Cannibal Sandwich

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673.

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

And you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

I’ve been playing a lot of crosswords lately on my smartphone. I have an Android phone.

I’ve seen you do it.

And there’s a program on there called Shorties.

Shorties.

With a Z, not a real shorts.

Okay.

And it lets me choose from about a half dozen crossword puzzles.

And the thing is, coming back to crosswords after having been away for a while,

Just kind of refreshed my mind on the kinds of clues that they use.

And the crossword constructors are a pretty clever bunch.

Oh, yeah.

And so you’re getting in the minds of these really smart people.

And I just wanted to share with you a few of the things I was reminded of,

True of the ways that they put their puzzles together.

For example, one of the aha moments comes with double meanings.

Oh, yeah.

English words have a lot of double meanings, right?

For example, if I give you the clue Latin quarters and the space has four letters, what would you say?

It’s not pesos.

I’m thinking 25-cent pieces, Latin quarters.

Yeah, but remember, double meanings.

Latin quarters.

I don’t know.

Casa.

Oh, casa.

Right?

Because Spanish is a Latin language.

And quarters is also a way of saying rooms.

Sure.

Right?

So casa.

And you start to get into these, and you’re like, oh, okay, you clever devil.

Now I see what you’re up to.

Here, here’s another one.

If the clue is hula hoop with a question mark at the end.

Hula hoop?

Yeah.

Yeah, no, those question marks are significant.

That’s right.

They mean you can’t take it literally.

Right.

So it’s probably a figurative or punny answer.

How many letters?

Three.

O’s?

You land at the airport.

Yeah.

There’s a lovely Hawaiian woman.

Right.

She puts something around your neck.

A leg.

Yeah.

It’s a hoop because it’s in a circle.

And it’s Hawaiian, so the hula connotation, right?

Oh, man.

So sometimes it’s really, really tricky.

I just love this stuff.

I’m going to put a bunch of links on the website to some clever crossword clues that some people have collected, including Chuck Schneebel.

He’s got a great list.

But my all-time favorite I came across recently.

And this is a different kind of clue.

Okay.

And I’ll explain why after we’re done with it.

Name a city in Czechoslovakia in four letters.

In Czechoslovakia in four letters.

Yeah.

I have no idea.

Oslo.

Oslo is in Norway, but the letters O-S-L-O are inside the word.

So sometimes the questions are about the form of the word, the orthography of the word,

And have nothing to do with the meaning of the word.

Maybe I should start doing crosswords on a smartphone instead of…

Because I keep breaking so many pencils over these kinds of clues.

Yeah, but when you break a smartphone out of frustration, it’s a lot more expensive, trust me.

In any case, we’ll put some clever crossword clues on our website.

We’ll link to a bunch of pages with some great stuff.

And if you’d like to share yours, 1-877-929-9673.

Or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Antoinette, and I’m in Appleton, Wisconsin.

Hello, Antoinette.

Hi.

I have a question for you.

All right.

Okay.

And I would like to know if a cannibal sandwich is something that is peculiar to Wisconsin

And specifically to Milwaukee.

I thought you were just going to end with, is peculiar.

It sure sounds that way to me.

Okay, tell us what a cannibal sandwich is.

Cannibal sandwich starts out with a heaping pile of raw ground round steak.

And you take a piece of rye bread and you slather some butter on it,

And then you put a nice big chunk of this raw meat,

And you sprinkle liberally with salt and pepper, and then you top it with raw onion.

Antoinette, you should see Martha’s face.

She’s quite disgusted.

Well, I was describing this to my boss, who’s a vegetarian, and his eyes started rolling back into his head.

From pleasure or fear?

He looked like he was going to pass out.

Me too. Where are the smelling salts?

That must be an incredibly strong dish.

Is it associated with a particular holiday or time of day?

Is this a last meal?

Well, my experience with it, I’m originally from Milwaukee.

And when we went over to my uncle’s house for holidays, we’d have this big honking plate of raw meat,

And we’d make these sandwiches, and it was just so delicious.

And this was back in the day when people obviously didn’t know or didn’t care that maybe raw beef wasn’t the best thing for your health.

Yeah.

It’s so great because you get the chewy bread, and then the beef kind of melts into the butter,

And then you got the crunch of the raw onion on the top, and it’s just wonderful.

Nice.

I’m a carnivore myself.

I’d like to try that.

Cannibal sandwich.

Do you still eat these, Antoinette?

I have not for quite a while.

And you can get steak tartare in a restaurant, but that’s a little too dear and delicate.

This is a real sandwich sandwich.

I see.

This is a man’s dish.

Yes.

Or a woman’s dish.

A brute’s dish.

Yes.

Put hair on your chest no matter what your sex is.

Right.

Exactly.

Well, I got to say, your question then, in there somewhere in this delicious sounding food.

Speak for yourself.

You wanted to know if this was pertinent to your part of the country.

Yes.

Okay.

A colleague of ours by the name of Barry Poppick specializes in digging up food words.

And he has done some work on cannibal sandwich.

You can find his website at BarryPopick.com.

P-O-P-I-K.

Barry Poppick.

And he has found that it goes back to the 1880s and that he believes that it’s somehow in the 1890s, it was particularly popular in Philadelphia and Detroit.

And he finds many uses of it throughout the years.

And you can do your own search on Google News Archive and Google Books and just the raw Internet and find them with onion and rye bread.

And you’ll find that this still appears occasionally in cookbooks, but they’re not the kind of cookbooks that you’re going to make wedding food from.

They’re not the kind of cookbooks where you’re planning the dessert to serve the new in-laws.

Oh, my gosh.

No.

Well, Grant, what about the distribution?

I’ve seen references to it in Texas.

Yeah, all over the place.

I don’t think that there’s a strong regional component.

Certainly in the 1880s and 1890s, the western part of the United States wasn’t overly developed.

I mean, it wasn’t like there were massive cities out here at the time.

There wasn’t a great deal happening.

I mean, plenty of towns out here.

It’s just they’re a lot smaller than they are now.

So it’s hard to really pin it down and say that it, I don’t know,

The diaconic information is not clear.

I was mentioning this to somebody who is from eastern Pennsylvania,

And he had never heard of it.

Yeah, this looks like it’s a kind of dish that’s passed from father to son.

Well, if you were a little boy, wouldn’t you think you were so cool eating a cannibal sandwich?

Here’s one recipe from a Fort Worth, Texas newspaper from 1907.

Put a half a pound of raw beef through a meat chopper.

Add a teaspoonful of salt, a dash of red pepper, and a tablespoon of onion juice.

Spread this over buttered rye bread.

Cover with another piece of bread and trim away the crust.

I love that.

You’re putting raw meat on rye bread and you’re going to take the crust off.

They’re going to cut it diagonally too, right?

And serve it on a saucer.

With a little porcelain teacup.

Oh, wow.

Antoinette, I bet you’re bringing back lots of memories for lots of people.

I hope I am.

I hope I am.

Probably making other ones like me cringe.

I’m going to go to menu pages and see if I can find this in San Diego.

Okay.

Antoinette, thanks for calling and sharing.

Doesn’t look like there’s a regional component to it.

It’s not particular to any part of the country, but boy, that’s a great word.

Cannibal sandwich.

There’s not really a cannibal in there, right?

Gosh, I hope not.

I hope not.

Serve it with graveyard stew, right?

Thanks so much.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, Grant, don’t we love those food words from people’s memory banks?

Wow.

Cannibal sandwich.

Jinx, you owe me coke.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org,

Or try us on Facebook at facebook.com slash waywordradio.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

I do.

Who is this?

I’m Russell from Dallas.

All right, Russell.

Welcome to the program, Russell.

What can we do you for?

Well, I have something that’s puzzled me.

I try and stay hip to the lingo of the young people.

And I’m pretty familiar with the way they use the terms way and no way, for instance.

One dude is telling another dude a story, and it sounds outlandish.

So the guy says, no way, which the dude retorts.

Way. And, you know, it’s a counterpoint point thing. Right. But then I’ve heard this other

Thing down in Austin where somebody will tell like a self-deprecating story and then at the

End of it, they’ll punctuate it with the term duh. And so sometimes another person jumps into

The conversation and says duh in response. And I think that’s an insult. But then I’ve heard this

Other one where they say, no, duh. And I’m not sure how to take it. I mean, do you guys have a clue?

Not always, but maybe on this one. I’m not quite sure that it’s the same usage that I grew up with,

But it sure sounds like it. And I think it’s a different phenomenon than way and no way.

Most people knew that from the early 90s. I know it was used in Wayne’s World in 1992.

No way.

Yeah, way.

Oh, way.

And it was definitely earlier than that, but that was a moment of popularity for way, no way.

And da and doi and der, which are variations on the theme, and no da and no doi and no der go back even further.

When we first heard from you about this, Russell, I put up a survey on the web to ask people about this

And a couple of the forms of it that we can’t say on the air, like no blank, Sherlock.

Gee, what would that be?

And it turns out that people have been saying duh, at least they’ve reported saying duh since the 1940s and probably earlier.

So we have a lot of people telling us their birth date, where they’re from, and which one they say, duh or doinder.

And duh, by far and away, is the one that they all say.

And a lot of people, however, also say no duh.

And they’re kind of contradictory, aren’t they?

Right?

Like Martha says to me, did you get a haircut?

And I say, no duh.

You know, I’m like, I went from long locks to bald head, right?

But I might also say, duh.

And so they’re exactly the same meaning, but just slightly different form.

As far as I can tell in this little throwaway survey that I did, I don’t see a difference.

But there’s no way to really test this without talking to tens of thousands of people.

If only I had a way to get this question out to a lot of people at once.

Well, we’ll see.

Russell, what we’re going to do then is we’re going to put this out to our listeners who have this magnificent ability to bring us a great deal of data all at once.

How do you use duh and no duh?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send your duhs and no duhs in email to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you’ve got something to say about no duh and no doy, well, we welcome those, too.

I appreciate your explanation.

I look forward to the survey results.

Yeah, me, too.

We’ll talk about that on the air and we’ll put something out in our newsletter, okay?

Very good.

Cheers, folks.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

On an earlier show, we were talking about childhood misunderstandings, like when you’re little and you think a cat burglar is going to come steal your cat, that kind of thing.

We got a lot of responses from folks on that.

Libby in Fort Worth, Texas, called us to say that when she was a child, she would never eat cotton candy.

Because she thought it was made out of cotton.

And she thought, well, there must be some people who can eat cotton candy and digest it,

But I can’t, so she never ate cotton candy.

Still doesn’t to this day.

Poor thing, she’s missing out.

Your misunderstandings, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send them to words@waywordradio.org.

Get ready to flex that cortex.

We have puzzles coming up on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined now by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hello, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

Hiya, John.

What’s cooking?

Well, you know, I’m getting ready to go to the National Book Awards ceremony in a couple weeks.

The finalists have already been announced and I get to go because, as you know, my wife was one of the judges in nonfiction.

And, oh, I’m all excited.

And Patti Smith is one of the nominees.

I’m going to get to meet her and a whole bunch of other people.

Yeah, yeah.

It should be cool.

I hope she’ll be there.

I should think she would be.

You know, we did a quiz about nonfiction a little while ago.

Yeah.

And I have one here about novels.

So you want to try it?

Oh, sure.

Sure.

Why not?

Since we’re here.

Can you tell me who is being described in the passages of literature that I’ve excerpted here?

Okay.

Oh, okay.

I’ll give you some clues.

Okay, here’s the first one.

In height, he was rather over six feet and so excessively lean that he seemed to be considerably taller.

His eyes were sharp and piercing, save during those intervals of torpor to which I have alluded,

And his thin hawk-like nose gave his whole expression.

Yes, Sherlock Holmes.

Nice.

Nice work.

An air of alertness and decision.

The word torpor gave it away.

Yeah.

That’s from A Study in Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle.

Nice.

Nice.

Off to a good start.

Here’s the next one.

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast cereal air of health, a soap and lemon cleanness, a rough pink darkening in the cheeks.

Her mouth was large, her nose upturned.

A pair of dark glasses blotted out her eyes.

It was a face beyond childhood, yet this side of belonging to a woman.

I thought her anywhere between 16 and 30.

As it turned out, she was shy two months of her 19th birthday.

That’s all I’m going to give you.

I was going to say Nabokov.

Yeah, I was going to say Lolita, but…

No.

That’s not ages wrong.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I’ll tell you, one of the words in the title of the book is actually in this first line.

For all her chic thinness, she had an almost breakfast cereal air of health.

Breakfast?

Mm—

Ed?

Yes.

Tiffany?

Yes.

Do you know the character?

What is it?

Is it Holly Golightly?

It is Holly Golightly.

Very good.

From Breakfast at Tiffany’s Truman Capote’s work.

Here’s the next one.

Our gentleman was approximately 50 years old.

His complexion was weathered, his flesh scrawny, his face gaunt,

And he was a very early riser and a great lover of the hunt.

Our gentleman.

This is, by the way, translated from the Spanish?

Oh.

Is it Don Quixote?

Yes, it is Don Quixote.

Some claim that his family name was Quijada or Quesada,

For there is a certain amount of disagreement among the authors.

I would have given it away if you could.

Yeah, I wouldn’t quite go that far.

Here’s the next one.

A squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner,

Hard and sharp as flint,

From which no steel had ever struck out generous fire,

Secret and self-contained and solitary as an oyster.

The cold from within him froze his old features,

Nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek, stiffened his gait,

Made his eyes red, his thin lips blue,

And spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice.

Was that from A Christmas Carol?

Yes.

Scrooge?

Ebenezer Scrooge.

A frosty rhyme was on his head and on his eyebrows and on his wiry chin.

He carried his own low temperature always about with him.

He iced his office in the dog days and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.

Nice.

That’s Ebenezer Scrooge.

Very good.

Thank you, Mr. Dickens.

Here’s the next one.

An old man with a staff.

He had a tall, pointed blue hat, a long gray cloak.

Gandalf the Gray.

Very good.

Gandalf the Gray.

Mithra Deer.

And you know where this description is from?

Is it from The Hobbit?

It’s from The Hobbit, yes.

Very good.

Here’s the next one.

Very tall, thin, and brown, and reminded one of a cult, for she never seemed to know what to do with her long limbs, which were very much in her way.

She had a decided mouth, a comical nose, and sharp gray eyes, which appeared to see everything and were by turns fierce, funny, or thoughtful.

Her long, thick hair was her one beauty, but it was usually bundled into a net to be out of the way.

Any guesses?

I don’t know.

One of Jane Austen’s characters or something.

I was thinking Charlotte Bronte or something.

I don’t know.

I have no idea.

Yeah, this one’s probably one of the toughest ones.

I’ll give you a little more.

Round shoulders had Joe, big hands and feet.

Oh, from Little Women.

Yes, Joe March from Little Women.

Very good.

I hope you get this one.

This is funny.

He was roughly humanoid in appearance, except for the extra head and third arm.

Is that Zephod Beeblebrox?

It is Zephod Beeblebrox from Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.

I didn’t even manage to mention his fair tousled hair stuck out in random directions.

His blue eyes glinted with something completely unidentifiable, and his chins were almost always unshaven.

And for those of you in the far galaxies, the secret is to bang the rocks together, guys.

Glad there are fans in the booth.

Okay, here’s the last one.

He was a lovely boy, clad in skeleton leaves and the juices that ooze out of trees.

But the most entrancing thing about him was that he had all his first teeth.

It’s not Mowgli, is it?

No.

When he saw she was a grown-up, he gnashed the little pearls at her.

And he would only ever have all his first teeth.

Oh, Peter Pan.

Yes, Peter Pan, little boy who never grew up.

Well, that was great.

You guys were fantastic.

Grant ate my lunch on that quiz.

I was just making up for all those times when Martha carries the weight and I just recline on the lounger here.

Oh, gosh.

That was tough, but fun.

Go read a book, everyone.

Go read one of these books.

If you want to talk about books in writing or language, grammar, slang, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

You can always find us on Facebook.

We’re there under the username WayWord.

And you can email us at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Thank you. This is Sean calling from Paris City, Michigan.

Hi, Sean. Welcome to the program.

I have a question about rigging things.

I’ve heard this three different ways.

I’ve heard jury rig, I’ve heard jerry rig,

And I used to work in a travel agency with an IT department,

And a man who used to say Gary rigged.

Gary rigged?

Yes, and I was convinced for the longest time,

And this is going to make me sound like an idiot,

That there was a gentleman named Gary who worked in the IT department

Who could fix anything.

There wasn’t, but I was totally convinced of it.

So you’re always waiting for Gary, huh?

Yes.

I was like, can you just send the guy already?

And he never showed up.

That’s great.

No, he never showed up.

Well, as far as I know, the jury rigged is an old expression that goes back to a jury mast,

Which was a makeshift mast on a boat.

And if your mast broke or you lost it somehow, it was replaced by something called a jury mast.

It may come from an old French word that means to help.

But then jerry-rigged comes along and there’s also jerry-built.

Yeah, which is a little different.

Yeah, which kind of influences, I think, the jerry-rig.

Yeah, they kind of like start to blend, right?

Yeah.

So in other words, Martha, this is hundreds of years old, right?

The jury-rig.

There’s this jerrymast. You might lose your mast of your ship in a storm and have to replace it with something that wasn’t really meant for the job, right?

Right.

And so that’s the jerrymast?

That would be, yeah. And you would refer to that as jerryrigging, which is a noun.

And then that became a verb.

So you would jerryrig anything, not just a mast. You might jerryrig a patch for the side of the boat or something ashore.

Or your pants, for that matter. Okay.

And then, Shonda, what happens is it leaves the nautical world.

Around the 1840s or so, we start to see this description in British newspapers of houses being jerry-built, J-E-R-R-Y.

And what this means is kind of a shoddy construction or that they’ve been made of tar paper and scrap lumber, the kind of thing that burns really easily.

And this begins to have its own life.

And before too long, we end up with these two really strong terms in English that a lot of people think are interchangeable.

The jury rigged and jerry built.

And jerry built and jerry rigged kind of coexist for a long time.

And then people begin to confuse them and mesh their meanings together and mess their uses together.

And now for a lot of people, the jerry from jerry built goes with the rig of jury rigged.

Does that make a lot of sense?

Not at all.

Fascinating.

Not at all, but it’s fascinating.

The brief summary of it is that people made a muddle of English.

Who’d have thunk it?

Ha! Darn them, people!

But what it is, there’s such a long history in all of these different forms of this word,

And it all hinges, as far as I’m concerned, on that sound of jury or jerry.

There’s such a long history.

There’s plenty of time there for people to confuse these and to make a muddle,

And even to borrow them intentionally for new uses.

It’s not just it’s all accidental or wrong-headed.

Sometimes there’s people do this because we’re English speakers.

We like to take words and repurpose them and put them to new work.

Right.

So you have jury rig, which means sort of makeshift.

It’s sort of a workaround, I guess you would say, in the IT world.

And then you have jerry built, which is shoddy, crummy workmanship, right?

Yeah.

And so what about Gary?

Who is Gary?

No.

Who is Gary?

I have to say, I’ve never heard that.

None of my dictionaries have a thing about that.

I think there are a few jokes you might find online where people use it,

And a couple of things were just patently wrong.

Whoever was using that in your office was either making a joke or doesn’t know how to read.

Oh, well, and that’s very possible.

So you asked around your office and.

Yeah.

And nobody had any history of anyone named Gary ever even working there.

So it’s just like.

He’s a figment of somebody’s imagination there, I think.

Unless we get all these emails and phone calls from listeners telling us that they know who Gary is.

Oh, sure.

If we find out, we’ll let you know, Sean.

That would be fantastic.

Okay.

Well, cool.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for talking to me.

Appreciate it.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

You can call us at 1-877-929-9673, or you can always email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Earlier we were talking about crossword clues, or I was.

Well, there’s a great site called crosswordese.com, C-R-O-S-S-W-O-R-D-E-S-E.com.

Okay.

And they post clever clues of the month, and I wondered if I could test you with a couple of those.

Oh, please do.

All right.

This is a crossword clue.

Okay.

Letters from your parents.

That has a question mark on the end.

Letters from my parents.

And how many letters?

Three?

Three?

DNA.

Yeah.

That’s pretty cool, right?

Yeah.

How about this one?

It’s often carried around a gym.

It’s often carried around a GYM.

-huh.

Okay.

How many letters?

Four.

It’s not fungal infections.

It’s often carried around a gym.

It’s odor.

Oh, odor.

Very good.

Boy, that brings me some.

And this one is the last one.

Sound elicited by an electric can opener?

So there’s a question mark at the end,

Which is why I say it that way.

Sound elicited by, and how many letters?

Four.

Four letters, so it’s not lid, it’s not,

I have no idea.

Meow.

Oh!

If you’ve got some crossword clues you’d like to share with us,

Drop us a line, words@waywordradio.org,

Or give us a ring on the telephone,

1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, thank you, this is Sean, how are you doing?

Hi, Sean. Doing well. And you?

Yeah. Loving life.

Loving life.

Oh, that’s nice to hear. Where are you loving life?

I am at Camp Pendleton, California.

Oh, well. How are you doing?

I have an inside job when the weather is bad.

Oh, nice. What do you do there?

I’m a public affairs officer for Marine Corps Installations West.

What can we do for you today?

Well, the word I was interested in, I’ve heard it just very periodically throughout my career.

It’s the word gyrene.

And it’s an old term.

I don’t think it’s been used probably at least since the Vietnam era, supposedly for a Marine.

I think it’s World War II slang, maybe a little bit earlier.

And just over the years, occasionally I look around and do a little bit of research on it,

And I’ve just never come to a real conclusion as to the origin.

Sean, how are you spelling it?

That’s G-Y-R-E-N-E, and then pronounced gyrene.

But it’s still sort of out there, perhaps in the ancient terminology of the Marine Corps,

And I just haven’t been able to nail down its origin.

Yeah, it is really ancient.

It predates the Korean War.

It predates World War II.

It predates World War I.

Okay.

The first uses of it start appearing in print in the 1890s.

I mean, according to what I’m reading,

This is a period in which the Marine Corps is actually smaller

Than the New York City police force.

So it’s definitely kind of early days.

And the theory that you propose that it’s GI plus Marine

Is the most common theory,

But it has been successfully debunked as far as I’m concerned.

I like debunking.

Yeah, me too, because I always like to get to the truth.

Right.

There’s a fellow by the name of Dr. Jonathan Leiter

Who worked on the Historical Dictionary of American Slang,

And I worked alongside him, and he specializes in military slang.

And so he’s the man who drafted this entry

For the Historical Dictionary of American Slang,

And this is a scholarly work.

He says, origin uncertain, but perhaps a jocular adaptation

Of a Greek word, G-Y-R-I-N-O-S,

Which means tadpole or poliwog.

And so this is a joke about the, you know,

The literal marine nature of these fighting troops.

Interesting. Sure, because our stock and trade is our amphibious capability.

And there are similar words in Italian and Portuguese and Latin

That are spelled more or less the same, and they mean tadpole.

The great thing about it is it just kind of clicks for you when you hear it, right?

You’re like, okay, I could see how you might try to belittle a man

By saying that he wasn’t really this awesome seafaring fighting force.

He was just a tadpole.

He’s a pollywog.

And even more interesting, in the early days, this term was used in the Navy as well.

It wasn’t just exclusive to the Marines.

And it even shows up a little bit in an Army literature.

Referring to Army soldiers?

Yeah, gyrene.

Yeah, gyrenes referring to Army soldiers and to seamen in the Navy.

Yeah, interesting.

Some of the stuff I’ve seen suggested is a derogatory term when applied to Marines.

But within the service, we’re always happy to take what other people think is a derogatory term and call each other that happily.

Oh, sure.

There was a fellow by the name of Albert Moe, M-O-E, and he wrote an article in their Journal of American Speech in the 1960s.

And he claims that the term never really was completely derogatory.

And it didn’t even start out that way.

And the derogatory uses usually came from a misinterpretation of the term from the outside, usually friendly.

There’s a great quote that I love from 1919 in the Literary Digest.

And I have to read this to you because it says,

If you find a fellow with a rooster on top of the earth on his hat, he’s one of them gyrenes.

And look out, he’s a bad man.

Wow, I want to be critical.

And that’s from 1919.

So, you know, Marines clearly had earned a reputation by that time of being, you know, tough fellows that you didn’t want to mess with.

You didn’t want to cross the street when they’re coming your way, I guess.

I like it.

Thank you so much for calling today, Sean.

No, thank you for taking the call.

I appreciate it.

Especially your research.

That’s great.

All right.

Take care.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye.

Let’s get into some history together.

Call us with a word that, well, maybe it’s out of use, but you still want to know more about it.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send your historical questions to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another one of those childhood misunderstandings we were talking about on an earlier show.

Linda Floyd from Valdosta, Georgia, called us to say that when her son was a toddler, he had a lot of allergies and colds.

And one time she turned to him in the car when he was coughing and she said,

Baby, are you a little horse?

And she said she’ll never forget the look in his eyes.

You know, he was trying to figure out, why is my mommy asking me if I’m a pony?

That’s pretty good.

I love that.

That reminds me of a time my son was refusing to brush his teeth before bedtime.

And I was like, you better get in here.

There’s a toothbrush with your name on it.

And he came in here and he picked up the toothbrush.

And he’s like, he points to the words Oral-B and he says, is that my name?

Oh, gosh, how great is that?

Share your stories about language with us, 1-877-929-9673.

Call us anytime, night or day.

Or you can send them an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Keep those calls about language coming.

We’ll take more of them in just a moment here on A Way with Words.

¶¶

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Marth, I’m chuffed.

You are?

Yes.

Are you chuffed to the mint balls?

I am indeed. Unicode 6 has come out.

I knew I’d get silence.

Unicode 6 is like a map for all the ways that you can write human language.

Oh, well, I’m sort of chuffed, I guess.

Tell me more.

Imagine this.

You’re studying, say, Mayan, right?

Yeah.

And you’re doing it on a computer.

You don’t want to handwrite all those little characters, right?

No.

You need a typeface on your computer that will do that.

Well, Unicode 6 is the map for that.

You can punch in some keys and it will type Mayan on your computer,

Which is like a time warp happening on your desktop.

It’s crazy.

And Unicode 6 has added a lot more stuff, a lot more languages.

For my work as a dictionary editor, they also have the International Phonetic Alphabet that’s been apart for a long time.

But they’ve added things like the Japanese equivalent of emoticons.

Emoji? Do you know these?

No.

The little faces that you make out of punctuation?

No.

Just like we would with, you know.

In Japanese?

Yeah, yeah.

So those are now a part of Unicode.

But let’s just put it the way.

What it is, it’s bringing order to all the mess that our human scripts for language.

If you want to be able to work in all these scripts, if you want to type in a language that works from right to left like Arabic or Hebrew.

Somebody does.

Yeah.

If you want to make complex characters in Japanese or Chinese that require you overlay or intermesh two different characters to create a final one, right?

You need a very sophisticated roadmap to do that.

And Unicode 6 is the latest version of that map.

Who’s making the map?

It’s a consortium called the Unicode Consortium.

It’s got partners like Microsoft and Apple and all of these companies get together because they realize that all these other systems weren’t interoperable.

You know, imagine that you had to have a special kind of gasoline for each car, right?

Or imagine the prongs in your house weren’t pretty standardized as they are, right?

You basically have two different kinds of prongs now, right?

Unicode 6 is that standardization for representing TypeScripts on a computer.

It’s great.

So if I want to type in Hindi or my language?

Any language you could, including many dead languages.

Really?

Yeah, like Linear A.

I’m serious.

I’m not even kidding.

These languages that we may not even fully have translated have characters.

I mean, we’re talking tens of thousands of characters are mapped in Unicode 6.

It’s wonderful.

If you want to find out more about Unicode 6, we’ll link to it and include some of the images from the update.

Call us, 1-877-929-9673, or send those emails in Unicode to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, buongiorno. This is Paul from Dallas, Texas.

Buongiorno.

Come sta?

Sto bene, boy.

What can we do for you, Paul?

Well, I live in the Tower of Babel.

My wife is Italian, and we’ve lived in different countries across Europe.

Mm—

And now, and we’ve picked up languages along the way,

And children and children who speak languages to varying degrees.

And so when we sit down for dinner, there’s sort of a confused atmosphere.

Not everybody understands what everybody’s saying.

And, of course, if we have dinner guests, there’s nobody there.

Oh, right.

Oh, man, I want to come to your house for dinner.

That sounds like a blast.

Well, yeah, the food’s good, too.

I bet.

But my wife has these sayings from Italian that even when she’s speaking English now, they’re sort of misunderstood.

And I was wondering if you knew what some of these might actually mean.

Oh, okay.

Going to give us a quiz then?

Yeah.

Okay.

Sure.

All right.

The first one is, I can put my hand on the fire.

I can put my hand on the fire.

Is it something that has to do with you’re looking for something and she’s trying to tell you that you’re really close to it?

Like you’re getting warm?

Yeah, you’re like you’re getting warm.

No, you’re cold.

You’re cold, yeah.

Well, you know, I live with an Argentinian and I think, you know, and there’s a lot of Italian influence there.

So I may have to disqualify myself from that.

Oh, you know the answer.

Go for it.

I think I might.

If it has to do with, I could put my hand on the fire, it means I swear it’s true?

Exactly.

Oh, very good.

But I never knew why.

Well, yeah, and I don’t know exactly.

I’ve only heard rumors.

And I think most of these expressions you never really know where they came from.

But it comes from ancient Rome.

And that something that they did in maybe one of the temples or the rites to swear to the god you would actually have to hold your hand over some sort of fire on the altar.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

So you really believe it’s true.

Yeah.

I’m not sure I believe the origin’s true.

What else did she say?

Here’s another one.

The watermelon isn’t always red on the inside.

The watermelon isn’t always red on the inside.

What does that mean?

Is that you can’t tell a book by its cover?

You’re getting warm, yeah.

I don’t know.

Yeah, it’s similar to that.

They eat a lot of watermelon there.

And, of course, the good watermelons are red on the inside.

So sometimes when you do something, it doesn’t come out right.

And so it’s sort of the Italian equivalent of life is like a box of chocolates.

Oh, you never know what you’re going to get.

Yeah.

So sometimes it’s good, sometimes it’s bad.

Oh, very good.

So she just tosses these things off, assuming that there’s the same expression in English?

I think so.

Yeah, yeah.

I think so.

Although over time what happens is her, and this happens to me when I’m speaking a foreign language,

Is eventually you realize that people don’t understand you.

Exactly.

But then your language becomes really bland because you stop using these wonderful, colorful expressions even if nobody understands.

Paul, this is rich stuff.

Never a dull moment in your house, it sounds like.

No, it’s not.

My life has been compared to one long episode of I Love Lucy.

Oh, yeah.

I can totally see that.

Only she’s the Ricky Ricardo character, right?

You’ve got the explaining to do.

Well, Paul, I want to thank you for sharing these stories with us.

This is great.

Thank you so much.

Okay, thanks.

Love the show.

Thanks a lot.

Ciao.

Holy moly.

Oh, man.

Well, I know that there are lots of great stories like that out there.

Tell us about your Tower of Babel in your home.

1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Beth calling from Keller, Texas. How are you?

We’re just great, Beth. Thanks for calling. How are you?

I’m great. Good to speak with you both.

And I am calling about a really exotic topic related to dry cleaning, of all things.

What is an exotic concerning dry cleaning?

My question, I have been transplanted from the Midwest down south for many years,

But I grew up in Madison, Wisconsin in the 60s and 70s

And recall the era of one-hour martinizing dry cleaning shops.

And recently when I was back in Milwaukee visiting my mother-in-law, saw this.

And so my curiosity, we don’t have those in Texas.

I travel around.

I don’t see that.

And my question, Martha and Grant, was really sort of what does the word mean,

Where did it come from, and why do some dry cleaners still refer to that as martinizing?

So I hope you can help.

Oh, sure.

Piece of cake.

You’re creating a mental image for me because where I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, we had one hour martinizing.

And I can picture the little piece of paper that goes over the coat hanger, right?

When you get your clothes back and it says martinizing and the letters get really big.

Yeah.

Well, it doesn’t have anything to do with martinis.

Oh.

Oh, darn.

Yeah, it’s dry cleaning.

But it has to do with a technique of dry cleaning that was patented by a guy named Henry Martin back in 1949.

I mean, think about dry cleaning.

Dry cleaning is really weird, isn’t it?

Why?

What’s so weird about it?

Don’t you think it’s weird that you take your clothes to this place and they come back magically cleaned and they didn’t put anything, they didn’t wash them?

But they crushed the buttons.

I mean, do you know what I’m talking about, Beth?

When you were a kid, didn’t you think it was a kind of magical thing?

I still think it’s magical.

I think it’s, yes, it is.

It is.

So what did he do differently?

Well, here’s the deal.

Back in the mid-19th century, dry cleaning was invented by this Frenchman whose last name was Jolie, I think.

And he discovered that, or maybe his housekeeper discovered it.

That’s what I’m betting.

His housekeeper accidentally knocked over some kerosene onto a table, and they realized that the tablecloth was cleaner where the kerosene was.

And so they figured out that you could use things like gasoline and kerosene to clean clothes.

But that’s kind of dangerous.

And so for a long time, dry cleaning establishments were sort of out of town, and you would drop off your dry cleaning,

And then they would take your dry cleaning to this safe place to do the dry cleaning.

This guy, Henry Martin, who was from Buffalo, New York, in the late 1940s,

Figured out how you could do this using materials that weren’t flammable.

A different chemical altogether, right?

Yeah. And so that meant that you could do the dry cleaning right there on the spot

Rather than sending it off to the industrial tires.

So you could have one hour martinizing, which is kind of like the established phrase for that.

So this is a trademarked name, a trademarked process.

You still have to get your stores licensed, right?

It’s like a licensed franchise or something like that?

I think so.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s Martinizing and then there’s not Martinizing.

Well, you know, you’ve explained something that I’ve long wondered about.

In New York City, a lot of the dry cleaners advertise themselves as French cleaners or French dry cleaning.

Oh, really?

And I think it’s just to differentiate themselves from the Martin system.

Oh, really?

The Martin method, yeah.

I wonder.

But I guess it’s curious then.

I just wondered if there was some sort of regional difference with the word, but you’ve explained it, that it’s probably this patented franchise.

But I was just very curious nonetheless.

And the stores, according to an article that I saw, the stores, the official martinizing stores that could do that, there were never that many of them.

And they were not necessarily widely spread.

The 500 maybe, just not that many.

It wasn’t the kind of thing you’re going to find in every town and village.

Right. So it’s like the white castles of laundry.

Gotcha.

Sure, yeah.

Mystery solved.

Glad we could help, Beth.

Well, thank you so much. A pleasure, and I really enjoy the show.

Oh, yay, thanks.

Thanks so much.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Beth.

Bye-bye.

Well, from day to day, from the things that we do in our lives,

We encounter words along the way that we’re not quite sure about, right?

Yes.

You have these questions, you make notes, sometimes you ask somebody,

Sometimes you don’t.

Well, we’re the people to ask.

That’s right.

1-877-929-9673 or send those word questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, here are a couple more crossword clues from crosswordese.com.

Okay, I’m ready.

And you’re a preacher’s daughter.

Right.

So this one’s for you.

Okay.

Cover of the Bible.

So it’s a question.

Cover of the Bible.

The answer is two words.

Oh, it is?

I was going to say Jesus Christ Superstar.

But no, I have no idea.

Fig leaf.

Oh.

Very nice.

Very nice.

And here’s another one, Martha.

Source of relief?

It’s a question.

Seven letters.

Seven letters.

Source of relief?

So I’m thinking Tums, Rolaids, aspirin.

But it’s a question, so it’s got to be something funny, right?

Well, right.

It’s not the meaning that you might have first thought.

That’s what the question mark means.

Oh, like a dugout?

A bullpen.

Oh, a bullpen.

Yeah, a relief pitcher.

Okay, a relief pitcher.

Share your favorite crossword clues with us, words@waywordradio.org or 1-877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jeff Russell from Greenwood, Indiana.

Hey, Jeff.

Hi, Jeff. Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

I had kind of a question that my 20-year-old daughters, I have twin daughters, were teasing me about this last week.

Okay.

A phrase that I use is, that I don’t even realize I use, is I will say something as slick when I mean that it is great or good.

Mm—

Mm—

And they said, where does it come from?

And, of course, I had no answer for them.

Mm—

So I was just curious.

Oh, you didn’t make one up?

No, I didn’t make it up.

They’re 20.

They’re not gold anymore.

Right, right.

You know, it’s not like I use Groovy a lot.

So you call good things slick, and you don’t mean it in a negative way.

Because I might call something slick, and I would mean that it was shiny on the outside but rotten to the core, maybe.

Right, right.

Yeah, a little wily.

Yeah, something who’s slick is just a little trying to get.

A little greasy.

Yeah, greasy, trying to get by with something, right?

-huh.

So they’re 20, and how old are you, Jeff, if you don’t mind me asking?

I am 52.

52, okay.

Slick, I have slick in my vocabulary, but I have both, Martha.

I have both the negative and the positive uses of slick.

Yeah, more and more I guess I have the negative, like slick willy, you know?

A little bit too, yeah.

Yeah, exactly, just a little too, what are we looking for?

Just weaselly, right?

Yeah, yeah, but then I’m pretty young.

But the interesting thing about slick is that it’s got a much longer history with these non-literal uses than you might expect, Jeff.

Oh, really?

Because one of my daughters made the comment, is it like slicked back hair, like it was cool during the 50s?

You know, something like that.

Here’s the thing.

It’s hundreds of years old.

Really?

Yeah.

It’s changed over the years.

But these non-literal uses of slick, they don’t actually mean smooth to the touch or slippery to the touch.

For example, the Oxford English Dictionary, which, of course, is the go-to source when you really want the deep history on something,

Unless you have to do the work yourself, which we are happy to do.

But in this particular case, they have a great entry on this, so no extra work is required.

And they have a citation from 1599.

Let’s just call it 1600.

Smooth and plausible.

So it means sleek.

All right.

So that’s a little different than slick, right?

So it’s the idea that you tell me something and it’s so kind of acceptable to me that it’s slick.

And that’s positive, right?

That’s positive.

A little bit later, it starts to develop a little bit more and we get variations where it means adroit or deft, quick, smart, skillful in action or execution.

Okay.

I can kind of see that.

Slick meaning, you know, just working just right.

Just like doing the right, you know, he’s a slick ball player.

You could just see that, right?

And then we get to the meaning that’s more in line with what you’re talking about,

Except it hasn’t turned negative yet.

First class, excellent, neat, in good order, smart, efficient, operating smoothly,

Superficially attractive, glibly clever.

And it’s that last part where we start to see in the 1830s or so,

Slick kind of flipped the switch, right?

And it goes from generally being positive to generally being negative

With some residue of the positive left around.

So you can actually have a slick operation

And have it both be an insult and a compliment.

-huh. That’s very interesting.

So it’s a long history.

So you can tell your daughters that you are in tuned

With the history of the English language by using slick.

And it’s not something from the corrupt days of your youth.

Yeah, right.

It goes way back before you were slicking your hair back.

Right, right.

When you were wearing your zoot suit and running around on your scooter or whatever it was.

Exactly.

A little before my time.

Yeah, yeah, it was.

I grant that.

In any case, so now we have the modern-day Slick, and it’s still going strong,

And you should tell your daughters that as well.

They may not use it, but there are plenty of 20- and 30-year-olds who might know Slick

And use it unironically without any kind of awareness at all that it might be dated.

Yeah, so put them in the car, take them on a drive to Chicago, and tell them all about it.

Sounds like just a trip to them.

They’re running.

Well, Jeff, thanks for calling today. Glad to help.

Hey, thanks for the answer.

Give us a call sometime if you have another one.

All right, great. Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Give us a call with your language, questions, comments, 1-877-929-9673,

Or put it all in email to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message,

Even when we’re not on the air, call us at 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

You can stay in touch with us all week on Facebook.

Look for us there under Wayword Radio.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell and Jennifer Powell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by a nonprofit organization, Wayword, Inc.

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Bye-bye.

Hasta luego.

You say either and I say either.

You say neither and I say neither.

Either, either, neither, neither.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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