By Jingo!

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you love words and you love comic strips, then maybe at some point you’ve wondered, is there a word for that little reflection mark that cartoonists use to make something seem shiny?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It looks like sort of a tiny window and they’ll draw it on a balloon or an apple.

And it makes the surface look curved and reflective.

And as you know, Grant, that question came up recently on our Facebook page.

Right.

Remember that?

Yes.

Matthew D. Littlefield said that he had once heard the word for that, but he was going crazy trying to remember it.

And he wanted to know if we could help.

And we did.

Did we not?

Yes, we did.

You had the answer.

I had the answer, which is a lucaflect.

A lucaflect.

L-U-C-A-F-L-E-C-T.

And you don’t hear that word that often, but it’s used among cartoonists.

It was one of several joking words that were invented by Mort Walker.

He’s the guy who…

Beetle Bailey cartoonist, right?

Bailey, High, and Lois.

And in 1980, he came out with this book called The Lexicon of Comicana.

He invented a lot of words for those little things that you see in comic strips.

And some of those words have caught on, right, at least in the discussion of comics.

Yes.

One of my favorites is pludes.

Pludes.

Pludes.

I love that.

It looks like the word leudes.

Those are the flying sweat droplets that appear around a character’s head when they’re working hard or they’re stressed.

That’s great.

I love that.

And my other favorite is those little clouds of dust that hang in a spot after a character departs suddenly.

He called those briffits.

Of briffits.

Isn’t it perfect?

That’s great.

Briffits.

Boom.

Well, we hope you’ll leave some briffits and run to your phone and call us about language.

We’d love to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation.

Beetle Bailey.

Usage, Beetle Bailey, comics, word origins.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

And just like the other fellow, you can find us on Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. This is Melissa from Jacksonville.

Hey, Melissa. Welcome to the program.

Hey, Martha. How are you guys doing?

Doing well. What’s going on in Jacksonville?

Yeah, how’s it?

Well, I have a grandfather, and he is an amazing man.

He’s 87 years old from the backcountry woods in North Carolina,

And he has some of the most interesting sayings.

For example, he calls paper bags pokes.

He calls Coca-Cola dope.

And then he also, when you ask when someone’s coming into town, he always says Sunday week.

And I have no idea what that means.

And so I have to ask him, this Sunday?

He says no.

I said next Sunday?

No.

The following Sunday.

So where does this saying come from?

He’s still around.

He’s still with us, right?

Yep.

He is kicking.

He’s called himself a sexy senior citizen and he’s hanging around to see what old folks do.

Awesome.

Where in North Carolina is this fella?

Well, he’s here in Jacksonville now.

Oh, okay.

He started out in Shelby, North Carolina, and then went from there.

He was a moonshine runner, and at the age of 15, they said, you’re either going to jail or the Navy.

So he chose the Navy, and that’s how he wound up here in Jacksonville.

Oh, I see.

Oh, that’s great.

The Navy made a good man of him, huh?

It did, absolutely.

That’s great.

We may have some relatives or friends in common because I came from some moonshiners as well.

I have moonshiners in my family, too, and recent ones.

Last week.

But let’s not talk about that.

Taxman’s coming.

So he says poke, which means bag or sack.

Yeah, like pig and a poke.

Like pig and a poke.

He says dope to mean a Coca-Cola.

My daddy said that.

That’s old-fashioned stuff.

Dope is one of those words that has something like 80 different chemicals that it can be.

Like dope is something you put on a canvas airplane in order to seal the wings.

Dope is something you can put on gears to make them go smooth.

Yeah, but they used to put coca in the coke.

Yeah, yeah.

Dope is something, junk that you can put in your veins.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, my God.

That’s so funny.

But you were calling about Sunday week, and that’s incredible.

Yeah, it’s Sunday week.

Let me ask you, do you have Scott’s Irish roots?

I mean, does your family?

I bet.

I mean, is it a Mac or somewhere in your name or in your family’s names or anything like that?

Let me think.

I know half of it is Cherokee, and the other half, I want to say, is Scotch.

They’re Patterson.

I’m betting, yes, that part of the country, Scotch-Irish.

Here’s why I asked.

The man in the United States who is an expert in the Scots and the Irish influence on American English is named Michael Montgomery.

Great fellow.

He did the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English.

But he’s also done a book called From Ulster to America.

And in this book, he has an entry for this term.

So you’re talking to somebody.

Aunt Bertie’s going to come to town.

And they tell you she’s coming Sunday week or Monday week or Thursday week.

And what they mean is a week from the coming day that they mentioned.

So Sunday week doesn’t mean this Sunday.

It means the Sunday after this Sunday.

Got it.

Thursday week doesn’t mean the coming Thursday.

It means the Thursday after this Thursday.

And you can do it in the past tense, too.

I’ve seen this in old newspapers, which is a little hint of what I’m about to say.

So somebody will say, yeah, they came down.

We sat on the porch and had some iced tea.

This was Tuesday last.

Or you might say it was Tuesday a week.

Tuesday last means last Tuesday, and Tuesday a week means a week Tuesday.

And I’ve seen this yesterday week.

Yeah.

A week counting backward from yesterday.

It’s great stuff.

It’s crazy.

It’s so confusing to me still.

It’s so confusing.

It’s still far more common in the dialects of the United Kingdom.

It’s growing a little old-fashioned there.

In the United States, it’s never been that common.

Where it has appeared, it was among the people with Irish roots or Scots roots or Scots-Irish roots.

They’re kind of three different things there.

And these days, your grandfather is one of the dying breed of people who uses this.

It’s going to be among older white folks in the South.

So that’s what the senior citizens are going to be doing.

Oh, gosh.

I think I’ll just stick to asking him exactly the date.

I think that’s a great plan.

But he probably does it just to befuddle you anyway, right?

I think he does.

He’s that type of guy to do that, yes.

Oh, is he really?

Oh, yeah.

It’s got a nice lilt to it.

Sunday week.

I can’t wait until I’m old.

Then I can just do all that kind of nonsense without having to worry about the consequences.

I think it would be fun to be old, yeah.

Oh, let’s just start now.

Melissa, thanks so much for entertaining us today.

Thank you so much, guys.

I really appreciate it.

All right, bye-bye.

Tell your grandpa hi.

Take care.

I will.

Bye.

That’s what we call a linguistic heirloom.

It’s the thing that your grandparents or your parents say that they pass on to you,

And somewhere along the way, you kind of lost track of what it meant or where it came from.

We’re the people who help you figure that out.

It’s like Antiques Roadshow on the radio, but it’s about language.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

We’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

So Mort Walker’s got this glossary of terms used in comics and cartooning, right?

Yeah.

It describes the conventions of the business, the little things that they do only in that universe.

Right.

My favorite, and we’ve talked about this on the show before, but it deserves another airing, is Grawlix’s.

Grawlix’s.

G-R-A-W-L-I-X-E-S. Grawlix’s.

And these are the typographic-looking symbols that represent profanity, right?

Right. The top of your computer keyboard.

Yeah, yeah. So the hat symbol and the hash mark and an exclamation mark and a question mark,

And it just means, you know, the four-letter words and things we can’t say on the air.

I’m bleeping you.

We’ll talk about some more of those in a minute, but we’d love to take your calls, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant, this is Chris from D.C.

Hey, Chris, how you doing? Welcome to the program.

Hi, Chris.

Hey, Martha.

Hey.

So glad to be with y’all.

Delighted to have you here, especially since you said y’all.

I thought that would get to your heart.

We like you already. What can we do for you?

Well, I’m hoping the two of you can provide me with some, I guess, linguistic background on the tradition of what I like to call verbing nouns.

So I’ve been in a couple of conversations over the last several months where people have been kind of dismissive of this practice, and usually in the context where a noun is being used for the first time or kind of newly used as a verb, so a word like impact.

And those same people are also then using words like shop or question as verbs, even though I would expect that, you know, in the past, those words were really started as nouns.

So to me, I mean, I love the adaptability of our language, and I think it’s one of the greatest strengths.

So while, you know, I guess I’m ambivalent about any kind of, you know, specific experimentation with verbing a noun, I’m hoping that with a little tutorial from the two of you that I can kind of be better prepared to defend the practice in general next time this comes up.

Yes, yes, yes. We can help you with that. We’re on the same page.

You know, it’s been estimated that some 20% of the verbs in English actually started out as nouns.

No.

Yes, yes. And it makes perfect sense.

And this is a practice that’s gone all the way back to Anglo-Saxon.

I mean, this is a really, really old practice.

I know that some people find it fashionable to dismiss these.

But you can look at, for example, Steven Pinker’s book, The Language Instinct.

And he has this great mnemonic that you can use for having these arguments with your friends.

Because if you just go from head to toe, think about it.

You can head a committee.

You can nose around the office.

You can hand somebody something.

You can stomach my bad puns.

Well, you probably can’t.

You can eye a problem or face a situation.

Yes, yes.

You can nose around.

Right.

Maybe you can’t ear something.

But you can foot the bill and you can toe the line.

I mean, all of those started out as nouns.

And, you know, if your friends are giving you a hard time about it, I’d say phone them or email them.

No, I just say elbow them out of the way and move on.

Well, elbow, that’s another.

Yes, very good.

Actually, knee them in the groin, elbow them out of the way, and then move on.

Wow.

That’s a lot.

Well, it’s funny that you should mention impact because there’s something fashionable about picking on impact as a verb.

It’s kind of one of those pass-along peeves that people hear, and it sounds really vigorous when somebody’s arguing against it, and you’re like, yeah, yeah, impact is a verb, should die.

And they just pick up the argument and run with it for themselves.

But really, like you said, there’s no valid reason why impact can’t be a verb.

Well, that one I picked.

You picked up this negativity from these people who don’t know how English works.

No, I picked it up from the hospital when I was a nurse’s aide, and if somebody was impacted, you ran with an enema.

Okay, you win.

But otherwise, Christopher, I’m with you.

But yeah, just to kind of recap here, verbing nouns and nouning verbs in English is absolutely ordinary.

It’s how we make new language.

It’s a rich source of being more precise.

That’s one cool thing that lets us do.

It lets us say exactly what we need to say without kind of fuddling around with other words that don’t quite do the job.

Yes, and it’s very natural.

As you said, I can’t remember how you said it exactly, but you said something about the vigor of the language.

Yeah, no, absolutely.

I think that is so incredibly helpful.

I’m well prepared next time this comes up.

Awesome.

We’ll link to the sources that we can find that will give you the full printable material that you can present to your colleagues.

So dialogue with us anytime.

Well, I don’t know about that one.

Well, the people you said.

I love how we’re hitting all your boundaries.

You’re pressing all my buttons.

Yeah.

All right, well, let’s knuckle down to finish this call.

Thanks, everybody, so much.

All right, bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I have another cartooning term for you.

Squeans.

Squeans.

What are squeans?

Squeans.

Well, you spell them S-Q-U-E-A-N-S, and they are the little starbursts or circles that signify intoxication, dizziness, or sickness.

You know what I’m talking about in a cartoon?

Squeens.

Yeah.

We’ll have more of those terms in a minute.

On with the show.

More word lore and the weekly puzzle.

Stay with us.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego, whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

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

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

Do you have a quiz there, a puzzle, something challenging?

I do.

This quiz is one of those where you have to figure out the connection between things.

The difference here is that I won’t tell you the things that are connected.

You’ll have to figure out the things and the connection.

I’ll give you a series of clues or synonyms to a list of items.

Now, I don’t want the answers to the clues.

What I want is for you to jump in when you know the commonality and tell me what it is, and then we’ll work back to the list.

For example, if I said elated, wild west dentist holiday, put out, addle-brained, shy, allergic, and lethargic, you could jump in any time with what commonality? What grouping?

Jump in, Grant.

I have no idea.

Oh, oh, Seven Dwarfs.

Yes, the Seven Dwarfs.

Disney’s Seven Dwarfs.

So Happy, Doc, and I don’t know, the Sleepy.

Put out is grumpy, right?

Yeah.

Lethargic, asleepy.

Yeah, there we go.

This isn’t going to be hard.

Okay, very good.

Hard or easy, it’ll take a long time.

I like the difficult ones.

I’ll just explain.

Battle-brained for dopey, shy for bashful, allergic for sneezy, and lethargic for sleepy.

Oh, golly.

Let’s try the first one.

Okay.

All right.

Here we go.

Raw as a recruit.

Cowardly.

Communist.

Colors.

Colors.

What colors do we have so far?

We have green, yellow, and red.

Here’s the next.

Actor Hunter.

Blank of the Jedi.

Maxwell Smart’s organization.

The final frontier, a means of getting from neutral to drive.

Oh, it’s things on a typewriter?

Yeah.

What’s a typewriter?

Whoa, dated myself there, didn’t I?

That’s right, they are on computer keyboards, too.

They are keyboard keys, right?

I use dictation software.

I’d forgotten.

You see, actor Hunter is?

Tab.

Tab, blank of the Jedi.

Return.

Maxwell Smart’s organization?

Option. No.

It’s next to option.

Control?

Control is right.

Okay.

The final frontier.

Space.

Yes, and a means of getting from neutral to drive.

Shift.

Shift, yes.

Okay.

Here’s the next.

Hooray!

Notable historical period.

Low, high, or neep.

Opposite of lose.

And the whole kitten caboodle.

Is it poker?

No.

Say this again.

Can we have it again?

Sure.

Hooray!

Notable historical period.

Low, high, or neep.

Opposite of lose.

And the whole kit and caboodle.

Well, all I can get is three-letter words.

Is that it?

Two of them are three-letter words, yeah.

So is the last one all?

Yes.

The one before that is win.

No, no.

Opposite of lose is a different one.

Gain is correct.

Oh, detergents.

Yes, detergent brands.

Hooray is a…

Cheer.

Cheer.

Notable historical period.

Era.

Era, right?

Low, high, or neep.

Tide.

Tide.

And you’ve got gain and all.

Nice work.

That’s a toughie.

Awesome.

That’s a tough one.

I like the difficult ones.

Good, good.

Here’s the next one.

That’s why he works with me.

Yeah.

Yeah, right.

Here we go.

Yeah.

Jack Sparrow and crew.

Jack Sparrow and crew.

That’s two separate clues, by the way.

Northerners.

They choose the Pope.

Mary Kate and Ashley.

And Cherubim.

Are these teams?

Baseball teams.

They are baseball teams, yes.

Jack Sparrow and crew.

Pirates.

Pirates.

Pirates. Jack Sparrow and crew?

It’s harder.

They’re also mariners.

Okay, very good. Mariners, nice.

Thank you. Northerners?

Yankees. Yankees. They choose the Pope.

Cardinals. Mary-Kate and Ashley?

Twins. I was going to say angels.

Oh. That’s nice.

That’s nice. We’ll use cherubim for angels. That’s what the cherubim’s for.

A little chubbier. Nice work.

One more. Here’s the last one. Okay.

Multiplication.

Use an iron.

Ball of incandescent gas.

Newspaper names.

Yes, newspapers.

What do we got?

Multiplication is?

Times.

Use an iron.

Press.

Oh, the press.

There we go.

Ball of incandescent gas.

Sun.

Sun or star.

Serial company?

Post.

Post is right.

How about three-dimensional atlas?

Globe.

Globe.

And gatekeeper?

Sentry?

I’ll take Sentinel.

Sentinel.

Or Guardian is good, too.

So that was good.

That was good.

Okay.

Wow.

That’s a real workout.

I love it.

Push-ups for your brain.

Thanks, John.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

If you’d like to participate in our radio show, you can give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Send your questions about grammar, slang, punctuation, pronunciation, you name it, to words@waywordradio.org.

Or try us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Valerie in Kansas City.

Hi, Valerie. Welcome to the program.

Hi. I’m glad to be on. I’m really glad.

We’re delighted to have you. What’s up?

Hey. Well, my in-laws passed away over the last five years, and I inherited a lot of old letters.

My parents happened to be at my house, and we were looking through all these letters.

My dad’s in his late 80s, and my mom’s almost 80.

And this is a letter from my husband’s great-grandmother to her brother, and she was living in Kansas City, and he lived in Burlington, Kansas, and this letter is from 1915.

She was trying to get him to come to Kansas City, and he was a bachelor, and she was going to set him up with friends.

So it says in the letter, Ella Arnold Dietrich is a widow, Grace Eastman is a widow, and Grace Clark Lane is a grass widow, and she underlined grass.

So you can have your choice of widows when you come.

I think with such inducements you ought to come on the next train.

So I said, grass widow.

Well, first I thought, does that say gross?

And my parents both said, no, it says grass, a grass widow.

And they immediately knew what it was.

My dad’s from southwestern Iowa.

My mom’s from Kansas City.

And they immediately knew what it was.

And I am in my early 50s have never, ever, ever heard that word.

And I’m always in tune with listening for strange words.

So my dad said that it meant a divorcee or someone whose husband had left them.

My mom’s was more like, no, it was just a divorcee and it didn’t have a bad connotation.

It was just someone who was divorced, period.

So I’d like to know what that really means.

Well, it’s all of the above, Valerie.

In the 1500s, when the grass widow first appears, it seems to mean a woman of loose morals, one who will sleep with just about anybody.

So sort of like a roll in the hay.

Yeah.

And there’s a very strong suggestion in the historical record that it means someone who just like, you know, go sleep with a man in the hay just for the fun of it and without being married.

Right.

Or the grass rather than a bed.

Yeah.

And then a little later, it comes to mean a woman who is separated from her husband for some reason.

Either he’s abandoned or he is away doing military service or he’s a merchant marine.

He’s aboard a ship and he only comes home a couple times a year, that sort of thing.

And this is what’s really interesting about having grass widow underlined in a letter from 1915, because it’s at a point where it could have been any of those definitions.

It could have meant a woman of loose morals.

Very interesting.

And you can’t really know unless you can find out more about this woman.

But let’s assume that a family member probably would have only mainly mentioned it if it were the polite definition.

When you’re reading old letters, it’s probably a safe bet that they didn’t mean the coarse meaning.

They meant the nice one.

Right?

She was just simply separated from her husband for some reason.

Yeah.

Are there more letters about her?

About this woman, actually, I did notice her exact name mentioned in other letters.

So I actually want to go back and do a little genealogy research on her, because I have her full name, including it looks like her maiden name, because it gives, you know, Grace Clark Lane.

So very interesting.

Yeah.

Well, let us know what you find.

If you find any hints as to which kind of grass widow she was, we’d love to know.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

Our pleasure, Valerie.

Thanks, Valerie.

Thanks for calling.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Patrick.

I’m calling from Morongo Valley, California.

Hello, Patrick.

Where is Morongo?

I don’t know.

Morongo Valley.

30 minutes east of Palm Springs, sort of a couple hours east of L.A.

So you’re out in the desert.

All right.

Yeah.

Welcome to the show, Patrick.

How can we help?

Well, actually, I had a word I’ve been thinking about for some years now.

My dad talked about it a couple years back when I was in high school, Jingo.

I think it’s J-I-N-G-O.

So like something sort of jingoistic or something like that.

And I don’t know, we were talking politics, and it came up, and I was like, okay.

You know, I didn’t really pursue it, but I’ve always heard it’s been sort of a patriotic kind of thing or, you know, something like that.

You hear it in connection with politicians.

So I was just wondering if you guys could shed a little light on maybe where that came from.

Jingoism.

So you’re really, really rah-rah your country and go to war.

Yeah, you’re like hyper-patriotic, right?

Yeah, that was my understanding.

Yeah.

We know where jingo comes from, and we know where jingoism comes from, and we’ve got a pretty good history of it.

When it first appears in English, it appears as what all the dictionaries describe as a conjurer’s phrase.

So imagine that you’re in a market and there’s all kinds of sellers, but they’re also performers and a couple of them are magicians.

And where they might say, ta-da, or presto.

Voila!

Yeah, they might also say, by jingo.

Oh, really?

Yeah, so when they’ve done their trick and the big reveal and the thing is gone or the thing has appeared, whatever the trick is.

Aver-a-caver.

Yeah, yeah.

So, by jingo was something that you might say.

Wow.

But.

That’s really interesting.

So, fast forward quite a while.

The British were going to put a fleet in Turkish waters.

It’s a very complicated history.

It involves Russia and Turkey and the British as well.

This is in the 1870s or so, right?

The thing is, in order to support this movement, this fellow wrote this song that includes the word by jingo.

And it’s this hyper-patriotic, crazy song saying that the British should go, go, go and fight this war and defeat the enemy and rah, rah, rah.

And By Jingo features largely in the song.

And the song apparently was pretty huge for the time, right?

Oh, man.

And so jingoism comes from the use of By Jingo in this hyper-patriotic song supporting this British war.

Oh, that is bizarre.

Yeah, cool, right?

Is it possible to hear recordings of this song?

Yes, if you go to YouTube and look for By Jingo Song, you’ll find it.

We’ll link to it on the website as well.

It’s pretty old-fashioned stuff.

But it sounds like it would never be a hit today.

Yeah, yeah.

Today we would have maybe a techno song with a heavy guitar riff in the background and somebody doing the cookie monster growl.

That might be our war song.

This would never be our war song again.

J-I-N-G-O.

No.

No.

Thanks for the earworm, Martha.

You’re welcome.

My apologies.

So, Patrick, that’s the short story of Jenga.

We’ll link to some online resources that explain it in full and talk about the conflict.

And we’ll also link to the song so people can hear it and sing along if they want.

Fantastic.

Yeah, that’s really interesting.

I had no idea.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Now you do.

400 years old, too.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thanks for calling, Patrick.

Yeah, thanks very much.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Did you hear a word that caught your ear?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673.

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Or you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s another cartooning term of art from Mort Walker.

You know, those curved lines preceding or trailing after a character’s moving limbs?

Yeah.

Those are blurgets.

Okay.

Isn’t that perfect?

Yeah.

B-L-U-R-G-I-T-S.

Blurgits or swaloops.

Swaloops.

Yeah.

One’s going forward are blurgits and the one’s going back are swaloops.

I guess so.

Blurgits and swaloops.

I don’t know.

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

Or send them to us in email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Alicia Spriggins.

Hi, Alicia, where are you calling from?

Hi, Alicia.

I’m calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

I was calling because I would like to know.

My mother would always say a phrase to me, and the phrase would be, whenever I was getting into a little bit of trouble,

She would say, you don’t believe that fat meat is greasy.

And I never quite got that.

And I was, like, really wanting to know the origin of that.

You don’t believe that fat meat is greasy.

Did she explain it to you ever?

Not really. And it was basically like if I was trying her is when she would say it.

Oh, okay.

Like she would tell you something and you would do the opposite?

Yes.

Okay. And so was she getting ready to give you a punishment then if you didn’t do it?

No, she never punished me, but she would always say stuff like that.

And then it would sometimes deter me from doing what I was going to do, and sometimes it would not.

But this was said to me quite a lot.

Oh, so you were a naughty child.

Oh, I wouldn’t say that.

Okay.

Well, you sound good to me.

Let’s see.

You don’t believe that fat meat is greasy.

Martha, do you know this?

I don’t know it personally, but I’ve read about it.

Oh.

Well, I think that the meaning of it is, as you said, Alicia, it’s like try me.

It’s like you don’t believe that water is wet.

I know.

Just try me.

But the interesting part to me is fat meat.

You know that that’s a southern expression for fat back.

It doesn’t just mean any old fat meat.

It means that particular part of a pig on the upper back, like that really thick layer of fat.

They cut it and salt it and dry it.

That’s fat back.

That’s also called fat meat.

So they specifically mean that part of the pig, right?

Okay.

Okay.

And did your mother grow up in Texas?

Yes, she did.

Okay.

All right.

Yeah, because the fat meat referring to fatback is almost exclusively southern,

Which means this expression is probably also southern.

I see a couple examples here that we can put some dates on.

There’s a use in Jet Magazine from 1977.

I see a pool player who calls himself Minnesota Fats after the character in the Paul Newman movie

From 1968.

He uses it.

And then in one dictionary of slang,

Jonathan Green claims that fat meat

Used as kind of just an interjection.

Fat meat, like that.

So somebody would say something,

They’d give you some guff or say something

That contradicts you.

You might say fat meat, meaning,

You know, exactly what you said.

You don’t believe that fat meat is greasy.

So we have some dates on this.

We have a little bit of history.

It’s almost certain to be Southern

And it’s African-American.

I’ve never, I don’t see any uses in the text

That seem to be from white folks.

Yeah, largely in the African-American community.

So I love the way that language reflects our heritage and our roots like that.

That’s great.

Thank you for bringing this phrase to folks’ attention.

And I was glad that we were able to help you just a little bit, Alicia.

Yes, thank you very much.

Well, be good now.

I shall.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You don’t believe that fat meat is greasy.

You’re going to start using that with your kids.

Yeah, that’s great.

It means I can’t tell you anything, right?

You don’t listen to me at all.

It’s like, did you know the word gullible isn’t in the dictionary?

Oh, really?

Hold on, let me look here.

Huh.

It’s there.

Your dictionary must be broken.

Call us with the things your parents said, 877-929-9673,

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

I’m looking through our electronic email bag here, and we have a question from Carrie Ives in Richardson, Texas.

She writes, I was looking at a label, and it said for safety reasons to be sure to ensure that blah blah is in the correct location.

I thought it should be ensure.

Before I mentioned to the company that made the label what I think is a typo, I wanted to make sure that it is.

Would you please let me know?

So on the package, it said I-N-S-U-R-E, and she thinks it should be E-N-S-U-R-E.

Yes, yes.

Very observant.

Yes, very observant.

Carrie, you’re exactly right.

It should be ensure unless you’re taking out a policy on it, right?

Right, exactly.

Just ensure instead of ensure.

What are your questions?

What did you come across?

What do we need to know?

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

Coming up, more of your calls about language.

Stay tuned.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette. It’s back.

Oh.

I’m talking about the style of speaking that’s sometimes called creaky voice.

Now, Grant, we talked about this before on the show a couple of years ago.

Often when you hear somebody doing this, they’ll start out talking normally,

But as the sentence goes on, their voice kind of drops and dissolves into something more like this.

Right. They sound a little more serious or a little more confidential, right?

Yeah, something like that.

And we talked about the fact that it’s also known as vocal fry, which is a term I love,

That fluttering of the vocal cords, because it sounds like frying, right?

And this is something that we all do to some extent,

But it seems that there’s something going on among some young American women

When it comes to creaky voice.

In fact, we had that caller who called us and said,

I think I’m going crazy because I feel like I’m the only one who notices this.

He mentioned the Olsen twins specifically.

There are different celebrities who do this.

People have mentioned Lady Gaga in the past.

And creaky voice has been back in the news lately because of a new study.

Researchers at Long Island University in New York

Listened to recordings of 34 young women reading aloud,

And they found that more than two-thirds of them used vocal fry.

Mostly at the end of their sentences.

And it’s a small sample, of course.

It’s a starting point.

Yes, yes.

But news reports of it caught fire.

It was all over the Internet for a while.

But it’s not exclusively a new trend, right?

We’ve got academics studying this for decades.

It’s just that now we have new tools and new ways of figuring out what’s happening.

Yes.

And I think it’s one of those things where if you notice it, then you start to hear it everywhere.

And one of the researchers noted, and I think this makes sense, that she said young students tend to use it when they get together.

Maybe this is a social link between members of a group.

Because I’ve certainly heard it among young white urban women of that particular age.

Very interesting stuff.

We’ve got all of these different trends in language.

Sometimes we can pin them down to groups.

Sometimes we can’t.

It’s kind of nice when you can, right?

Yeah.

But why young women?

Why not young men?

That’s a great question.

I think in Britain it’s more common among young men.

It makes sense to me that maybe it functions as slang, you know, in that it…

Forms the group, right?

Forms the group.

If we’re all doing this thing together, then we are like one another and we know that we belong.

Yeah.

Interesting stuff. Very cool.

We’ll post links to the science article about vocal fry,

And we’ll post some links to the commentary among linguists about this.

You’ll find that all on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John from Richmond, Indiana.

Hi, John. Welcome.

Hey, John. What’s going on?

Not a lot.

Richmond.

Thank you so much for having me.

How can we help, John?

My daughter brought home a note from her kindergarten that was trying to use the word voila, the French word. What they had actually done was kind of written it in poor phonetic English, W-A-L-L-A or something similar, so voila with a W.

Oh, really?

You know, it was from a part-time art teacher who was a college student. My wife talked me down from saying anything.

How high up were you?

Not too bad. More of a, boy, this seems odd.

Okay.

And not too long later, I was reading an article on the web and the exact same thing. Except this time it was by an author who claimed to have written six books and was a serial entrepreneur. And I figured he had enough life experience to know better.

So I just I wanted to know I have never I can’t remember having seen this before. It’s a super hard thing to Google thanks to Walla Walla Washington. So I was wondering if this is like is it becoming acceptable?

No.

No, not really.

No, no, no. It’s very explainable, but not at all acceptable.

Okay.

That makes me feel a little bit better. We’re up on the roof with you now.

Okay.

I’ve been meaning to try this human kite out. Come along.

Yeah, it is hard to search for if you do Walla Walla. Just use that minus sign in front of your quoted Walla Walla, and you’ll get a little further.

One of the things that you’ll find if you Google this is a great discussion on Language Log, which is the venerable and much respected group blog. Some of the world’s best linguists and language people get together and talk about what’s happening in language today. You’ll also find this pop-up in numerous style guides and reference works.

And in short, what they all say is that this is a spelling error because people are approximating what they think the word is. They don’t quite realize that it’s a borrowed word and that it should follow French orthography and not English orthography. And what’s contributing is they think it’s just that they behave as if it’s just an interjection like ta-da or like huh.

Right.

Like that where you can kind of fool around a little bit with the spelling and it’s okay because it’s not actually a word so much as an utterance. They don’t realize that it’s French for there it is.

Yeah.

See there. See there. Literally.

Yeah.

Right. And, you know, one of the reasons I wasn’t super high up on my horse was as I was mentally composing my question, I realized I never spell it right because I don’t put the accent on the A.

Oh, well, you’re not like the people who write me so many times and they say, and you do this and you do this and viola. I’m not kidding. I have gotten that so many times. I kind of like it. Viola. Trombone.

I would blame autocorrect on some of those violas.

Oh, I hadn’t thought about that. And in English, you don’t have to use the accent mark. It’s a nice thing to add it, but we don’t have them in English. And voila is close to a perfectly borrowed word where it has lost a great deal of its Frenchness. It’s like lingerie and perfume. Those are almost American now, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, but it’s not spelled like walla walla.

No, it’s V-O-I-L-A with a grave accent on the A from the upper left to the lower right.

Right?

Yes, that is what I’ve seen. One of the two possible accents that an A might ordinarily take.

Yeah, the law. Just check your dictionary. It’s V-O-I-L-A. Easy.

John, we are up on the high horse with you.

Giddy up.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Take care.

Okay, au revoir.

Bye-bye.

All right, thank you very much.

Bye.

Bye.

What are you on your high horse about? Give us a call. Actually, don’t write and call. Call us, 877-929-9673. Send an email to words@waywordradio.org. And look us up on Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Bill Waters calling from Marquette, Michigan.

Well, Bill, welcome to the program.

Hi, Bill.

Okay, I’m retired from the criminal justice system about 30-plus years in one venue or another, most recently as a criminal justice professor at Northern Michigan University here in Marquette. And for most of that time, colleagues of the same generation as I were quite comfortable with the word, Hooskow as a place to lock the bad guys up. It’s something that I first heard in almost every B-grade Western movie that I watched religiously growing up in the 40s and 50s. Roy Rogers and Gene Autry were always referring to locking the bad guys up in the Hooskow. And I don’t hear it that much anymore, but it’s still part of my repertoire. And I can’t imagine where that word comes from as a reference to a jail, lockup, a prison. Maybe you can help me.

Yeah, we should be able to help you. Are you telling me, though, that your professional colleagues would use this, like, in front of judges or in their academic papers or that sort of thing?

No, no, no. It would be over a beer at a conference or something like that.

That’s what I would expect. Very good. Like one dean or one president, university president or another ought to be in the Hooskow.

Okay, gotcha.

They should all be in the Hooskow.

Yeah, we can definitely help on this. Martha’s got the scoop, I’m sure.

Yeah, and I don’t know if you’ve seen it written out, but H-O-O-S-E-G-O-W?

Yeah, I wasn’t even sure how to spell it.

That sounds about right.

Yeah, okay, well that’s how you’ll see it in English, but it will make infinite sense if you know that it comes from a Spanish word. That means tribunal. And the word is juzgado, which is J-U-Z-G-A-D-O, juzgado. And it’s related, therefore, to words like judge and judgment and judicial. It goes back to a Latin word that starts with a J. And so we borrowed and adapted the Spanish juzgado into juzgado. That happened a lot in the West. In Spanish, they don’t pronounce the J as a J sound, right? It’s more similar to an H.

Right.

Yeah, so it’s the place where people are judged, in other words. So it was borrowed into English in the south and the southwest from Spanish speakers, and we gave it our own spelling. But it’s definitely slangy, right?

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, when you mentioned those westerns, that’s exactly what I thought of. I can see Roy and Trigger and his horse. What was his horse’s name?

Oh, no, the dog was named Bullet, right?

Bullet was the dog. Trigger was Roy’s horse. And champion. Champion was jeans.

Oh, very good. It’s all coming back to me now. But, yeah, he put all the bad guys in the hoose gal.

Well, that makes phenomenally good sense. Now I can use the word with a certain amount of certainty then that it isn’t just some drunk stumbling out of a Western bar then and making it up.

It might still be that, but go ahead.

Or maybe a fellow professor. I don’t know.

Thanks for your call, Bill. Much appreciated.

Pleasure.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What do you use in your profession that’s kind of got you stumped? Something, a puzzle, that word that everyone says but nobody quite knows where it comes from? Send us an email, words@waywordradio.org, or give us a call, 877-929-9673. And find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Well, Grant, I have a correction to make.

Oh.

A few episodes ago, we talked about roly-poly bugs, remember? All the different names for them, like wood lice and sow bugs and all of those things. You and I call them roly-poly bugs.

Well, we heard from a few people, including Lucy Zeldinrust from Two Rivers, Wisconsin. Lucy’s a retired biology teacher who wrote to say, roly-poly bugs aren’t bugs at all.

No?

No.

No.

They’re isopods.

Oh?

They’re not bugs.

Oh.

Isopods comes from Greek words that mean similar or equal and foot. So they have equal feet. And they’re crustaceans. They’re a distant kin of shrimps, crabs, and crayfish.

I see.

Who knew? Besides all the biologists out there.

Right.

I didn’t think that bug was specific or scientific enough to matter much. But okay, I’ll accept the correction.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever seen a land crab? These are incredible. They look just like the sea crabs, but they dig in the dirt. They’re in China and other places.

Crazy.

Really? Yes.

Yeah, I assume that they’re related to roly-polies as well. Land crabs.

Are they related to land sharks?

I don’t know.

Let’s hope not.

Send your questions to words@waywordradio.org and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Laura.

Hi, Laura. How are you doing?

Hi, Laura.

Great. How are you?

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Oh, well, what can we help you with today?

Well, I have noticed a really strange phenomenon that’s happening, and it seems to be getting worse as all of my correspondence has done with either emailing or texting or typing.

I’m having this problem where my fingers are doing an auto-correction, and they’re typing a word other than the word I wanted to type.

So, for example, the other day I wanted to type the word sentry, and my fingers automatically typed central.

So you were typing century or sentry?

Sentry, S-E-N-T-R-Y.

Oh, really?

And then you typed C-E-N-T-R-A-L.

Exactly.

Wow, so you’re your own autocorrect program.

Well, your own mis-autocorrect.

Auto-incorrect.

Exactly.

I was trying to, I think maybe one thing we could do is come up with a word for it, because it’s not an autocorrect.

It’s an auto-incorrect.

Yeah. Oh, boy, that is interesting.

They study this sort of thing in CMC, computer-mediated communication.

This is exactly the kind of thing that comes up.

They don’t have anything fascinating to call it.

I’ve seen it called contextual spelling errors, which is you have a real word. It’s just not the right word for the situation.

Oh, so maybe we could shorten it to CSE then.

And one of the explanations that I’ve read in these CMC journals, these computer-mediated communication journals, one of the explanations, and it makes a lot of sense, is that most of the speech that passes through our fingers to our keyboards actually goes through the verbal and oral speech processing part of our brain.

Right.

If I say the words to you now, discombobulate, you could probably write it without thinking where your fingers are on the keyboard.

Right.

Yeah, exactly.

But it’s still passing through these speech centers, which means at some point your brain may be converting it to the spoken word.

That is, it’s finding the phonetics of it.

And that’s why you can get a word like century out of central.

Or what was your example?

Century and, yeah, central.

Yes.

And it’s a pun.

And I find that really interesting because I caught myself doing that the other day.

I was talking about going by somebody’s house and I spelled it B-U-I.

Why in the world would I do that?

Yeah, we do this all the time.

There’s something, you can see this in beginning readers.

You can actually witness this process where the words pass through their eyes from a book into their brain and then their mouth moves a little bit.

It’s called sub-vocalization.

And we all do this to a certain degree.

I mean, at some point you stop moving your lips, but your brain is still doing the work even if your mouth isn’t moving.

And so it’s kind of a hardwired thing in us for that language to pass through our brain in a certain way so that it involves our brain thinking about sounds as much as letters and shapes.

One of my co-workers gave me a great example, and I think this might help us out.

She wanted to type interception, and instead it came out intervention.

Oh.

So I think we’re all moving too fast.

We’re thinking and typing too quickly, and maybe we all need an intervention.

I like that.

I’ll try to find some of the public information that’s out there that I can link to that talks about this.

But academics and linguists have gone so far, and actually people working in the technology fields, because this is part of making sure, for example, that your Google search is understood, they’ve made lists and categories of the kinds of misspellings that we have.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, they just know.

They’re all categorized.

Any kind of misspelling that you might make, they know about it.

But they don’t always care about how it got there.

They care about how to make their systems understand what you meant.

This is a really good question.

I’m sure we’ll get some responses from the rest of our listeners.

This seems like a universal problem, right?

Do you have a word for Laura?

Do you have a word to describe that phenomenon of meaning to type one word, but typing a second word instead, and it’s a real word?

It’s not just a misspelling?

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

Laura, thanks for calling.

All right, thanks a lot, guys.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, the other thing I notice is that I have habits of typing things.

Like, you know, I grew up in Louisville, and if I’m typing the name Louis, I always type the Ville, and then I have to go back.

I mean, I don’t know if that’s muscle memory, what that is.

Yeah, there’s a certain amount of autumn, right?

Your brain is triggered into thinking of the most common word that you always type, right?

Yeah, yeah.

I wish I could do that for larger blocks of text.

Help Laura out or send us your questions, words@waywordradio.org.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter or give us a call on the telephone anytime, 877-929-9673.

There are a lot more of these Mort Walker terms for describing the conventions of being a cartoonist.

Solrads, S-O-L-R-A-D-S.

Solrads.

Yeah, you can kind of guess where that comes from, the radiation from the sun maybe.

And these are the lines drawn from something luminous like a light bulb, the radiating lines or the sun to show that it’s giving off light or heat.

Solarids.

Solarids.

Yeah, not to be confused with dites, D-I-T-E-S, which are the diagonal lines on a mirror.

Oh, that indicate that it’s like smooth.

Yeah, yeah, smooth and shiny in a different way.

Oh, very interesting.

Nice.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Things have come to a pretty path.

Well, our show’s over for today, but let’s continue the conversation.

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He also chooses that great music you hear between segments.

And we have production help from James Ramsey and Josette Hurdell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

Bye, y’all.

Tomato, tomato, let’s call the whole thing off.

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