Clean as a Whistle

Hey there, it’s Martha. Recently we heard from a listener named Wendy. She writes,

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A Way with Words. Think of it as Miracle Grove for your mind.

Thanks.

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.

The other night I was at a wine bar, and it was my first time there, and I was looking over their unfamiliar menu, which reminded me of that peculiar variety of language we call winespeak.

You know what I’m talking about, right? It’s very stilted and weird, isn’t it?

Yeah, well, check out this description of a Santa Barbara Grenache from that menu. Luxurious and mysterious with every kiss to your lips. Strawberries, rhubarb, and hints of leather are present in the nose. Ripe, forward fruit, with mulberry, cardamom, tea leaves on the first sip. Medium body is belied by the depth and melange of flavors, melding into a long finish with Dutch cocoa lingering on the palate, balanced by soft tannins.

Dutch cocoa. We’re not talking Ovaltine. We’re talking Dutch cocoa.

I’ve got to admit, it sounds like somebody’s just been licking the spice rack and then talking about it. I’m not convinced.

I mean, my mom had a lazy Susan that always got the debris down at the bottom of it. This sounds just like that.

Yeah, yeah. I love your description of that. That’s so good.

Or how about for Beaujolais? On the other hand, we’ve talked about this before, how difficult it is to describe flavors in words.

Yes.

So what do you do? So credit to the writer. So props to the writer, right?

What’s the Beaujolais one? The Beaujolais one, I came across this in a collection of wine writing. It says, a texture like the sinful strokes of a feather boa.

I mean. Hello.

But yeah, you’re right. I bet they have a lot of leather in their closet.

By the way, you said that the menu was strange to you and you’ve never been to this wine bar.

I’m not convinced. This one I hadn’t. It’s new.

We will be talking later in the show about wine writing, and we have some great advice from one of the best wine writers on the planet. But in the meantime, we’re going to talk about other kinds of language.

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lana from Flower Mound, Texas. I had a question about a phrase that I have known. I’ve always known this phrase. I don’t remember anybody using it around me. So it’s just like deep in my vernacular. It’s the phrase, clean as a whistle.

The first time I used this phrase around my husband, he laughed at me because he thought I had mixed up the phrase because he said, well, a whistle is really dirty. So if something’s clean as a whistle, is it full of spit? Is it dirty? What’s going on?

Oh, dirty like an actual physical whistle like a referee would have? We got your back. Awesome.

And I said, it’s a real phrase people use all the time. And he laughed at me and didn’t believe me.

Oh, really? He grew up in Texas, so he says phrases all the time that I’ve never heard of.

I bet. I bet. And where are you from?

Well, it’s one of the privileges of living in Texas. You can speak like you want to.

I guess so. Colorful language. I’m from California originally.

Okay. All right. So it must be interesting around your house.

Here’s the thing. Clean as a whistle has nothing to do with the device or the thing. It’s the actual sound itself. The sharp, piercing sound of a whistle is one of the cleanest things you can know.

Right? It’s the sound. The sound is sharp and piercing. It’s very, it’s got a clean, audible edge to it. Nothing could be cleaner.

Yeah. There’s no germs on the sound of a whistle.

Yeah, but the spit-covered little metal thing with the ball rolling around it, vibrating inside, yeah, that’s really disgusting. Probably got mold growing on the cork.

Right. So you’re right. It’s clean as a whistle, and it refers to the sound, not the device, okay?

Okay, that makes sense. That’s great. I can win this one.

Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You are completely in the right. Good to go.

Good. I’ll use it all the time now. Oh, are those plates clean as a whistle? I guess you better wash them again.

That’s great. Thanks, Lana. Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling. Bye-bye.

You know, that reminds me, and this is completely a tangent, but I have to tell you this.

Sure. One of the things about having a kid is going to the toy store or any kind of gift shop in a museum. And they always have these things at child height.

Oh, yeah. Like whistles and harmonicas and flutes and recorders. And so the first couple years, you’re trying to get your kid not to put that toy in his mouth because you know that a thousand other children have done that.

And then at some point, you’re just like, I guess you’re tired of fighting the battle. Those are some dirty whistles.

I mean, while your fingers are in your ears, right?

Yeah, so we could coin a new idiom, as dirty as a toy store whistle. Because those are filthy. And the kid doesn’t care.

I like that. Like it could be still wet and gummy from the last kid, you know?

Well, yeah, yeah. And if it’s plastic, it’s got teeth marks in it, right?

Yeah, exactly. It’s got a little bit of like the arrow biscuit on it still, like gummed up in the, you know.

Why doesn’t this a whistle work? Well, you have to take the cookies out of the hole.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lucia.

Hi, Lucia. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

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

Hiya.

Hi there. Well, my mother-in-law uses a phrase. It’s a euphemism for death. It’s to stick your spoon in the wall. And I cannot find where that phrase has come from or how it came to be, and I’m wondering if you could help.

Very good. Well, I think it just has to do with the fact that eating is essential to life. There’s an expression in German that goes, hat den Löffel abgegeben, which is he passed along his spoon, or he set his spoon aside, and that means he died as well.

There’s a version of this in Afrikaans, in South Africa, where you jab your spoon into the ceiling.

Really? Yeah.

Yeah. So the idea has been around for a good long while. And there’s also to lay down one’s knife and fork as a way of saying that you died.

Mm—

Mm—

Or in Finland, they say to throw the spoon into the corner. But the idea is that you’re setting aside this thing and you’re never going to use it again.

I mean, in Mexico, sometimes they say the equivalent of he hung up his tennis shoes.

Mm—

Yeah. And what we’re envisioning here is, say, a cabin or an older style house, say, pre-electricity, pre-modern era, kind of a one-room house, where your utensils might actually be hung on the wall on a peg. And each person probably had their own utensil.

And so if John dies, then that spoon stays on the wall because nobody’s going to use John’s spoon. So he’s literally hung up his spoon on the wall.

Yeah, kind of testament to his passing away.

That is fabulous.

Yeah. Isn’t that great? Well, that’s so fair.

Yeah, English is replete with history. Well, thank you so much.

You are so welcome. I am so excited. I can’t wait to share this with her.

That’s great. Thanks for calling. I so appreciate it. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

All righty, bye-bye.

There is a fabulous article that was published earlier this year in the British Medical Journal where these researchers were talking about different euphemisms around the world for dying because doctors need to know this more and more internationally.

You know, so they don’t say anything insensitive.

In Portuguese, a euphemism for death translates as to wear wooden pajamas.

To wear wooden pajamas.

Isn’t that great?

Or to not eat mangoes next season, speaking of food.

Isn’t that great?

Oh, I do like that one.

I’ll share some more of those later.

Yeah, I’ve got a few myself I’ll throw in there.

Okay, great.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

It’s Jeff Weiss from Dallas, Texas.

Jeff, hi.

Hi, Jeff.

How are you doing?

I’m doing great.

What’s going on?

Well, I have a question that I’ve been pursuing like the white whale for 19 years that I hope you guys have a good answer for.

Oh, my goodness.

Definitely.

Park that boat at a pier and we’ll help.

Well, I’m a reporter for the Dallas Morning News.

And 19 years ago, I was given the assignment to do a feature story on the 150th anniversary of the first Christmas card, pre-printed Christmas card.

Okay.

And it’s a beautiful little postcard thing that was published in England.

And on it, it said, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year.

And it occurred to me that that greeting, that particular formulation, obviously had a long history.

And it got me wondering why, at least in modern American language,

Why Christmas must be merry, but nothing else can be.

You would never say merry birthday or merry anniversary or even merry new year,

But if you do blank Christmas, there really isn’t anything that goes there but merry.

So why is it, in common American speech, merry is Christmas and only Christmas?

You can find out a few things about Mary that I think will give you an answer if you look in these large corpora, these large bodies of text that I often talk about on the show.

And what you’re going to find is that Mary’s heyday is a word that was widely used by Americans, was the 1800s.

And it has rapidly been declining ever since.

And a Mary generally means exuberant or very happy or joyful.

Yeah, it’s a kind of animated enjoyment.

Yeah, it seems a little odd to the modern ear because we’re not quite sure that Christmas should be merry, right?

We’re a little suspicious of the idea that you’re supposed to be having fun.

And yet the Christmas celebrations, we are moderate compared to what they’ve been in the past with the drunken revelry and the dancing on tape.

I mean, Christmas celebrations have traditionally been out of hand, like frat parties, you know?

Which doesn’t sound merry to me. It sounds dangerous.

Well, you know.

Well, it’s cognate with the word mirth, too.

Mary and mirth are from the same root.

And I think it’s always kind of connoted that kind of laughter and joyousness.

Different from happy.

Yeah, don’t get the eggnog next to the candle and you’ll be fine.

So, yeah, you’re right.

Mary is a word that mainly, and I have a little footnote here in a second,

Mainly is associated with Christmas in American English today.

It’s just what has happened.

Mary has fallen out of use.

However, you might say something like the lightning played merry hell with my electronics, right?

Meaning that the lightning had…

And the other exception I thought about is somebody did something terrible and then went upon their merry way.

Exactly.

Good point.

But in most cases, both cases, you don’t actually mean merry.

Right.

And there’s another one of those kind of not quite merry uses of merry, which is the cat led the dog on a merry chase around the yard, right?

Yes.

Well, and Robin Hood and his merry men, I mean, they must have been a lot of fun, right?

They were.

And merry-go-round.

Yeah.

If you go back far enough, you can find other examples, and you’ll see merry old England,

But these are all used in intentionally archaic or sometimes ironic fashion.

Exactly.

A little fossilized, right?

Nobody ever looked at you and says, have a merry birthday.

Right.

No, you don’t do that.

You don’t do that anymore.

But there was a time that you would.

You can look in any newspaper archive of the 1800s and see that Mary was widely used.

But, you know, you’re perceptive.

You figure Mary is kind of fossilized almost.

Yeah, God resty Mary gentleman.

It’s not archaic yet, and it’s not obsolete, but I wouldn’t be surprised at 100 years if it is.

Preserved just in those carols and things.

Thanks for calling.

Jeff, if you see the whale, let us know.

This is all off the record, by the way.

I will do that.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So you’ll make us happy if you call us at 877-929-9673,

Or you can send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s an expression for getting married that I didn’t know.

Okay.

If a fellow’s getting married, you might say he’s getting himself another rib.

Another rib. Oh, like the biblical reference, right?

Very good, right? Getting hitched, getting hooked up.

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

A word game and more of your calls about language. Stay tuned.

Support for Way With Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies,

Whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And is that John Chaneski on the horizon?

It sure looks like him.

It’s me.

Hi, guys.

It’s our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

What’s up, buddy?

What’s going on?

Well, you know, it’s around that time of year to look back at news stories in limerick form.

Okay.

For some reason.

Okay.

Let’s hear it.

For some reason.

Limerick.

I should do a sonnet.

Well, it goes back to the old country, son.

That’s right. The early newsmen were mostly Irish. That’s probably why news stories are often in limerick form.

So I’m going to give you some limericks. You’re going to give me the last word or words that I’m going to leave off.

Okay?

Okay.

Here we go. These are all stuff from last year. Here we go.

An impatient young fellow named Clive couldn’t wait for the truck to arrive.

Without any duress, he junked his 4S as he drooled for his new…

IPhone 5.

IPhone 5 is right.

I actually know a few people like that who immediately get rid of their old phone as soon as the new one comes out.

Here’s the next one.

When they speak of their great virtuosity, the team does not speak with pomposity.

NASA’s rolling in clover.

They’ve delivered a rover aptly named…

Curiosity.

Curiosity, right.

That’s right.

Curiosity is on Mars.

Yes.

Okay.

Here we go.

An IPO that began with a spike gave Facebook a bit of a hike.

But the price, some implied, was what started a slide that inspired no one to click…

Like.

Like.

That’s right.

Sometimes you’re not actually guessing what the story’s about.

You’re just sort of…

Waiting.

Yeah, having fun with it.

Waiting for the gap.

Thank you.

I really don’t want to sound snooty, but this world is so full of beauty.

So this guy, I must say, was crazy to play five straight days with the game…

Call of Duty.

Call of Duty is right.

A man in Sydney played five straight days of Call of Duty.

Here we go.

There was a young fellow called Niles who overcame several trials.

To space he did scoot, a high-tech parachute helped him skydive from 24…

Miles.

Miles is right.

Yeah, the Austrian dude.

By the way, his name was actually Felix Baumgartner.

It wasn’t Niles.

But Baumgartner doesn’t rhyme with anything.

It doesn’t match up with a lot.

Even Felix a little bit.

There was a young fellow called Kyle who wished to impress.

He said, I’ll give it a chance with a Korean dance.

So he hit the floor in…

Gangnam style.

Gangnam style, yeah.

Couldn’t get it out there, could you?

I couldn’t.

All-bang-gang-gang style.

Oh, I’ve got a mental picture.

I’m trying to get rid of him.

Now I’ve got a new worm.

Okay, here’s the last one.

The country was put through a grinder, an election that could have been kinder.

Barack made a comeback, but Mitt Romney took flack for resumes kept in a…

Binder.

Binder is right.

So there are my limericks of the year.

I hope you like them.

There once was a man named Chaneski.

I have nothing further.

You finished that.

Let me know next week.

Thanks, John.

Thanks, guys.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

If you want to talk about language, wordplay, slang, words, and how we use them, call us 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Yolani.

Hi, Yolani.

Oh, hi.

Welcome to the show.

Where are you calling from?

San Diego.

Okay, what can we do for you?

So my question is about the difference between squeezed and squoze, which is the proper past tense to use.

And Yelani, why are you wondering about this one?

Well, funny is it started a while ago.

I’ve always used squoze, and I know my mom uses squoze too, but I don’t know many other people who have.

And I said it once, and my friends were arguing with me, saying that, oh, that’s not the right word, that’s not even a word, and it’s supposed to be squeezed.

And then my mom actually wrote it down on her paperwork, and her coworkers also said the same thing.

She’s like, no, no, I’m pretty positive it’s a word.

But we couldn’t figure it out, and I’ve read that it is a word, and I’ve read that it isn’t a word.

And so we were just kind of wondering.

So you would say, I squoze some oranges into orange juice?

Yeah, or like I squoze his hand hard or she wrote it, he squoze my hand hard.

And that feels right to you in the same way that freeze and froze feel right to you.

Yeah, exactly.

Rather than we’ve freezed.

Yeah.

So when you see your boyfriend, you say, I squoze my squeeze.

Oh, well, I don’t think I’ve ever said it that way, but I thought it would work.

And if you broke up with him, then he would be your squoze.

If he’s your ex.

Yeah, that actually sounds pretty right, too.

So we have a verdict on this, don’t we, Martha?

Yeah, more or less, yeah.

I wonder if we agree.

I’m looking forward to this.

Well, let’s see.

Okay.

I would say squoze is sort of dialect, right?

It’s not the proper, proper version.

But it is a legitimate word.

Yeah, it’s a legitimate word.

You can use it in most circumstances, but if you’re writing formally, you should avoid it.

Or speaking formally.

Okay, so it is an actual word.

It’s an actual word with hundreds of years of history.

It pops up again and again in the U.K., in the U.S., among the Scots, and all different kind of varieties of speech.

Even Ronald Reagan used it in the 1980s.

Yes, he did.

When he was talking about his cancer, I think.

Yes, and Yelani, did you read Winnie the Pooh when you were growing up?

I did, but I don’t think I remember it.

Well, it might have stuck in your mind, because there’s a story from Winnie the Pooh where Owl’s house blows over and all the animals are inside,

And the only one that can get out and save everybody is Piglet.

And there’s a line in there about he squeezed and he squoze.

And then with one last squoze, he was out.

Oh, no way.

Yeah.

So that probably imprinted on your brain.

But it’s a real word.

Yeah, it’s real.

If you’re speaking in front of Congress, you probably don’t want to use it unless you are the president.

Ronald Reagan did.

He’s the president.

It’s a real word.

And you can just thumb your nose at people who say that it isn’t.

Okay, perfect.

Thank you so much for that.

I can go back and, you know, prove I was right to my friends.

Yes, absolutely.

Of course.

Thanks for calling, Yolani.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What’s really interesting about this word is it’s so naturally funny.

Squoze is one of those words.

It is, isn’t it?

It’s automatically humorous.

It is.

But it used to be used in vaudeville routines.

Did you know this?

No.

Yeah, so it starts showing up in these acts, these one-act plays that kind of make the rounds in the mid-1800s,

And it keeps popping up again and again in these lists of plays and these monologues that you can do.

And I have one of them here.

Okay.

Did you hear this?

Of course, yeah.

So one character says to another, he was so glad to see me, he took my hand and squoze it.

He did what?

He squoze it.

No, he squeezed your hand.

No, he squoze my hand.

I say he squeezed your hand.

No, sir, I can prove it squoze.

Don’t Murray say rise, rose, risen?

Yes.

Well, then it’s squeeze, squoze, squoze-in.

Squoze-in.

And by Murray, they’re referring to James Murray, the Oxford English Dictionary editor.

That’s awesome.

They were referencing him in vaudeville?

That’s great.

Yeah, it was later.

It was more area time, right?

Versions of this show up in the 1860s and the 1870s, and it’s still, this same exact script is still growing strong by the 1930s and 1940s.

How interesting.

I think it strikes me as a construction that a kid would come up with.

You know, like I eated my dinner or something.

I think that’s why it strikes people that way, don’t you think?

I do, yeah.

But there’s actually no reason it necessarily should.

I mean, if you think of freeze and froze and your examples, that’s great.

Squeeze, squo, squizzin’.

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

You know the expression, if wishes were horses, then beggars would ride?

Well, here’s a variant of that.

It’s the same idea in different words.

Okay.

When the sky falls, we shall all catch larks.

Ooh.

Nice, right?

That’s really nice.

When the sky falls, we shall all catch larks.

The idea that wishing for things to happen or worrying about things happening isn’t going to change what does happen.

Yeah, yeah.

I like that.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Chris from Seattle.

Hiya, Chris. Welcome.

Hey there. What’s up?

Hey. I have a question here that’s actually been causing quite a bit of domestic discord over the last few years.

Question about scone versus scone.

Actually, I am from the U.S., lived in Canada for 10 years.

My wife is from Canada, and she insists that those pastries you have with high tea are called scones.

And I actually work for a company that designs software that translates text into speech and vice versa.

And I have used their American text-to-speech engine and their British text-to-speech engine,

And the pronunciation varies.

It’s scone if you’re in the States and scone if you’re everywhere else in the world.

So I’m hoping you can maybe solve this one for us.

So the Canadian says scone. That’s your wife?

Yes.

And you’re the American?

I’m the American, and I say whatever happens to come out.

So you say both.

I say both, really depending on who I’m talking to.

I also, when I write emails, spell color and humor and so forth differently depending on my audience.

And God forbid I’m mailing a mixed American and UK.

You’re a true North American.

You span the continent.

I do try.

And the text-to-speech and speech-to-text software that I work with, which was designed by people with degrees in linguistics, varies its parsing based on what language you’ve got selected.

So I’m bringing the question to you people.

Unfortunately, it’s not a clear line, particularly when you talk about Canada, because Canada is such a linguistic mutt.

In spelling and pronunciation, they are a mishmash of stuff that they got from the rest of North America and what they got from the British.

And so, for example, scone is used by about two-thirds of the population in the United Kingdom, and then the rest say scone.

In Canada, scone is used roughly by about 40%, and the rest say scone.

In the United States, about 90% of people say scone, and the rest say scone.

And you can see that these different percentages here make it impossible to come down in a decision either in your favor or in hers.

Yeah, yeah.

And this is why, you know, I kind of changed my decision to be sort of, you know, that both of them must be correct to some degree.

Because, like I say, you know, my background is software engineering.

The people that design this software’s background is in linguistics.

And they accept both pronunciations depending on what you’ve got selected.

So I figured there must be some flexibility there.

What’s startling me is I didn’t know anyone from the United Kingdom said scone.

Yes, they do.

And as a matter of fact, it’s really interesting.

When you get to asking individual Scots and Brits and so forth about this pronunciation,

If they say scone, then they think that the scone pronunciation is posh.

But if they say scone, then they think the scone pronunciation is posh.

There’s very much a class thing in their eyes.

But it just depends what you say.

You believe that the other pronunciation is the one that’s put upon or is done by posers of people who are aspirants to a higher lifestyle to which they’re not actually supposed to belong.

Yeah, you’ll see both of those pronunciations in the OED, in the Oxford English Dictionary.

Yeah, most good dictionaries will give you both pronunciations.

In North America, south of the Canadian-American border, scone is by far away the best pronunciation, the one most likely to use.

In Canada, flip a quarter.

Or flip a loony.

Yeah, no question.

So, Chris, I think we’ve preserved your domestic tranquility, don’t you think?

Yes, I think so, actually.

You have to do it her way.

I did get an agreement from her to accept whatever decision was come to here.

But I’m not done yet.

Here’s the rule.

Whoever makes the scones gets to choose the pronunciation.

That’s great.

So what if we’re out and we’re, well, I guess then—

Whoever pays gets to choose the pronunciation.

Right.

Okay.

And if you’re going Dutch, then you both get to use your own pronunciation.

Sounds good to me.

All right.

I hope the Discord is mild.

Oh, truly.

You can stop sleeping in the car now.

You can go back into the house.

Excellent.

Thanks for calling, Chris.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Chris.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

Call us with your linguistic domestic disputes, 877-929-9673.

Every year I look back on the previous 12 months and come up with the words of the year and publish a column in the New York Times, and I want to share some of those words with you this year.

Great.

Do you know the term doxing?

Doxing.

D-O-X-I-N-G.

To dox someone is to document their life.

Dox is a longstanding abbreviation for to document, a verb.

Oh, okay.

And so if I was doxing you, I’d find out everything I could about you.

I’d look for the secret stuff.

And then I would share it with the world.

And this came out because there was some scandal involved with the website Reddit.

One of their longtime users was involved in not very pleasant activities and exposing pictures of people and things like that.

So he got doxed in Gawker.

So doxing is one of my words of the year.

I’ll share a few more as we go on through the show.

Okay, great.

What’s your word of the year?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words?

Hi, this is Jennifer from Evansville, Indiana.

Hi, Jennifer. What’s going on in Evansville?

Hi. Well, I’m calling because I want to know if you know the origin of a phrase that we used to say when we were kids, and I have nobody else to ask but you.

Well, what’s the question? Let’s hear it.

When we were kids, when we were in the car with our mother, my sister and I, and we would drive over one of those bumps that sent your stomach doing flip-flops inside of you.

The minute you landed from the bump, everybody in the car would in unison say, thank you, Mom.

Thank you, Mom.

When you got down at the bottom of the bump.

And I never even sought to ask why until our public radio station started airing your show.

And then I started to wonder but didn’t have anybody around to ask.

So I’m calling you.

Let me ask you, did you grow up there in southwest Indiana?

Well, I grew up in Indiana, but all my family is from the northeast, and this is this part of the family from the White Mountains of New Hampshire, actually.

Perfect.

Perfect.

I can’t believe it.

We’re really excited about this.

Oh, golly.

Okay.

Because this is an expression that you hear up in the northeast in particular, and you painted the picture really well, Jennifer.

You’ve got a whole bunch of people in a vehicle.

You go over a bump, and everybody goes up and down, right?

And their heads nod, right?

Yeah.

Your head kind of goes forward and then jerks back.

And it’s like somebody tipping his hat and saying, thank you, ma’am.

Right, because you would nod your head as you were walking by a lady on the street, right?

Yeah.

Good day to you, ma’am. Thank you, ma’am.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh. So that’s why people started saying that in the car?

Oh, well, even before the car.

Yeah, the wagon days.

Yeah.

It goes back at least to the 1840s.

It’s probably older still.

And it’s got a lot of names.

Excuse me, ma’am.

How do you do?

Whoop-de-doo.

Tickle bump.

Yes, ma’am.

Tons of names.

Oh, my God.

Kiss me quick is my favorite.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, I never knew, and I have my mother’s cousin’s cousin is the only other person that I even thought to ask.

And they said, thank you, ma’am, when they were growing up.

But she didn’t know where it came from either.

So, oh, my gosh, wow, that’s exciting.

You know, there’s a really great entry.

I feel compelled to mention this in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Our friends and colleagues there at DARE, as it’s known, have done a great job of mapping this.

And it’s so perfectly just clustered in the Northeast that it’s not even funny, which is why we were both delighted when you said New Hampshire and the White Mountains.

Oh, yeah, nobody here in Indiana has ever heard of it.

Well, they have now.

They look at me like I’m crazy.

But I hadn’t had anybody in the Northeast that even heard of it either.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

I wonder if it’s just not as common anymore.

With better roads, maybe people say it less.

Yeah, yeah.

Or better shocks in the cars or something like that.

Yeah.

So there’s your answer.

Yeah, bumping the road is a thank you, ma’am.

Thank you.

That’s great.

Oh, I’m so excited.

Thank you.

All right, take care now.

You too.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Or you can send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Sometimes people ask me what my favorite word of all time is.

Grant, you probably get this too.

Yeah, definitely.

All I can say is so many words, so little time.

Although I will say that these days I’m partial to the word mellifluous.

Oh, yes.

You know, it means having a beautiful sound.

And it comes from Latin words that mean flowing with honey, like the Spanish word miel, which means honey.

So I’ve told you mine, but we’d like to hear yours.

We’re building a whole wall of words from fellow word lovers at our website, waywordradio.org.

So here’s what we’d like you to do.

Write your favorite word in big, bold letters on a white sheet of paper.

Snap a photo of yourself while holding it up close to your face.

Send it to us.

And you can see the faces and words we’ve already received at waywordradio.org.

Just click on the Word Wall link at the top of any page.

Advice about writing from one of the world’s best wine writers, coming up next.

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

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Earlier we were having some fun at the expense of wine writers.

Maybe we were just showing our lack of sophistication, Grant, when it comes to wine.

That’s me.

But I wanted to share part of an essay that I stumbled across recently when I was reading about wine.

It’s called Wine and Astonishment.

And this is by the wine writer Andrew Jefford.

It’s from a speech he gave earlier this year at a wine writer’s conference.

And there’s a whole lot about wine in it.

He’s super, super knowledgeable.

But there’s also fantastic writing advice for anybody in there.

And his main message to wine writers is to be astonished.

That’s what he says, to be astonished.

And remember that there was a moment when you got it about wine.

And most likely that moment, he says, didn’t come from drinking this particular pricey bottle from that particular year.

It was a moment it could have come with any kind of wine where you had the explosion of insight in which you realized for the first time all the connections, that what you’re sipping has an intimate relationship to the natural world and the place that it came from, that there was a particular grower, a particular winemaker, that there’s so much wrapped in that one mouthful.

And Grant, I think that that’s such great advice for writers to remember to be astonished.

Remember that moment when the light bulb went on about your particular topic that you write over and over about and that you have to tell somebody about.

I mean, I certainly had that experience with etymology, and you maybe did with slang or whatever.

And I want to share just a couple of lines that he wrote about that.

He says, we explore unfamiliar places with passionate intensity for two weeks a year, then barely glance at the familiar places where we live for 50 weeks a year.

We look with glazed or veiled or ungrateful eyes at those closest to us, those who give us most, whereas indifferent strangers are minutely appraised.

We relish health only when we’ve lost it.

And in the same way, he says that you have to pay close attention to language and keep reworking it to make it fresh.

And remember, we were talking about how do you get your passion back if you’re writing computer manuals by day.

And I just, I like the way that he was talking about that to people who have to blog and put out a whole bunch of information about a topic like wine.

We’ll link to this on the website so you can read it too.

What is his name again?

His name is Andrew Jefford.

You can call us if you want to talk about language, tell us how you keep the joy in your writing.

What do you do to keep it fresh?

877-929-9673.

Or send your thoughts about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katie from Traverse City, Michigan.

Katie, what would you like to talk about?

I have a question about the word hobby.

My husband and I were recently on our honeymoon in Canada, and we were walking around there, and we passed quite a few hobby shops, and it kind of made me start thinking, like, what is a hobby?

My husband and I are both musicians, and we’re pretty active.

You know, we walk a lot, we bike, we like to read and garden, those kind of things.

But we both agreed that we wouldn’t really consider those things hobbies.

And so a few days ago we were at a dinner party with some friends, and I brought this question up and kind of led to a pretty lively discussion with some of us really coming down firmly on the side of hobby as being particularly narrow or frivolous activity, like stamp collecting or tinkering with your car or something, and other people really thinking that it meant more really like any pastime, like walking or gardening or sports activities.

Yeah, I bet that was an interesting discussion, a lively discussion.

I could see the division right away.

That’s a great question.

As soon as you said that, I can say, you know what, I have that same discrepancy in my own understanding of hobby.

So you said that playing music for you isn’t a hobby.

Right, yeah.

Playing music or walking, I think, are a really essential part of my day.

So you take an after-dinner walk or something, and you don’t count that as a hobby.

It’s just something you like to do.

Right, it’s something I feel like I really need to do.

We do have both meanings of hobby in American English and, as far as I know, in British English, so that a lot of people seem to believe it’s just something, anything that you do regularly with your leisure time.

So it’s not related to making money or it’s not a chore where you’re cleaning the house, for example.

But it’s something you do when you have nothing else to do.

And that’s a hobby.

But yet a lot of people, and this is the one that interests me the most because it connects to the etymology of the word hobby.

That’s where I was going.

A lot of people think that hobby is something you not only do it in your leisure time, but you do it kind of obsessively and constantly.

Almost like if you have a mission and you can’t stop yourself.

Well, I was thinking etymologically.

I mean, it originally goes back to a small diminutive horse, a little pony.

And there is, I think, a certain connotation of, you know, it’s not the same thing as a passion, you know, a grand passion or your bliss.

There’s a certain demeaning element in some people’s understanding of the word hobby.

Well, certainly, if you’re a Calvinist and you think that all only work is good, then anything that’s not work, you know, any leisure must be bad.

You know, a hobby horse, I mean, there have been instances where people have talked about somebody’s hobby, and there’s a little bit of condescension or something to it.

So just to lay this etymology out so you can understand a little better, it starts out as a nickname for Robert, and then apparently horses were often called Robert, so therefore they were also called Robin or Dobbin and Hobby.

And then Hobby Horse became a name, and then the children’s toy appeared.

You know, the stick with the horse’s head that the children would gallop around.

Now, children can be very obsessive about something that they like to do.

They can do it for hours on end, day after day, year after year, for a very long time.

And I can just, in my mind, envision children galloping around on their hobby horse in this kind of obsessive, monomaniac way and never leaving it alone.

And then hobby is shortened again from hobby horse back to hobby and refers to anything that you do with that kind of constant, regular activity.

And then it kind of comes forward to two different meanings that we have today.

One is just anything you do in your leisure time.

And the other one is anything you do in your leisure time that you do with a kind of a passion or drive or energy.

It almost seems a little outdated in a way.

Like, you know, like I would say my peers maybe don’t use that word very often.

That’s so interesting.

Yeah, and hobby shops.

I had to go to a hobby shop to find a part for something that I was working on recently.

And it was odd to me walking into something called a hobby shop.

It felt like walking into a toy store rather than REI or something.

It’s interesting.

Well, I wonder what our listeners think about this.

Yeah, how do you see a hobby?

What do you have in your life that you call your hobby?

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

Katie, this is a great question.

I think we’re going to get a lot of response on this.

Yeah, we’re going to continue this conversation.

All right, thank you.

Thanks for starting it.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Here’s something you can say about a braggart or a blowhard.

Okay.

A noisy river never drowned nobody.

What does that mean?

It’s about people who are all hat and no cattle.

All hat and no cattle.

Right? All hat and no ranch.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is R. Allen Smith.

R. Allen Smith?

Do you go by R?

I go by Allen, but everybody in San Diego where I’m from calls me R. Allen Smith.

Okay, well, we are too, so we will as well.

Go ahead, R. Allen Smith.

What can we do for you?

Well, I tell you, I’ve been repositioning my business.

I’ve been an attorney and an executive coach and a number of other things, and I added the title of strategic advisor, and I have been spelling it A-D-V-I-S-O-R, which looks right to me, but my spell check keeps telling me it wants to do E-R.

So I went on the Internet, and I found that both spellings are acceptable, that the O-R is a more, I guess, a U.S. version of it, but I’m worried that I will damage my credibility if I’m spelling it in a way that people say, what could he possibly know if he doesn’t know how to spell advisor right?

That’s very good.

What a great question.

And your preferred spelling is O-R, advisor O-R on the end, right?

That’s my preference.

That’s what looks right to me.

I’m with you.

I really am.

E-R always looks wrong to me.

It always looks wrong to me, too.

And you know why the three of us have that feeling?

Is because it turns out, and you’re going to love this, this is brand new data, the O-R spelling actually is more common in all of North America.

And is almost about to overtake the spelling in the UK.

Oh, yay!

Yay! This is great news!

Listen, what this means is that all of the dictionaries and usage guides and spelling manuals are out of date.

Wow.

They have not caught up.

I can’t tell you how exciting this is for us.

They’ll probably still be giving this bad advice about the spelling for another 10 or 20 years before they all kind of like get to it.

They’re going to be bad advisors.

Yeah.

So, for example.

They should be advisors.

For example, one of the sources quotes the British National Corpus, which is this giant body of text.

The thing is, it’s a tiny body of text, relatively speaking, because now I can go into bigger bodies of text, look at them across time,

And you can see where Advisor, around the year 2000, starts to be more often spelled with an OR and less often spelled with an

This is hot chat for us, R. Allen.

It is, and I feel like I’m at the front end of a wave.

You’re an innovator.

Cowabunga.

What’s really interesting, we have a weird feedback loop when it comes to these style guides.

Just bear with me one second, R. Allen Smith.

I’m going to explain this to you.

So the usage guides, what they do is say, what are all the best writers doing in their writing?

And so they go look in newspapers and magazines and books and say, oh, they’re all spelling E-R.

Therefore, the best spelling is E-R.

And they put it into their style guide.

But what do the editors of these newspapers and magazines and books use in order to decide how to spell?

They use that very same style guide.

Oh, man.

And so what happens is if you leave out newspapers and magazines and books that are using these particular style guides,

And you go with intelligent, well-written, educated text.

And we’re not talking like fly-by-night emails or anything like that.

If you go with real legitimate writing, you will find 90% of people use OR.

90% of them.

Wow.

Be darn.

It’s just these style guides have perpetuated something,

And then they keep using the evidence of their own influence

As evidence that they should continue to keep that rule in place.

It’s very wrong.

This explains so much.

When will the word processing spell checkers catch up with this?

Well, given that Microsoft Word has had some of its errors in its spell checker and its grammar checker for 30 years, never.

30.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

I hope we helped some.

Go ahead with OR.

Absolutely.

And you’re going to find that most people aren’t even going to bat an eye at it.

In fact, why don’t you change your name to OR Alan Smith?

I think that would be.

One of my personal email addresses, ourallen, O-U-R-A-L-E-N.

There we go.

Thanks for calling, buddy.

Thank you.

Good luck.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673, words@waywordradio.org.

On the list of words of the year for 2012, of course, is Higgs boson.

Yes.

This was the atomic particle whose existence was finally confirmed in July by scientists at the Large Hadron Collider.

Yes.

That’s a great one, right?

Yes, Higgs boson.

Scientists are our friends.

We love you people.

We love you boffins.

And our quasi-science arena here, you can call us 877-929-9673 or send your words of the year.

They should be the words that you love, not the words that you hate.

To words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Kathy Wilson, and I’m calling today from Richmond, Virginia.

Okay, well, welcome to the show.

Hi, Kathy.

Today.

Thank you.

Hi.

Today you’re calling from Richmond?

Tomorrow you might call.

Yes, today I’m calling from Richmond, but this is the end.

No, actually it’s not.

I’m going to Minnesota and then flying home to Mexico.

Wow, okay.

Well, how can we help you?

Actually, my sister and my brother-in-law were having a conversation in Moscow, Idaho,

About the expression above board.

And then I was driving in Montana, and I heard your show,

And I thought, this is the perfect people to ask.

Yes.

Yeah, I think so.

No matter what state you’re in.

Yeah.

So the expression above board, in what sense?

How would you use it in a sentence?

Well, like you say, well, I’m making this transaction with you, and everything is above board.

Mm—

And we thought, well, maybe it’s like it came from when people were on a ship, and they were under the deck.

Maybe when they went above board, up on deck, they could see everything.

Mm—

And so that made it whatever was happening real.

Well, anyway, that’s all we could come up with.

Mm—

Yeah.

Well, it actually has nothing to do with ships.

Or pirates or anything like that.

Yeah.

Oh, sorry.

Well, you’re not the first to make that leap and think that that might be the origin, but it’s not.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it sounds plausible, sure.

But this sense of board goes back to the idea of a board being related to a table.

You know, like room and board is, you know, your room and your food on the table.

And if you’re talking about above board as far back as the 1600s, what you were talking about was doing things like cards, playing cards, and you keep your hands above board.

Oh, yeah.

So there’s no cheating.

So you’re not pulling a card out of your lap or you’re not doing something surreptitious under the table that would give you an unfair advantage.

Right. Everybody’s on the up and up.

Literally not being underhanded.

Yeah, yeah, right. Underhanded.

Under the table.

Yeah.

Yeah, I remember movies or books, you know, medieval times or Sir Arthur or something,

You know, and they say that the people were eating with plantains and boards.

Yep, exactly.

Something like that.

Well, that’s still done in some places, you know, serving food on a board.

But they’re sanded.

Yeah, yeah, I hope so.

I should hope so.

Unless you really need some roughage.

Yeah, that’d be a heck of a lisp.

Hey, happy trails.

Have a good trip back to all those places.

Oh, thank you.

It was really fun listening to your show.

Take care.

Good luck.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Here’s another 2012 word of the year.

Great.

MOOC.

M-O-O-C.

Yep.

It’s an acronym.

Right.

Massive, open, online course.

Yes.

And so these are these courses,

Pretty much what you might encounter

If you went to, say, Stanford,

Except you do it online,

And the lectures are there,

And there might be materials

And maybe discussion forums,

And you can learn.

And often they’re free.

They don’t cost you a thing

To see some of the most brilliant professors

Of our age giving you free lectures.

And so you can learn online

Alongside all these other people.

We evangelize lifelong learning.

That’s part of the mission of our show.

We do.

And so this movement for this free education from the top minds of our age is wonderful.

The MOOC movement.

I mean, the universities, they might not like it because people are saying, well, I really just wanted to know.

I didn’t want to actually have to pay for it.

Yeah, yeah.

And I think there’s some criticism that people are just going to dip into this or that.

But no question, if you’re in a third world country and you don’t have access to this or that university,

I mean, you can study at Stanford and get a certificate or something, right?

Exactly.

This is a leapfrog movement.

This is where some people around the world can leapfrog these intervening stages of educational development and go straight to the top.

I love it. MOOC, M-O-O-C, Massive Open Online Course.

Which is sort of what we do, not exactly, but you can join in by calling us at 877-929-9673.

That’s all for today’s broadcast. Don’t forget about our word wall.

You can send your face and your favorite word to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673.

Share your family’s stories or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or in school.

You can also email us. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

If you happen to miss our broadcast, you can hear us on podcast anytime at all.

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Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Hurdell.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Servus.

Let’s call the whole thing off. You like potato and I like potato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

And from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.