trombone.

It looks like the slide on a trombone.

Right. Wah, wah. I thought that was great.

Thanks, Sarah.

If you’ve got something funny from another language, tell us.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Martha Scheinman.

I’m calling from Kingston, Ontario, Canada.

Well, welcome. How can we help you?

Well, it turns out my maiden name is Martha Barnette.

No.

Oh, really?

It is.

And so that was one of the first things that I thought was really very interesting.

Yours, I believe, has an E at the end.

Mine does not.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, you know, actually, the Barnetts didn’t have an E on the end until we moved from the mountains to the town.

And my Aunt Mazo added an E because she thought it looked French.

So it could well be that you and I are related because originally we were without the E.

Yeah, except that the story of how my family name became Barnette is kind of interesting.

My grandfather came from Russia just around the turn of the century,

And of course he came with a different last name that was changed at Ellis Island by the immigration officials.

Okay.

And the name they gave him was Barnette.

Oh, really? Okay.

And we know the other name. We’ve always known the other name, and it’s a bit of a family story.

It’s a bit of family lore.

What’s the other name?

It was Benach, B-E-N-O-C-H, very different.

Oh, how interesting.

Yeah.

Well, Martha Barnette, welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Did you call just to hear each other’s voices?

I’m enjoying hearing Martha Barnette’s voice, frankly.

It’s the Martha Club.

Did you have a question, Martha?

I did.

Well, I’ve always wondered, too, about the name Martha.

Now, having moved to Canada from the U.S. When I was about 14,

I knew a lot of Marthas in the United States,

But never met a Martha in Canada.

And I would speculate maybe that was because Martha was popular in the United States

Because of Martha Washington.

I have no idea if that’s true or not true, but that’s really my question.

And it took until really 10, 15 years ago I did begin to meet a few Marthas,

But I would have gone 20 years.

I never even met one.

And Martha, how old are those Marthas?

The Marthas I met would be 50, 60s now.

And now I know people are now naming their little children Martha.

Oh, they are.

They’re coming back.

They are up here.

Yep, they are up here.

Yeah, that’s just like my wardrobe.

I just wait for the fashions to come back.

Me too.

Me too.

You hold on to things long enough, then they’re very much in style again.

Exactly.

Well, I’m hoping that that will happen with Martha, although I’ve always thought of it as an old-fashioned name.

In fact, my parents told me it was an old-fashioned name.

It goes back to the Bible, actually.

If you look on the Global News website, a couple years ago, they analyzed the name database for Ontario, the province, and came up with a chart.

And you can type in any common name, and it will give you a chart of the frequency of that name being used.

And Martha had a really great peak around the late 1950s and was actually pretty heavily used in the 1950s and 1960s to name baby girls.

And then it’s declined very much since then.

So it doesn’t surprise me at all that the Marthas that you are meeting do have that name.

But it also shows that the name was common in Canada, at least in that province.

Oh, that’s really interesting. I’ll have to look that up.

Now, I don’t know how it compares to all the other names that were given,

And certainly in French Pink in Canada, I’m sure it’s very different, but at least in that province.

Interesting, and I think I remember reading that in this country, Martha had its peak back in the 1880s.

Yeah, so there’s a couple of websites where you can do name trends, baby names, that sort of thing.

You can graph the Social Security database.

Martha had a rank in the 1950s of the 49th most common name.

And then in 2012, it was the 730th most common name.

So it’s dropped dramatically.

There aren’t actually that many names.

And like the top 1,000 is a pretty steady kind of list.

Grant, by the way, when I was born in 1970, was the 270th most common name.

And in 2013, it’s the 168th most common name.

Oh, so moving on up.

Well, no, actually it’s declining again.

In the early 200s, late 1990s, it had another heyday.

So there’s tons of data out there for this,

And we can show that Martha peaked in the 1950s, 1960s.

The name. We’re talking about the name.

Yes. No, I think as people, it’s true.

It’s also true.

As individuals.

When you were three, you were at your best.

That’s right. It’s all been downhill since then.

No, no, no.

Martha, I think we’re about to have another heyday.

I can just feel it.

Martha Barnette, it is such a thrill to have you on our show.

Well, it’s been really fun for me.

Great.

Well, thank you for calling.

Maybe we can get a Grant Barrett to call us.

There are a couple.

One was just elected judge in Calaveras County.

That’s right.

Thanks, Martha.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We talked on an earlier show about eponymous laws,

Those sort of informal laws of nature, like Murphy’s Law,

Anything that can go wrong will go wrong, and Occam’s Razor.

We heard from Darby Vensa, who lives in Austin, Texas,

And Darby prefers having a razor.

And Darby calls this Vensa’s razor,

Which states that whenever a garden hose or extension cord can catch on something,

It will. That’s a great one. Isn’t that the truth? Totally true.

877-929-9673

That’s all for today’s broadcast, but don’t wait till next week to chat with us.

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Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten.

We have production help from James Ramsey and Tamar Wittenberg.

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A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

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.