Cathead Biscuits

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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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And Grant, I know how much you like riddles.

Riddles.

Riddles. Are you ready for one?

I like those.

With butter and syrup.

Are they sweet?

This one’s really sweet.

Let’s have it.

Okay.

What happens when you throw a yellow rock into a purple stream?

It splashes?

Oh, that’s right.

Got it right.

Oh, I got one for you.

It reminds me of a riddle that I know.

All right, you ready?

It has the head like a cat, feet like a cat, tail like a cat, but it isn’t a cat.

What is it?

A kitten?

Yes.

Oh, we’re good.

I love the obvious riddles, right?

Because you’re looking for the trick, but it’s not a trick.

It’s just an obvious answer.

All right.

Give me another one.

Throw it at me.

Let’s see how we do.

Okay.

Forward I’m heavy, but backwards I’m not.

What am I?

Forward I’m heavy, but backwards I’m not.

I have no idea.

Backwards I’m not.

Ton.

T-O-N.

Oh, wonderful.

Nice.

This is the show about words and how we use them, slang, grammar, and riddles.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Andy from San Diego.

What can we help you with, Andy?

I’m calling today because as a 7th grade English teacher, I’ve had the opportunity to use a word a couple of times this year that my students have taken issue with, especially the way I pronounce the words.

So I wanted to find out some more about this.

Okay.

Is it the way you’re saying legit or random?

No, it isn’t. Is that a question you just had?

No, no. Those are slang words that teachers might be forbidden from using.

Well, no, no. It’s just a traditional word, but they don’t like my pronunciation.

So basically, the word is bury, as in to inter someone.

And of course, it came up when we were studying idiomatic expressions.

We talked about burying your head in the sand.

And they were like, what are you talking about?

You mean burying your head in the sand?

And I was like, oh, okay.

Well, we have different pronunciations in English.

And I wasn’t quite sure.

And then when we were actually studying Latin roots and we came to Terra and we were talking about to inter, and I said it means to bury, and they’re like, bury?

So I said, you know what, this is the second time this has come up this year.

I think I need to seek some expert advice on this.

And so I’m calling you.

All right.

I see.

So you grew up saying bury for B-U-R-Y.

Correct.

And where are you from, Andy?

Well, that’s a long story, but I mostly grew up in Arizona, Tempe, Arizona, and Southern California.

But my mother was from East Texas, so I suspect that it may have come through her speech in some way.

Okay, so when you were growing up, you heard it and that sounded natural.

It wasn’t as if you were reading words like jury or fury and deciding, oh, well, this word B-U-R-Y must be bury, like jury and fury.

You know, I don’t think so.

I mean, as far as I know, that’s the way it would be said.

And then I sort of, you know, I surreptitiously asked, like, how do you pronounce this word?

I didn’t tell them the word, and then they repeated it.

I, you know, in a roundabout way asked them, and they pronounced it that way.

So, Andy, I also am curious.

You’ve never had anybody call you on this before?

No.

No students?

Interesting.

So they’re ribbing you about it, giving you a hard time, or just telling you you’re absolutely wrong?

No, it’s not a huge issue, but, you know, it comes up and, you know, it rankles them and they go, what are you doing?

And I’m like, OK, well, let me look into this further.

What do you say, Martha?

I say Barry.

I say Barry.

I absolutely say Barry.

And in fact, some dictionaries won’t even have the Burry pronunciation in it.

I know Merriam-Webster does.

They tend to be more permissive about their pronunciations.

But they have Burry.

And I’ve heard it, and I don’t know that it’s a regional thing at all.

But it goes back to an old English word.

This is the word.

It’s B-Y-R-G-A-N.

And it’s pronounced something like birrian.

Birrian.

Yeah.

And here’s the thing about Barry is that it comes from two different paths of English in the United Kingdom, right?

It has the spelling from one region and the pronunciation from another.

And then they were married in print once the language started to be standardized and regularized.

And so that’s why it’s curious.

That’s why the written form of it appears not to match the way that we say it.

Because most people, it’s something like 99% of people in the English-speaking world pronounce it as Barry.

And those who pronounce it as Burry, they have a variety of reasons to do it.

Usually it’s because they learn to say it from a lot of reading, which is what Martha was getting at.

Or they learn it from their parents who learn to say it from a lot of reading.

Yes, my mother and I are both voracious readers.

So that might be.

Yeah, you know, I have a million of those words where I mispronounced them because I only have ever seen them in books.

And once they come out of my mouth, I sound like an idiot.

But what are you going to do?

Okay.

And busy is another one of those words.

It’s kind of the same story.

B-U-S-Y.

Exactly.

So it has a pronunciation that doesn’t seem to match its spelling.

It’s because the spelling and the pronunciation come from two different historical paths of English.

And English is just a mess, which is the whole reason you can have an hour-long weekly radio show about it.

Because there’s so much to explain.

Right? Exactly. Okay. But here’s the thing is, your students are using the traditional, typical, most common pronunciation. Yours is far more unusual. It’s not completely taboo.

Right. Maybe next year when you have a whole new batch of students, just to top the other pronunciation.

Exactly. You don’t have to, but it would stop them from concentrating too much on what you’re saying, and they would pay a little more attention to what you’re teaching.

Exactly. All right. All right. Well, I totally appreciate your taking my call and clarifying that for me.

Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Bye. Bye. I love these questions.

We’re getting to the heart of English. Why is it so messed up, Marla? What did you do to it?

I didn’t do it. Who do we blame?

877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org. Language, grammar, slang, pronunciation, classroom dilemmas. Give us a call.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. This is Dale Hobson from Potsdam, New York.

Hi, Dale. Thanks for having me on the show.

Hi, Dale. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Grant. Thank you.

What can we help you with?

Well, I was reading Robert Perlwich’s science blog at NPR, Perlwich Wonders, and he was saying that the standard greeting in English, hello, is actually kind of a new term.

It first shows up in print in the 1830s, and it really doesn’t get popular until the last part of the 19th century when the Edison Telephone Company recommended it as a standard greeting for answering the telephone.

At the same time, Alexander Graham Bell was recommending that we use Ahoy to answer the phone, and I’m just as glad that that didn’t catch on.

Ahoy, you have A Way with Words.

Yes.

Yeah, you’re right, you’re right.

I tend to save that for September 19th, which is National Talk Like a Pirate Day.

Good point.

So, hello appeared on the scene in the 1830s, and I know where you’re heading with this.

What did people say before?

Exactly.

You know, if Thomas Jefferson or Shakespeare or Chaucer walked into a bar, how would they greet the bartender?

They just slammed their hand on the table and said, give me a drink.

This sounds like the beginning of a joke.

Ahoy! Two shots of rye.

So, you know, I was looking back to sort of backwaters of English speakers,

And I thought, like, in the Old West, people said, howdy, you know, some version of how do you do, howdy doody.

And I think of, well, I guess Australia would probably consider itself a backwater, but g’day.

G’day.

But really, I have no idea.

Yeah, it is really interesting to think about that moment in history when hello really emerged on the scene.

But it wasn’t this big breakthrough that was heralded in the newspapers where people were astonished at this new word that appeared.

It was a gradual transition from earlier forms.

Right.

But I mean, the idea of having to answer a telephone and incorporating this new technology, what are we going to say?

But it wasn’t just that.

Because previously, you might shout across a valley, right?

Hello.

Hey, Martha, right?

Right.

Or you might meet somebody face-to-face.

How are you, Martha?

How do you do?

Or even earlier, centuries earlier, hail Martha, right?

But now we have this strange circumstance where you were greeting someone who was both present and far away.

It’s the same, at the same time.

It required a new kind of greeting, right?

Yeah.

I think Krolwich gets a little bit of this.

We’ll link to his blog.

He’s always entertaining.

I think he gets into this a little bit, but that’s the crux of it is why we need it.

Why couldn’t you just have said, hail or how do you do or howdy?

Can you hear me now?

Yeah, and it didn’t stop people from saying it because you, Dale, you hit upon it.

The earlier forms were hail is recorded, Shakespeare records it, goes back centuries.

You just say, hail.

And then later it became a question genuinely or just as a matter of form about someone’s health.

How are you?

Corrupted to how do you do or howdy or so forth and all the different dialects and various older English forms of saying that, right?

But it’s generally how we greeted people.

It’s pretty straightforward stuff.

There’s no secret hidden word back there that people said that we’ve forgotten.

Yeah, and it’s kind of hard to research too because it’s such an everyday kind of thing.

It’s not something that you see in recorded.

Yeah.

But don’t forget, too, that even today we still greet people with more than hello.

Exactly.

There are lots of different things.

Good morning, Martha.

How are you?

Good morrow.

Good morrow.

We would say good night or good day.

We might bid someone good day as a parting, but we might have previously said good day as a greeting.

Or I say hey.

Yeah, hey, right?

Hey.

Which is a direct descendant from these Scandinavian slash Germanic languages, right?

So we have all this shared history, a lot of different ways to greet each other, very finely nuanced.

And the rise of hello is interesting, but it stems from holo with a U instead of an E or holo with an A instead of an E.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

It’s interesting that we had to all agree on what that would be, although it’s different in different languages.

I mean, you know, you pick up the phone in some countries and you say pronto, you know, the equivalent of ready.

Mushy, mushy.

Right, in Japan.

Right.

So we’ve kind of been all over the map here.

Did that help?

That helps.

I hadn’t realized that it was so recent, and it never occurred to me to wonder what people actually said in the language that I use every day.

Yeah, I’m trying to think what else we see fossilized, like Shakespeare, what ho?

You know, I mean, I think there were lots of different kinds of things, as Grant said.

What ho?

I love it.

What ho?

I love it.

Well, God be with you.

Right?

Or as Alexander Graham Bell recommended in signing off from the telephone, he said, say, that is all.

Oh, really?

Okay.

Nice.

Nice.

Well, Dale.

That’s the way it is.

All right.

Thanks.

That is all.

Thanks, Dale.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And so it goes.

877-929-9673.

Or you can send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

My turn for a riddle, Martha.

Okay.

A riddle, a riddle, I suppose, a thousand eyes and never a nose.

This one might be a little misleading, but that’s how it is in the book.

A thousand eyes, a thousand eyes.

How many eyes are in Mississippi?

Is it Mississippi written 400 times?

You’re spelling it wrong.

Oh, a different kind of eye?

A thousand eyes.

A potato.

Well, like I said, that’s how it is in the book.

It must be a very big potato.

Or a picture of a potato that says a thousand words.

I got it from a book called A World Treasury of Riddles by Phil Cousineau.

Oh, you didn’t make it up?

C-O-U-S-I-N-E-A-U.

Did you think it was bad enough that I must have made it up?

Yes.

Call us with your terrible riddles to 877-929-9673 or send them to words@waywordradio.org.

A word puzzle and your language questions coming up next.

Stick around.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And now we’re joined by our lovely and talented quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Hi, Greg.

Hello, Greg.

Hello, Grant.

Hello, Martha.

It’s nice to be lovely and talented today.

Yes, it is.

What do you have for us?

Well, I’ve got a puzzle in honor of the Broadway show that I’m working on.

That would be.

The show is called War Horse, and it’s at Lincoln Center.

And it’s a fantastic piece of theater, which I hope you’ll come see.

I’m dying to see it.

I’ve seen a trailer online, and it just looks terrific.

So do we have to solve a puzzle to get into your show?

You do.

Oh, I do.

Everyone else has got a free pass.

No, I’ve put together this little quiz that involves phrases with animals in them.

I’ve taken one phrase that ends with an animal and melded it with another that begins with the same animal to create a new hybrid phrase.

Oh, good.

Oh, genetic engineering on the radio.

Exactly.

The island of Dr. Pliska.

So, for example, if I said Lincoln Center Show about the Marx Brothers in the Trenches.

Okay.

So it would be War Horse Feathers.

What is the name of that Marx?

Yeah, that’s it.

Horse Feathers.

War Horse Feathers.

Okay.

Giddy up.

When stuffed animal stocks go down.

When stuffed animal stocks go down.

Teddy Bear Market.

Teddy Bear Market.

Exactly.

Nice.

That’s like a place I want to visit.

Yeah, exactly.

A MASH character who loves skateboarding.

Oh, Tony Hawkeye.

Tony Hawkeye.

Nice, nice.

Hawkeye from MASH and Tony Hawk, the great skateboarder.

An itchy rash you get from eating too much fried fast food.

An itchy rash?

An itchy rash.

An itchy rash.

Something bug?

Oh, fried chicken pox.

Yeah, and specifically, I was thinking Kentucky Fried Chicken Pox, but there you go, yeah.

Fried Chicken Pox, exactly.

Where Mr. Green Jeans got convicted on trumped-up charges.

Mr. Green Jeans.

Kangaroo Court.

Captain Kangaroo Court.

Oh, yes!

Captain Kangaroo Court.

Exactly.

Exactly.

The band that sang Stayin’ Alive, More Than a Word List, and If I Can’t Have the Word in a Sentence.

More than a word.

So it’s not spelling BG.

It is exactly.

Spelling BGs.

Right?

They say staying alive, more than a woman, and if I can’t have you.

Right.

Though I want to hear if I can’t have the word in a sentence, personally.

Another one for the kids.

Highest ranking troop member with no hair.

Bald Eagle Scout?

Bald Eagle Scout.

Exactly.

Okay.

Here’s another one.

Theory that a slight difference in a Puccini opera performance can change weather patterns on the other side of the world.

So the butterfly effect.

The Madame Butterfly effect.

The Madame Butterfly effect, exactly.

Oh, she sang it differently.

It’s going to be thundering in New York tomorrow.

Nobody will sleep.

Yeah.

Having turned in your friends, you have turned in feet.

So you are?

Stool Pigeon Toad.

Stool Pigeon Toad.

Very good.

Exactly.

Here’s one.

Movie about conservative Democrats taking hostages at a bank in Brooklyn.

What?

Blue Dog Day Afternoon.

Exactly.

The Blue Dog Day Afternoon.

A Henry James novel about an American heiress with an incurable addiction to ice cream treats.

Dove Bar.

Dove Bar is the ice cream treat.

Now you need a Henry James novel that has Dove at the end of the title.

Wings of the Dove Bar.

Wings of the Dove Bar, exactly.

That’s the one.

Oh, Greg, those were fantastic.

It’s a pleasure.

I’m so glad you enjoyed them.

Call us 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary Louise from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hello, Mary Louise.

Welcome to the program.

Oh, thank you.

That doesn’t sound like a Kenosha, Wisconsin accent.

No, I don’t think so.

No.

I was raised in Upper East Tennessee.

Okay.

Great.

Very good.

So what’s your question today, Mary Louise?

Okay.

Well, I had heard you talking about childhood misunderstandings, and I had moved away during my adult years from East Tennessee, and when my son was two years old, we had moved back to Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

And one of our things we did was we would read signs that he would point out to him.

And we were one day, we just moved back to Tennessee, driving past a local restaurant that had one of the signs where the proprietor can change and make messages on it.

And the sign said, basically, golden cat heads for breakfast. Yum.

Say that again, please.

Golden cat heads for breakfast. Yum.

Yum.

Poor kitties.

How dare they?

That’s basically what my son thought.

He was kind of horrified by the fact that they were eating cat heads for breakfast.

Having been raised there, explain to him that that was a term for biscuits.

Okay.

I might have guessed.

Of course it wasn’t felines, but I might have guessed catfish, but biscuits.

Biscuits.

-huh.

And he wasn’t really sure because he had just learned that there were people there that ate rabbits and squirrels.

Oh, so why not cat heads?

Yeah, to him, you know, our Siamese is now in danger.

I’ve eaten rabbits and squirrels myself.

And, you know, as a regular practice, we never eat cats either.

But kitties, no.

So biscuits.

So Mary Louise, do you know how to make these and will you make me some?

Yeah, describe one for us.

Yes, I can make biscuits, but probably not as good as my grandmother could.

Well, none of us hold the candle to our grandparents, do we?

No.

Basically, they’re just flour and egg and buttermilk.

And how big are they?

About the size of your fist.

About the size of a fist.

That’s pretty good.

Yeah, they’re good size.

Well, you know, whenever I meet a cat, I usually hold my fist up to its face, and then it starts rubbing up against my fist.

And I was told that that was because they think the fist looks like a cat head because it’s about the same size, you know, and they’re sort of rubbing up against it like a cat.

And, yeah.

So are you wondering about why they’re called cat heads, perhaps?

It’s the size, right?

How did that get started?

Do you know the southern humorous Louis Grizzard?

Oh, yeah.

Well, he’s written about this and talked about it.

Grizzard.

Oh, is it Grizzard?

That’s what Mary Louise used to say.

Yes, he would correct you.

Well, I don’t know.

I’ve only read his work.

I haven’t heard him speak.

But he’s passed now, hasn’t he?

Yes, he has.

Okay.

He thought that they were called that because they were as big as a cat’s head, and he knew them very well.

And the way he describes them was a particular kind of joy, you know, a cat head biscuit showing up on your plate was a thing to be celebrated, right?

Oh, yes.

Yeah.

But, yeah, as far as I know, it’s the idea that the cat head biscuit is about the same size as a cat head.

I mean, they are big.

Mary Louise, you’ve heard us talk about the Dictionary of American Regional English.

They’ve got an entry for this as well.

Their uses of it that they find come from Tennessee and North Carolina and West Virginia, pretty much the same part of the country that you’re talking about.

Yeah.

A couple from Georgia.

And they find uses in a collection of scholarly works called dialect notes as far back as 1930.

So it’s got a bit of history.

I would not be surprised if we looked a little harder, Martha, that we could find it well back into the 1800s.

I would not be surprised at all.

Yeah.

No, I wouldn’t either.

I wouldn’t either.

And it follows the same pattern that so many food names have, which is that they’re just named for what they look like.

I mean, think about a head of cabbage.

It looks like a head.

Oh, very good.

You know, and cabbage comes from that whole family of words like capital.

It means head.

So, yeah, it’s just in a long line of foods that are named for what they look like.

Golden cat head biscuits.

Yum.

Oh, man.

Mary Louise, thank you for sharing this food word with us.

You know how we are.

We love the food language.

We do.

Oh, me too.

Cathead biscuits and hush puppies.

All right.

Best of luck to you.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Yum.

Share your food questions with us, 877-929-9673, or send an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Mark in La Crosse, Wisconsin.

How are you?

Hello, Mark.

I’m fine.

And yourself?

I’m wonderful, and I’m thrilled to be talking to you.

I have been on about a 30-year quest to solve the world’s greatest mystery.

Whoa.

My maternal grandfather had an expression, you’re the berries.

And it usually followed with somebody saying something ridiculous.

And it was kind of an affectionate term.

Everybody smiled.

He said it mostly to my maternal grandmother.

Grandfather was Norwegian.

Grandmother was German.

And literally for about 30 years, I have been trying to figure out it out when the Internet came out.

I’d find an easy answer to this.

It always sounded French to me, even though they’re German or Norwegian.

It just has that French sound.

But I’ve had friends that I’ve gotten over the Internet, you know, Facebook and what, and I can’t.

No one knows.

I’ve asked people from France, people from Sweden, people.

I’ve lived in 10 states, and everybody kind of scratches their head and says, well, it sounds nice.

Why do you think French might come into play?

I don’t know.

Berries, berets, who knows, Grant?

I see.

The berries.

Grant, you are the berries, by the way.

Thanks, man.

He is the berries.

Well said.

Well said.

That’s swell.

If it was 1920 or 1930, I’d be flattered.

And what am I, the chopped liver?

No.

What year were your grandparents born?

1895.

1895.

Okay, so by the 1920s, they’re in their 20s, right?

Mm—

Mid-20s, right?

Right.

Very good.

I ask because this really pops up on the scene in the 1920s and the 1930s.

You see it show up in plays and books and newspaper stories, fiction and nonfiction and so forth.

And there’s a slightly older form of it that was first.

And that’s to say that somebody is all to the berries.

All to it.

Martha, she’s all to the berries.

And I have no idea what it means.

That’s weird.

Unfortunately, I can’t really help you, Mark.

Your mystery continues.

No way. You’re kidding me, right?

I think the answer is in that gigantic warehouse where they’ve locked away the Ark of the Covenant.

Because I don’t have it.

Oh, no.

And don’t feel bad.

The only reference I’ve ever found is a Rodgers and Hart song from 1931.

Yeah?

No one else knows either.

Well, you can do more with that.

The first use that I know of, and the first use that any of the dictionaries that I have has, is from 1908.

There’s a book called The Sorrows of a Showgirl, The Story of the Great White Way.

Of course, it’s about a showgirl’s life on Broadway in New York City by Kenneth McGaffey, published 1908.

You can find it in full text on Google Books, and it’s used in there.

It says, say, that piece of work that stands on the end opposite you is all to the berries, ain’t she?

And it’s talking about a woman.

All to the berries.

That piece of work, right?

I don’t know that that’s the origin of it.

I doubt it.

It might have been a popular book.

I have no way of really knowing.

But certainly it’s the first use on record that I can find, the first use that any of my colleagues can find.

And by the 1920s, it was well known enough that it can be used in newspaper stories, commentaries and one-off columns, kind of Walter Winchell style stuff, gossip pages, without any kind of real quote marking around or any kind of offsetting to indicate that it was strange or unusual.

But by the end of the 1930s, its use kind of just faded away.

It became a slang relic of the past.

And now you’ll only find it, as you did, if you’re browsing those old songs or reading those old books or looking in the old newspapers.

Or if your grandparents are still alive.

Okay, well, then I’ll call you again sometime because I have a couple more.

Oh, please, please do.

We’ll stay in touch.

All right, thanks, Mark.

Okay, thank you.

Take care.

All right.

You are the berries.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

And no raspberries to you, Martha.

Maybe that’s it.

Maybe that’s it, raspberries.

I don’t know.

That’s a negative.

Yeah, that’s true.

If you’ve got a question like Mark, something’s been stumping you for decades, you can call us.

30 years.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Meredith and I’m calling from San Diego.

Welcome, Meredith.

Hi, Meredith.

Hi there.

I had a question about a pet peeve.

Okay.

You want to know what to feed it?

This actually is an inherited pet peeve from my mother, and she’s sort of chief of the grammar police.

They’re like parrots. They live for a very long time.

I know. It’s amazing. I cannot get rid of it.

And it’s the use of try and as opposed to try to.

Her point is that if you try and do something, you’ve basically already predetermined that you will accomplish it.

The use of try and is grammatically incorrect, and you should say try to.

And that’s the thing. You inherit something like that from your mother and then you just carry it with you.

I know.

My father gave me a radio when I was a boy that when he passed it on to me, I thought that it was a relic.

It was this thing that I should protect and care for forever.

And then I found out that it was a mass-produced radio that they made like 25 million of.

I didn’t think so highly of it after that.

Exactly.

Sometimes the heirlooms that were given aren’t worth as much as we’re led to believe in the beginning.

I don’t even know if it is grammatically incorrect or if it’s just my mom’s own.

Is your mother still with us?

Yes.

Okay.

She’s probably listening.

Is she now?

Yeah.

Okay, you might want to turn off the radio.

Okay.

One of the reference works that we turn to from time to time is the Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage.

It’s kind of the more progressive, permissive sphere of language commentary.

I tend to rely upon it.

I do sometimes quibble with it.

But there’s a great line in the entry for try and.

Okay.

In spite of what critics believe, infinitives are used in many constructions without to,

And in some of those constructions they use and.

So we have try and is okay.

Try and go to the store.

Try and spell differently.

Try and speak up.

You do not require the to in there in order to make that grammatical.

It’s like we often say, some of the things in English that we do are idiomatic,

And sometimes it’s just a matter of accepting them for what they are

And don’t over-parse them for logic.

It’s a gigantic mistake to over-parse English,

Looking for rules that aren’t there and that there’s no need for.

Okay.

Yeah, there are some style guides that will say that try and is a little bit more informal,

And there are people like your mother and you, and me, don’t tell Grant, but and me,

Who have thought this through and who thought that try and means you’re absolutely going to be successful.

Right.

I’m going to try and get somebody on the phone.

There’s no doubt about it.

And there are some style guides that will tell you that if you’re going to be formal about it, it won’t trip people up if you say try to.

But, you know.

Part of the logic, and I don’t know the details of your mother’s argument, but part of the logic from people who share her opinion is that try should almost always be followed by an action.

It should be followed by a verb or an infinitive that you’re going to try to do something.

And try actually doesn’t require that.

Try can be followed in a variety of ways by other kinds of implications, if that makes sense.

So try and do better.

Okay.

So I’m going to try and do better.

I promise to do better.

Both of them go together.

Both are going to happen.

That’s another kind of overparsing English.

Accept try and is idiomatic.

Accept it for what it is.

Know that it’s been in English for hundreds of years, used by the best writers.

All of these people who are using this aren’t all making an error.

They actually represent the data that support that this is a useful case in English.

It’s something useful to have in our language.

Okay.

I will go back to her and explain that this is not grammatically incorrect.

We’ll link to some sources on the website to explain it in a little more nuanced fashion.

So that I’m not left to my own devices.

Right, right, right.

Maybe she can adopt another pet peeve.

You’ve got plenty.

I wouldn’t worry about it.

I was going to say, there’s no shortage.

Why is your hair like that?

They all need good homes.

You get a better job.

Is he good enough for you?

Two are as easy as one, just like cats.

Exactly.

All right.

Well, great talking with you.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks very much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Round up your peeves and herd them on over our way, 877-929-9673, or take photos of your

Peeves and send them to us at words@waywordradio.org.

Riddle me this, Grant.

I never understood that construction.

Riddle me this.

Yeah, it’s an archaic way of introducing a riddle.

Right.

Yeah, it goes back into the ages.

Okay, well, you’re not getting out of it.

Okay.

I’m still going to give you the riddle.

Well, that was one answer.

Okay.

Okay, here it goes.

Whoever makes it tells it not.

Whoever takes it knows it not.

Whoever knows it wants it not.

What is it?

I don’t know.

A secret?

Silence?

A bed?

A bed.

I don’t know.

Counterfeit money.

Oh, very nice.

You make it, you don’t talk about it, you take it, you don’t know about it, you got it, you don’t want it.

Oh, that’s one for the Secret Service.

Thanks, guys.

It’s just a radio show.

We’re not really in the business.

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send your riddles or things you want to talk about to words@waywordradio.org.

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

Learn more at nu.edu.

And by the fifth edition of the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language.

Ten years in the making with 10,000 new words and senses.

More at ahdictionary.com.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Not that long ago on the show, we talked about how kids acquire language.

We had a great conversation about that with a caller.

And do you know, right after that, there was a fascinating article in Wired magazine about this astonishing project by an MIT cognitive scientist.

His name is Deb Roy, and this involved his newborn son.

Deb Roy and his wife wired their home with 11 cameras and 14 microphones to capture every single word that this baby said.

That’s taking it a little far, don’t you think?

I know.

I post pictures on Facebook.

I post pictures on Facebook.

I mean, I keep a couple shots on my phone.

But what are you going to do with all that video?

Oh, my gosh.

All that audio.

Well, they ended up having 90,000 hours of video and 140,000.

90,000.

Yes.

Yes.

And 140,000 hours of audio.

They had a special privacy button that they could turn on to, you know.

To disable the whole thing.

Yeah.

Yeah, but they had these fisheye lenses in the ceilings.

And they had all these microphones.

And they were recording the process of this one baby as he entered toddlerhood learning to talk.

And it’s just fascinating.

You can go online and find audio of, for example, a speeded up version.

It takes about 40 seconds of the kid’s progress from saying gaga to water.

So you hear him learning to get it right.

Yes, compressed into 40 seconds.

So they’re going to do this for all of the things that he learns to do.

It’s not just what he talks about.

It’s how he behaves and all that other kind of stuff as well.

Well, it’s specifically language.

Okay, that’s what they’re interested in.

Yeah, they’re interested in how kids acquire language and talk about data.

I mean, they have so much data to crunch.

And so they’re doing all this cool stuff with rendering the data and twisting it different ways to mine information.

They figured out that by his second birthday, he knew 530 words.

Very good.

And they also found something really interesting, which was that when the child was close to mastering a word, like, say, water, the parents or caregivers, whichever adults were around him, they ended up slowing down and really simplifying their sentences until the kid got the hang of it.

And then they talked normally again.

They did this naturally without even really thinking about it.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Very good.

And I don’t know if other parents have noticed this pattern.

Yes.

This pattern.

We do this in our house.

My wife and I, she’s a linguist and I’m a lexicographer.

And, yeah, we trade glances over the head of my son when he says something approximately right.

And then we both, without thinking about it, repeat it a little slower.

Yeah, absolutely.

You absolutely do that.

That’s wonderful.

So my question is, is there going to be a movie from this, a book?

This is decades of research coming up, right?

Not to mention psychotherapy for the kid.

No, he’ll be fine.

No, yeah.

Did they name him Truman?

That’s the question.

I don’t know what they named him.

I mean, I think they were protective of the kid, really.

But it’s really fascinating to see the process of what this guy is calling word birth.

Call us with your language questions or your comments about language acquisition or words and phrases and how we use them.

The number is 877-929-9673, and the address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Emma Lewis Thomas.

Hi, Emma Lewis. Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you.

What can we do for you today?

I wanted to know if you could help me understand a phrase that I grew up with, but that always surprises people when I’m not in East Tennessee or in the Kentucky Mountains.

I was born in West Virginia, but my mother was from Tennessee.

And my grandfather used to always say when anyone asked him, how are you? I’m fair to Midland.

And I never knew what it meant because he would always smile.

And he was always in very good humor, and other people in the family didn’t use that phrase as much.

And when I became an adult and I traveled widely all around the world, and any time I used that phrase, people would look at me as if I were crazy.

The thing about it is that my grandfather was always very cheerful, and he was never sad, except when my grandmother passed away. That was the only time I saw him sad.

So I’m wondering if you can tell me the origin of this phrase, fair to Midland.

Okay.

So fair to Midland is a, what does that mean to you, Martha?

Is this something in your experience?

Yeah, I’ve heard it.

I’ve heard it.

And it goes back to the 19th century and gradations of goods, particularly cotton, when people were talking about different qualities of cotton.

Oh, so you’d bring the bales in, they’d be graded by the wholesaler, and then he would give you money for them, and he’d sell them up the food chain to the textile manufacturers, right?

Right, right.

And there were lots and lots of categories for that, running from fine and then down to fair, middling, ordinary.

And there were lots of different ways to classify them.

But if you’re fair to middling, you’re pretty good.

But they’re not exactly the same, right?

One of the arguments that I see in some of the language books is that fair and middling are the same, so it’s redundant or it’s a pleonasm.

Do you find that to be true?

I don’t know about that.

I’ve seen all kinds of, I mean, I’m looking at something from the International Library of Technology in 1906 that has all these different gradations, like fair, barely fair, strict, middlin’ fair, full middlin’ fair, middlin’, barely middlin’ fair, good middlin’, barely good middlin’, middlin’, fully middlin’, middlin’, barely middlin’, strict low middlin’.

You know, I think that there were lots of different categories there.

So Emma Lewis’s grandfather had a term borrowed from the old agricultural south.

Yeah.

He was part of the old agricultural south.

Oh, was he?

Because the family had lived on the same farms.

The first deeds we had were 1770, but they’d been there a long time.

Wow.

So he grew up on a farm.

Wow.

And they did raise cotton.

They raised a lot more other cloths, other things.

But he became a lawyer.

And I interpreted fair as better than Midland.

So I thought, okay, fair is good.

And then Midland is a little step below, but that may be wrong.

No, I think that sounds right to me.

I mean, I’ve seen lots of different interpretations of that.

But I think basically if you pull back from all those really specific little things like strict Midland fair and all that, that, yeah.

He means basically fine.

Yeah.

I’m somewhere.

I’m not too bad.

Not too good.

I’m pretty good.

I’m pretty good, right?

Yeah.

Well, how do we do, Emma Lewis?

Well, wonderful, and I do appreciate it.

Thank you for calling.

You have a good rest of your week, all right?

Same.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Craig calling from La Mesa.

Hello, Craig.

Hi, Craig.

Welcome to the show.

What can we help you with?

Thanks for having me.

I was listening to this show a couple of weekends ago, Saturday, and the word irregardless was being discussed.

And I believe it was Grant who wound up that piece using the term whether or not the user would find that acceptable and common usage for himself.

And it immediately occurred to me that whether or not is something that I’ve always questioned as redundant in our language because whether itself is a conditional.

And yet we feel compelled to add the or not to that.

And I do it myself, so I’m not disparaging those who do because it’s very common.

But I guess my curiosity goes to how did that crept into semantics in terms of how it’s used today?

In that case, I probably should have not used the or not.

Certainly if I was writing it, I probably would have cut it immediately out of my writing.

When you’re speaking, you’re a little looser and you tend to be more colloquial.

Yeah, and after you’ve heard the word irregardless, too, you just sort of get all discombobulated.

So your larger point is how do we get to the point where or not seems to make sense even though it’s not strictly needed?

Exactly, because it does sound a little odd just to say whether something happens.

I understand that, but I’m curious how it crept into language.

There’s some cases for or not where it makes sense to have it.

And I think the confusion here is that whether or not has kind of become idiomatic in a way that you don’t want to break it up.

And that’s the thing with idioms.

We’re inclined not to break them up.

Here, let’s try these sentences, for example, and you tell me whether I need to have or not in them, right?

Or not.

Whether or not you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina.

Yeah, I can see that going both ways, but still my instinct tells me that correct is whether because it’s redundant otherwise.

If I said whether you like it, Martha is dressing as a ballerina, it doesn’t quite work.

I agree.

Right.

How about this?

I don’t care whether you like it, you’re dressing as a ballerina.

That’s more acceptable with weather by itself.

Right.

Because it sounds more natural to our ear to leave the or not off of that one.

How about this one?

Find out whether or not Martha would like to dress as a ballerina.

Either way.

Find out whether Martha would like to dress as a ballerina.

Yeah, I’m with Craig.

Either way.

Either works, right?

So, gosh.

Is there any rule?

Yeah, there is.

So we’re getting to the heart of the, it’s difficult.

Sometimes you have to step outside of the rules and say, does it feel right?

Are people going to stumble on what I’m saying and what I’m writing?

Are they going to go and put on their brakes and not pay attention to my message and instead pay attention to my words?

And again, when you’re speaking aloud off the cuff, this is an unscripted show, for example.

So Martha and I make colloquial kinds of conversation all the time.

Whether you like it or not.

Whether you like it or don’t.

But when you’re writing, you know, it’s a case-by-case thing.

How does it feel?

How does it sound?

And how will it be received?

If I’m writing for the Toastmasters, I’m definitely going to be really careful about that.

If I’m writing for the New York Times, I’m going to pay a lot more attention to that.

But I’m trying to think if there’s a hard and fast rule for this.

Here’s the way that I look at it.

Okay.

In some cases, you have only two choices.

Whether or not you like it, you’re dressing as a ballerina.

-huh.

Versus whether you like it, you’re dressing as a ballerina.

The first one sounds right because it’s A or B.

Right.

There’s no C or any other choice.

It’s only two choices.

I like dressing as a ballerina or I don’t.

Yeah, exactly.

So the or not really makes sure that you understand that it’s a binary choice, right?

In other cases, it’s not opposites and it’s not binary and might have more than one choice.

So it’s almost like whether it’s the case that.

Right.

Whether you’re going to the store or going to the beach or you’re going to go dress as a ballerina, I’ll be there for you.

Right.

In that case, the or not absolutely is uncalled for because there’s no opposition there.

Right.

There’s no one or zero, black or white, salt or pepper, peanut butter or jelly.

There’s no oppositional kind of statement.

Yeah.

It’s just kind of conjectural.

Yeah.

So I would say, Craig, that any number of style books and guidebooks can give you advice on this.

But most of the best ones will always say, native speakers think this sounds correct, or native speakers think this doesn’t sound correct.

Pay attention to their sample sentences because those are what will guide you.

And ultimately, of course, when in doubt, rewrite it so you can just avoid it altogether.

That makes sense.

And that’s kind of what I do, I think.

I just sort of wanted to understand a bit more about how that or not crept in.

Because there are cases for both, and I’ll use both.

But every time I hear it, I’m like, oh, that’s redundant.

But it sounds right.

Craig, thanks for having us think about this.

I hadn’t really thought that one through.

Thanks for having me.

Bye, Craig.

Bye now.

Give us a call with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send it all an email.

Tell us your big story to words@waywordradio.org.

From time to time, we talk about proverbs on the show, and Christy Winkler from the Bronx in New York sent us a great one that she learned from a friend of hers in Liberia.

It’s an African saying that goes, only the grass dies when elephants fight.

Isn’t that nice?

It means that the kids are hurt when the parents fight, for example, right?

Well, she said my Liberian friend explained that it meant that only the little people die or suffer when governments or factions fight.

Too true, right?

Very true.

Yeah.

Call us with your thoughts about language, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara Sullivan. I’m calling from Waco, Texas.

Hi, Barbara. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thank you. Thank you. Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

What can we help you with, Barbara?

What’s going on?

Well, I’m calling about an interesting, very informal, I think a colloquial expression that I hear around Texas, and I was wondering if it’s in any other parts of the country, and I also kind of wondered if it had any kind of literary history.

It’s not grammatical, but it’s probably acceptably used.

It’s called, it’s and them, the two words, and them, used as the subject of a verb and also used to substitute for everybody else.

And you may give me an example?

Oh, yeah, please.

Well, for example, if someone who’s near and dear to me is going to tell me that Sam is coming along with his wife, Sue, he’ll say, Sam and them are going to be here after a while.

Or if he’s going to tell me that Sam and Sue are coming with all their children, then I might hear, Sam and them will be here after a while.

And obviously, and them means all those other folks.

So it could be anywhere from one to 15 other people.

It could be the whole family.

It could be everybody at the house.

And it could also be Sam and one other person, right?

And Sam and one other person.

Interesting.

But I’m wondering, is it Southern?

Is it Texan?

Is it countrywide?

Is it regional?

It sure is Southern.

You hear it there in Texas.

You hear it in the Appalachians.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I can’t think of anything more Southern than Annam.

Annam.

Yeah.

Well, it’s a cousin to y’all because y’all is what you say when you’re standing in front of a lot of people or one person or more, right?

And then them is what you say when they’re not around.

Correct.

So it’s kind of the same, different ways of referring to the same group of people.

Right.

And absolutely, even though it’s not a grammatical thing, it’s absolutely acceptable.

Yeah, I think it’s charming.

Because that’s what everybody says.

Yeah.

So do you have any literary history for this thing or do you know anything?

Literary history.

Well, what are you looking for literary history for?

You’ve got an argument that you want to settle?

You want to prove that it’s okay to say it?

I don’t want to prove anything.

I just was wondering if you’d come across it.

And, you know, I haven’t done any extensive research, but I was thinking, I wonder if Mark Twain used it.

I wonder if Faulkner used it.

Now we do, too.

We wonder that.

I bet so.

Especially Faulkner.

Well, it’s certainly recorded in the dialect dictionaries.

This kind of thing has been noted for more than 100 years.

Is that right?

It’s got a long history, yeah.

And the last time I heard it, I think, was a Barrett family reunion.

Oh, yeah.

So it’s spread up into Missouri as well.

You know, it’s not just Texas.

And it’s pretty much east to west, probably as far north as the northern edge of Tennessee and as far west as, say, I don’t know, what’s that little spur of Texas called?

Oh, well, are you talking about just where El Paso is?

Yeah.

It’s just called far west Texas as far as, you know.

Okay.

Yeah.

And there are some variations of it I’ve seen in thing or in that.

Oh, my.

Very good.

Yeah, or in those.

Yeah, but the most common is exactly as you described it, in them, for one or more people.

I love that, Sam and them, meaning Sam and his wife.

Exactly.

Well, that’s my favorite.

I think it’s really very cute.

Yeah.

So have you adopted it then?

I probably have.

I probably try not to say that, but I probably have.

Thank you so much for giving us a ring today.

Well, thank you.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

Okay.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your southernisms or northernisms or westernisms or easternisms to words@waywordradio.org.

You wrote a book about animals, right?

I did.

Dog days and dandelions.

Here’s a riddle about something like an animal.

What goes 99 clump?

99 clump.

Wait, this is a centipede with a wooden leg.

Or a caterpillar with a wooden leg, yeah.

That’s as old as Moses’ toes and twice as corny.

Last time I heard that one, I fell off my dinosaur.

All right, well then, smarty pants.

If you woke up at night and scratched your head, what time would it be?

Time to get a new bed frame, bed post.

Five to one.

Oh, five fingers to one head?

Yes, five to one.

Or one hair.

Oh, terrible riddles are as good as good riddles.

Send them to words@waywordradio.org or call us and tell us your riddles on the telephone, 877-929-9673.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget, you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us, 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week long on Facebook.

Look for us there under Wayword Radio.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten. Tim also chooses our music.

Josette Herdell, Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey help with production.

Generous support for A Way with Words comes from Robert Lawrence and Lori Black.

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

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

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

Learn more at nu.edu.

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