By the Seat of Your Pants (episode #1388)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And Grant, I have a mathematical riddle for you.

Yes, please.

There are 30 cows and 28 chickens.

How many didn’t?

30 cows and 28 chickens.

How many didn’t?

28 chickens.

10.

Oh, good.

That’s good.

That took me forever.

That’s nice.

Right.

30 cows and 28 chickens.

That is, the cows ate the chickens.

So it sounds like the number 28 projection thing, 20-A-T-E.

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s a tough one, right?

Yeah, it’s great.

You have to try that one out on your kid.

I will totally get that.

He’ll crack up.

That’s just his kind of thing.

He loves it.

Words have more than one meaning.

It’s strange.

Yeah.

And that’s funny.

Yes, and we love talking about that kind of thing on the show.

So call us, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Karen, and I’m calling from Denton, Texas.

Hi, Karen. Welcome.

Hi.

What can we help you with?

I have an idea.

I was just thinking to myself about my financial plans,

And I was thinking, well, you don’t really have any,

And you don’t have any structure,

And you’re just flying by the seat of your pants.

And so that’s the phrase that I was curious about,

Where that came from,

Because to me, it means that I don’t have any structure or we just take things as they come instead of planning.

No plan.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Flying by the seat of your pants goes back to the 1930s when there were no instruments in aircraft.

So a pilot, if the clouds were thick and they couldn’t see the horizon, they’d literally have to wing it.

And they could feel by the vibrations of the plane and what was happening with the different moving parts and just kind of like their natural sense of where up and down were, which is, by the way, in most people, terrible when you can’t see the horizon.

Yeah.

Right.

And they’d have to just fly literally by the seat of their pants by feeling the vibrations of the plane come up through their bum.

So there we go.

You’re using a flying terminology and you didn’t know it.

I didn’t know it.

Yeah.

Thanks, Karen.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Like I said, winging it is a similar thing.

Yeah.

Also from flying.

From aviation.

Yeah.

But isn’t it weird that this term that even pilots don’t really need anymore entered the language with enough fastness and firmness that we still use it in standard English?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s one of those things I never thought about.

And then you think about flying by the seat of your pants.

And if there’s no airplane involved, that’s a really weird image.

Yeah.

It’s not propellers on your britches.

Right.

Okay.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you for that explanation.

It’s not rocket-powered pants.

Although what a great idea.

Seriously.

We can make a mint.

It’d be a jet-propelled wedgie.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

This is Suzanne, and I’m calling from New York City.

Well, welcome to the show, Suzanne.

Where in New York City are you?

Right now, I am on Wall Street, looking at the lower Manhattan helicopter pad.

Oh, okay.

I know exactly where that is.

Well, welcome to the show, Suzanne.

We’re glad to talk to you.

What’s up?

Thank you.

So, I don’t remember exactly the context, but the other day I was having a conversation with someone and I said, by and large, this would happen in this situation.

Then all of a sudden I thought to myself, why do we say by and large?

What is by and large?

Why does it become and large?

I mean, I understand that we sort of mean in the larger sense or in a bigger sense, but by and large it seemed a really strange combination of words.

And then it occurred to me that I have heard people say, by enlarge,

Which I’m wondering is one of, if maybe that’s one of those things that you guys sometimes talk about where people hear something one way and then they think it’s supposed to be written another way.

But I wasn’t sure.

They say by, E-N-L-A-R-G-E, as if enlarge is the word?

Exactly.

Oh, wow.

I’ve heard it a few other ways.

I’ve heard it by in large, B-Y-I-N-L-A-R-G-E.

And I’ve heard by at large as well.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And actually, if you Google by at large, you’ll find lots of hits for it.

Yeah, Suzanne, I grew up thinking it was by in large with the E-N.

Oh, okay.

But I was wrong.

I found out later that it has to do with sailing.

Sailing?

Yeah.

It is by and large.

If you’re sailing large, you’re sailing largely with the wind at your back or to a little bit to one side or the other, but coming from behind.

And that’s an easier way to sail.

You have more room to maneuver and that kind of thing.

If you’re sailing by, as I understand it, you’re sailing more into the wind and there’s less room for error.

Because if you make an error when you’re sailing by, when you’re sailing into the wind,

Then you can be taken aback.

Literally, that’s the origin of taken aback, that the sails go back and slap against the mast.

That’s a nautical term as well.

Exactly.

Oh, interesting.

Okay.

I had no idea.

That’s fascinating.

And it’s very strange, but here I am looking out over the New York Harbor where people are probably sailing by and large.

I have no idea.

So by and large together encompass everything.

You know, generally, as you were saying, by and large.

All the different ways that you can sail, right?

The two different major strategies for getting the boat underway.

Yeah.

Oh, interesting.

Very interesting.

Fascinating.

I had absolutely no clue.

Well, there you go, Suzanne.

Am I right about the enlarge thing?

Is that just mostly people are hearing it wrong?

Because I’ve actually seen that in print, and I think it’s probably not in print when someone’s edited it.

I’ve probably just seen it in email or in an individual posting or something like that.

But I know I’ve seen it written.

Yeah, the correct way, and we’re not at the point where any variation is worth considering,

The correct is B-Y-A-N-D-L-A-R-G-E, by and large, three words.

Great.

Cool.

Thanks, Suzanne.

Fabulous.

Thank you for enlightening me on two nautical terms at once.

All right.

How about that?

Multitasking.

Kiss the New York City ground for me, will you?

I will.

We miss you here.

Thank you both, and keep the show going.

It’s one of my very favorites.

Oh, thank you very much.

Take care now.

We appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

So, nautical dictionary, can we dig deep in this stuff?

Because this is crazy.

There’s a ton of these things, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Is this dangerous?

Well, it’s dangerous, too, because we’re landlubbers.

Right.

I mean, I’m sure that all the sailors are out there.

They’re already writing email emails now.

Dear Martha and Grant, how dare you misrepresent?

They’re not even saying dear.

But one of my favorite terms that I dug up out of this nautical dictionary, which is related to this,

Is another expression for dead reckoning when you kind of just do it by the seat of the pants.

By the seat of the pants, yeah.

It’s by guess and by God.

By guess and by God.

You’re sailing by guess and by God.

Yeah, you can do your finances that way, right?

And I’m thinking, you know what?

That’s tombstone worthy.

He lived his life by guess and by God, which meant he just did his best and headed forward.

Love it.

If you’ve got something that just kind of dropped out of your language,

You’re like, whoa, how did that get into English?

Give us a call.

We’re the ones who can help you figure it out.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And we’re all over Facebook and Twitter.

In the networking world, and by networking I mean the world in which you get internet into your home or into your workplace.

Oh, that networking world.

In that networking world, there’s a term called Netflix-o-clock.

Do you know what Netflix-o-clock is?

Around the clock?

This is when everyone arrives home about prime time, and they all fire up their Netflix to binge watch their shows,

And it saturates the internet or saturates the channel.

Oh, no kidding.

So it’s internet prime time.

Yeah, internet prime time.

Yeah, Netflix-o-clock.

So in a household, you can have Netflix-o-clock when you’ve got three or four devices all streaming different shows at the same time, and you realize, I need to upgrade my DSL.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Robert Gordon.

Aloha from Hawaii, the big island.

Aloha.

What can we help you with?

Well, I had a grandmother, Granny Gordon, that lived in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, and also our family came from Gettysburg. It was a powerful influence on us being in Gettysburg, I think. And Granny used to say, oh, Lee’s army had to skedaddle. And I found this in an old newspaper, too, as if the word skedaddle was some kind of an insult that they had made up or something to make fun of the southern troops.

She also said a couple other funny things. Before a journey, she got journey proud or travel proud.

Yeah, we know that one.

Yeah, we’ve talked about that one on the show before. I want to hear about that one because I never heard it from anybody else, and I get it very badly.

And finally she said, oh, you’re just glegged, old top. She called me old top. She said, you’re just glegged. I said, what’s that, Grant? He said, oh, that’s too lazy to be any good at all.

Glegged?

I don’t know that one.

She sounds like she had a bit of fire in her.

Oh, she was all milquetoast, really, inside.

Yeah, but she was a tough old Presbyterian lady, I guess. You’ve got to watch out for those Presbyterian ladies.

Well, let’s break these down as quickly as we can.

Please.

Skedaddle’s really interesting. It did appear at first during the American Civil War. 1861 is when we find it first in print in a New York newspaper to talk about soldiers retreating. And probably not a formal retreat, but more the disorganized fleeing for your life kind of retreat.

We do not know where skedaddle comes from. They’re one of the best etymologists in the world. Anatoly Lieberman has put his mind to it and come up with lots of theories, none of them which hold any water. He’s got page after page in his book called The Analytical Dictionary of English Etymology. And so it’s a big mystery where we get skedaddle. But, yeah, it did come up during the American Civil War.

To be journey proud, as we’ve talked about on the show, that’s, Martha, that’s your domain, right? Journey proud. I think proud has to do with being big or swelling or something like that. Like you can have proud skin, which is a raised part of your skin. And so if you’re journey proud, you’re just bursting with.

Bursting with the get up and go.

Yeah. Well, it’s on the night before a trip. You’re all packed. You’re so psyched to go.

Right. It’s kind of the opposite. In our family, Granny couldn’t do anything for a week. She was always rechecking her lists. Me, I can’t sleep for two or three nights before a trip, the older I get. And it was not really a good thing, although it was a form of energy, yes, but Granny wasn’t happy about it.

Well, yeah, that’s sort of like German rice-a-fieber, which is, again, that agitation before a trip.

Ich habe in kein Deutsch.

Nein.

So, Robert, your other term was glecht, G-L-E-G-E-D?

Glegged.

You’re just glegged, she said.

Glegged.

I don’t know how to spell it. And she used it in what condition? What circumstances?

It was an affectionate way of her telling her grandson that he’d better get up and take out the garbage.

Oh, interesting.

Glegged.

I did not know that. And it’s true. I’m like Stephen Foster. I just would lay around and play music all the time. That’s the kind of guy I am.

Colleged comes up in some old dialect dictionaries in the United Kingdom from quite a while ago, but it just means to look a sconce or to glance at or to look upon something. To look a sconce. So maybe it’s a dim chance that it has something to do with you just kind of standing there with your mouth agape, looking like I don’t know what you’re doing.

That’s it. That’s it. I have to ask my sister about that.

You’re just standing there looking cross-eyed and dull.

I don’t know.

I can see it.

Well, I was always lost in thought, you know, someplace far away.

Well, Robert, you’ve been a delight on this show, so we really appreciate it.

Yeah, do follow us again.

Thanks a lot.

Take care, Charlie.

Mahalo.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Cheers.

Bye.

If you’ve got something you’d like to share or like to discuss, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

More from the bouncy house of language as A Way with Words continues.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And who’s this handsome fellow?

It’s John Chaneski on the line with a quiz.

Hello, John.

If I’m on the line, how can you tell I’m handsome?

Listen, you know, it’s been a while since we talked about the NPL. And I’ve got a little quiz here about an NPL flat type. We talk about the flats, which are the kind of iconic puzzle that the wordplay puzzles that the NPL likes to use. This is about terminal deletions. I know it sounds very, very dun-dun-dun. It sounds final.

Yeah, very final.

But terminal deletions are an NPL flat style that involves taking a letter from both ends of a word to make another word.

Okay.

I’ll give you a sentence that clues two words. One word is the other word with both first and last letters deleted.

Okay?

Okay.

The shorter the word, the easier it is, but I’ll give you the enumeration if you need it. And the first blank will always be the longer word in these examples.

Okay?

Okay, great.

Here we go.

It was very blank this December morning, and it’s still cold, but it’s clear right blank.

Snowy and now.

Snowy and now.

Yes, Grant. Very good. Snowy and now. It was very snowy this December morning, and it’s still cold, but it’s clear right now.

It was a typical physical. He listened to my blank and stuck a thermometer in my blank.

Heart and ear.

Heart and ear, yeah. It was a typical physical. He listened to my heart and stuck a thermometer in my ear.

I gave the farmer’s daughter a ring with an expensive blank, but she’d rather I gave her a blank or a lamb.

A jewel or a u?

Nice.

Very good.

A jewel or a u. Nicely done. I gave the farmer’s daughter a ring with an expensive jewel, but she’d rather I gave her a ewe or a lamb.

The blank of the dance was prim and proper, so the blank of Mary’s skirt was much too high.

The theme and the hem.

Yes, nicely done, Martha. The theme of the dance was prim and proper, so the hem of Mary’s skirt was much too high.

All right.

Oh, you’ve just got a little blank in your finger. I know it hurts, but you’ll blank.

Splinter?

No.

Sliver and live.

Yeah.

Sliver and live.

Sliver and live is correct. That’s right. Oh, you’ve just got a little sliver in your finger. I know it hurts, but you’ll live.

You’ll quickly become a blank among the other sopranos if you can’t sing a simple operatic blank.

Pariah and aria.

Yes, pariah and aria. You’ll quickly become a pariah among the other sopranos if you can’t sing a simple operatic aria.

Right.

Now, in Tolkien’s world, you’ll find elves in the blank, while dwarves search for all kinds of blank in their minds.

That’s your field, Grant.

Woods and…

Woods and ood?

No, and forests and oars.

Forest and oars, yes. In Tolkien’s world, you’ll find elves in the forest, while dwarves search for all kinds of ores in their mines.

Nice.

For just a blank, I thought that everything would be okay. Then a black cat appeared, which I knew was a horrible blank.

Moment and omen.

Yes. For just a moment, I thought that everything would be okay. Then a black cat appeared, which I knew was a horrible omen.

All right, guys. Now we’ve come to the terminal part of my quiz, at the end of the quiz.

Way to go.

You died very well.

Thanks, John.

Thank you, John.

As Martha did it, she was great.

We were great.

We’ll talk to you again next week, buddy, all right?

Bye.

Talk to you then.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

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

If you’ve got something to say, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Find us on Facebook and Twitter and iTunes and SoundCloud, and I don’t even know where.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Stephanie calling from San Diego.

Hi, Stephanie.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

I have a question.

My pastor was speaking in church the other day, and he was talking about this story in Genesis where Sarah and Abraham are at their house, and God actually comes in the form of a man, and he tells Sarah that he’s going to have a child, or he tells Abraham, but Sarah is listening inside.

So the pastor said that he was eavesdropping, and he realized that he said the wrong word.

It was actually eavesdropping, but he always thought it was eavesdropping.

So I was just curious if it was eaves or eaves, and if so, where it came from.

So your pastor was saying E-A-S-E dropping instead of E-A-V-E-S dropping, right?

Exactly, and I thought maybe it came from people sitting on eaves listening down.

I wasn’t sure, but I thought maybe there was more of a story to it.

Oh, that’s funny.

I could see you easily making that mistake, even in front of a crowd where you’re practicing speaking.

It’s kind of easy to listen in on people.

It’s a common mistake.

You’ll actually find eavesdropping in the Eggcorn database, which is a list of terms that people tend to mistake for legitimate terms.

You can find it.

Just Google Eggcorn database, and you’ll find it.

But eavesdrop itself is pretty interesting.

There used to be a law, or at least a rule or a custom, to make sure that the space around your house was sufficiently wide so that when it rained, the drips wouldn’t drip down onto your neighbor’s property or neighbor’s house.

And this zone around the building was called the eaves drip, D-R-I-P.

It became, over time, eaves drop, D-R-O-P.

And it also started to refer to the place that you could stand where you were sufficiently close enough to the house to hear anything that was happening inside through the windows or the doors or maybe even by pressing your ear to the wood.

I don’t know.

And so in that way, the eavesdrop zone around the house became eavesdrop as in to listen in that space.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s a little bit different than what I thought.

Yeah, what were you thinking?

Well, I was thinking people sitting on top of the eaves listening above.

Oh, yeah.

Okay, sure.

But they’re actually underneath where the water wasn’t dripping on them.

Yeah, it’s pretty hard.

A little more sneaky that way.

Yeah, pretty hard to climb up on top of the tiled roof and not be heard.

Or seam, right?

Or seam, yeah.

But to sneak around.

I was imagining that scene in Aladdin, you know, where he’s on top.

There we go.

That’s a good scene, right?

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

So that’s you’s job.

It’s pretty cool.

It goes back hundreds of years, too.

Oh, okay.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure, Stephanie.

Thanks for calling.

Have a good one.

Take care now.

Okay, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, that was a timely call, wasn’t it? Eavesdropping?

Why is that timely? Because of the NSA?

Yeah.

They’re listening.

And you’re listening to A Way with Words, and you can call us 877-929-9673, or send your questions in email to words@waywordradio.org.

What do you call it when you’re cleaning the snow off a car and your arms can’t quite reach and there’s this strip of snow left in the middle?

Oh, that’s fantastic.

I never thought about that.

Is it agnistis?

No.

What’s that?

I was thinking car hawk.

What are you talking about?

Agnistis.

It’s the word for that place on your back that you can’t reach to scratch.

I can reach my whole back.

I can totally reach my whole back.

I don’t know what you’re talking about.

Yeah, very limber.

That’s a better word for it, but I don’t think most people are going to know that.

But if I said there was a car hawk left on my car, you’d probably figure that one out.

Oh, a car hawk.

That’s even better.

Mohawk on your car.

No, that’s better.

Yeah, this drip of snow you just can’t quite reach.

It is fantastic.

And you drive anyway, and it falls off on the freeway.

Right, right.

Share your language with us, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

My name is Jack Eaton, and I’m calling from Jensen Beach, Florida.

I had been fascinated with Abraham Lincoln and the assassination since about the third grade.

And mentioning that, a shout out to my third grade teacher, Joyce Pelosi, who’s probably listening.

All right, Joyce.

I first read about the assassination, and there’s a phrase which is pivotal to the story, which when I first read it made no sense to me.

And 35 years later still makes no sense to me.

You know, we’re talking April 14th, 1865.

Just after 10 p.m., the president, Mrs. Lincoln, Major Rathbone, and Clara Harris are sitting in Ford’s Theater watching Our American Cousin, starring Laura Keane, who is a theater idol of the day.

She’s on stage with Asa Trenchard.

They’re having an argument.

While this is happening, Booth is waiting outside the door of the president’s box.

And he knows the play, and he knows that the next line is a big laugh, the biggest laugh in the play.

And he’s going to use the sound of the laughter to cover the sound of the gunshot.

Trenchard calls out to Keene and calls her a sockdologizing old man trap.

And that was my reaction when I first read it. It made no sense. I’m like, why is this funny?

Sockdologizing old man trap.

I think the answer might lie in the play itself.

Because the play, as you said, is Our American Cousin.

And it’s sort of like Duck Dynasty meets Downton Abbey or the Beverly Hillbillies meets Downton Abbey.

Because it’s this American guy who goes over to see these long-lost English relatives.

And the long-lost English relatives are very uptight, sort of aristocratic.

And he’s this sort of, you know, countrified, rustic bumpkin from the United States who says stuff like cow juice instead of milk and that kind of thing.

So he’s always throughout this play using funny words like that that were kind of in fashion in the mid 19th century.

And so I’m thinking that it’s not particularly the word sockdologizing itself.

He could have used one of the other words from that period, like gosh bustified or catawampshus or something like that.

It’s just a sort of pseudo sophisticated speech in the mouth of somebody who’s really not so sophisticated.

Does that make sense?

OK. In the context of the play, does sockdologizing have a meaning?

Well, it means, in the context of the play, I’m not so sure, because a sockdollager is like a definitive final blow.

The term may come from boxing.

Like the sockdollager is the punch that knocks you out.

Oh, okay.

That could kind of make sense.

I can see that if he’s, you know, calling a woman that, where, you know, if you’re a man trap, you’re going to be the last one that he has, maybe.

Okay.

I hadn’t thought about that.

Okay.

But yeah, it could be that, and it could be that he doesn’t even know what the word means.

I mean, he uses words in that play like absquatulate, which means to leave.

And so I think it’s just the idea itself of putting two really, really different characters together and seeing what happens.

It’s sort of a basic comedic strategy.

Oh, okay. Well, that’s a better answer than I’ve gotten in 35 years.

Oh, well, thank you very much.

Outstanding. Well, Jack, we hope you go away happy then.

You might look up the play. It’s online, and maybe that will give you a better feel for it, too.

I will definitely do that.

Okay. Take care.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, another thing that’s interesting about that whole story is, you know how we were taught in school that John Wilkes Booth leaps to the sage and then he says, six semper tyrannis, thus always to tyrants.

Some eyewitnesses said he said something different, like the South is revenged or something like that.

And also there are those immortal words, now he belongs to the ages.

We were taught that.

Remember when Lincoln dies across the street in the bed and that guy says, now he belongs to the ages.

But there was a fascinating article a few years ago in The New Yorker suggesting that the phrase was actually, now he belongs to the angels.

It’s a really interesting piece by Adam Gopnik.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing, I would recommend looking it up online.

Cool.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, how about another riddle?

Okay.

A man leaves home.

He goes a little ways and turns a corner.

He goes a while and turns another corner.

Soon, he turns one more corner.

As he’s returning home, he sees two masked men.

Who are they?

Ooh, nice.

I love this.

Two masked men.

Mm—

I don’t know. What’s the answer?

After he’s turned all those corners after he’s left home.

He’s turned all these corners after he left home.

And he comes back to home.

And he sees two masked men.

I don’t know who.

What are they doing there?

I don’t know. Who is it?

They are the catcher and the umpire.

Oh!

He’s playing baseball.

Nice!

Love it.

Totally suckered.

Give us your riddles, your best ones.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Paul. I’m calling from Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show, Paul. What can we do for you?

I have a question about the word dude.

Dude?

Dude.

Dude, D-U-D-E.

I’ve noticed that college-age students use it as a unisex word.

So in the days of my youth, I graduated high school in 86.

It was primarily used to address a man.

But now I’ve noticed that girls are calling each other dude.

And I wonder, when did that start?

Are they calling each other dude?

Are you sure that that’s what they’re doing?

I am positive.

In fact, I’ve talked to them about it.

Oh, you have?

They just shrug it off and say, oh, yeah, I’ve always done that.

The reason I question that exact way that you put that is because there’s a type of usage called evocative usage where you kind of just get someone’s attention.

Usually at the beginning of a sentence, like I might say, hey, buddy, move your car.

I can’t get out of my driveway.

That buddy is evocative use.

And this is the dude that is primarily used by young women to refer to other young women.

They’ll say, dude, you’ve got to buy that dress.

OK, so they’re addressing.

So they’re addressing them.

And it’s pretty much about the only place that you’re going to hear a lot of women using dude in that way when they’re speaking to another woman.

So it’s not so much about calling them a dude.

I mean, you could maybe make a case for that, but it’s mostly about getting their attention, putting something at the beginning of the sentence that says, pay attention to what follows.

So we do a lot of this.

Man, I can’t believe I got another speeding ticket.

So that man is doing that job, that vocative job.

Boy, you’re smart, Grant.

Yeah, there we go.

Exactly like that.

Say some more of that.

I like that.

What they’re probably not saying is like, I went down to the record store with these three dudes and they were Mary and Sue and Joan, right?

When you put it that way, it does seem that it is being used in the evocative sense.

The only speculation I may have to that is, in doing my own research, I noticed that it was cited as being used by females in Less Than Zero, the novel, the modern ladies.

And in that context, it was used by a daughter addressing her mother.

But now that I think about it, that may also have been in the evocative sense.

If you want to completely nerd out on this, and this is an activity that we hardly endorse at all opportunity,

In 2004, Scott Kiesling, who was at the University of Pittsburgh, published a paper in the Journal of American Speech titled Dude.

And it is literally about dude and this use and many other uses.

And he confirms that young women are using dude,

But only in the vocative sense.

That’s so interesting.

They’re not saying that women are dudes.

And they’re not ungendering it.

They’re strictly using it to get attention.

I see.

Well, that clarifies a great deal.

It’s been bugging me.

So watch for that, Paul.

Let us know what you think.

Will do.

Thanks a lot, guys.

Okay.

Yeah, sure.

Our pleasure.

Bye.

Dude shows all the signs of being like cool,

Which is the word that will never leave slang.

Never, ever.

But continue to be used.

Yeah.

Just constant saying.

But, of course, in the 60s and 70s when people said man, where we say dude a lot now,

Maybe people then thought that man would continue forever.

It’s just really uncommon today to have someone say, man, that’s an awesome dress.

Oh, I think maybe I do, but I don’t use dudes.

Really? A woman like you in her 30s?

Yeah, I know, I know. He said he graduated in 86. I’m thinking.

Yeah, I’m thinking too. He’s only two years older than I am.

What have you observed about language?

Call us about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org, and we are all over Facebook and Twitter.

Grant, I had a forehead-smacking moment the other day.

I always love this.

When you look at a word and you never thought about where it comes from.

Okay.

Drawing room.

Did you ever think about that?

I guess that’s two words, but it’s a term.

No, I never did.

I always assumed they were drawing tea as they, you know, kind of could draw tea to pour it for your guests.

That’s what I was thinking.

Something like that.

No, what is it?

It’s short for withdrawing room.

Oh, I see.

I know, right?

You step away from the dining room while the staff clean up the table.

Exactly.

Yeah, or the women do all the work or something like that.

But, yeah, isn’t that interesting?

Yeah, that’s outstanding.

Learn something new every day.

Ding, ding, ding, ding.

Sometimes more than once.

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More of your questions and stories about language.

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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A few weeks ago, we talked on the show about text tattoos, the fact that more people are getting tattoos that have words and letters on them.

And we asked people for their stories about that, and we got some really thoughtful responses.

A lot of the text tattoos that people are getting tell a kind of story.

You know, people get them when they’re at a turning point in their life, maybe a breakup or a move across the country.

And another thing that I found interesting from these emails was the fact that for a lot of people, as these text tattoos accumulate, they start to tell a kind of story in different languages.

We heard from Patience Etaya, who was originally from Ghana, but she moved here as a small child.

And one of her tattoos is her traditional Ghanaian name, which is Akosua.

And she said she got that because it’s a beautiful name, but it doesn’t show up in any of my official documents.

And then she has her name spelled out in Arabic letters.

And the reason that she has Arabic letters for her name is because her husband is from Morocco.

And she said, I didn’t want to put his name on my body, so I chose something representative of both of us coming together.

And then she has lyrics from a song that really spoke to her in Spanish.

And she also has her father’s initials with his birthday intertwined because he passed away in a car accident.

And she said, this is my way of always keeping him with me.

And so they were really personal stories, you know, really touching.

And we also heard firsthand from a tattoo artist.

His name is Joseph Wittenberg, and he’s out here in Temecula near San Diego.

And he said that text tattoos are now about 25% of his business.

Most of them are names and song lyrics.

And Joseph himself has a text tattoo.

He put one on his thigh.

He has a tattoo just above his knee that says,

Rachel, will you marry me?

And what he did was he was wearing shorts.

He went down on one knee and he pulled up his shorts so she could see the marriage.

The proposal.

Yeah.

And it’s still there.

Yeah.

Did he put a yes in afterward?

Yes.

Or something to that effect.

I can’t remember what it is, but he actually got news coverage.

You can actually go on YouTube and see him pulling his shorts up to show her the tentative.

Proposal on his leg.

Yeah.

Isn’t that sweet?

Yeah.

I guess.

That’s serious, right?

Serious?

I don’t know about sweets.

Well, you know, I think that’s a commitment.

I was going to say it’s a commitment because he didn’t just say, will you marry me?

He said, Rachel, will you marry me?

Anyway, I love how personal all these stories are, and we love hearing your personal stories about language.

You can send them to words@waywordradio.org or call us with them, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. My name is Steve from Fort Worth.

Hi, Steve from Fort Worth.

And I have a question about the word cute.

I’m English, as you can probably tell.

My mother was from the Midlands in England,

And she had a very different usage of the word cute.

When my mother used it, she meant somebody was sly or shrewd, like a fox,

And it was definitely not a compliment.

And I was just wondering, I sort of have adopted that, and I will occasionally use it,

But my mother and I are the only people that I know have ever used the word in that context.

And I did look it up in the dictionary, and yes, there is a definition, shrewd,

But I’ve never heard of anybody else use it in that context.

And I was just wondering, is it in usage, common usage in that context,

Or how was the transition made, what was the original usage,

As opposed to the modern usage meaning that something is pleasant or attractive.

All good questions, Steve. All good questions.

And there’s a bit of a story here.

The usage that you and your mother have is old-fashioned,

But it does exist in pockets here and there.

By a huge amount, cute meaning adorable or attractive

Is the winning definition of cute these days.

But it used to mean shrewd, and that actually is the original definition.

It was shrewd or clever, and actually it meant a cute.

And this is where we get the word.

A-C-U-T-E was the original term.

And through a process called aphesis, we dropped off the A and it just became cute.

And it slowly changed over time and went from meaning perceptive or keen or shrewd to meaning on point or exactly what you want.

And then it went from meaning exactly what you want to meaning something that was appealing and then something that was attractive.

And here we get today where it means something just a little adorable.

Japanese say it’s kawaii, which has very cute little big eyes, big head, round cheeks.

Right.

So there it is in a nutshell.

Crazy story of cute.

Okay.

Do you know if it is in use, if other people do use it in various regions?

Absolutely.

They absolutely do.

You are not alone in this.

It’s not common anymore, but you will find it in certain regions of the U.S. and the U.K.

You’ve got to look carefully for it, though, because it’s the kind of thing, once people realize that their use of it is out of fashion,

They might kind of withdraw that use and only use it when they feel like they’re around people who also use it.

I’ve heard people say, don’t get cute with me.

It’s a similar use, yeah.

It’s a meaning of cleverness, yeah.

Yeah, so it’s like an acute angle, like a sharp angle.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay, well, thank you very much indeed.

Great help.

Cheers.

Great information.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling Steve.

Thank you, Steve.

Take care now.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Or send your stories about your close encounters with words to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi, Grant. This is Hugh Walt in Newton, Massachusetts.

Hi, Hugh. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Hugh.

I have a query about quarry.

A query about quarry.

I recently went to an exhibition at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts here

And saw the watercolors of John Singer Sargent,

Who was an American early 20th century painter.

And one of the features of the exhibit was a series of stone quarries in Italy

That he had painted with lovely pastels and colors.

And then I subsequently went to a museum at the McMullen Museum at Boston College,

Where I teach, and they had an exhibition of Gustave Courbet,

Who’s a 19th century French realist.

And one of his most famous paintings is entitled The Quarry,

But that’s a depiction of a fallen stag after a hunt.

And my wife, who’s an art historian and docent, admired the artistic styles,

But I was struck by the linguistic question of the two different meanings of the same word,

And I thought it might have a Latin root, Arthur, that’s in your court.

Oh, I’m thrilled that you asked about this because there are two different words here, actually.

It’s not the same quarry.

And the one that has to do with excavation goes back to the idea of a place where stone is chipped and shaped.

And so you’re making things at right angles out of that.

And it goes back to a Latin word that has to do with for.

Oh, that’s fascinating. So it’s like quatre in French.

Exactly. And the other quarry is really interesting.

And if you know French, you’ll find this especially interesting.

And I’m fascinated that it was a painting of a stag because in Middle English, the word quarry referred to originally the guts of an animal that are given to dogs after the hunt.

And they traditionally were spread out.

You would kill the animal.

You would disembowel it.

You would skin the animal, too, and put the skin down on the ground

And put all the guts there for the dogs to devour.

And if you know French, you know the French word for skin or hide, right?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Queer.

Queer, yeah.

And that was actually the French title.

The original French title was curé.

Oh, okay.

I think it’s related to the explanation you had.

Yes, exactly. So there are two different quarries here with really picturesque images behind each of them.

The second one actually is also related to the English word excoriate.

If you think of skin or hide, you know, originally that was to skin or flay somebody.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Well, that’s very, very interesting. And thank you very much for your help.

Thank you, Hu.

Okay. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, another interesting word coming from the whole idea of deer guts, of course, is humble pie.

Humble pie?

Yes.

How’s that?

The old word for the innards of deer was numbles.

Numbles?

Yeah.

So you would make a numble pie.

And a numble pie eventually, by misdivision, became a humble pie.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Why do you know so much about guts, Martha?

You’re a gutsy gal.

Maybe that’s it.

That’s it.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org, and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

I came across an Apache proverb I like.

Okay.

It goes, it is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand.

Yeah. Do more, say less.

Yeah.

Yeah. I’ve never heard it put that way.

Say it again?

Yeah. It is better to have less thunder in the mouth and more lightning in the hand.

Very, very good. Thank you very much for that.

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kate. I’m in Wyoming.

Wyoming. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

My father used to say he was an old cowboy born in the early 1900s,

And he used to say when something was ended or finalized, that’s all she wrote.

That’s all she wrote.

Yep.

That’s all she wrote.

What did he mean by it?

Well, like, I found myself saying it yesterday.

Like, if you were finished with something or I was feeding my dogs and I gave them some treats, I said, that’s all she wrote.

I said, oh, I just said it.

There’s no more, right?

Like, when you finalize something or it’s at the end of something, that’s all she wrote.

And I was an English teacher, and I can’t find a source of that anywhere.

It’s interesting that your father was an old cowboy.

There was a famous song in 1942 by Ernest Tubb called That’s All She Wrote.

And it was just a couple years prior to that that this term first appears on the scene.

And it’s typically couched in the language of a woman writing to her lover and saying,

It’s finished.

I’m done with you.

And in the tale telling, imagine a man in the barracks talking to his fellow soldiers,

Reading the letter from his love, and she says, Dear John.

It’s literally a Dear John letter.

Dear John.

Exactly.

I was going to say, like a Dear John letter.

And you know what?

I think I have heard that song.

There we go.

I’m sorry I’ve met another.

But I didn’t.

I didn’t connect the two at all.

Yeah.

He’s reading, Dear John, I’m sorry I’ve met another.

It’s finished between us.

And then he looks up to his friends and says, that’s all she wrote.

And so he’s done.

It’s over.

And it’s hard to say how influential this song was,

But it certainly was a big enough hit that it could have had an influence.

And by the time World War II was underway for Americans,

It was fairly widespread and it was a common catchphrase.

Well, wonderful.

And when was the Ernest Tubbs song?

1942.

1942.

Okay, I’ll remember that.

Well, thanks for calling, Kate.

Well, thank you for all your information.

It’s wonderful.

And I’ll get online and look up old Ernest.

There we go.

I think you can find the song on YouTube.

Take care now.

Take care.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Have we talked about Gaby on the show?

The Gaby boom?

Yeah, the Gaby boom.

Yeah, that’s been around for a while.

Okay, yeah.

I just wanted to talk about it because it turns out it’s got a lot of history and it’s lasting.

A Gabie is the child of a gay couple.

Sure.

Yeah.

So you’ve got the Gabie boom, which is like the rise in gay couples adopting kids or having their own kids and raising families.

Yeah.

Gabies.

Gabies.

So it’s funny because when that word first came along, I thought there’s no chance this is going to take off.

Oh, really?

It’s too cutesy, a little too clever.

But you find it now without any kind of like remarkable offsetting by quotes or italics or any kind of explanation really in just a wide variety of texts.

Interesting.

That’s the sign of success for a word.

If you’ve got a word that you came across and you want to make a prediction about its success, let us know, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jay. I’m calling from Boston.

Jay, hello.

How are you doing? What can we help with?

Well, I was calling to ask about sports idioms and figures of speech and to be more specific, how they translate or how they are analogous in different languages and cultures.

I’m a cab driver here in Boston, and I hear all kinds of languages in my cab.

And I had a Brit and a Yank in the back, and the Brit says to the Yank,

And that was, I can’t believe we got that meeting.

That was an 89-minute goal for sure.

And the American guy says, what?

And I said, he means a Hail Mary.

And the guy’s like, oh, I understand.

So, you know, I’m just curious, things like we say in the ballpark,

Do they say, you know, on the soccer pitch?

You know, some things probably translate well, some things don’t.

You know, when people talk about quarterbacking a meeting or something was a home run,

Do they say, oh, that was a wild sixer?

How does that translate and how does that get treated in other languages?

Oh, it totally depends on the sports idiom.

Some of the baseball terminology, some of the baseball idioms have actually made their way back across the Atlantic,

Like home run, and you will see them pop up in speeches and in newspapers.

And, of course, the Brits know that they’re American and decry them.

It doesn’t stop them from taking their place in the British English.

Others are completely untranslatable.

You have some great examples here.

These are wonderful.

Yeah, an 89-minute goal.

So that takes the whole match almost, right?

Because a soccer football game is 90 minutes long, right?

Right, okay.

So at the last minute?

Yeah, pull it out at the last minute.

So it really depends on what we’re talking about here.

Some of this stuff doesn’t come back either.

Americans might have heard that that’s not cricket, meaning that’s not the way things are done,

But we don’t probably use that.

And I think the British, because of their exposure to American television, have a lot of that going on.

They’ll understand it through context, but they wouldn’t use it themselves.

I’m curious if the soccer analogies are more universal because the game is played more,

Whereas some sports that are very American, like baseball and football,

You know, just those would not travel or translate well, I’m sure.

It’s true, but sometimes the idioms can travel without the sport.

Quarterbacking shows little signs of having done that,

Where it’s kind of separated from its origins and lives on its own

Without having to be associated with the sport.

That’s what’s happening to some of the baseball language.

It’s not common, but it does happen, and we can find it.

It’s just the cross-contamination of these different English dialects is too huge.

We watch a lot of their media, listen to a lot of their media, same for them of ours.

Is too much going back and forth.

There may, by the way, be an equivalent to quarterbacking.

It’s not that common, but if you talk about Thursday morning tippy-tappy,

That’s kind of like Monday morning quarterbacking.

Wait a minute.

Now, I don’t know if this is a real thing that people use,

But it did come up in one of my lists here.

I made a note of it.

So tippy-tappy refers to just kind of light passing back and forth on the soccer pitch, right?

And then, so Thursday morning, tippy-tappy,

Just to talk about all the kind of like bad plays of the night before.

So presumably Wednesday nights are the big football nights over there.

Yeah, I don’t know.

I have no idea.

But this is what I’ve uncovered.

I’m not very well exposed to that language.

I thought it was really a nice phrase, though.

So here we go, Thursday morning, tippy-tappy.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, sure.

But, you know, it’s a really good question,

And it sounds like you are in a great position to bring more questions like this to us.

We’d welcome your call in the future.

Okay.

Very good. Thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Yeah, there are lots of these great sports metaphors, like up stumps.

Do you know this one from crickets?

Up stumps? Is that crickets?

Yes, yes. You abandon the game.

Oh, you make them up?

Yeah, we up stumps and move to Dublin or something like that.

Up stumps and move to Dublin.

Yeah, and then there are great ones in other languages as well.

Certainly in Spanish, there are a lot of soccer-influenced phrases like transpirar la camiseta,

Which means to make your jersey really sweaty,

Which means that you worked really, really, really hard.

Okay, very good. Very, very good.

And that appears outside of a soccer context.

Yes, or to score a goal from midfield.

It’s sort of like a Hail Mary pass or something like that.

Okay, very good.

We’d love to hear your sports idioms that you think are untranslatable,

Particularly if they’re from outside the United States.

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

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We’re coming to you this week from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Take care.

Sayonara.