Cheese Toasties (episode #1683)

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.

We received a lovely message from Carol Shepherd, who wanted to share her mother’s favorite word with us.

It’s a word she says that her mother always pronounced with sheer delight.

And the word is humu humu nuku nuku apu’a.

Don’t ask me to spell it.

Oh that’s a Hawaiian word, I think.

Yeah.

Yes, yes it is And that is a fish, but usually they call it something shorter.

Yes, they usually call it a trigger fish.

But it turns out that the humu humu nuku nuku Apua is the official state fish of Hawaii.

And what’s really cool about her bringing this word to us is it’s you know, it’s just one of those things where you want to pull on a thread and follow at where your curiosity takes you, I was really fascinated to learn that this name translates as little trigger fish with a small snout like a pig.

Oh I just imagine little piggy swimming.

I know.

On the beautiful Hawaiian beaches.

Yes.

And and I looked them up.

They do sort of look like little pigs.

Pu’a is the word for pig.

But then I got curious about why it’s called a triggerfish.

And do you have any idea why it’s called a trigger fish?

No, but is it one of those that shoots like high-speed jets of water or something?

That was my guess.

But no, it’s more interesting than that actually, because the trigger fish has a large spine on its back that it can snap upright and lock into place using a second shorter spine that’s directly behind it.

So it’s exactly like a trigger.

And the reason they have this is that when the first spine snaps up and is locked into place, then the fish can wedge itself into a little crack Oh, so it’s like a trigger on a gun.

Gotcha.

Yes.

Yes.

I thought that was the coolest thing.

And this is what I love about what we do, Grant.

You know, you just pull We love to talk about language and we love to talk to you.

Whether in Hawaii or Newfoundland, Alaska or Florida, or anywhere in between, in the United States or Canada, call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

Hi, who’s this?

This is David calling from Matthews, North Carolina.

Hey, David, glad to have you.

What’s up?

So I’ve grown up with a tradition or an item that people have called one name and then I’ve moved and nobody knows what I’m talking about.

Typically it’s called a grilled cheese, which is just you know, two pieces of bread buttered with slice of cheese in the middle, then you put in a frying pan.

So it’s not technically grilled, but we grew up in my hometown, everybody calls them cheese toasties.

And so I’ve been trying to figure out ’cause I’ve mentioned it in various places.

I currently like I said live in North Carolina.

My wife’s from Florida and every time I say cheese toasties she gives me the crooked eye and like that’s not a thing.

And so Yeah.

Well something tells me you moved east.

Well I was from Illinois.

So so yeah, a little bit east and further south.

So were you near Decatur, Illinois?

I exactly.

Okay, gotcha.

So cheese toasty T-O-A-S-T-I-E is definitely a regional term in the United States for a grilled cheese sandwich.

And you’re right, we don’t grill it.

We cook it in a pan.

Doesn’t matter.

It’s still called grilled cheese by most Americans.

And there’s a part of this country.

It’s not just decatur, although people in Decatur think it’s only theirs, it’s actually a little more widespread than that.

You’ll find cheese toasty used instead of grilled cheese in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, especially places like Decatur and Springfield, Illinois.

So it’s it’s it’s spread just across those three states.

And what complicates it is that there’s a cheese toasty in British English for a toasted sandwich, but it’s not made the same way.

It is bread, it is cheese, but you’re more likely to make it in a in an oven, maybe a toaster oven, or in a in a press grill, like a panini grill or a George Foreman grill.

And so so yeah, so there’s a separate cheese toasty.

They were coined independently.

The British one didn’t give its name to the American one, nor vice versa.

It’s just a really, really common way to form new words to add you know add an IE.

That’s it, man.

It’s that simple.

That’s crazy.

So yeah, it’s funny ’cause I’ve been listening to you guys for quite a while and there’s been a a part of my soul that’s been waiting for somebody else to call in and go, What’s the story with cheese toasties?

Search the website.

You will find it.

We have talked about this before, but why wait in agony when the information’s right there?

Just to put a little more more information on this, the earliest use that we know of cheese toasty in the US to mean a cheese a grilled cheese sandwich was nineteen oh nine.

And the recipe was a little different.

It says you can use cream cheese instead of sliced cheese.

Whoa.

And yeah, that recipe was widely reprinted.

The whole conceit was that it’s a an easy, convenient snack.

And definitely convenient enough.

That’s why the British have their own version of it.

Well, David, you’re not alone.

All right, thanks, man.

Take care.

Yeah, I appreciate you guys taking.

I appreciate that information.

It’s great.

Call or text anytime eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey Martha, this is Jonathan Owen from Winter Haven, Florida.

Hey Jonathan, we’re glad to have you on board.

What’s up?

Hey, I had a question for you about the pronunciation of a word.

I so yeah, when I when I don’t have A Way with Words listen to I listen to other things and one of the things I listen to is a pop culture podcast from NPR and one of the reporters one time used the word integral w in her report.

She was talking about something being integral to the plot of a movie.

And at the time I thought maybe she had misspoken, because I’ve always pronounced that word integral.

And so I just kind of carried on, didn’t think much about it, but she did it again and again.

And so I wondered, well maybe is it a generational thing?

Because I know she’s in her in her late thirties and I’m in my late fifties.

So I called my my older daughter who was in her late twenties and said, How do you pronounce this word?

And she said she pronounces it integral, integral integral, like I do.

And she works at the University of Florida, and her employees are all college students.

And so I said, Well, why don’t you ask your college students how they pronounce it?

And so she did and got back with me later on.

And to a person, every one of her employees says integral when they use that word.

So it made me wonder what’s going on.

Is it something that changed?

I never heard about it, or is it just people are mispronouncing it, or what’s the deal?

So that’s the reason I called you guys to see if you could maybe clarify it for me.

Yeah, I love the field work here.

I really totally appreciate exactly what you’ve done here because it’s exactly what Martha and I would do if we encountered something new.

So the word we’re talking about, I-N-T-E-G-R-A-L, and in generally in the use that you heard on the radio, it sounds like it meant essential or necessary.

So something is integral to the to the outcome or integral to the core product.

Correct, yes, exactly.

And there we kind of get to the nut of this that we’re kind of talking about one word with two meanings, and one of those meanings is special to a particular field and that’s mathematics.

These days you mainly hear integral with the stress on the first syllable among mathematicians and specialists in and scientific fields that use a lot of math.

So I don’t know if you and your daughter work in those fields, but perhaps that’s why you have that pronunciation.

Actually we don’t.

I’ve I was an English major.

I I work for an insurance company now, but I was actually an English major in college and she was an advertising major, so we’re kind of pretty far off field from the from the maths and sciences.

The second thing that you did, which I think is wonderful, because you brought in the answer to your own question basically, it’s not an age thing, it’s a change thing.

And generally, in all of the English dialects words that have previously been stressed on the first syllable are becoming stressed on the second syllable.

So it’s not just integral becoming integral, it’s also words like applicable becoming applicable.

Formidable, becoming formidable.

And the famous one which actually has a UK US divide, although usually there is no US UK divide, it’s just it’s just a change thing, is c controversy versus controversy.

Oh yeah.

But even words like exquisite, harassed, despicable, hospitable, they’re all moving that that pronunciation, that stress on the pronunciation to the second syllable.

And and there’s a reason for this is because English wants a rhythm.

We understand as native English speakers that there is a particular kinds of pacing and rhythm.

And there’s actually something called the principle of rhythmic alternation, which was described in 1977 by a couple of brilliant linguists.

And it this this metrical phonology, as they call it, shows how English speakers will naturally adjust word stress, the syllable stress, to keep an alternating trochaic rhythm, which is basically a strong syllable followed by a weak one.

So that’s so long words are far more susceptible to this change.

Because there’s so many syllables on it, of course.

Another thing that’s happening is we’re moving away from this like this Germanic pronunciation system and we’re more developing English’s own pronunciation system where those Germanic ties that that would have preferred the stress on the first syllable are are are fading.

Partly because we have moved more towards Latin rules from Latin and French over the many centuries that English has become what it is.

I see.

Okay.

Very good.

Well that’s interesting.

Very interesting.

I I’d only ever heard it pronounced it one way and it kind of took me up abruptly when I looked at the first one.

Yeah, but but both both correct just to to clarify here, both correct, but the mathematicians and and math using scientists are more likely to put say int integral with the stress on the first syllable.

My favorite change that I love to talk about when Martha and I go into live events in the roads is the word balcony, you know, like this place on a stage that you can look down upon the seats, used to be pronounced balcony.

Oh wow, okay.

Yeah, which people like, What how?

Why did that doesn’t make any sense, but yeah.

But it has completely undergone the change, whereas other words are still in transition.

That’s wild.

I will I’ll definitely do it.

I’ve got a bunch of other things I want to call you about too, so I’ll just have to put it on the list.

Take care.

Give our best to your daughter.

We’re the one with the bright yellow icon.

Okay.

I got it on the top of my list.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Thank you, guys.

Bye.

Eight seven seven nine two nine-nine six seven three.

We heard from Diane Dalton who told us that where she lives in Wisconsin, when they teach little kids the sound a bullfrog makes, they say juggerum, juggerum, jugger rum.

So these are the big boys, right?

The ones with the bulging throats, like they’re hefty in your hand if you pick them up.

Right., right And juggerum is what biologists refer to as an advertisement call, that is, you know, the male of the species sort of making himself known to all the ladies out there.

Oh right.

So if I were a female bullfrog, I would find that very attractive.

If you were, yeah.

Yeah.

And it’s interesting to me that Jug O’Rum also appears in a poem by the writer and editor Willard Espy.

He once wrote this sort of naughty little ditty called The Serenading Frog, and it ends with the bloated bullfrog calls his mate by booming on his drum, but gladly settles if she’s late for juggerum.

Juggerum, juggerum, that’s our advertisement for you to call with your language questions, stories, and ideas.

Call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

The word quiz and lots more as A Way with Words Continues.

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, dressed in his Texas tuxedo that’s denim top to bottom.

It’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

It’s comfortable.

What can I say?

Denim is a little bit more.

It look great.

It really fits here.

I’ve never seen a blue jean ten gallon hat, but it’s all right.

I don’t have to think about what to wear.

I just denim.

Just denim.

That’s it.

All right, I’ll give you guys this, time.

This week our quiz is something we’ve done before.

I’ll give you three things and you tell me what they have in common.

We call it common bonds.

There’s a lot of names for these, but when they were in a board game format, it was called tribond.

People still call it that.

If you’re a diehard puzzle solver, you probably know it from yes, the UK game show only connect where it’s called the connecting wall.

If I said something like handed, bank or click, you would say left.

Left handed, left bank, left click, something like that.

Okay?

Gotcha.

All right, good.

Because they’re all these are all word based.

Here’s the first one.

Canon, leaf, change.

Canon C-A-N-O-N.

Correct.

Canon leaf change.

Loose.

Loose is correct.

Loose cannon.

Loose leaf, loose change.

Very good.

Gasp, supper, ditch.

Last.

Last is T.

Is right.

Last is next.

It’s last, last gasp, last supper, last ditch.

Will room wage living.

Living, yeah.

Living is correct.

You might notice a pattern in these, by the way.

You’ll see quickly as we move on.

The next one.

Oh, I’ll say that again, by the way.

Living will, living room, living wage.

Gas, stock, cow.

I was gonna say live cow, but that doesn’t help.

So are they also gas stock cow.

Cow.

The last one’s less a phrase, more of a brand name.

Oh, laughing.

Yes, laughing is correct.

Laughing gas, laughing Stock, Laughing Cow.

I have contributed to the Wikipedia entry for that one.

What really?

Yes.

That sounds like a story.

Yeah, I want to hear that sometime.

How about mine line mass mine e line line mass spelled the usual way.

Could be land.

It could be land because it is land.

Oh, there we go.

Land mine, landline, land mass.

For you kids out there, a landline was a foam.

And condescension is that’s what it is, right?

How about this one?

Opener perfect box opener perfect box B O X I was going with King but that doesn’t work.

Opener gift mail no letter letter letter is correct.

Lteret opener, letters.

Yes.

What are the other ones?

I love the sound of realization.

Very good.

Letter opener, letter perfect, letterbox.

Finally, pitchers, women, dipper.

P-I-T-C-H-E-R-S Pitchers.

Yes.

Your spelling is on point today.

Grant.

Very good.

Very smart.

Sounds like it could be teeny weeny.

And it is.

What is the teeny weeny answer?

Little women, little dipper and little leaves.

Little pictures.

Little pictures.

That’s right.

Slang for kids, little pictures have big ears.

There we go.

You guys did fantastic on that common bonds quiz.

Well done.

Thank you, John.

We’ll see you next week.

Take care of yourselves.

See you then.

You too.

Bye-bye.

You can leave us a voicemail anytime, toll-free in the US and Canada, 877-929-9673, or send us an email, words at waywordradio.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey Grant, this is Andy Rasik calling from Kensington, Maryland.

Oh hi Andy, welcome to the program.

What’s up?

For maybe reasons that don’t bear going into right now.

The other day I looked up the word sycophant and I had the a hunch that maybe it had a Greek origin and I was correct on that, but where I got confused and and wanted to reach out to you all is I believe the original meeting, meaning, excuse me, was either showing someone the sign of the fig, which apparently was a rude hand gesture, or maybe telling on someone who was importing figs but not paying a fig tax.

And I I cannot for the life of me figure out how something like that turned into the modern usage, which you know, I I think you m might be able to encapsulate that as suck up or one.

Yeah, yeah, brown paper.

Yeah.

Let’s let’s spell some words here, since we’re on radio and sometimes it’s hard to hear.

So sycophant S Y C O P H A N T and then you mentioned figs as in the fruit, F I G Mm-

Yeah, much to say about the word sycophant, because in ancient Greece, the sycophants were people who prosecuted other people without justification.

Either they were trying to convict somebody who was innocent of something or blackmail somebody into paying them to drop the case.

So the Greeks had this word sucophantes which referred to this kind of sleazebag.

And then by the sixteenth century, mid-sixteenth century in English, its derivative sycophant, had found its way into our language meaning a malicious accuser or slanderer from this ancient Greek meaning.

But it soon developed this other negative meaning.

And I think the Oxford English Dictionary defines it best a mean, servile, cringing or abject flatterer, a parasite, toady, lickspittle.

That must be one of the entries that has not been revised since the eighteen hundreds.

But let’s get back to that Greek word sucophantes.

It breaks down into two words and as you suggested the sucon there means fig as in the fruit and the fantes means one who shows.

It has to do with showing.

So the Greek pseudophantes literally meant someone who shows the fig.

And that’s where it gets kind of murky because there have been lots of stories proposed, as you suggested, involving the literal fruit of the fig tree.

That that the sycophants in ancient Greek were were people who snitched about the illegal exportation of figs or something having to do with taxes, but more likely the Greek word sucon, meaning fig, could also mean female genitalia.

And for centuries there’s been this obscene gesture that translates in a lot of different languages as the fig, and that’s sticking your thumb between your next two fingers and then waving it at somebody and for centuries and across cultures showing the fig like that making that little gesture is you know kind of the equivalent of flipping somebody off in fact there’s a great passage in Dante’s Inferno, where this thief who’s really angry at being in hell, lifts both his hands, making the figs with both his thumbs, and yells at God, and then he’s promptly strangled by snakes.

So it’s plausible that in ancient Greece showing the fig somehow became linked with these bad actors.

Andy, just to put a cap on exactly how unknown this is, even Plutarch, who was born in the year fifty, di had some questions about the origin of this word or this idea of of showing figs and what it could possibly do.

So it has been unknown for a very long time.

But it’s a bad thing.

And I want to leave you, Andy, with one more word.

So any kind of offensive gesture like showing the fig or the middle finger is apotropaic.

A-P-O-T-R-O-P-A-I-C.

And so that’s what we call any kind of physical euphemism or or gesture that’s meant to be obscene.

Yeah, it comes from Greek for turning away.

Yeah.

So how about that?

Well I I didn’t know what to expect, but I know that I didn’t expect that.

That is an interesting lesson.

Thanks so much, Andy.

We really appreciate your time.

Yeah, thanks Grant.

Thanks so much, Martha.

Take care, y’all.

Okay.

Take care, Andy.

Yep.

Bye.

I forgot to mention that that second part, the P H A N T in Sycaphant, has a really interesting history.

It goes back to the Greek word that means show, and that if you know that, it unlocks a whole lot of different words in English like diaphanous, which means showing through, and epiphany, which means you know, sort of sort of manifesting upon, and also the word Tiffany, which goes back to words that mean God shining through.

Tiffany, the name or Tiffany the glassmaker?

No.

Well it’s interesting that you know Tiffany lamp has light shining through Whether you listen to my podcast or over the air, there are a lot of ways to reach us, and you can find them all on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Amon.

I’m calling from Cape Pod, Massachusetts.

Hi, Amon.

We’re glad to have you.

What’s up?

So my question is kind of random.

I you know, I I was born in India and I grew up there and I kinda grew up in a region where like literacy wasn’t super high and you know when people said like words like English words they would always add like the is sound in front of them like you know they would say like is guder or is school and then when I you know I moved to the US took Spanish and you know like when I as I grew up and became fluent in English as well I started exploring languages more and I realized that in Spanish there’s also that is sound that’s added to the front of words.

And I was just it just kinda got me thinking that like, you know, if that’s like maybe something that is a natural way of human language where it like just to make things easier.

I know like I I’ve realized that language kinda moved towards like the easiest way to say words.

And but I never found anything online.

I I did some research but I couldn’t find anything and I was just wondering if if we wanted to get your thoughts, is that something you’ve encountered or is that like a real thing?

Or am I just like connecting random things, you know?

Yeah, Amen, that’s a this is a great question for us.

This is this is really good.

One thing I want to say though is that language doesn’t only go towards simpler forms.

Sometimes it goes towards more complex forms.

So these two conflicting things that can happen in in in language.

Any language will do this.

This adding of the sound before an S word in Spanish and some of the Indian languages is well known and well studied by linguists.

It’s part of the sound sequencing rules of language that make it happen.

It’s called phonotactics.

P H O N O T A C T I C S phonotactics.

And specifically what’s happening here is a kind of appenthesis.

An epenthesis is the insertion of a sound that isn’t usually there.

And when you add it to the beginning of the word, it’s called prothesis.

So at the front of it.

And the Spanish examples that you gave are spot on like they will say estop when they’re speaking English or especial when they’re speaking English.

And partly it’s you you might say, oh well that’s because you know they that’s how it’s spelled in those languages they say especial, but it’s because they don’t have that that phonetic structure that we have.

They just don’t use those sounds at the beginning of words in Spanish.

And the same for the Indian languages that you encountered.

They’re just some things in a languages that just don’t happen at the beginning of words.

So when you encounter that happening in a second or third or fifth language or however many you speak, you naturally try to make that new language fit the rules of the old one because you in your brain without even thinking about know that it cannot begin with that sc sound, it just can’t be done, or the st sound, or the sp sound, or whatever it is, and so you added a vowel sound there at the beginning.

Maybe a schwa, maybe a a a different kind of E, but you add a you add a vowel sound there at the beginning ’cause that’s what your original you know, your base language says to do.

Wow, how fascinating.

Yeah the the di the language the of the state that I’m from, or I guess it’s not even recognized, it’s more so called the dialect.

But you know, people speak and I I grew up listening to that and but that’s so fascinating to hear that that’s like just to conform it to how you you’re used to speaking language, you automatically add it.

So the thing to look up is phono tactics, P H O N O T A C T I S, and then a Penthesis, E P E N T H E S I S.

And if you Google those two things and don’t trust the AI summaries, although it might get you started, you’re gonna come up with a ton of great stuff on this.

Okay, phono tactics and appenthesis.

I’m definitely going to look this up.

Yeah, you know, it’s it’s just fascinating to connect, you know, like sometimes the world seems so far apart.

The language I feel like there’s so many connections that you know it’s just like one way to join like the two worlds that I’m from.

So it’s great that I I’m really happy that you were able to share this with me.

I’m definitely going to look this up.

Amen, that’s very well said.

You do have A Way with Words.

Oh, thank you..

Amen Take care and good luck on your language learning journey.

Thank you so much.

I really thank you for having me on the show.

I really appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

Take care now.

Bye.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye bye.

Bye.

Toll free in the US and Canada eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Oh hi, this is Justin calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

How are you?

All right.

Well what’s on your mind?

Well I was working one day with my buddy and we were kind of running a little late and he says, Oh Justin, we gotta hurry up, we don’t want to get whistle bit.

And you know, I can understand from the context he didn’t want to work late, but I never heard that before.

So I look it up in the dictionary and that’s what it says, you know, whistle bit is to work after quitting time.

But I wanted to know why whistle bit?

You know, what does that mean?

And when I Google around, all I can find is that it’s a bit that goes in the horse of a mouth and it’s got little holes in the piece that goes in the mouth that looks like a tin whistle.

Apparently keeps them from sucking in air and they can’t burp and that’s a problem because but I couldn’t figure out why you would say whistle bit.

You know, are we gonna end up with bits in our mouths if we work late after five?

No that’s a red herring.

It’s got nothing to do with horses or bits and mouths at all.

Actually has to do with another bit of southern slang.

Have you ever heard somebody unlucky being s said to be snake bit?

Well that boy’s just snake bit.

He can’t he can’t win for losing.

Right, right, right, yeah.

Yeah, so this whistle bit, W-H-I-S-T-L-E, one word, and then the second word, bit, B-I-T, is like being snake bit, except by the quitting whistle at your job or the quitting siren or the quitting alarm or whatever.

And so the idea here is that you’re gonna get unlucky enough to have that that shift signal s go off while you still need to be employed or while you still are at y at your task.

I see.

Okay, okay.

So so the bit here isn’t what goes in a horse’s mouth to be to be bitten.

Yeah.

To be like injured or hurt.

Yeah, that’s right, exactly.

Well not literally, but it means to to be to be figuratively stung or figuratively bit.

Mm.

Yeah.

Mmm-hm.

You got bit by the whistle.

And it’s particularly common in and blue collar jobs.

Like I find it in HVAC journals or steam and engineering journals and newspapers.

And we got a really nice glossary or dictionary a few years ago by a a fellow named Ray Journey.

His class that he took, a technical course that he took, they put this construction dictionary together and they have the term in there and and they define it as still at work in the field when the whistle blows rather than at the gang box with tools secured and most importantly ready to go home.

That’s right.

You gotta have your gear put up, ready to go.

So so your whistle bit if you still got all your tools out when it’s time to go home.

That’s right.

That’s right.

Oh that’s pretty good.

Oh man.

Okay, I had the wrong so it’s like Fred Swinstone, he’s working in the quarry and the whistle goes off But it you say it’s mostly blue collar though.

Yeah, it is, yeah.

Yeah, but again, the connection to snake bit, which is the southern slang, which means unlucky, unfortunate, always having something you didn’t expect happen to you when you need things to go well.

You got snake bit.

Oh.

Ye Yeahah, yeah,.

We’ve had those days too.

We get snake bit sometimes too.

Yeah, yeah.

The you order a part, it arrives, it doesn’t fit, you just got snake bit.

Yeah, yeah.

-huh.

Things just aren’t going your way some days.

Yeah.

And then you end up getting whistled bit.

That’s how that works.

That’s right.

That’s it.

Justin.

Thanks so much.

We appreciate it.

Be safe out there.

I really enjoyed this.

All right.

Take care.

Thanks, Justin.

All right.

Y’all too.

Mm-

Yes, ma’am.

Bye bye.

Toll free in the US and Canada 877-929-9673.

It’s the bounty house for language, 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.

We recently got an email from Beverly in Ontario, Canada, who was looking for a word for that moment when you’re dictating a message and your dictation program misunderstands you.

She writes, I recently dictated the word onerous and my voice to text spelled owner us.

And so she had to go back to all the people on her email thread and explain that this was an error.

And the word that she came up for this kind of mistake was mico, like typo.

Oh, so mic short for microphone.

Yeah.

Following on the typo as a role model.

Yeah, I like it.

I like it.

But that can’t be the only lexical gap we’ve gotten because I know we get them all the time.

Well I was gonna say, don’t we get at least one a day.

More than that.

Yeah.

Phone, email, text messages, you name it, they come in because people recognize these holes in the language and they want a neat pat set word.

They want this kind of tidy little package all wrapped up in a single word.

Exactly.

And I mean you know it when you hear it.

You know it’s that little moment of satisfaction.

Like I don’t know, like like when you fill in the last square of a crossword puzzle or you’re doing wordle and all the letters flip over and turn green.

It’s it’s just that satisfying click that I think, you know, makes makes life a little bit more manageable.

I mean here’s another one.

Tristan Seal from Saxe, Texas wrote us to say that she’s a mother of five, and she and her friends were searching for a word for the feeling you have when your child is doing something great, like going to kindergarten, so you’re happy that they’re healthy and they’re ready for kindergarten, but at the same time you’re sad because they’re leaving behind a stage of life.

And you know, for her, she says it feels more than bittersweet, and she thinks that there should be something that applies specifically to parents or mentors.

And she and her friends decided on mom happy slash sads, but I just wonder if there’s another word for that.

So happy s happy slash sads, mom, happy slash yeah, but what about dad?

But parental happy sad.

Yeah, I think there should be a compact word for that feeling.

Martha, because we get all these lexical gaps from all of our listeners, we need to do something about them.

Yeah, we would love to hear what lexical gaps you’ve observed, or maybe what lexical gaps you’ve figured out that you can fill, share those with us.

877-929-9673 is a toll-free number, 24 hours a day, for calls and texts from Canada and the United States, or of course, you can always email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelly from Beautiful Butte America.

Beautiful But where?

Butte America.

Butte Montana, really.

Butte America.

Is that what they say in Butte Montana?

Yes.

So it’s a it’s a nickname for Butte.

Gotcha.

Never heard that.

No, me neither.

What’s on your mind though?

What’s a what’s your language you thing?

Okay, yeah.

So when I was a kid a long time ago in Minnesota, my grandma would say make it a nice day tomorrow when we would be finishing a meal and there is just a little bit of food left.

We took that to mean to eat up all the food.

I never heard it anywhere else except in my immediate family.

And then recently a childhood friend said a similar phrase.

It was make it a clear day tomorrow, and it was in the same exact context.

So I guess I’m just wondering where does that come from?

What does it mean and how does finishing food affect the next day.

So that was your parents’ motivational technique then to get and did it work?

Yeah, I guess it did.

I mean we would clean it all up, but it you know, there was only you know it’ll only be a bite or two of everything.

But yeah I, I would would say yes, we would try to finish it up.

Yeah.

I r I remember when I was growing up, my mom would always say, You wanna be a member of the clean plate club?

And I didn’t.

Oh, have you?

Yeah.

Yeah.

It just sounded like a club I wanted to be a part of.

Oh, not me.

It sounded like a bunch of snobby people I didn’t want to have anything to do with.

I’m like, ugh, hall monitors.

No thanks.

Oh.

Yeah, well that’s why I would have joined it.

But in any case, yeah, there are lots of different versions of this in English, like clean your plate and it’ll be a nice day tomorrow, or clean your plate or we won’t have a clear day tomorrow or if you don’t eat all your dinner the sun won’t shine tomorrow.

And apparently this goes back to a German phrase that that means the same thing basically.

Eat your plate clean and then tomorrow you’ll have good weather.

But there’s kind of a kind of a mistranslation there isn’t there Grant?

Yeah so in English it dates to about the eighteen eighties but it’s centuries older in German, and there’s a dialect difference that caused some confusion here.

In one dialect, when you say the versions of this proverb, you’re saying, if you clear all the food, you’ll get more good food tomorrow.

And it’s nothing about the weather.

But that word for more good food or some variation on that sounds exactly like the word for weather.

So in other dialects of German, it was misunderstood.

And the expression that became more established was the version about the weather.

It’s very interesting.

So it wasn’t originally about weather at all.

It moved from the like practical advice about eating all your food so you get more good food tomorrow to something a little more superstitious that eating all your food means magically there’ll be good weather tomorrow.

And even in the United States, the original saying lurks behind the scenes, partly because we have this Germanic history here, and there’s a version of this in Pennsylvania Dutch, by the way, Pennsylvania German.

But that version behind the scene is that there are variations in English about cleaning all the serving dishes or platters or everything off the table, not the individual plate.

So it’s literally about eating everything on the table in the original German use.

Not not that a kid should behave.

It’s like you’re telling adults this as well.

You’re telling everyone present to eat everything on the table.

Right, and that’s how it was used in my family.

It was for everybody.

Yeah, yeah..

It wasn’t just the kids And but again, it’s not about weather.

It was about that’s the only way that you’re ensure that this chef or the cook will go to all this trouble tomorrow to provide food for you again.

Because if you’re insulting them by not eating all the food today, then why would they bother tomorrow?

This weather connection is interesting though because there are other little bits of folklore like from Kentucky where if you lick your plate at breakfast there will be rain before supper.

Oh.

So people have conflated the two.

Or if all the dishes are emptied at a meal it’s gonna rain.

That’s that’s an idea there.

But but what interests me too is that that it’s you know it’s spoken in terms that a kid can understand Oh my goodness.

So okay.

So it’s I never really took it as a motivation.

It was more it’s just gonna make it a a nice day tomorrow for whatever reason.

And you know, I guess part of me or, you know, maybe when I was younger, I didn’t really think about the weather.

But as I got older, I thought, well, okay, if it it maybe it is about the weather, but how does it affect the weather?

I think your explanations have been fabulous.

Oh, outstanding.

Thank you for bringing this to us.

It’s always fun.

We always like digging into folklore, even though it’s not exactly linguistic.

But it’s it’s certainly fun for us and we appreciate your time today.

All right.

You have a nice or clear day tomorrow Or today.

Well that means we get to eat everything right on our plate.

Excellent.

That’s right down to the parsley.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call and leave us a voicemail 877-929-9673 and there are lots of other ways to reach us.

Just go to waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Brian from Lafayette, Indiana.

Hey Brian, we’re glad to have you.

What’s up?

So I work in the restaurant industry and something that one of my employees noticed is that we abbreviate chicken a lot with CHX.

And that seemed kind of weird that it’s not like CHK or CHN.

CHX.

So like on an order form from your suppliers, that’s how they’ll make it short.

Yep.

Or like even just in our own system, and I’ve seen it in a lot of different food service places.

And when you think about it, do you think of it as chicks or CHX or do you pronounce it in your head?

I usually just think of it as chicken in my head.

It would make more sense if it was like a plural, but it’s not.

-huh.

Yeah, that’s a really good that’s a really that’s a little thing that we’ll bring up here in a second about that X.

All right, this is actually a really interesting question.

And I’m so happy that you’re here with this because this what abbreviation in your restaurant, CHX as an abbreviation for chicken, goes back thousands of years.

Well maybe not thousands, but a long time.

There’s a several different ways that X got there.

One of them is X as you know has been a placeholder in math like geometry and other things for a long time.

So Descartes did it, turned X, Y, and Z into these characters to use as variables or placeholder letters when the number was unknown.

And so that’s one of the ways that X is stood in for a thing, a larger thing.

Another one, of course, is medicine.

We use RX to refer to medicine or for prescription.

And that X actually is originally an X.

It was the leg of the R had a line through it.

Because this is what old scribes would do, ancient scribes would do, that when they abbreviated a word, they would put an a line through like the last tail or last leg of the characters that they did put on the page and that was one of the more common ones.

So it actually stands for requipe.

It means to take.

It’s related to our word receive.

So that’s another place we got the X.

But then there’s a third one.

And the third one, it’s not altogether clear if it comes from the medical use or the geometry use, but this is in technical fields like broadcasting and in the old days in telegraphs where they would use X to make words short because obviously if you’re using a a Morse code device to send your messages you want to do as little hammering on the clicker as possible, right?

So you’re gonna make as many words short as you can.

And X became the way to do that.

So besides RX for prescriptions or for medicine, you will sometimes see in the medical world ABX for antibiotics, BX for biopsy.

I have a whole list of these.

FX for fracture, SX for symptoms, PX for problems, and then HX for history, as in the patient’s medical history, but there are a couple that overlap with the technical field.

For example, TX can mean treatment in medicine, but transmit in radio or in telegraph.

DX can mean diagnosis in medicine, but it means distance in broadcasting.

So there’s quite a few of these.

WX is a really common one.

You probably maybe have seen that even.

Sometimes you’ll even see that in the newspaper when they kind of relay these short form forecast WX for weather.

Oh, I’ve never seen that.

I’ve definitely seen DX on you know, like stereos.

Yeah, there we go.

Yeah, exactly.

DX for stereos.

Like well, there’ll be a little switch you can flip to change the way that it receives and the power that it gives to the amplifier.

So that’s what we know.

So maybe go back to Descartes and using X as a placeholder letter for an unknown a number or a known quantity, but it might also come from the X used by Latin scribes actually which wasn’t an X it was just a line through a leg that turned into an X.

Just sounds like it’s kind of a common way to to shorten words because I’ve definitely seen some of the ones that you’ve mentioned, obviously like Rx and stuff like that.

Yeah, exactly.

And but that that huge history did lead to your your chicken and your your your computer system at the restaurant.

I love the idea that Descartes had a money hand and CHX in your your ticketing system.

Brian, I’m so glad that you brought your job experience and this really interesting question.

I had no idea.

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

All right.

We’ll fire up the grill.

We’ll be right over.

Thank you so much for your fire.

Sounds good.

All right, bye-bye.

Take care.

What words and phrases have you run into on your job?

We’d love to hear about them.

877-929-9673 or send an email to words at waywordradio.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan.

I am calling from Savannah, Georgia.

Hi, Megan.

Welcome to the program.

Thanks.

I wanted to ask you guys about a weird phrase that I heard growing up and I had the chance to grill my parents about it when they were visiting recently.

Down cellar behind the axe.

Down cellar behind the axe.

So who said this?

Dad?

Mostly dad when I was little and it never made any sense to me.

What would you be doing when he said it?

I can’t remember.

I was pretty little.

I just remember we did have a weird basement that had you know, like stone it was a stone foundation and and a dirt floor.

And so the the whole image was very scary.

Yeah, I imagine.

Somebody down there with an axe.

But but I don’t know.

I don’t really remember what I thought it meant.

What’s was your dad Martha knows what I’m about to ask, was you dad from New England?

So he was not, but his dad and granddad were very much old New England.

So yeah, I’m I’m certain that that’s where he picked it up.

Okay, yeah, that makes a lot of sense because down seller is an expression that you hear mostly in New England and the Canadian Maritimes, down cellar meaning down in the cellar.

It’s what what’s sometimes called a bear noun or a bear locative, where you leave the words leave out the words between the adverb and the noun like on campus or in church or in studio.

There are different versions of this like down cellar behind the fish barrels or down cellar behind the fish bowl, down cellar in a teacup.

I’ve also read down cellar behind the axe and the teacup.

Yeah, it’s a behind the furnace, cider barrel, coal bin, pigs barrel, potato barrel, piano, nail kegs.

And then there’s my favorite version, down cellar tying the dog loose.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, like you might ask, you know, some somebody comes over to your house and you say to the wife, Where’s your husband?

And she just says, Oh, he’s down cellar tying the dog loose you know, it’s just like she doesn’t know.

That’s what my dad remembers and my mom too, as they grew older, that it sort of morphed into a lightly dismissive, not mean, but sort of dismiss you know, you sort of who knows with them.

Right.

But he does remember his grandparent talking about it meaning that mom was doing drudge work.

Oh interesting.

That that was a s a shorthand for saying like well she’s doing the You know, and down cellar itself, in the mid eighteen hundreds, ’cause it’s it’s quite old to say down cellar instead of down in the cellar, often was about hiding things, bootlegging, for example and one of my favorite uses that i found was some eighteen seventy five and it it says it turns out to be a solemn fact that a Baltimore woman gave birth to four children a few weeks ago and her husband has been hiding down cellar ever since.

And so it’s very typical though of the early uses where it really was about this distant dirty place that you didn’t usually go where something might be stowed away and not be seen.

No, eighteen fiftys.

Yeah, early eighteen hundreds.

Expression and its variants.

The the book Prince Edward Island Sayings P E I Sayings is fantastic and has a really good entry on this.

Okay, great.

And also Stephen Keene, the writer, uses variations on this because he’s a maner.

You know, he’s from New England.

So it’s part of his stock phrases.

Amazing.

Thank you so much.

Well yeah, share that with your family and see what they say.

I sure will.

Thanks so much for calling.

Thank you.

Take care, Megan.

You too.

Bye bye.

You can You can find all of our past episodes and one zillion ways to reach us on our website at waywordradio.org.

With Word’s senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quizmaster.

Go to WaywordRadio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language thought or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S.

And Canada.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words is an independent nonprofit production of Wayword Inc., it’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofits, volunteer board, Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.