Catch My Fade (episode #1413)

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. Sometimes I think there are two kinds of people in the world.

The kind of people who come across an unfamiliar word in a text and they just keep reading.

And then other people like me who can’t resist looking it up. And I can’t resist looking up these words because I find out all kinds of other interesting stuff besides what the author was talking about. Yesterday, I came across the word pegafilic. Do you know this word?

Pagophilic. So philic probably meaning love of or liking.

Yes, liking.

But I don’t know what pago is.

Pago, P-A-G-O, comes from the Greek word for ice or frost.

And so you can talk about pagophilic animals like seals or certain kinds of birds. They’re pagophilic.

So when they get a cool rum drink, they want ice in it.

Something like that.

But the fun part about that for me was that it sent me down this pagophilic rabbit hole where I also came across words like pagophagia.

People who eat ice?

Yes, yes.

The condition of eating ice?

Yes, yes.

There are people who eat ice compulsively, often because they have an iron deficiency. There are ice-chewing enthusiasts who have support groups online.

Do they have contests, like conventions for ice-chewing?

They have a bulletin board where they discuss the best kinds of ice machines and that kind of thing.

Wow, really?

Yeah, Vince Gill, the country music star, is a big ice chomper.

Now, this is very bad for your teeth. I’m not recommending it.

But what I am recommending is looking up words that are unfamiliar to you when you’re reading them in a text.

Now, on a Kindle or a smartphone, you can usually just hold down on the word that you don’t know when you’re reading a book.

And it will call up a dictionary and that helps you out.

And it doesn’t really take you out of the narrative.

But when you’re reading a paper, particularly fiction, looking up a word means the whole thing, everything that the author has worked so hard to make you feel dissipates by the time you get back to the book.

There is that problem, isn’t there?

Yeah.

So my strategy for this is sometimes I do note cards. Sometimes I just skip the word.

If the word keeps coming up, obviously I look it up.

But it’s hard.

Maybe you do it at the end of the chapter rather than right on the spot.

Yeah, but then you have to go back to the beginning and it’s challenging.

I do have a strategy supposedly for marking words that I need to look up.

And there’s a particular way I bend the bottom corner of a page of books that I own.

Depending on how far you bend it up in the little white space shows you how far up the page the word is to be found.

And usually I can re-find it with no trouble after I’m done with the book.

And you should go back, you look it up, and you re-read the context, and then you get the word.

Well, how do you manage the problem of looking up words?

Do you stop everything down and run to the dictionary, or do you make a note, or what do you do?

Give us a call at 877-929-9673, or send your thoughts about reading and writing and language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Cassie and I’m calling from Tallahassee.

Hi, Kathy. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. How are you?

Oh, we’re great here. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, my question is about the phrase cease and desist. I want to know where it comes from and when it’s appropriate to use.

Because whenever I looked up the words, they always just said the opposite of each other.

So like when you looked up the word cease, it meant to stop, desist. Or when you looked up desist, it meant to stop, cease.

So it kind of just sounds like you’re saying stop and stop.

It’s kind of like a new form of time travel, right? You just keep going into the dictionary loop.

See Dictionary A.

Yeah.

See you in TV.

And so what have you been doing wrong that you’re getting letters from lawyers?

What?

Good question.

What have you been doing?

Who’s telling you to cease and desist, Kathy? What are you doing wrong?

What kind of court owners are coming to your house?

No, I first came across that phrase reading, I think it was a C.S. Lewis book as a kid.

Oh, okay.

It kind of randomly pops up every now and then. It’s become a pet peeve of mine because it just means stop and stop.

-huh.

Well, it’s interesting because there is a slight difference in these two words. It’s one of what we call legal doublets, and there are a lot of these in legal language.

If you think about it, like will and testament, you know, or all and sundry, aid and abet, words that are very, very, very close together.

And they sort of create this airtight meaning.

Because if you think about cease and desist, I think what most attorneys would tell you is that it means stop and don’t ever do it again, basically.

And where cease alone means to quit something that you’ve been doing.

And desist means never start something up.

Right.

And so between the two, you’re saying not only do we want you to stop, there is no period at which we want you to begin doing this activity.

Yes. And for us lay people, they do look the same, but they’re different shades of meaning there.

They believe in law. They pile on the language in order to make sure that nobody can quibble with a single word later.

Yeah, they love that legalese.

Yes, exactly.

And some of it has to do with, interesting enough, to the linguistic heritage that we share, where some of it comes from the Anglo-Saxon heritage and some of it comes from the French heritage or the Latin heritage.

And so you kind of just want to make sure you’re getting all your little nuances taken care of there.

Yeah, you’ll have one term from each language.

Oh, okay.

If you want more of these kinds of things, Martha tipped you off. She said legal doublet, but more broadly, there are lexical doublets.

There are a lot of words that we pair in English in an idiomatic way that work together like this.

Aidan, that is my favorite one.

I think cease and desist might be my favorite one now.

There we go. Yeah, make it a favorite.

It’s better to be favorite than a peeve, right?

Yes. Well, now I know, and I’ll know how to use it properly.

That’s right. And you’ll always think of us when you use it, right?

I will.

All right. We’ll never cease and never desist from being curious, all right?

Will do. You guys have a good one.

Okay. Thanks, Kathy. Take care, Kathy.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

This is a show about words and language. We’ll take your calls about speech, writing, anything.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha. This is Steve. I call from Louisville, Kentucky.

From Louisville. Miles Stomping Ground. How are you doing, Steve?

Not too bad. I was calling about a phrase that I’ve modified, and thanks to your all show, I now have to find the origin to it.

Okay.

But I always use the word pipe up and pipe down. Pipe down is the one I kind of grew up with.

I used pipe up as a, when I’m talking to my nine-year-old on a baseball field, rather than man up, Kirkwood being a baby, I used pipe up.

And my knee-jerk reaction was, it was very elementary, but it was Mario Brothers.

And I turned that around. I said, no, that can’t be right.

I thought more about it. And I’m thinking it’s some kind of work whistle or a bell, like a lunch bell or something of that nature.

Your instincts are good.

You’re getting close.

Very good.

Yes, Steve. That’s pretty much it.

Only think nautical.

You know…

Not naughty, nautical.

Nautical, not naughty.

It comes from the bosun’s whistle aboard a ship. You’ve probably seen this on Star Trek, where when the captain comes to the bridge, there’s a whistle sound.

Well, this comes from the nautical tradition where there’s always a signal when certain things happen, when shifts change, or when the captain wants a certain thing done.

Or when it’s time for people to move to new duties,

And when it’s time to end the day,

Or the primary responsibilities of the day,

They have the pipe down.

The bosun blows the pipe down whistle.

And did that just evolve to where we use it to tell kids there’s time for bed?

I guess the phrase pipe down, it had to be a sound.

So I guess that’s just kind of how it evolved.

That’s pretty cool.

Yeah.

Well, think about, you know, we’re not very much a nautical world at this point.

I mean, there’s tons of ships at sea, but it’s not core to how we get around.

But there was a time in the world where you probably would have been much more familiar with ships.

And as a boy, read a lot of seafaring, rip-roaring tales and maybe looked up to sea captains and people who went to foreign countries aboard ships.

And this kind of narrative of the pipe and the customs aboard the ships was probably a lot more common.

That’s my guess.

That’s excellent.

I’m very glad that you were able to answer my question there.

Thanks, guys.

Yeah, take care.

Thanks.

Appreciate it, Steve.

Thanks for calling, Steve.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Elizabeth calling.

Hello, Elizabeth.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Indianapolis.

Right on.

Circle City.

What’s going on?

Welcome to the show.

Well, I was calling because I have been doing some historical research,

And in the course of looking at a paper, my eye fell on another article

That used an expression that I thought was odd.

And it was rushing the can.

It was a story about a woman who was behaving drunk and disorderly

And kicking garbage cans down the street.

At the end of the article, the policeman was joking, I think, in the article,

That he didn’t know whether he should arrest her for drunk and disorderly behavior

Or for rushing the can, which was probably in quotes.

So that was my question.

I looked around and saw it in a couple of other articles as well.

She was kicking cans down the street?

Well, the story was that she was knocking over garbage cans and rolling them into the river.

This was in Kansas City.

Wow. Really in her cups.

When was this article run?

It was 1897.

Oh, 1897. Okay. Okay.

And this was a big thing in the late 1880s.

It came up in New York City where they had new liquor laws in place and people discovered

The loophole, which was since you weren’t actually allowed to buy alcohol, what you

Would do is you’d send your kid down to the bar to get it filled and the kid would bring

It back to you.

So you weren’t actually buying it and you weren’t actually drinking it in a bar.

And the bar technically wasn’t open.

And there was a lot of different caveats on this and kind of weirdness.

And the kid would bring you back the beer.

And there was like a standard size for a while.

And then people realized, well, they could just increase the size of this growler, the vessel, and still pay the same price and get more beer, twice as much or three times as much beer.

And apparently this was a source of much drunkenness on Sundays and fights and gang activity and different kinds of mischief got up to.

And eventually growlers were banned altogether in New York City because they seemed to contribute to the, you know, you had people not working on Sunday, doing a lot of drinking and running around town causing mischief.

Now, why it’s called rushing, we don’t really know, but presumably you’d send the kid down at top speed.

And why the vessel is called a growler, we don’t know either.

There’s one newspaper article from 1883 turned up by Barry Poppick, a word researcher,

That suggests that it had something to do with the sound of the can.

It was made out of metal usually, kind of sliding across the rough surface of a bar top, kind of making grrr as it goes.

But that might be made up that we don’t really know.

There’s no real substantiation for that.

Chasing the duck was another term for it.

Chasing the duck.

Chasing the duck, yeah.

Rush the growler, rush the can, chase the can, chase the duck.

Lots of different terms for it.

Yeah, I see.

Anyway, I’m not a drinker, so it was just kind of a good thing.

Cool.

Thank you for the call, though.

Okay.

Thanks very much.

Thanks, Elizabeth.

Bye-bye.

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

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

And you can find us on Facebook and Twitter.

I was looking at an old book of Proverbs the other day and came across one that you might appreciate, Grant.

It goes, wedlock is a padlock.

Wedlock is a padlock.

Yeah.

At first I thought, well, that’s negative.

And then I thought, well, maybe it’s positive.

Right.

Because it’s supposed to be about the permanent union, right?

Yes.

Yeah.

Exactly.

You’re supposed to be committed.

Exactly.

That’s the whole idea.

Right.

Commitment means something.

Yeah.

Wedlock is a padlock.

Give us a call.

877-929-9673

Email words@waywordradio.org

It’s the bouncy house for the nerds with words.

Stay tuned.

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 here he is, that master man, John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hey, John, take off

The mask.

It’s much easier to do the quiz without the mask.

Really is.

I take it that you have a quiz for us today?

I do.

Yeah.

I call it definitely cryptic because we’re going to talk about cryptic

Clues as we sometimes do.

And then we’re talking about charade cryptic clues.

We’ve discussed those.

They involve cluing two words that combine to form the answer like disc and over to make discover.

But some charade-like clues, they outright give you a letter to add like T and his to make this.

Now, the letter we’re working with today is just A, just a definite article.

This definite article can be used to make a cryptic clue.

For instance, a fight can be about.

There we go.

Okay.

Okay.

So I’ll give you two clues.

Let’s kind of run together.

One is a definition of the answer, and the other clue is a noun that if you add the definite article, makes the answer.

Okay.

And do you add the definite article to the beginning?

It’s at the beginning, always at the beginning of the noun, right.

For example, if I said profit once more, that would clue the word again.

Yes, again.

Very good.

Now, sometimes the clue has two words.

Sometimes the definition has two words, but we’ll deal with that.

All right, let’s see how it goes.

Okay, here we go.

Oak seed maize.

Acorn.

Acorn.

Yes, very good.

Acorn.

And then the maize is corn, and the oak seed is acorn.

Oh, is that kind of maze?

I was, you can’t imagine what I was picturing just now.

I was tricky right out of the gate.

You were.

And I appreciate Grant picking up on that.

Very nice.

How about glass container slightly open?

Ajar.

Ajar, nice.

Ajar, good.

Expel lacking rain.

Oh, so dry.

Dry, drought.

Dusty.

A desert.

Lacking rain.

What’s the word that describes a desert?

Arid?

Arid?

Oh, arid.

Arid.

Oh, arid.

Okay.

Nicely done.

It doesn’t matter if you get it accidentally.

Your unconscious did the work.

It wasn’t an accident.

Just the conscious wasn’t involved.

That’s right.

Mind like water.

Try this one.

Climb odor.

Climb.

Ascent.

Yes.

Ascent.

Ascent.

Nice.

Tiny part male cat.

Adam.

Adam.

Oh, a Tom.

Got it.

Martha’s in the groove.

She’s got her eyes closed.

She’s all clenched up here.

All clenched up.

She’s just a floating presence in the studio.

How about hospital section trophy?

Hospital section trophy.

Award.

Award, yes.

Very good.

Finally, you old nautical agreement.

Aye.

Aye.

A-Y-E.

That’s correct.

A and ye.

John, you get an A for this quiz.

Thanks, John.

Oh, thank you.

That’s so great.

And a gold star, if I could top her.

And an A-ward.

A-ward, yeah.

A-ward.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks, Grant.

Thanks, Martha.

See you next week.

All right.

Bye-bye.

And if you want to talk about language with us, the number to call is 877-929-9673.

We’re also taking your emails at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sigrun Newell.

Hi, Sigrun.

How are you?

Hi, Sigrun.

I’m good, thank you.

Hello, Martha.

Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Albany, New York.

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

Well, recently I read an article in Archaeology Magazine that discusses the recovery of a 2,000-year-old shipwreck off the coast of Sri Lanka. It seems as though ever since then that island nation has been an important way station for shipping between India and China. People always went by Sri Lanka in order to refill their ships and pick up products to sell and so forth. It’s been so important that there’s more than half a dozen different names for the place. And it turns out that our word serendipity comes from the Arabic name for the island, which was serendip.

And so my question is, what other common words have ancient geographical places hidden in them?

Yeah, serendipity is one of those classic toponyms, right?

Yeah, yeah. It comes from a Persian fairy tale, as I recall.

Right, although the meaning kind of transformed over time. But yeah, so we use serendipity to mean something happens fortuitously. We weren’t expecting it, but there it is when we need it.

Yeah. So interesting. So you’re talking about ancient places buried in modern English words.

Right.

Do you have any in mind, Sigrun?

Not really. I wondered about Shangri-La, which we use now is more than just the place of Shangri-La, the geographical place. We use more to mean a place of beauty and wonderful.

That’s true. We talk about Eden the same way, Garden of Eden the same way.

Yeah. I think Shangri-La is a little bit more recent, isn’t it?

We can go into the language to words that are opaque.

Sure.

Their etymology is invisible to you when you use them or read them.

Sure.

Well, I can think of a couple off the top of my head, certainly Olympics, you know, from Mount Olympus. And I think of Laconic, which has to do with the area around Sparta where there were people who lived who were very short and brief in their speech. So Laconic would be one. There’s the word peach, as in the fruit, ultimately comes from a word meaning Persia. And bungalow comes from a word meaning of Bengal. So that’s a direct borrowing from Hindi into English.

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, and then there’s Sardonic.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, that has to do with in Sardinia, there was supposedly a weed. I remember this from studying ancient Greek. There was a weed that people would eat, like a plant, and it would cause them to smile. It just created this rictus in their face. You know, like their face would tense up and it would look like they had this real weird smile.

Well, there’s another one from Sardinia as well.

Sardines.

Oh, hello.

Sardines are named after that.

Yeah.

Okay. So there’s two from that place.

Okay.

Food words.

Currants.

Oh, currants.

Nice. Like currants. Like raisin-type currants are from Corinth. I mean, we can go all day on this. It’s this port city where they…

Oh, here’s a food word for it.

Java.

We call it coffee Java sometimes. It’s from the Indonesian island of Java.

Yeah, lots of foods. You’re plugging into this larger theme, which is really a key part of this show, which is like it seems so modern and current to speak English. And yet every time we open our mouths or start to work on a keyboard and put words to a page, we are expressing history.

Oh, I love that.

It just pours out of us. And we don’t even know it half the time or most of the time. You have no idea that this word and that word, a thousand years, ten thousand years, five hundred years.

Yes. Well said, Grant. History is flying out of your mouth every day.

So, Sigrun, you got us off on a roll here.

I hope this call was serendipitous, right?

That’s true. A fine serendipitous call.

Well, thanks a lot for calling, Sigrun.

And thanks for all the ways you have improved my vocabulary and my world.

Oh, thank you so much. Thanks for listening.

Thanks. That means a lot.

Take care now.

Goodbye.

Bye-bye.

This is a show about what we say and how we say it.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or put it in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Clay. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Clay. You sound like you’re standing next to me.

Wow, yeah, amazing line quality.

Thank you.

What’s going on?

A little back story. I am a theater teacher at a private high school or private school here in Dallas for kids with learning differences. We were reading a script of the play Harvey and kind of to get him in the mood for that lesson. We watched the old 1950 movie with Jimmy Stewart and ran across an interesting line from the movie. It wasn’t in the script. At one point in the movie, there’s a tussle in a bar. Bartender helps break it up. And he says, one more word out of you, Weisenheimer, and I’ll butter your necktie.

I went.

All right, butter your necktie.

Butter your necktie.

I got really into finding out where that came from. And I looked on the Internet some and just couldn’t find anything other than references to the movie. And so I was curious as to, you know, where it came from. Did the screenwriter, you know, just make it up or does it have any kind of regional origins or something like that?

Interesting. And did it sound threatening or not?

Yeah. Did you feel like that he was going to kill the guy?

Threatening. Comically threatening.

Did you feel like he was going to kill the guy or just hurt him? I’m thinking rough him up.

Okay. Okay. This is important, I think.

And now the line is in the movie but it isn’t.

Is it in the play?

No.

It’s not in the play. It’s not in the play.

Are you sure?

I’m pretty sure because they never go to a bar.

Okay. I think you’re right. I think we’ve got a great screenwriter here who just knows the language and loves to spin a phrase. So whoever it was, congratulations because that’s a great line.

And if you Google it, it turns out it’s on like a million like best insults ever or best threats ever lists.

If it didn’t look like he was going to kill him, I think he may have actually meant that he was going to take a butter knife and butter the guy’s necktie and shove it down his throat.

And that’s his threat.

That’s what he’s saying by butter your necktie, that he would actually do it and just shove the thing right down with his fist.

You just kind of reminded me of just a flash in my brain of either an old Three Stooges or an old cartoon I remember seeing as a kid where that actually was depicted.

Oh, really?

I think you’re right.

Was it the necktie ended up in the sandwich and they ate the sandwich?

Oh, I think I saw that one.

Oh, hey.

Three people with a vague memory of something that may or may not have happened.

That’s our show.

Yeah, that’s our show.

Well, I wasn’t even thinking of that.

I mean, I haven’t seen the movie, but it sounds like this sort of comically pathetic threat. You know, I’m going to butter your necktie. Like, so what?

How threatening is that?

You know, that’s the most milk toasty threat I’ve ever heard.

I’m going to blunt every pencil in the house.

Ha!

Take that.

Exactly.

That’s what I’m thinking.

So I guess the point is that we don’t see it much of anyplace else besides that movie or references to that movie. And it has been borrowed by novelists usually of no great reputation, but it has been borrowed by novelists in a variety of different contexts. If you go to Google Books, you’ll find it. But most of them are like last 10 or 15 years or so.

Well, Clay, good luck with the production.

Oh, thank you so much.

And good luck with the kids.

We’re having a lot of fun, and I want to say you’ve got a lot of fans here.

Yay!

Oh, yay!

You’re doing the real work, buddy.

You’re doing the hard work there.

It sounds like you’re working with kids who need a lot of extra help, and you may just be the guy to do it.

Best of luck to you.

Take care.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I’ve said it before. I’ll say it again. If you’re teaching kids, that’s hard work. You’re doing work that I don’t know that I’d be capable of doing.

I stand in front of a microphone and spout off my mouth for an hour, but that guy in the classroom, he’s doing it.

Teachers are our heroes.

Teachers, librarians, and knitters.

We know we have a lot of teachers and librarians listening to the show.

There’s something that’s come up in your work, maybe a question your students had or a customer wanted to know something. Give us a call. Tell us about it.

877-929-9673

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, remember we were talking about Georgia baths and bird baths? Yeah, so these are these quick baths just to get the basics done without lingering. Exactly. We heard from David Magliaro, who says, my late and much beloved grandmother referred to this type of quick bath as swabbing the vittles. He said she was born in 1898 and grew up in Glasgow, Scotland.

Okay.

Yeah, it’s spelled like vitals, but it’s pronounced vittles. Swabbing the vittles. Swabbing the vittles. That’s all you got to do. And then you’re out the door. Throughout all of human history, that brief bath must have always been a thing, right?

Right.

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Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Sarah from Dallas.

Hiya, Sarah from Dallas. What’s up?

So I have a question. My boyfriend is from Russia, and we have this debate going. He thinks that the word preheat or preheated is incorrect. When you’re talking about, like, preheating an oven, in recipe directions, he feels that you can’t heat something before you heat it. The direction should just say heat your oven to whatever temperature. And I have told him that I feel like it’s, you know, they’re telling you to do it ahead of time, but he feels like if it’s directions and it’s the first direction, then that should be the first thing you do.

So he’s saying that Russian doesn’t have an equivalent of preheat. Is that right?

I don’t think so. I think that he just feels like the prefix pre is unnecessary and incorrect.

Yeah, I’m going to take and I assume that you’re not agreeing with him.

No, I’m not. So we have this debate going because I feel like it’s telling you to do it ahead of time.

So you need to agree.

Yeah.

So what’s on the line? And is one of you baking something for the other?

I don’t know. It’s just that it’s just that who’s right. And I’m going to go see him this weekend in Russia. And I will be able to tell him that I was right.

You will be because you are right. You’re 100 percent right. The problem that he’s got is he’s breaking the word down into its components of pre and heat and assuming that when we talk about pre meaning before, it means before heating. But it doesn’t. If you actually reverse those words and think about it as heating before, we are heating before we do something else. The pre and the heat go together. They perform a single word with a single concrete idea. He can reanalyze the component parts all that he wants, but it doesn’t change the meaning.

We see this also in prepay. Pre-pay works the same way. It doesn’t mean that we’re paying before we’re paying. It means we’re paying in advance of something else. We also have it in pre-plan. We took a call about this a while back on the show. When you pre-plan, you’re planning before you do something else. You’re not planning before you’re planning. So that’s how English works. That’s the morphology of English. He’s not really going to change that, but he can try to spoon the ocean as much as he wants. He’s just not going to get anywhere.

All right. Well, that’s kind of what I thought. So what you’re saying, though, is it’s one whole word.

So you really can’t break it down.

Yeah, it’s one whole word, and it relates to what you do before you put the food in.

Yeah. Right? Before you put something in the oven. Yeah, you’re preheating it. Because here’s the problem with his argument. Let’s just say that he’s right, and he goes ahead and he makes a recipe, and he says, heat the oven to 400. He’s going to have a world full of cooks and chefs and folks who are going, wait a second, do I put the casserole in and then heat it up to 400? Or do I heat it up in advance to 400? And so when you say preheat, you remove that question completely from people’s minds.

So it’s becoming more specific.

Very specific, yeah.

Because in his mind, the recipe goes in order.

But that’s true.

That would be a question.

Well, Sarah, how much does he cook?

Yeah, there we go.

That’s a good question.

He doesn’t.

Okay.

Ding, ding, ding.

There we go.

Bingo.

Okay.

I cook quite a bit. And you can tell your boyfriend also, if he is only doing things in order, he’s got a problem. There are a lot of things happening at once. The oven is heating. The jello is setting. The ice is hardening. Whatever. All of this stuff happens at once before you get to the final moment where everything shows up on the table.

Well, then I am glad that I’m right. I’m going to tell him all about it. And then we’ll move on to the next language argument. And it’ll be great. Sarah, I want you to email us or call us again and tell us how it went. And let us know if he wants to talk to us because we really want to get his perspective on this too.

Okay?

Directly from the horse’s mouth.

I have a feeling he’ll have an opinion.

I’ll definitely email you. Strong-willed people are good partners, but boy, they’re a lot of work.

They are.

Oh, thank you so much.

Thanks, Sarah. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Sarah. Bye-bye.

Bye.

So we’d love to solve your relationship problems. Just call us, if it’s about language, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Have you ever heard this expression, Grant? I’m not as green as I am cabbage looking.

No.

It’s like if you acted as if I were really inexperienced or naive or something, I would say to you, I’m not as green as I am cabbage looking. That is, maybe I look like a cabbage, but I’m not, you know, I didn’t fall off the turnip truck yesterday.

Right. Gotcha.

Okay, so you’re not green, even though you might seem green.

Yeah.

It’s an old expression that seems to come from Yorkshire. I’m not so green as I am cabbage looking, which is funny right off the bat.

Right.

877-929-9673.

More of your questions and calls about what we say, how we say it, and why. Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And I have a problem when it comes to communicating.

Oh.

I don’t like to talk on the phone except to our listeners.

Right.

But otherwise, I prefer text and email. I have another friend who only talks on the phone. She won’t even get on the internet.

Oh, yeah, my parents.

My parents, yes.

Okay, okay.

I have another friend who sends me stickers in Facebook Messenger all the time. I have another friend who uses Instagram, and I’m still finding my way around on that. I have another friend who texts all the time, and it’s hard to get them together. Another friend who only invites me to things on eVite and never uses email otherwise. It’s just nuts. And then the friend who only uses emoji or like half the message is emoji, which I’m totally on board with, but I can’t interpret this stuff. What does the pizza mean? I’m buying new pizza, or you had a pizza delivered, or you’re feeling hot today.

Yeah.

Yeah, we’ve got this multiplicity of platforms that should be making our lives easier, but it comes down to a certain incompatibility. There’s nothing quite as universal still as the postal service, but you can’t count on the postal service either.

Yeah, or a face-to-face conversation.

And who has everyone’s address anymore, right?

Oh, I don’t know anybody’s address.

I don’t know anybody’s phone number. So to reach people, let’s say that you are throwing a party, you have to do a Facebook event. You have to set up an Evite event. You have to send out Twitter reminders, Facebook reminders, email reminders, and a few people.

You have to go down to their place of work and wait for them to come out of the building. Because there’s no other way to reach them.

Bob, how are you? I’m having a party. Here’s the invite. See you then. Right.

I mean, I feel like I need somebody to manage all of these things. Wouldn’t a universal inbox be wonderful? Yes. Yes. And we’re not quite there yet. No, we’re not at all. Some people have tried it, but they always leave out some essential service. Or they make it where you can’t archive. Like the thing that drives me crazy about Snapchat, which is totally fine. I don’t care what you do with Snapchat, is that it does disappear. I want history. I want to remember what you said 10 minutes from now because I probably won’t. Right, right. The picture just disappears after five seconds, right? Yeah.

So this communications incompatibility is not intergenerational. It’s like everybody’s got their thing. Yes. People in their 50s and 60s have their one thing they will or won’t do. And God help us for the people who are still on AOL Instant Messenger. Because I don’t know who’s talking to them anymore. Is that still around? I’m not talking to them. Wow.

So all this communications technology that was supposed to make it easier is making it harder. Well, it’s making it easier to reach more people, but you’ve got to master more methods of reaching people. Yeah. I’m just going back to Usenet. I’m done with the rest of this. I’m just going to go back to the news groups. Catch me in alt.folklore, okay? Maybe we should spend more time offline. What about that? You do a lot of hiking. I do. I’m going to start going to the beach. That’s a deal. Sounds like a plan.

We’d love to hear about the difficulties you have in this modern world where it seems like there are more ways to reach people, and yet it also seems like it’s harder than ever. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi there. This is Beth. I’m calling from Woodstock, Vermont. Excellent. Well, welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, my mom was from Baltimore and moved to New England with my dad when they got married. And when I was young, and she’s no longer around so I can’t ask her, when she didn’t want me to know something or see something, or she’d hide something, you know, Christmas presents or other things, she’d call them lay lows for meddlers. Lay lows for meddlers! If I had a bell, I would ring it. What did this mean to you? Did you understand what she was up to?

Well, no, I knew I wasn’t supposed to look, or no. But other than that, I’ve always wondered about it. Where did it come from? Very interesting, Beth. And did that keep you from asking more questions? It did. Yeah, because it sounds so, I don’t know, specific and so ominous, right? Yes.

This expression has a very long tradition, and it is in so many different forms. And I think the classic one is layovers to catch meddlers. Layovers to catch meddlers, like M-E-D-D-L-E-R. Yeah. People who meddle, who interfere. Yes, but what in the heck it means, nobody really knows. It’s just one of those things that parents tell their children to keep them from asking more questions. And we have a bunch of those, right? Well, yeah, like I’m sewing buttons on ice cream when you ask. Yeah, have you heard that one? I’ve never heard that.

I’m sewing buttons on ice cream or I’m making a whim-wham for a goose’s bridle, and it’s just supposed to sort of shoo the children away, right? What’s the one about the rabbit fur or something like that? Oh, cat. Well, sometimes if you say, what’s that for? Yeah. Then the parent will say, that’s cat’s fur to make a kitten’s britches or something like that. Yeah, but layovers to catch meddlers or what was your version of it again, Beth? My mom would say lay lows for meddlers. Yeah, yeah. That’s one of the variations. And you see this expression mostly in the South and South Midlands, but it does make it up to Baltimore. And what’s really interesting, yes, Baltimore with its strong Southern heritage. Balmer, yeah.

Definitely.

What’s interesting, a lot of these variations show that this expression clearly has been transmitted orally. It’s at the classic signs of oral corruption, so to speak. Oral transmission is really imperfect as opposed to written transmission. So wide variety of complete misunderstandings. But they all have the same purpose. Deflect the kid’s interest, get them to stop bothering you, you know, make them walk away.

Right.

But as far as we know, I mean, that expression is meaningless, right? I mean, layovers to catch meddlers or lay lows. That’s the point, yeah. Yeah. Okay. A meaningless saying. Okay. Yes. A handy term.

I appreciate the opportunity to ask you guys. Well, thank you very much for calling that. Because I love listening to you. Oh, thank you very much. Well, we welcome your questions. Well, thank you so much. Bye-bye. All right. Bye, Beth.

Well, what are the words and phrases that you heard growing up that you wonder about still today? Call us 877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a new word for you. Yeah. Invasivore. Invasivore. Invasivore is someone who eats invasive species. Oh. So you’ve got all these plants from elsewhere around the world that are like pushing out native species. Okay. And instead of just tearing them out, you tear them out and you eat them.

Oh, okay. So like sauteed kudzu? Yeah, I guess. A kudzu apparently is edible. Is it? I think I would feed it to the pigs. But you can find out more about this at invasivore.org. Invasivore. Send us your new words. Send us your questions about words and language. Tell us something funny. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Maui.

I’m from Addison, Texas.

Maui?

Well, my real name is Dagnawi, but I go by Maui.

It’s easier for everybody involved.

Okay.

Welcome to the show, Maui.

How can we help?

Well, I initially moved from Ethiopia to California when I was 12, and after spending a couple years in a small Catholic school, I went to a big public high school, and I heard this slang term that really caught me off guard, which is catch my fade.

And from the context I got, that kind of means, like, come fight me or let’s get in a fight.

And I kind of forgot about it until a couple of weeks ago I heard you talk about some slang words, and I thought you might enjoy this term.

Catch my fade.

So what’s happening when this term is used?

You’re at school, maybe between classes, and some guys are getting into it?

Well, first I heard somebody say, oh, I caught his fade.

Then along the next few months, whenever somebody’s pushing or shrubbing or that high-fueled area, they’ll say, catch my fate, and they’ll probably use some explosives as well thrown in.

That’s kind of like we used to say in my area, which is like, bring it or step two, right?

Okay.

Which is basically challenging them to a fight.

Yeah, basically.

Do you know that one, Greg?

I have heard that one, yeah.

It’s fairly widespread.

It’s a little old-fashioned now.

I definitely would date it to the 1990s or the 2000s.

I’ve seen it come up in slang collected in California.

I’m not surprised to find it elsewhere, though.

And it shows up in a few dictionaries.

What’s really interesting to me, though, and you’re going to love this, Maui, is it may have a 100-year-old history.

Wow.

Yeah.

Oh, wow.

There’s this old verb meaning to fade, and it dates from, say, the late 1800s, 1890s even.

And I got this from Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

There’s a really nice entry there.

It means to put somebody at a disadvantage.

And it’s usually in these similar contexts.

They say in gambling or boxing or in a street altercation or some kind of verbal argument, if I fade you, it means that I put you down or I diminish you, I punish you, or I beat you.

I conquer you.

And so I would not be surprised to find that if we could dig it out, Catch My Fade has some tenuous connection to this older slang form.

Yeah, it was really interesting because I asked my friends in the neighboring counties, and they were never, my cousins were ever in, like, Orange County, and they didn’t hear about it.

And it was only in just Pasadena, which is where I went to high school, that I heard about it.

And here in Texas, I haven’t came across it at all, and that’s quite interesting.

Oh, so you didn’t find it in Texas?

No.

Okay.

But, again, I was, well, again, I didn’t go to high school, and I wasn’t in that environment here, because I came here to go to college, and then I started working.

So I wasn’t with a lot of teenagers that have a whole bunch of hormones running around, so I might be here, but I am.

So Maui, I have a question that I think might help us uncover a little bit of other slaying connected to this.

When you were in high school and somebody tricked somebody else or made them look the fool, did you guys ever go faded or moated or anything like that?

No, because the term faded was reserved in high school for when you’re intoxicated.

Okay.

Primarily with marijuana.

No, that’s when somebody, that’s why it was such a hard thing to come, like, to try to figure out.

Because fated was never associated with fighting in other terms,

Just in that instant when you say, catch my fated, or she caught my fated.

Now, that use of being fated, meaning to be drunk or high, was fairly common,

But there were parts of California in particular where I grew up in Missouri saying psych,

But in California they would say moated, or they would say fated.

Faded was far less common, but I do have some reports of that.

Well, Maui, thank you for sharing this slang with us.

Super cool, dude.

I appreciate it.

Oh, thank you very much.

Take care.

Thanks.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Good stuff.

Really, really good stuff.

We love these first-hand reports of slang.

Yeah, and it changes.

I wonder if high schoolers today are using Catch My Fade in the same way.

Let us know.

Because it’s been just long enough since he was in high school that it could completely be gone now.

Or are there adults who are holding on to it from their high school years?

Yeah, I don’t think it works in PowerPoints like it does in the hallways next to the gym.

Let’s find out.

I think that’s a special effect in PowerPoint.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

We asked you to send in your examples of your own laws, like Murphy’s Law.

Mine was something about if you change lanes in your car, then the other lane is going to go faster.

We heard from Joshua Racklin, who is a proofreader for an academic publisher.

And he says he believes he’s uncovered a rule that many textbook authors follow.

And so this is Racklin’s rule.

In the course of composing textual content for scholarly purposes, care must be taken to always utilize the absolute largest number of words possible in the process of conveying any specific piece of factual information.

In addition, thesaurusizing is a valuable component to any and every academic writing process such that the author can ensure that verbiage containing the largest syllabic count conceivable is employed.

His point is well made.

Joshua, we feel your pain.

Sorry, bud. I apologize for all of academia.

If you’ve got a rule or a law that you want to name after yourself, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or tell us about it in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Sarah Sturzant. I am calling from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Welcome to the program.

Hi, Sarah.

What’s on your mind?

So I thought about you when I was considering my mom.

My mom grew up in southern Ohio, and whenever she encountered some food that she thought might be sort of going bad or spoiling, she’d say, this is Blinky.

And we were all together staying at a beach house in North Carolina once, and she said that, and the whole place busts out and laughed her.

No one had ever heard that.

Maybe read the credits on the Blink, but the idea of Blinky just seemed really funny.

And that’s one of the ways we remember my mom is to get that word.

So I thought I’d ask you about it.

So what exactly was Blinky? Was it milk or…?

Actually, it was the pimento cheese spread that she was making.

Pimento cheese spread smells Blinky even when it’s fresh.

No, actually, you’re right.

And for my mother to even be concerned that something with Blinky is amazing because she’d practically eat anything.

You’d have to have mold growing on it.

But she smelled that and said, I think this is Blinky.

On the Blink isn’t that far from Blinky, right?

Well, no, I guess not.

I think everyone would understand Blinky if you already knew On the Blink.

Yeah.

But why are we blinking at food?

Well, exactly.

I mean, the way it was explained to me when I was younger was that if you’re opening up a carton of milk and you’re smelling it and holding it up to your face, you’re going to start blinking.

Your eyes will start watering, tearing up.

Yeah.

However, that is a folk etymology.

Yes.

Yes.

The actual etymology seems to have something to do with the idea of blink meaning to turn sour, like sour milk, from the idea of sort of the evil eye, you know, exercising an evil influence or bewitching the milk.

Oh, sure.

You know, something’s afoot.

Somebody made that milk turn sour.

The devil has cast his stern gaze upon my meal.

Upon my pimento cheese.

Upon my pimento cheese.

And turned it blinky.

And the pimento cheese is so important at the beach house.

Oh, isn’t it?

Yeah.

Yeah.

That’s close to a crisis, isn’t it?

If you’re down with pimento cheese.

That’s a very Southern Ohio thing to have.

And so when we all get together, you know, all of the children have all spread around.

But, you know, coming back together, that’s the thing that you eat that is very reminiscent of my mom and of Southern Ohio.

Oh, really?

Pimento cheese.

Yes.

So you had to eat a lot more beef and noodles then.

Beef and noodles is not a thing that has resonance to me.

Oh, really?

Okay.

All right.

I thought that was an Ohio thing.

So you let the pimento loaf sit out all day, and then at dinner time, everyone raises a slice to mom and says, here’s to Blinky.

It’s not pimento loaf.

Oh, okay.

It’s like cheddar cheese with pimentos and God only knows what else, made into a dip that you eat on saltine.

Oh, okay.

Apparently, they didn’t make it across the Mississippi to my part of Missouri.

Oh, my gosh.

And the color.

The color is amazing.

It’s like the color of a, I don’t know, Howard Johnson’s roof or something.

You know, a highway construction cone.

Well, it depends on the cheese, but it can be really vivid, yeah.

Yes, vivid.

And you, vivid is one word.

And so that was the thing that was meant to be Blinky.

All right, well.

So I like the evil eye idea as being the etymology.

You know, I’m getting ready to go home from so I can’t wait to report on Blinky.

That’s great.

Well, Sarah, well, I’m glad you have one of those linguistic heirlooms and that you celebrate it with us.

Thanks for calling, Sarah. Bye-bye.

Well, what family language and lore do you talk about around the dinner table?

Call us with it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

For we know we need each other, so we better call the calling of R.

Let’s call the whole thing R.