By a Landslide (episode #1611)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

I was charmed this week to learn that there is a German word for the electronic dashboard display on your car. You know, all those little flashing lights and different colors. It’s Moisequino. And Moisequino translates as mouse cinema. So you can just imagine the little furry guy sitting up there watching the show.

Yeah. You know, like a laser light show. There goes the speedometer. Mouth cinema. That’s really good. How do you spell that? Moise Kino. M-A-U-M-L-A-U-S-E-K-I-N-O. Moise Kino. Moise Kino. I just thought that was charming. And actually, there’s a Hungarian word, Egermozy, which also means mouth cinema. And people are using it to describe any device that has an electronic display like your mobile phone. So you can, you know, take your little mouse cinema and curl up with it and watch a movie.

Right. Yeah. You’re in bed, got the blankets, you’re in grub mode. Curled up, blankets wrapped around you, warm and cozy with your mouse cinema going. That’s nice. I love it.

Well, this show is about words and language. If there’s something lovely and charming you’ve come across in your reading or in your hearing, we’d love to hear about it. Let us know, words@waywordradio.org. And you can call us toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673. And if you’re somewhere else, there are lots of ways to reach us. Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jordan calling from Cheyenne, Wyoming.

Jordan, welcome.

Hi, Jordan and Cheyenne. What’s going on?

Well, I enjoyed the New York Times spelling bee game where you try to make as many words out of letters as possible, out of seven letters as possible. And they curate the list of words that are acceptable. They get rid of slang and curse words and pejoratives and things like that. And I was playing the other day and the word pipped, P-I-P-P-E-D, came to mind. And it was not accepted as an answer in spelling bee. And at first I was mildly incredulous. And then I started asking the Internet and doing a poll with my friends and family and found that I shouldn’t be very incredulous because not very many people understood it to mean what I thought it meant. And what I’ve always understood it to be.

Oh, well, they’ve never heard of it. They weren’t sure. They’re like, it’s like a fruit, you know, a seed and like a lemon or something. That was kind of what most of them were thinking of it as. Whereas I have always sort of understood it to mean getting beaten at the last moment in a race or in a game. I think of where I think I first heard of it, but I’m not actually sure where I first heard of it, was in the race between Roger Bannister and I think it was John Landy. After they both broke the four-mile mark, they raced each other. And I think Bannister came right at the last minute and won at the line. I always understood that to be, you know, Landry got pipped at the line. And so that’s always how I’ve understood it. I’ve used it when I played cribbage with my daughter. She pipped me just the other night, right at the end. So pipped, P-I-P-P-E-D.

Yeah, P-I-P-P-E-D. That’s correct.

Are those, I don’t know those runners, Landry and Bannister, are they American runners, British runners?

They’re British.

British.

Yeah.

Aha. There you go.

Aha, there’s a clue.

All right, here’s the thing. I’m going to lay this out for you. You’re right. The New York Times Spelling Bee is incredible fun, not least because it allows people to moan and complain when the words that they found aren’t actually accepted by the puzzle. Because as you said, it’s a curated list, which means not everything is in there. And the editor, Sam Bezerski, has talked about this on the New York Times website. Somebody asked a question about why words are rejected, he says he uses two dictionaries. One is the Apple dictionary that’s included with the macOS operating system, which is based on the New Oxford American Dictionary. And the other is Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary. So if you look up PIP and look up the definition on those two dictionaries, they both mark that meaning as British.

Oh, OK. Well, there you go. I wonder if it just made its way into running lexicon via the influence of the British running of the 40s, because it was a big, the mile specifically was a big thing. But there’s no accounting for how words get into your vocabulary. All it takes is you watching one movie or documentary or a single YouTube or a book or an article, and a word from another dialect of English can just show up in your everyday speech. And so in this particular case, we know why PIPT wasn’t included because it’s marked as British in those dictionaries. And Sam was probably right not to include it in an American newspaper in an American puzzle.

Well, I don’t mean to throw shade at Sam. I think he does a great job. I know he gets a lot of flack. But you have to accept that part of the game is the curated list. So that is part of the game. If he included every word, first, it’s an impossible task for an editor because the English language is so fast. But second, it would make it too easy. It needs to have a constrained list to make it harder.

Well, that’s really cool. And I’m, yeah, it’s interesting to think that it would have just leached into my language from osmosis, basically. That’s kind of cool to think about. I wonder what other words I have hiding that maybe are not as familiar to my friends and family as they are to me.

They’ve all been judging you behind your back.

I’m sure you’re right. Absolutely. It’s your cribbage language I’m sure they’ve been rolling their eyes at.

I’m sure you’re right.

Jordan, thank you so much for your call. We appreciate it.

And thank you so much for having me. Have a wonderful day.

All right. Take care.

Thanks, Jordan.

Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Caroline calling from Charlotte, North Carolina.

Hello, Caroline.

Hi, Caroline. What’s going on?

Well, I’m hoping that you can give me a little bit of a backstory on the word vittles. I’m sure it starts with a V. It sounds like it does, but I don’t know much about it. It’s a word that my parents would say regarding food in sort of a joking manner. So when I was going up, you know, after dinner, they might say, oh, those are some good vittles. The way they said it is like they were acknowledging that it was kind of a funny term or a colloquialism. But I don’t really know outside of the fact that they were referring to food what it really means or where it comes from.

Vittles, V-I-T-T-L-E-S.

Sure.

Sure.

You never saw it spelled, huh?

No, certainly not.

And are they from North Carolina as well?

Yes. And my family goes back in North Carolina. I mean, I think back to like the Revolutionary War. And so I always kind of wondered if it was something that came from kind of some old timey speak or to me, it always sounded a little Germanic. I don’t know if there’s something there. But I think there was a large German population who settled in the area. So I don’t know, maybe I’m making that up in my own head.

Well, it’s a wonderful word with a wonderful history. I remember my Aunt Maiso from North Carolina talking about, do you want me to cook you up a mess of vittles? It goes back to Latin, actually. The word victualis, which means nourishment or sustenance. And victualis was adapted from an older Latin word that simply means to live. So it’s related to words like vitality and vitamin. And then Latin victualis passed into French, but along the way it lost that hard C sound, so it sounded more like vitae. And that word for nourishment without the hard C found its way into English. And eventually people spelled it vittle, V-I-T-T-L-E, because that’s sort of what it sounded like. It was spelled a lot of different ways when English was really irregular. And then in the 16th century, English scholars decided that this word for food should look more like the original Latin word. It should look more like victualis.

And so they put the letter C back into it and started spelling it V-I-C-T-U-A-L.

But the thing is that the old pronunciation was already so well established that people kept pronouncing it vittles anyway.

So today you’ll see either the word vittle spelled V-I-T-T-L-E or V-I-T-T-L-E-S, vittles, and you’ll also see it spelled V-I-C-T-U-A-L-S, vittles.

And you look it up in the dictionary and the pronunciation is vittles for both words.

So I’m not crazy for not having any clue what the spelling was.

No, not at all.

You wait.

Okay.

But as you suggested, the word vittle spelled V-I-T-T-L-E, it’s a little more, I mean, like your parents used it.

It’s a little bit, it sounds kind of rustic and some people use it in a playful way.

Interesting.

And I wonder why we don’t, I mean, you don’t hear it very often.

It’s kind of an old fashioned word, it sounds like.

I mean, you wouldn’t hear anybody under, you know, under maybe 40 say it.

And so I don’t know.

I wonder kind of where it went.

Oh, I think it’s still out there. But it does, as Martha said, have that rustic, almost country feel to it.

Words just kind of get stuck in their places and they persist in those places and become attached to those places and aren’t widely used.

That’s all. You know, you’re just not going to hear that used in maybe the urban areas or in the among the most buffet groups of people.

Well, I won’t claim to socialize with the most elite groups, but I do live in a city and I’m going to do my best to bring it back.

We’re going to save Vittles in every restaurant.

Open a restaurant, make it the classiest place in town and call it Vittles.

Call it Vittles.

Well, in Carolina, I’m going to offer you a strategy as well.

There is a book by my dear friend, Ronnie Lundy, who lives outside Asheville.

And she’s written this book called Vittles, An Appalachian Journey with Recipes.

And it’s spelled V-I-C-T-U-A-L-S, Vittles.

And it’s a love letter to the cuisine and the folkways and the foodways and the history and language of Appalachia.

It won, not one, but two James Beard Awards.

So it’s this gorgeous book.

And I think if you want to celebrate Vittles, that’s a great way to do it.

I love that recommendation.

Well, within North Carolina, my family goes back through Appalachia and outside of Asheville.

So there you go.

I’ll buy it for a few reasons.

Yeah, you got to get this book, Vittles by Ronnie Lundy.

Caroline, thank you so much for sharing this with us.

Thank you.

That was really interesting.

I appreciate it.

Take care now.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, you can go crazy with us as we talk about the language.

Whatever’s on your mind, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

In Japanese, the word sakura means cherry blossom.

And I’ve become particularly fond of sakura fubuki, which means cherry blossom snowstorm.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

Oh, that’s lovely.

Does that mean when they fall or when they all bloom at once?

I think it’s when they’re all blooming at once and the wind blows through them and they just kind of look like a snowstorm.

Oh, yeah.

So they’re just gently waving in the breeze.

Oh, that’s nice.

And the smell.

I can just smell it.

Oh, that’s very good.

You find the best words, Martha.

We have the best words.

Share your words with us.

words@waywordradio.org.

More about what you say and why you say it.

Stick around for more of A Way with Words.

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 hey, there he is.

It’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

You know, I’ve got to tell you guys, I think you’ll like this one.

I’m terrible at remembering adages and proverbs.

I always get the last word wrong.

Luckily, I can usually remember the cadence and the rhyme.

For example, there’s this old German proverb, a clear conscience is a soft willow.

Wait, that’s not quite right.

A clear conscience is a soft willow.

No, no, it’s not willow.

It rhymes with willow.

That’s right.

A clear conscience is a soft pillow.

Yes.

I like that.

I also like a soft pillow.

Well, who doesn’t?

So it’s with clear conscience that I share with you these proverbs from around the world.

Remember, the last word is wrong.

The appropriate word will rhyme with it.

Here we go.

Here’s an Irish proverb.

A drink precedes a glory.

A drink precedes a story.

Yes, that’s right.

That’s what it is here.

Let me make a note of that to myself.

Very good.

A drink precedes a story.

Thankfully.

I love that.

An Irish proverb, a friend’s eye is a good clearer.

Steerer?

A friend’s eye is a good mirror.

Yes, a friend’s eye is a good mirror.

Martha, you’re good at proverbs.

That’s good.

How about this German proverb?

A teacher is better than two crooks.

Better than two books?

Yes, a teacher is better than two books.

The Yiddish proverb.

All things grow with time except beef.

Grief?

Yes, all things grow with time except grief.

Nice.

Nicely done.

How about this African proverb?

Do not look where you fell, but where you crypt.

Tripped?

Yes.

No, well, try it again.

It’s close.

Do not look where you fell but where you tripped.

It’s not that.

Where you tripped.

Slipped.

Slipped.

Slipped, yes.

Do not look where you fell but where you slipped.

I like that.

Here’s an English proverb.

He that seeks trouble never kisses.

No, never misses.

That’s right.

The German proverb.

He who has burnt his mouth always blows his droop.

Soup?

Yes.

And finally, an Irish proverb.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the claimant.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the…

Oh, the payment.

Yes.

Sweet is the wine, but sour is the payment.

Nice.

Very good.

Well, thank you, John.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language at all, you can always give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Cindy Evans from Henderson, Kentucky.

Hi, Cindy.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

I’m so glad to be here.

What would you like to talk with us about today, Cindy?

I was married and then divorced, and the second wife is the nicest person you could ever hope to meet, and she has been a good stepmother to my sons.

I don’t think they even call her stepmother.

It’s just I would like to have a word to call her that doesn’t say she is the wife of my ex-husband or I don’t know how else to put it.

Well, that’s really great that you have a great relationship with the woman who married your ex-husband, right?

Yes.

Something besides her name.

Something that says my something.

Okay.

Like you would say my sister-in-law, but she’s not my sister-in-law.

A relationship term.

Yes.

Well, you mentioned sister-in-law.

What about sister outlaw?

I’ve thought of that.

Did you?

Yes.

And actually, I sometimes call my former in-laws my outlaws.

Yeah, that’s a common one.

Lots of people call their former in-laws their outlaws.

You know, we talked about this a long time ago on the show, Martha, and we had a lot of responses then.

A number of people said to use the term ex-in-law or wife-in-law.

Do either of those sound like something to you?

Wife-in-law sounds horrible.

So what about just explaining the relationship in full and using her name, and from then on out you can use her name?

Well, that’s all right for the long term, but in the immediate moment, I’d like just a, she is my da-da-da.

Right, okay.

Right, you want something convenient.

Some people use it, refer to them by the relationship they have with the shared children.

They’ll say, my son’s stepmother, for example.

Yes.

Something like that.

Some people will say step-wife.

No?

None of these working for you?

None of these are working for me.

I know you have a broad audience.

I thought maybe somebody would generate a new word for this.

Oh, yeah, they definitely will.

Well, Cindy, what we’re going to do is we’re going to put the cherries and berries on the roof and turn on the sirens and put out the alert for everyone to tell us what do they call the new spouse of their ex-spouse if they have a good relationship with them.

What do you call your ex-husband’s new wife that you really love?

Or your ex-wife’s new husband that you really like to pal around with?

Yes. Thank you so much.

All right. Take care of yourself, and thanks for sharing.

You too. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Cindy.

Send us an email and tell us.

words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, remember the call with Ann and her daughter Amina?

They called about the word jinx and that little game that you play when two people accidentally say the same thing simultaneously.

Oh, yeah.

Sometimes you count and then say that you owe each other something or the other person owes you something like a Coke or a coconut.

Sometimes there’s wishing involved or maybe hooking pinky fingers.

Right.

What, you’ve got an update? There’s something new in the Jinx universe?

There is. We got a voicemail from Sarah Krug, who grew up in central Kansas, and she said that when she was growing up, they had a much more elaborate version.

It went, Jinx, buy me a Coke, inky, pinky, stinky, winky, flush it down the toilet, Sinky, allay, who, allay, who, king of France, wet his pants right in the middle of the ballroom, dance.

That’s a mix of so many different childhood rhymes and songs. I can, oh, you could just break that down.

There’s like an etymological like history there.

Oh, there sure is because there’s different versions of this.

I started looking around on the internet and then, and there are versions of this?

I think there’s a doctorate in there for the right scholar.

Well, I needed something to do on Thursday nights. Now I have something.

We’d love childhood rhymes, whether your childhood was yesterday or not quite yesterday.

Reach us from anywhere in the world.

Find out how at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Anthony from Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

And I was calling in wondering about an expression.

Great. What is it?

The expression is won by a landslide.

And there’s people who talk around here about that coming from two different towns in this area that they were trying to develop and put money into.

And it seemed kind of like a convenient answer, like it came from around this area between Kelly and Jackson Hole.

But I kind of wanted to get to the bottom if that’s just what they tell tourists and I believe them or if there’s something more to that.

Oh, I love these kinds of stories.

When I travel and I hear the local story from the tour guides, oh, this is the source of this word.

It comes from our town.

I never believe them.

It’s always wrong.

Do you know this story?

Do you know this story about supposedly why they claim wind by a landslide comes from that part of Wyoming?

So, yeah, supposedly.

The story I’ve heard was that there’s a lake, Live Lake, that’s out in Kelly in the Grovant Mountain Range, kind of right across from the Tetons.

There’s a big river that ran through there, the Grovant River, and they decided to put a bunch of money into developing that because it made sense.

There was a main road there.

There was a river.

And then after the town bought a bunch of property, then a landslide happened and it dammed up the river, created this big lake and flooded this whole town.

So then they said, well, I guess Jackson it is instead of going to Kelly.

So then the expression was, well, Jackson won by a landslide, meaning like, I guess that’s their only alternative.

So that’s what people say is that that landslide caused Jackson to win funding and things like that.

Yeah. So the competition was which one would become the county seat of Teton County, right?

Would it be Kelly or Jackson?

Yes.

And Jackson won the county seat honor.

Yes.

And now that landslide, according to what I read, was huge.

This was 1927.

It was 50 million tons of rock, soil, and plants.

And it made Slide Lake.

So we’re talking a huge landslide that dammed the Grovant River.

It was massive.

And then that dam broke, and there was an 8-foot wall of water and a flood that just wiped Kelly basically off the map.

There’s still trees poking out of the top of the lake.

You can see the tops of pine trees in the lake.

So yeah, in the slide you can see.

There’s a great description of it on the Wyoming Historical Society website if you want to look at that.

But no, that is not the origin of one by a landslide.

And the main reason we know that is that the idea of a landslide as some kind of political victory or some kind of figurative victory between two opponents appears much earlier.

It appears in the 1850s, which is well before that took place.

So you were right to be suspicious.

Yeah, you were right to be suspicious.

In the geological sense, the landslide appears in the 1820s,

But there’s an earlier term which was used long before landslide,

And that was land slip, and that goes back well into the 1600s.

Oh, okay.

Well, that’s great.

Well, thank you so much for answering my question.

I appreciate you guys looking into that.

Thanks for calling.

Our pleasure.

Thanks, Anthony.

Take care.

Okay.

Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Is there a word or phrase that’s puzzled you?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Emma calling from East Hampton, Massachusetts.

East Hampton, Massachusetts.

Welcome to the show, Emma.

Hi, Emma.

Thank you.

Hi.

Nice to meet you both.

Nice to meet you. What’s up?

Well, my wife and I were driving back from a road trip to coastal Maine the other weekend.

Nice.

And yeah, it was beautiful, very wintry.

And I was trying to say that I recommended something, but I used the word vouch.

And I realized that’s actually not, I can’t describe this recommendation.

I wouldn’t vouch for it, but I would recommend it.

And it occurred to me it’s such a strange thing to say.

I’m not sure exactly what I’m saying when I’m using it.

Like, it’s almost as though you’re using, you’re suggesting that you’d like put yourself in place of something.

And I want to know, yeah, the origins of that.

Whether it had maybe a labor history or if it went back like to medieval knighthood or something.

Well, you’re right that vouch goes way, way back in English.

All the way back to the 14th century, where it was used as a transitive verb that meant

To summon into court to prove a title. That is, you would summon somebody into court to prove

That that person owned the property that they were selling.

And so it was this legal term

Involving calling somebody in to provide evidence.

It came into English via Old French.

There was a word that meant to call or summon.

And both that word in Old French and English, vouch, come from Latin, vocare, which means to call.

And that’s the source of words like vocal and vocation, like your vocation is literally your calling.

So if you vouched someone, you call them into court.

And over time, it became used with the word for, you know, I’ll vouch for her.

I’ll guarantee that she’s who she says she is.

So, yeah, it’s an odd word, but you find a slight difference between that and what was the word?

Recommend?

Yes.

Can you talk a little more about that?

Well, honestly, I was wracking my brain.

I can’t remember the exact thing I was comparing it to, but it was something that I would recommend and wouldn’t vouch for.

So I think maybe like.

Oh, that’s interesting.

And it made me realize that maybe vouch is a little bit stronger than recommend, and you’re putting your own reputation at stake.

That’s interesting.

Well, that would fit with its early sense.

Yeah, I like that.

So there’s a range of how willing you are to put your word on the line.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And I love that.

So it’s funny because my wife and I are both lawyers, so it’s kind of hilarious that it ended up being a legal term.

So, yeah, hair splitting is in your history.

These are the kinds of conversations you have on the road then.

I like it.

So what’s the difference between the part where you’re calling someone into court and you vouch someone by like actively making them come to the legal field and then the part where they actually like the vouch for like bringing someone.

Like how did you get on the same side of the V, if that makes sense?

How did you get on the same team?

Yeah. So in the legal sense, to prove that somebody owned land, you literally would have somebody show up and saying, yes, I can verify that Martha doesn’t indeed own these acres that she says she owns because I was there when they were bequeathed to her by her mother, blah, blah, blah.

So that’s part of the legal vouching process was witnesses coming to say it because you might have a whole body of people who couldn’t read and write.

So the word of your neighbors or the word of your community was as important as paper.

So that’s why vouching really mattered.

I would call them as my witness because I believe in this.

Yeah, calling.

Yeah, that was like Martha was saying.

So that vocate, it’s funny how often it shows up.

You know, vocal, of course, and evoke, call to mind, or convoke, call together, provoke to call forth.

I love the hair splatting that you do.

It’s very much what we do as linguists.

Well, thank you.

This is fascinating.

Yeah, it is.

Emma, thank you so much for your call.

Call us again sometime when you’ve had this road discussion.

Okay, well, I love your show.

I really appreciate being on, so thank you.

Thank you so much, and we appreciate it.

Take care of yourself and be well.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

And come to think of it, the word voucher followed a somewhat similar path.

Originally, voucher was a legal term that meant the calling of a person into court to warrant the title to a property.

And then in the 17th century, it was used as evidence of a transaction, a business receipt.

And now it’s a document that you can exchange for goods or services, like school vouchers, for example.

Yeah, exactly.

Every time I think about it, I’m amazed.

I never stopped being amazed the fact that this history of this language persists.

This Latin shows up again and again in our everyday language.

It’s astonishing that something should have such endurance.

Indeed.

You talked about vocare, meaning call.

And it does have all this history and language, but you know, it doesn’t give us the word call.

And you can call us, 877-929-9673.

Here’s a tweet from writer Ian Bogus that I think you’ll appreciate.

He’s suggesting the name for a bar.

And he says, a bar called the Copy Desk, where they offer an alternative to your drink order.

And you get kind of really upset for a second, but then realize, no, that’s in fact a better order.

Oh, that makes sense.

Because at a newspaper or a print publication, the copy desk is where you submit your story for editing.

And you get it back and you realize they’ve changed it.

And at first you’re upset and you’re like, oh, wait, this is a better story.

And I’m going to look great when this goes to print because my name is on it and theirs isn’t.

Exactly.

I mean, a good editor is worth their waiting goal.

Absolutely.

And they don’t get credit.

You get the credit.

They’re just like, you know, in tiny prints on the masthead somewhere, you know, a masthead page somewhere.

So shout out to copy editors.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

This show’s about language seen through the lens of family, history, and culture.

Stick around for more.

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.

If you pull down an English dictionary from the shelf, it’s a fairly simple matter to look up a word.

You know that words starting with A are going to be at the beginning, and words that start with Z are going to be at the end.

And if a word shares the same initial letters as another words, like, say, the words production and progress,

You just keep looking letter by letter from left to right until you find what you want.

And that’s simple.

All you had to do to understand the system was learn your ABCs, just 26 letters.

Using a Chinese dictionary, though, is quite different.

A Chinese character is a unit of meaning.

It’s roughly equivalent to a word.

And to look up a Chinese character, you pull down that dictionary,

And you first either go to the front or the back of the book,

Where there’s a table that lists the particular components of Chinese characters.

And these components of strokes are called radicals.

There are 214 of those, and assigned to each radical is a number,

And you follow that number to another table, and you find all the characters that contain that radical, and there can be as many as 64.

And then once you find the character you want in this table,

Now you have the page number in the actual dictionary itself.

So you turn to that page,

And you hunt until you find the character and the definition.

So it’s a lot more complicated.

Or consider typewriters.

The first QWERTY typewriters were marketed in the United States in the early 1870s, and these were portable and relatively easy to use.

But the first Chinese typewriter, which was invented a few decades later, looked like a small table with this huge flat disc containing more than 4,000 commonly used characters arranged in concentric rings.

And you would use one hand to rotate the disc and use a long, thin pointer to select the character you want, and he used the other hand to position the carriage that holds the paper underneath.

All of which means that a century ago, China faced a huge challenge.

How do you adapt this magnificent Chinese script into modern technology?

How do you reinvent the Chinese language so that you can more easily use things like computers?

It’s a fascinating story, and it’s told in a new book called Kingdom of Characters, The Language Revolution That Made China Modern.

It’s by Jing Su, and she’s a professor of East Asian languages at Yale.

And she’s written a history of this massive technological transformation in China.

And she also writes about this colorful assortment of innovators through the years who were passionate about the Chinese language and about reinventing it for the modern age.

It’s a fascinating read, Grant.

Yeah, it sounds fascinating.

Wow, it took so many brilliant, bright people to sort that out, to take this sophisticated script and put it into our computers and to make it possible to produce all these great books and beautiful text and newspapers and so forth.

Well, speaking of great books, this one is called Kingdom of Characters, The Language Revolution That Made China Modern, and it’s by Jing Su.

That’s J-I-N-G-T-S-U.

We’ll list this book and all of our book recommendations on our website at waywordradio.org.

And you can reach out to us with your language thoughts, ideas, and questions.

Just go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

How are you doing?

This is Artie from New Bern.

Hi, Artie from New Bern, New Bern, North Carolina.

Correct.

Welcome to the show, Artie.

What’s on your mind?

I was wondering why they say aces and eights are a dead man’s hand when you’re playing cards,

Because I’ve always played cards and I never died when I had that hand.

Well, that’s good.

That’s good.

Yeah, here you are with us.

You don’t sound dead.

So why do we call aces and eights, a pair of aces and pair of eights, a dead man’s hand in poker?

Well, there’s some wild stories connected to this, and a couple of legends seem to have collided.

But I think I can untangle these for you if you want to hear this.

A lot of folks immediately think of Wild Bill Hickok.

Wild Bill was supposedly killed at a poker table in 1876 in Deadwood in the Dakota Territory.

And the legend has it that the poker hand he was holding was two pair.

A pair of aces and a pair of eights when he was shot in the back.

And the legend goes that supposedly that’s where we get the expression dead man’s hand.

Most people who play poker today will say that it means aces and eights, usually the black suits.

However, it looks like it’s just a legend because for one thing,

There are no contemporary records from the time, 1876, at all about what hand he was holding.

We have some stories from later of people who were souvenir hunting or making myths or doing get-rich storytelling,

Trying to make a buck off of telling stories they invented about the cards or producing cards supposedly from the scene that they were trying to sell for a lot of money.

And the two-pair story about Aces and Eights doesn’t appear until more than 50 years after Wild Bill died.

The story appears in 1926.

That’s a long time between his death and for the story of the Aces and Eights to show up.

And for another thing, Dead Man’s Hand has referred to a lot of different cards.

It has referred to any two pair, or three jacks and a pair of tens, or full jacks and red sevens, or red eights, and a wide variety of other hands.

So even if it was about Wild Bill’s cards, why would they change?

So it’s probably not about Wild Bill Hickok, even though the legend is pretty nice.

And it’d be cool if it was about Wild Bill.

Oh, now I learned something.

Thank you.

Yeah.

But usually these days it means two black aces and two black eights.

It’s nice talking to you.

I learned something.

Thanks, Artie.

Don’t spend too much at the tables, all right?

Okay.

Have a nice weekend.

You too.

Be well.

Bye, Artie.

Well, we’ll be your Huckleberry.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us words at waitradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Who am I speaking to?

It’s Irv Teitelbaum from Montreal.

Hi, Irv.

This is Martha.

And this is Grant.

Welcome to the show.

English-speaking Montrealers my entire life have never used the word.

I’ve got a few errands to do.

It’s messages.

It’s always, I’ve got to go out and do some messages, and then we can deal with the issues at hand.

And I never really got anyone who understood why this was a typical English-speaking Montreal peccadillo, let’s say.

And a few weeks ago, found a paragraph in a novel by Tana French, who is an Irish writer.

And the messages appears in her book, and the character in the book says, what does that mean?

And the response was, oh, it’s just some, I’ve got to pick up some things at the supermarket.

That doesn’t quite explain it, and I’m thrilled that you guys are going to fill me in.

So you’re saying in Montreal, it’s typical for people to say, I’m going to do some messages, and they mean they’re going to go to the shops or run some errands.

Precisely.

Okay. I did not know that. I didn’t know that it was a common thing on this side of the Atlantic.

But I do know something about it on the other side of the Atlantic, and it’s not just in Ireland, but the Scots and the Welsh even may use it, particularly the Scots.

And what’s happened here is the oldest meaning of errand, E-R-R-A-N-D, is message or news or tidings.

Because what it meant was a verbal message that a runner or a messenger was to repeat word for word to the recipient.

So the errand was the message.

That was what an errand was.

It was delivering a message.

And so it’s an ancient word as far back as the year 890 AD.

That is some old, old English.

And similar meanings can be found in other Germanic languages like Old Icelandic.

So in modern Scots, for example, you go the messages, not go do the messages, but just go the messages, meaning you do the shopping.

And so if someone comes back from the shops, Scott might say, show us the messages, meaning show me what you bought.

And a shopping bag might be called a message bag.

And one interesting thing in Ireland and Scotland, doing messages may more often mean shopping for someone else rather than for yourself.

And because of the settlement of Scots and Irish in the New World in the Caribbean, you may also hear messages used this way in English-speaking parts of the Caribbean.

How about that, Irv?

That’s absolutely fascinating.

But, you know, there’s another layer to this, which is significant in Montreal because of the French-speaking history there.

There is an old French expression, faire une commission, which has two possible translations, either to do an errand or to deliver a message.

Faire des commissions would be to run errands or deliver messages.

So you see that someone who didn’t understand French or English equally well might mistranslate it into English.

So it could either be translated as run an errand or deliver a message.

So I wonder if in Montreal, if there isn’t a second thing happening there, if both the old English word of errand meaning message is happening and this French being translated awkwardly into English is happening as well.

The two of them combining to result in this Montreal dialect use.

That’s interesting because I’m fairly bilingual, and when I’ve been speaking to a French francophone person, I might say, and I have said it, J’ai quelques commissions à faire, which is basically what you just mentioned.

But also, in the late 19th century, there was a tremendous amount of immigration into Montreal from Ireland.

So that may have, and of course, the Scots were always pretty big on Montreal in that era.

Of course, things have changed, but very, very interesting, and I thank you.

Yeah, our pleasure. Thanks, Irv, and call us again sometime.

I love hearing from Montreal because it is such a, I love it when two cultures and two languages rub up against each other and lend each other different parts of their languages.

And that’s where you get the most exciting things happening.

So Montreal is just this perfect little pot of soup where we like to take samples from time to time.

Well, thank you for explaining.

All right.

Take care now and be well.

You too.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

What are the language collisions in your house or your neighborhood or your city?

Let us know.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Madison calling from Wilmington, North Carolina.

Hello, Madison.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was calling to ask you about something that my grandfather used to say, which is that he would tell us to take Churchill’s advice.

And I wanted to see what I could learn about that phrase.

Take Churchill’s advice?

Oh, boy.

Churchill had lots of advice, some of it good, some of it rascally.

What was it?

So when he would tell us that, we knew that he was basically telling us to go try to use the bathroom while you have the chance.

Churchill’s advice says go to the bathroom every chance that you get.

So, like, if you’re on a road trip and you’re stopping for gas and you’re like, well, I don’t really have to go right now, but, you know, I may as well take Churchill’s advice since we’re here or something like that, you know?

Yeah, yeah.

Why would Churchill say that?

I have no idea.

Like you said, Churchill was known for saying a lot of wacky things.

So I was just wondering, like, is that something like do other people say that?

Is that something that, you know, where would he have gotten that from?

Is that something his family or he made up?

Because I’ve never heard anybody or run into anybody else who knows what that means.

First of all, Madison, I would say that’s excellent advice, wouldn’t you?

Yeah, you know, it does come in handy.

Right.

Carpe PM. But it didn’t come from Churchill, as you might have suspected.

There is a quotation floating around that a lot of people repeat that goes something like, never pass up the chance to sit down or go to the bathroom. And it often gets attributed to Churchill, but it’s sort of like one of those memes that go around the internet.

Like, you know, you see a picture of Abraham Lincoln, which says, don’t believe everything you read on the internet, you know, and he’s the source of that quote.

Yeah. So that’s not advice from Churchill, but there is a bit more to that story, isn’t there, Grant?

Yeah, there really is. There was a contemporary of Churchill, one of the biggest scandals of the Age in the late 1940s was when the King of England abdicated the throne to marry the American Wallace Simpson, who had been divorced twice.

And Edward wrote a book that was first serialized in newspapers across the English-speaking world.

And in that book, and in those serialized articles in the newspapers, he uses an expression that’s very similar to that.

He says, perhaps one of the only positive pieces of advice that I was ever given was that supplies by an old courtier who observed only two rules really count.

Never miss an opportunity to relieve yourself.

Never miss a chance to sit down and rest your feet.

And this is from his book called A King’s Story, 1951.

And at that point, he was no longer king. His official title was the Duke of Windsor.

And there’s a British scholar called Nigel Rees, who for a very long time has been researching quotations. He has a fantastic newsletter called Quote Unquote and a great website by the same name.

And he believes, Nigel Rees believes, that it may go back even further among the royals, the royal families. He thinks it may have been said by the very first Duke of Wellington, Arthur Wellesley, as always make water when you can. Because it’s attributed to that first Duke of Wellington, but I don’t have a date on that. But it is possible that instead of Churchill, it comes from other British august figures of note who have to make lots of public appearances.

I mean, this makes sense to me. Yeah. Yeah. You’re always being shuttled around from important event to important events and people always wanted to catch your eye or catch your arm and, you know, talk to you and they forget that you have very human needs that are private, that don’t involve other people.

Well, that makes sense. Madison, thank you so much for calling today. And it doesn’t matter that your grandpa didn’t get it quite right. It was still really good advice to pass along to you. It is. And you know, he had a lot of good advice. Thank you for letting me ask about that. That was a lot of fun.

Yeah, it was. All right, take care. Call us again sometime.

-huh. Bye. Take care. Bye-bye. And you know, if there’s a famous saying or quotation that you’ve been repeating for years and now you’re wondering, do I have that right? Is that really the person who said it? Do I even have the words right? Let us check that for you. 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or find a dozen other ways to reach us at waywordradio.org/contact. Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, and quiz guide John Chaneski.

We’d love to hear from you no matter where you are in the world. Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Subscribe to the podcast, hear hundreds of past episodes, and get the newsletter at waywordradio.org. Whenever you have a language story or question, our toll-free line is open in the U.S. and Canada. 1-877-929-9673.

Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org. A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

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

Bye.

Thank you.