Coinkydink (episode #1505)

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.

Grant, do you know who Pat and Charlie are?

Pat and Charlie.

No, they sound like Canadian television hosts, a morning show around a fire.

Bearskin rugs.

They may be, but that’s not the Pat and Charlie I’m thinking of.

Say I say, come over to my house, Grant, for a party.

And you say, okay, I’ll get a ride with Pat and Charlie.

Is that your own feet?

You’ll walk?

Your legs.

Your legs.

That’s very good.

Oh, okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah, I’m going to go with Pat and Charlie.

I’m going to get a ride with Pat and Charlie.

Yeah.

Where’d you pick that up?

I stumbled across it in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Of course.

And it turns out there are lots and lots and lots of terms for going on foot someplace.

I know a few of them.

Yeah.

Shank’s Mare.

Shank’s Mare.

Right.

Chevro legs is one of my favorite.

What’s that?

Chevro legs.

So instead of taking your Chevrolet, you take your Chevro legs.

That’s great.

I hadn’t heard that one.

I’d heard on Tom and Jerry, which is also your legs.

Or you can say, I’m going to use my pegs or use my ponies.

Sure, yeah.

Pegs, I know.

Yeah, but same idea as Shank’s mare.

Nice.

Yeah.

All words meaning take your legs instead of drive.

Exactly.

And I will be sharing many more of them later in the show.

Give us a call.

This show is about language and a lot more than language.

It’s culture, it’s family, it’s history.

877-929-9673.

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Hello.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello.

How’s it going?

Great. Who’s this?

My name is Gary Cleveland.

Where are you calling from, Gary?

Carolina Beach, North Carolina.

Okay.

Nice.

What can we do for you?

So I play in a fantastic punk band called Sacred Cash Cow.

That’s nice.

Punk will never die.

There’s a local band here that’s going to break up.

And so we were talking about covering one of their songs, learning one of their songs and covering it.

And I said, you know, it would be a cool way to pay homage to them.

And so our guitar player, Alex, and bass player, Steve, they both are staring at me.

And they’re like, what?

And I said, you know, pay homage to them.

And then they’re like, oh, wait, do you mean homage?

I’m like, oh, my God.

So then the heckling commences immediately, you know.

So I said, I know who can settle this debate.

So I’m thinking it’s sort of the debate between, like, vase and vase.

You know, that kind of thing.

But I don’t want to seem like a pretentious guy.

You know, I’m in a punk band, you know.

So hopefully you guys can settle this debate for us.

Homage versus homage.

Right.

But when you say homage, you’re usually talking about a tribute, right?

And homage to something.

Okay.

Rather than, I mean, there’s also paying homage or paying homage.

But the accent in both of those cases is on the first syllable.

So if you’re talking about the noun that you would use when you’re talking about doing a tribute to somebody, that would have the accent on the second syllable and you don’t pronounce the H there.

No, wait, I was right? Is that what you’re saying?

Well, it’s complicated.

But it sounds like what you’re doing is putting the accent on, which syllable are you accenting there?

Paying homage.

Paying homage.

Homage.

Yeah.

You would accent the second syllable if you’re talking about the thing itself that you’re doing, the tribute itself.

This is an homage.

Oh.

Yeah, this is an homage to that other band.

Right.

Okay, so wait, are you telling me that these guys are right and I’m wrong?

Hang on a second.

Do you have more of them there?

Wait, I was right?

Hi, who’s this?

This is Alex.

I play guitar in Sacred Cash Cow.

Okay.

Hi, Alex.

Welcome to the show.

Okay.

All right, so what’s your question?

Oh, yeah. Thank you for having me on.

What’s your position?

I’m really just against the homogenization of pronunciation.

Oh, no.

I don’t know what you’re thinking.

You know, I went to school.

I’m not from homage country or anything.

Yeah, yeah.

Let’s focus this conversation a little bit, all right?

So first we have the pronunciation homage, which is sometimes pronounced with the H at the beginning.

If you pay homage to someone, you show them respect or you show them consideration for what they’ve earned.

As an expert or what they’ve earned as your mentor or somebody who came before you and showed the way.

Correct. They’re superior.

Yeah. And that tends to be a non-count noun.

You pay homage. It’s a substance that you don’t pluralize, right?

You don’t pay homages. You just pay homage.

Then we have homage, right?

So if you play a song as an homage to another band, right?

And that is a count noun.

You can have homages, although it still sounds weird.

And what it has here is something essential that we haven’t talked about yet.

It has the direct influence of the French word homage, which is H-O-M-M-A-G-E, and which basically means a mark of respect.

So what you’re hearing here, and it came through artistic circles in the art world and in the music world and the creative fields.

People re-borrowed the word a second time from French, and it still retains some of that French pronunciation.

While at the same time, the previous borrowing has been very anglicized and doesn’t have very much of the original French pronunciation.

So it’s the same word borrowed twice from the same language at different periods for different purposes.

You’re both right.

You took the word right out of my mouth.

You’re both right.

So what you’re saying is homage is just Gary trying to sound smart at 1 o’clock in the morning.

It’s the tribute itself.

That’s exactly what I was trying to say.

Send us your songs, all right, so we can take a listen, all right?

Oh, we would love to.

Here, let me give it back to Gary.

And I just want to state again, I’m undefeated in these little corals.

So thank you so much, and here he is.

Take care.

His pronunciation is incredible.

All right.

Gary, he sounds like a real fun guy, though.

It sounds like you found somebody cool to have a band with.

Oh, absolutely.

I love these guys.

If I didn’t, I wouldn’t be here.

Well, you need to call us when you have another argument.

Yes, please.

Yeah, it sounds good.

I’ll talk to you in about five minutes.

Okay.

And do send us your music, all right?

Oh, yeah, you got it.

We’ll put a CD in the mail, and thanks again.

This has been awesome.

All right.

Punk lives.

Take care.

All right.

Stay cool.

Bye.

Bye, Gary.

You know, in all that mess, I’m pretty sure I said the word wrong a couple of times.

I probably all did.

Probably did, too.

I think we all did.

So we have homage or homage, right?

And then we have an homage, which is the tribute itself.

Yeah, yeah.

Right?

The artistic work that imitates or pays honor to the other one.

And it’s the same word borrowed from French twice, but centuries apart.

And so the newer borrowing, the newer re-borrowing, retains some of the Frenchiness because it comes up through art circles where people still find the Frenchiness to be a flair that they want to add to their lingo.

And clearly these guys have Frenchy flair.

There are some great punk bands from France now.

Hey, Sacred Cash Cow.

We know you’re in a band because everyone’s in a band and you’re arguing.

We want to hear it as long as it’s about language, 877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about the Southern expression, Pat and Charlie, meaning your legs, like you take Pat and Charlie to a party, meaning you go on foot.

And I was trying to figure out why Pat and why Charlie.

And the only thing that I can find is that there is a folktale in the African-American tradition of two mules named Pat and Charlie.

And these two mules were overworked and they started talking to each other.

And one of them was complaining about how hard they were working.

And the other one said to its companion, well, don’t worry, it’s about over.

Tomorrow we’re going to haul our owner to the cemetery.

And somebody overheard them saying that and went to the owner and said, you won’t believe this. Your mules are talking.

And they’re saying that you’re going to be hauled to the cemetery tomorrow.

So the owner goes running to the barn to find out what’s going on.

And here’s the mules saying that that they’re going to take the owner to the cemetery tomorrow.

And they won’t have to work anymore.

So the owner goes running back to the house all alarmed and falls and breaks his neck.

Oh, interesting.

Comes to pass and trying to stop it from coming to pass.

Yeah, so I don’t know if that’s the source of this expression, Pat and Charlie.

If you know something about Pat and Charlie related to legs or a story that explains it, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Judy.

I am calling from Indianapolis.

Hi, Judy.

Welcome to the show.

What’s going on?

Aunt Fanny was quite a bit older than I was, an old maiden aunt, who was born, I think, in Covington, Kentucky, and lived their life in Cincinnati.

She was born probably around 1880 or something, because she died when she was 96 in 1968.

Anyway, Aunt Fanny would say, we’d be talking, and she said, oh, I’m tired tonight.

I said, you’re going to take a bath?

No, I’m not going to take a bath.

I’m just going to take a jaybird.

When I asked her what a jaybird was, she said, oh, you know, just kind of when you wash under your wings and your tail feathers, maybe polish off your beak.

I’ve never heard anybody say that, but Benny said it quite often, so I don’t know where she picked it up.

I love that. That reminds me of a call we had about possibles.

Oh, yeah.

Go wash your possibles. Have you heard that one?

No, I missed that show.

Yeah, that’s when you say something like wash as far up as possible, and then wash as far down as possible, and then you wash your possibles.

Yeah, I like that too.

But I have not heard anybody say I’m going to take a jaybird.

We’ve had many, many people email us and call us to say that they use the term birdbath itself.

Yeah, I wonder if your aunt combines jaybird, like naked as a jaybird, with birdbath.

Yeah, that was my thought.

I have no idea.

Yeah.

But there are other names for this Dutch bath and wipe off and, oh, I’ve got some naughty ones here I can’t share.

GI bath, although there’s a couple different meanings for that.

Yeah, and I’ve heard marine shower, too.

Often it turns out that people use a term for arrival.

You know, like people in North Florida may say, I’m taking a Georgia bath.

Oh.

Oh, interesting.

You know, it’s like not as good as the real thing.

Yeah, we have a culture of making fun of the state next door, don’t we?

Yeah.

Pretty much everywhere in this country.

Yeah, maybe there they have Ohio baths.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I miss her.

She was something.

My old maiden aunt.

Oh, sounds nice.

That’s so lovely.

Judy, thank you for sharing this memory with us.

And call us again sometime when something else comes up.

All right.

Well, thank you for having me.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I love how Judy brought us a story from her family, from her great aunt Fanny, who was born in the 19th century.

We’d love to play Antiques Roadshow with…

Your language.

Your language.

So call us 877-929-9673 or send your stories about language and family lore to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s another Southernism for traveling on foot.

I’m going to take my foot in my hand.

Or I’m going to take my foot in hand and walk.

Okay.

Gotcha.

Yeah.

That doesn’t make any sense, but okay.

No, but so many of those phrases don’t.

All right.

Talk to us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

This show is about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stay with us.

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

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Here we go. This is actually related to sports.

I call it exports.

I’ll take a sport and change its first letter.

I’ll describe the change that occurs in that sport that would result from changing its name.

You tell me the name of the new sport.

Now, bear in mind the wordplay might be orthographic or it might be phonetic.

Okay?

For example, in this sport, you’re allowed to punish an error by shocking the shortstop or center fielder with 50,000 volts.

Tazeball?

Tazeball, yes.

I would not want to see that.

In this sport, you score points by somehow getting a large turnip across the goal line.

Root ball?

Root ball is correct, yeah. Root ball from football.

Not all of them end in ball, by the way.

Based on a racket sport, this sport occurs only once a year on a Sunday in June.

It includes a series of events, grilling steaks, taking out the garbage, farting, and making really bad jokes, usually about farting.

Sad mitten. I don’t know.

No, that’s a good guess, but you’re on the right track.

Who do we talk about on a Sunday in June who makes really bad jokes?

Dad mitten.

Dad mitten.

Dad mitten. Okay, gotcha.

This sport remains essentially unchanged, except for the fact that several large predatory animals, Canis lupus, are released periodically throughout the lakes.

Wolf.

Wolf.

Wow, I’d watch that.

I know you were.

These extreme sports, they’re really getting out there.

Jack Nicklaus, getting on in years, having a hard time staying away from the wolves.

Watch him, look at him run.

Clap, clap, clap, clap.

This game remains, again, relatively unchanged, except the hoop is switched out for a tiny rubber ring.

The plumbers and mechanics who play it like it a lot.

A gasket ball.

Nice.

Gasket ball, yeah.

Oh, man.

Tiny.

Probably you can get a big gasket, but still tinier than a hoop.

I don’t see the point of this sport, which swaps out rods and reels in favor of crossing your fingers and hoping really hard that you catch something.

Oh, wishing.

Wishing, yes.

Not exactly a spectator sport.

In this sport, two men attempt to knock each other out using smoked salmon.

Loxing.

Loxing, that’s right.

Finally, in this sport, instead of four guys careening down an iced track, there’s just one guy who approaches the other teams and says, it’s a nice ice track you got there.

Be a shame if something happened to it.

Mob sledding.

Mob sledding.

That’s right.

Don’t get involved in mob sledding.

Anyway, those are my suggestions for new sports.

All right.

That’s pretty rich, dude.

Yeah, I’m watching those Olympics for sure.

Thanks, Bob.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Thanks, John.

Take care.

This show is about words and language and goofing around just a little bit.

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

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Stephanie.

I’m from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Stephanie.

Welcome.

What’s up?

I’m a social worker, and so you can imagine I talk to people a lot.

I’ve been doing this for 20-plus years.

I’ve had several professional and personal experiences over the years where when I am talking, the person I’m talking to will start mouthing my words silently.

And it’s sometimes distracting, but it’s also kind of intriguing.

And I’m wondering if you’re familiar with this, is there a word for it, anything you can tell me about it?

And so are they listening with a particular intensity?

Do they have a hearing problem?

They’re very focused.

You know, I’ve wondered if maybe this helps them learn and help them digest what I’m saying.

You know, I work with folks with mental health backgrounds.

Maybe it has something to do with that.

My father’s a therapist.

Now, I’ve asked him.

He told me about something called echolalia, which is a repetition of another person’s words.

I said, well, they’re not vocalizing anything.

They’re looking at me very intensely, and they will be moving their mouth.

And it looks like they’re mouthing what I’m saying.

These are colleagues or clients?

Clients.

You don’t sound like a slow speaker to me that you’re speaking too slowly for them?

I don’t get that sense.

I’m a context person, so sometimes I can be a bit verbose.

Okay, good.

So I wonder sometimes, are they just not following me?

Am I being too complex?

Or maybe it’s me.

But it’s happened in enough different settings that I started to believe, okay, there’s got to be something in this.

You know, I’ve met enough people that do this, but this has got to be something.

Whether it’s psychiatric disorder or a way for people to process information, I have no clue.

And I couldn’t find anything when I started looking into it.

I would say ding-ding on both of those.

Ring the yes bell.

Okay.

Ding-ding.

Polylalia is a pretty good guess. I’m not an expert in this, but as I understand it, the clinical diagnosis doesn’t require that they vocalize the words.

And it can also be used to describe when they’re anticipating your words or trying to say them at the same time, or even when they repeat them just a fraction of a second after you say them.

But there’s another word which is related, which is polylalia, P-A-L-I-L-A-L-I-A.

And this is when someone just repeats the last one or two words of what you’re saying.

And again, they can just mouth them to themselves.

They don’t have to use their vocal cords for it to be polylelia.

So you had one of those words and there’s a second word.

But in general, there’s another theory here that I’ve read a little bit on.

Again, I’m not an expert in clinical diagnoses for these kinds of speech behaviors, but it’s called mirroring.

And the idea is that when you mirror someone else’s actions, including their speech and the shape and form of their words in their mouth, you better understand what they’re saying.

Because you can mirror somebody’s, say, tennis serve.

You can move your arm in that same way.

And that can help you understand how they successfully hit a ball in a difficult situation and get you to being a little more expert yourself.

And it’s the same supposedly with the words that people are saying.

So in a situation where someone has a hearing impairment or where they’re really just not getting the words, repeating the words can help you have that second chance to rehear them, but kind of in your own head.

You know, we were talking about diagnosis.

And I think the last thing you said, Grant, makes a lot of sense to me that there’s not necessarily a pathology involved.

I mean, one of the best listeners I know on the planet does this.

And I think it’s just her intensity of listening to another person.

She’s very, very present and she will do that.

Stephanie, when they do this, are they anticipating your words?

They’re trying to predict what you’re about to say?

It feels like it’s happening simultaneously.

And how accurate do you think they are?

Do they get the words or just kind of the lips kind of formlessly moving along to what you’re saying?

You know, honestly, I’m trying to be present with them.

It’s like try not to pay too much attention to it.

I’m not sure I can answer that.

Because if I let it distract me, then I’m not able to help them in the best way possible.

I know what you’re talking about.

I had a coworker, and they do this, and I’m trying to avoid pronouns.

And they would do full sentences of pretty much everyone they spoke to.

And their lips didn’t match the words at all.

And it was like little worms wriggling on their face because it didn’t match.

And they were very intelligent and very competent at their work.

And a perfectly regular human being as far as I ever knew.

And it was just, I guess, their way of understanding better.

I’m sure there’s a little bit of an undertone when I was younger.

One of my older brothers used to do this to annoy me.

As I was talking, he would try to repeat out loud every single word I said.

So I’m sure there’s a little bit of that from my childhood that’s just annoyed by it.

There’s one more theory that’s worth considering, and you might Google it to see what you can.

Or even look in your professional texts on this.

It invokes this idea that humans are constantly calculating the odds.

We are constantly in small ways and large ways trying to predict the future.

And there’s one theory that says mouthing the words that someone else is speaking is your way of trying to predict what they’re going to say next as you prepare yourself to respond.

So it’s a form of turn taking.

And I’ve certainly, I’ve read about people who have different kinds of learning abilities, including autistic people.

And it’s one of the things that they may do, because they have difficulty, some of them, with interaction.

So one of the things that they may do in order to have that turn and know when their turn is and be ready for the turn and have something more like a regular conversation with the people around them, a regular dialogue.

That resonates with me.

If I were to listen to my intuition, that’s what it feels like to me most often, that people are trying to predict what I’m saying.

Interesting.

Very interesting.

Yeah.

I should say, as Martha said, I want to underscore this.

Lots of people do this.

It doesn’t mean there’s a pathology there.

It doesn’t mean there’s something wrong with them.

As far as can be told by the experts, it’s pretty ordinary, except if it occurs with a whole other host of pathological behaviors, which may not be present in most people.

Right.

It’s just fascinating to me.

Thank you.

Well, thank you so much, Stephanie, for calling.

Absolutely.

Thank you all.

I enjoy your show often.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know there’s something that you do that you’ve been wondering about.

And I think this is the place where you can get a nice conversation going on whatever it is.

And we won’t think you’re weird.

Promise.

877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about shanks mares or to use shanks ponies.

Another expression like that is to use mother’s colt or to use granny’s colt.

And all of these means to walk somewhere.

Yes.

Right?

The joke is that your legs are part of a horse.

Yes.

Shanks mares.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And originally shanks mares was capitalized, like somebody named shank.

Oh, interesting.

But shank, of course, is your shinbone.

Shanks mares.

Hit us up on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

My name is Scott, and I’m from Billings, Montana.

Okay.

Hi, Scott. What’s up?

Well, I’ve always had a word in my repertoire that escapes me as to where I would have come up with it.

The word is hornswoggle.

Hornswoggle.

And how would you use it?

That darn low-down, dirty, no-good rat hornswoggle made out of my paycheck.

Ooh.

Yeah.

That sounds serious.

I take it as swindle or bamboozle, but that’s a word for a different day.

That’s right. Swindle or bamboozle, deceive, trick.

Sometimes it’s just plain a lie to you without any kind of money accidentally trading hands or anything like that.

You just want some background on Hornswoggle?

Yeah, I’m kind of curious where it comes from.

I’m assuming I came up with it via the old-time Foghorn Leghorn or Yosemite Sam cartoons.

I didn’t watch a lot of westerns as a youngster.

Yeah, that sounds just like them.

Yeah, it sure does. It sounds exactly kind of like the thing that Foghorn Leghorn would say.

Hornswoggle, H-O-R-N-S-W-O-G-G-L-E, although sometimes spelled with an A, Hornswoggle, dates to around the 1820s.

It just kind of pops up, and it was part of this trend of newspaper editors and writers for newspapers just inventing these ridiculous long words that were funny to say and funny to read and maybe had outlandish pronunciations and outlandish definitions, including things like gosh bustified and snawly goster and absquatulate and skedaddle and discombobulate.

And a couple of them, as you’ve heard, skedaddle and discombobulate kind of caught on and had a little future.

Nobody really says absquatulate unless they’re being ironic, I think.

Yeah, Mark Twain used that a lot.

But it’s a sort of faux Latin, too.

They sound Latinate and learned.

Yeah, there was a trend in the Middle English era of using or inventing inkhorn terms.

And these were terms coined with Latin roots that were meant to replace existing English words or existing French words.

And some of those are still with us.

But this is kind of a second wave of that, of just coming up with these words for the pure pleasure of inventing words, really.

Oh, I see.

Yeah, there’s not much more to it.

There’s a famous quote, though, that I want to share with you from 1895, talking about snolly goster.

A a snollygoster is a shrewd or unprincipled person.

And the quote defines the word like this.

I found it in the Columbus Dispatch.

But it was widely circulated in newspapers at the time.

A snollygoster is a fellow who wants office, regardless of party, platform, or principles, and who, whenever he wins, gets there by the sheer force of monumental talknophical assumnancy.

So talknophical assumnancy is how these words get coined.

So somebody having a laugh there.

But there’s a ton of these, and again, some of them last, like Hornswoggle and Skedaddle, but some of them didn’t.

Well, I definitely don’t use it very often, but when it comes up, I always do wonder, so I appreciate you putting that to rest for me.

Our pleasure.

Scott, we’re glad to help.

Thanks for calling. Call us again sometime, all right?

All right. Thank you.

Thank you. Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What word has been on your mind lately?

Give us a call about it, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Brianna Kane, and I’m from Dallas, Texas.

Hey, welcome, Brianna.

What can we do for you?

When I was in middle school about three years ago, there was this word going around that I had no idea what it meant.

The word was on fleek, and I would ask my peers what the word meant, and they really couldn’t tell me.

I felt like you could sort of help me out with that.

Yeah, sure, absolutely.

And the timing is just about perfect for when on fleek was really popular in slang.

So you’re in high school now, I gather?

Yes, I’ll be a junior, actually, this coming school year.

Excellent. And so are people still using on fleek in your school?

They use it occasionally. It’s not as popular, I’m guessing, as it used to be.

But it’s still the same situation. They really can’t tell me what on fleek means.

When I ask them, they’re like, on fleek means on fleek.

They define the word with the word itself, which is circular, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, it’s not very helpful.

But is your sense of it that if somebody’s on fleek, they’re looking good or they’re just right or something like that?

Maybe? They use it in that sort of context, but I’ve also heard it used in like, food is on fleek, or your hair is on fleek, or this TV show is on fleek. And so I feel like it has different meanings depending on when it’s said.

Right. That’s good. That’s a common thing in language. Context matters.

So a little bit of background on this, just to help you out. There was a, there’s a young woman named Peaches Monroe who posted a, I believe it was a Vine, a short video on social media in 2014. And Peaches used what sounded like to a lot of people, the phrase on fleek. She said something about finna get crunk, eyebrows on fleek is what it sounded like to people. And this post, because she was great, she just had a wonderful miniature performance, and she just was very expressive, and people just loved her look and her sound and everything. It went viral.

And so she is the person who popularized on fleek as slang in the United States. And it was really common in 2014 and 2015, and then kind of has slowed down quite a bit, but it looks like it’s probably going to stick around in slang as a much less frequently used word but not disappear.

In any case, what’s really interesting is after she posted that original video, she later posted one and said, I didn’t say fleek. I said F-L-I-C-K. She meant on flick. And what she meant was, and she explains it in interviews and other places, she said it means on point. If your eyebrows are on fleek, they’re perfect. They’re exactly as you want them to be, like perfectly outlined or straight or colored or whatever it is.

And so a lot of uses on fleek, especially in the early days of the slang term, were about hair on fleek or clothes on fleek or makeup on fleek or just something about your physical appearance being exquisite and well done and just looking really fine or really nice. They weren’t trying to say anything badly. They were trying to give a compliment.

That’s right.

Exactly.

Just right. Just as good as it could possibly be.

Exactly what you want in a good way.

That makes a whole lot more sense now. I really appreciate it.

Sure.

Our pleasure.

And good luck with school.

And you let us know if there’s something else that you hear in school that you’re pretty sure that we need to hear about.

All right?

Thank you.

I appreciate it.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Brianna.

Well, if you’ve got a question about language, you’ve been wondering about something, we may be able to clear it up for you.

So call us 877-929-9673.

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.

When is it time to break up with a book?

Oh, boy.

Maybe you’ve given it a few pages or a few chapters and you just can’t get through it.

Do you feel obligated to go ahead and finish that thing?

Are you asking me or is this rhetorical?

Both.

Both.

Well, what do you do, Martha?

You know, I have this weird thing where I will read a book most of the way through, even a book I like. And sometimes I drop it when I only have 20 pages left.

Oh, I’ve done that too.

Really?

Yeah, absolutely.

The number of books that have a bookmark at 90% of the way through.

Yes.

Why is that?

I think the author tailed off and so did I.

I think they lost their inertia.

That is so interesting.

I thought I was the only one.

Wow.

Well, I was thinking about this because Nancy Pearl, the librarian who’s known for her book Lust, recently updated her rule of 50. You remember she used to urge people to read at least 50 pages of a book. But she noted that as she gets older, she’s realizing that there are more and more and more books out there and that she’s never going to get to them all.

So she added a little corollary to her rule of 50, and it goes, when you’re 51 years of age or older, subtract your age from 100, and the resulting number, which of course gets smaller every year, is the number of pages you should read before you can guiltlessly give up on a book.

As the saying goes, age has its privileges, and the ultimate privilege of age, of course, is that when you turn 100, you are authorized by the rule of 50 to judge a book by its cover.

Absolutely. Absolutely. You know, for a long time, I’ve used the expression reading mortality or book mortality. I think I’ve used it on the show a couple of times and I may have learned it from her. There was a piece in the Boston Globe many years ago. But the idea is when you have that, that dawning moment that you’re never going to get to all the books you want to read before you die.

Yeah.

And it happens to me all the time.

It happens to me with the stack of books next to my bed, which I think is up to 40 now.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and to just see them on the shelves is like a memento mori, right?

Yeah, I have to tell you, my rule is it used to be 100 pages, but now it’s instant. Like, you have to impress me chapter one, page one.

And you’re not even 50.

No, I’m not even 50.

And I will tell you why.

It’s because I give a lot of books a chance based on recommendations, and people have terrible taste.

I mean, no, that’s obviously just a joke.

But the truth is, it takes me a while to figure out who in my world really has taste like me.

So I will try books that somebody recommends, hoping that they’re my literary doppelganger and that what they like, I like.

So I get a lot of books that I’m like, oh, yeah, this is terrible. And this person does not match me in their taste and inclinations.

Well, I would be really interested to know what our listeners have to say about that.

Yeah. Give us a call. 877-929-9673.

Tell us, when do you give up on a book or as an author or a novelist? What kind of shot should people be giving you? Should we give you a chapter? Two? Ten? 877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Stephen.

I’m calling from Maryland.

Hi, Stephen.

Where in Maryland are you?

I’m in Baltimore right now.

Baltimore.

Okay, welcome to the show.

What’s on your mind, Stephen?

I have moved around a lot. And for part of my life, I lived in Nevada. And once I left Nevada, nobody said Nevada. So what I mean is when I moved to North Carolina, kids on the bus would call it Nevada. And I have gotten in many a fight because of this. Because, you know, I was from Nevada and I knew the way it was supposed to be pronounced. And it seems like everyone else in the world says Nevada. So I was wondering, I hope I’m not wrong, but is it possible that I’m saying it incorrectly or is the rest of the world wrong?

Are you saying that you got in fistfights on the bus because they mispronounced Nevada?

Never fistfight. No, I still haven’t been in one of those in my lifetime. No, just more me kind of screaming at kindergartners for mispronouncing the state. I don’t know why it offended me so much, but it truly did.

When you were screaming at kindergartners, you were also a kindergartner, right?

Yeah, we can go with that.

I’m imagining a high schooler shouting at tiny little people.

No, that was cool. I was probably like second grade and just really felt like I had to defend Nevada from being called Nevada.

Right. Well, you can tell people that if you’re in that state, that’s how you should be pronouncing it with a short A. I grew up in Kentucky, and I have to confess that I pronounced it like your friends in North Carolina, Nevada. I never knew anything different until just a few years ago. And now I’m training myself to say Nevada because I’ve run into so many people from that state who are very, very insistent that it’s a short A. In fact, I think the Nevada Tourism Authority puts a little short mark, a little brev on that A.

Yeah, in some of their materials. So they want the word to get out that it is Nevada.

My story is even worse. I grew up in Missouri, and there’s a town that’s spelled the same, but it is pronounced Nevada. So for me, the state was Nevada for a very long time because that’s how you pronounce the town in Missouri.

Oh, that’s so interesting. There are people from other states that have a similar problem. People from Hawaii. Most of the country doesn’t say it with that stop in there.

Right. And people from Oregon. It’s not Oregon or Oregon. It’s Oregon, basically.

I was thinking about that. Yeah, they have the same problem. And there’s tons of local place names. Look, you’re never going to correct everyone on this. You might just hold on to it like secret knowledge, like a magic spell that you have and they don’t, because you might just find a way to relax and just enjoy the fact that they’re talking about a state that you love and tell them really wonderful things about Nevada since it came up.

I guess I can let it slide, but it’s good to know that, you know, in the context of the state that I’m correct.

Yeah. Yeah, you are correct. And everyone in Nevada is like cheering now.

Well, cool. Thank you for your call. We’re with you on this. You’ve got the right pronunciation. I would try to pick your battles and don’t fight kindergartners. Stop that. But otherwise, good on you, all right?

Thank you.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Stephen.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Rose calling from South Central PA.

South Central PA. Welcome to the show. What are you thinking about linguistically today?

I work at a trailer shop with a bunch of mechanics, and I’ve noticed that a few of them use an expression like if you wanted to get 27 screws, you’d say 20 couple, and I hadn’t encountered it anywhere else before, and I asked them about it, and nobody seems to know where it came from, so I thought I’d ask you guys.

Interesting, and are they all from that same part of the country?

I think so.

So instead of 27, they would say 20 couple?

Yes.

And would that be the same for 23 or 25?

Yes.

So it’s kind of like saying 20-odd screws.

Yeah. 20-some-odd, something like that.

20-some-odd, yeah.

Yeah. What’s really interesting, I think you might have found what I would call an unpolished diamond here. Because if you dig around on this term, I can find no slang dictionary or dialect dictionary or any linguistic resource that has touched upon the idea of using couple attached to a number in this way to represent some unknown quantity. I mean, obviously, couple on its own can sometimes mean two, three, or even four. But attaching it in this way to a number is really unusual. When I look this up on the internet and newspapers and discussion forums, I find what looks like a nice tight circle of usage in places like Maryland, Virginia, York, PA, Gettysburg, PA, and Winston-Salem, North Carolina. Winston-Salem is kind of the outlier here, but you could draw a kind of odd shaped oval around all those cities, which might suggest that there’s a geographic nature to it. I would need a lot more data to prove that. So if I had the time, I would be spending a couple days trying to figure this one out. I think you found something nice here.

A couple days? That’s really interesting.

Yeah, a couple few maybe.

Yeah, what is really well established is the term couple three, which is just kind of across the United States in the north. Couple three, meaning a few, meaning someplace between two and four. It’s odd. But couple few exists. That’s widespread, including the American South, right? Or a couple two, three.

Couple two, three. Also, meaning more than just two.

Interesting. I do find people using couple in this way following on a number. It’s usually a nice round number, right? Does that sound correct to you, Rose?

Yeah.

Yeah. So it would be like 20 couple or 50 couple. It would never be 52 couple.

No, yeah. I find it as far back in newspapers as 1979, which gives us at least a beginning of a starting date to it being common. And that was in a Pennsylvania newspaper.

That makes sense.

Yeah.

How about that? It’s neat because I do. I live in York County, and there are a lot of strange little colloquialisms. Someday I’m going to write a book. There are a couple books written about Pennsylvania speech, so dig around for those. You might find them at the Chamber of Commerce type of tourist spots.

Yeah. We really appreciate you calling.

Thank you.

Take care.

Thanks, Rose.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

Well, we want your calls about how they speak out your way, 877-929-9673, or tell us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

I learned a phrase that was new to me when you and I went to San Antonio recently to do an appearance on behalf of San Antonio Youth Literacy. We also made a lot of new friends at Texas Public Radio. And when I was in conversation with one of the staffers there, she said, yeah, San Antonio is really blowing and going.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I remember that.

I didn’t know that expression.

It just means booming, right?

Yeah, booming, busy, busy, busy, just going all the time, blowing and going.

Blowing and going. I have to add that to my rhyming compounds list.

Yes, I thought you would enjoy that.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you doing?

I’m Thomas from Bahamut, North Carolina, and I’ve got a question about a phrase my father used to tell me when I was a child.

Great. Let’s hear it, Thomas.

Well, when I was a kid, you know, starting school, he wanted to make sure I was hanging around with the right folks and whatnot, and he used to tell me if he thought I was around those sort of shady kids, even in middle school, just, you know, son, you know, if you’re going to hang around these kids, you can’t hang around the barbershop and not get your hair cut. I guess he meant, you know, if you hung around there as a group of kids that long, eventually something bad happened, you’d get in that crowd. And I was wondering if it was something he kind of made up or if it’s something that’s more culturally wide.

He said his dad told him, and I was just curious of the origin of it.

So he’s saying if you hang around the barbershop, you’re going to get a haircut.

Absolutely, yeah.

If you’re going to mess with these kids long enough and they’re bad enough, you’re going to be bad, too, if you wait around too long.

I like it. And what did you take that to mean?

Well, I guess it just always told me to hang around the right kids, and if I didn’t, kind of try to keep it short, you know, so I wasn’t in the barbershop too long, I guess.

Yes, things are going to quickly seem normal, and it won’t seem weird, right, if you’re hanging around people who’ve got bad habits.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s good advice.

It reminds me of an expression I heard a few years ago that’s been making the rounds, and I don’t know how old it is, but it’s something like, play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

The whole idea that if you’re just playing for small stakes, you’re only ever going to win small stakes.

Kind of like think big.

And it also reminds me of the wrestling with pigs saying.

You know that one?

Oh, no, I haven’t heard it.

There’s two variants, but the longer one is if you wrestle with pigs, you get dirty, and the pig likes it.

Yeah, it reminds me of if you lie down with dogs, you get up with fleas.

Yeah, there we go.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one.

I’ve heard that one.

But, you know, Thomas, I don’t know the expression that your dad used.

I’ve never heard it before.

I haven’t seen it in any of the folklore books that I have or any of the slang dictionaries or the idiom books or catchphrases or any of that sort of thing.

Well, my family sort of likes coming up with things like that and spreading around.

I’m from sort of a rural place in North Carolina, so it’s kind of privy to that sort of thing.

A lot of different things you hear.

What part of North Carolina?

Well, it’s really in the central part of North Carolina, sort of north of Durham, south of Roxborough.

Okay.

Thomas, thank you so much for your call.

Have a good day.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Some families do just have a way with words, don’t they?

They do.

They have a knack.

They’ve got this internal culture of saying clever things to each other.

Yeah.

And the other thing that strikes me is that it’s a wonderful way to give parental advice to come up with something really colorful like that rather than wag your finger and say, don’t hang around with those people.

Right.

Because he remembered it.

Thomas remembered the words, and if he has kids, they’ll hear it too.

Yeah.

If you hang around a barbershop, sooner or later you get a haircut.

Tell us your family aphorisms on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have a way with words.

Hello, this is Sundance Brennan.

Hi, Sundance. Welcome to the show. Where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Dallas, Texas. What’s up?

Well, I’ve got a five-year-old daughter, and she couldn’t pronounce the word coincidence.

And so she said something that sounded closer to clinky-dink.

Oh, nice.

Yeah, so I tried to coach her into the word coincidence and mentioned, well, maybe we just say coinkinink.

And then my wife overheard, and, you know, she’s wondering, like, well, are you teaching our kids fake words?

Fake words.

Fake words, right?

So then the question comes up, well, this word, I guess, is slang, or, you know, at what point in time does a slang word become a real word?

And, you know, is that a regional word?

Because she didn’t seem to be as familiar with it as I was, and I thought everybody knew what coinkinink meant.

Oh, that’s funny.

I’m surprised, too, because I think it should be in every mainstream dictionary, and it isn’t.

Yeah, it’s surprising, right?

It’s what we call an intentional malapropism, you know, when somebody just goofs with a word and makes it something that it’s not quite exactly.

Like defulgety for difficulty, skidooly for schedule, that kind of thing.

And you can find coinkydink in newspapers back to the 1940s.

And I have no doubt that it’s much older than that.

So it’s been making the rounds for quite a while.

It sounds like the type of thing that a five-year-old girl would say on accident.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

In order to have that pronunciation of the word, though, she has to be familiar with the spelling of it.

So I assume that she’s already learning to read.

Yes, yes.

Gotcha. Very good.

That’s a pretty big word.

I will say something about the pronunciation coinkading.

And there’s a whole category, not just these intentional malapropisms, but saying words wrong on purpose is a thing that many families do just because it’s fun.

It’s a goof and it becomes your in-house or family word because the kid said it wrong or somebody misunderstood or it’s just ridiculous.

In my house, my wife likes to say aminals instead of animals because it’s a common metathesis, the transposition of the sounds.

I say family because that is, for some people, a dialect pronunciation of the word family.

And I just like the way it sounds.

Chimbley.

Chimbley, yeah.

Or library is what I sometimes say wrong on purpose, even though I know it’s not correct.

And I find, too, that this happens to me a lot with texting, too.

If I misspell a word, then I’ll start using it.

Is it because your phone keeps re-suggesting it?

So anyway, yeah, these words, mispronunciations are common.

For it to become ensconced in language, though, to formally show up in dictionaries, it has to have a lot of legs, as they say in Hollywood.

But it really has to be used widespread over a long period of time by a lot of people in a lot of different domains.

And coinkinink definitely is one of those words that appears repeatedly thousands and thousands of times in the written record since the 1940s and no doubt earlier.

So Sundance, how are you all handling it?

Now it’s been a family topic.

So we have three small children, and the two brothers, she has two older brothers, they will say coinkinink, but almost in a teasing manner.

And she still tries to say coincidence, but she doesn’t quite say it correctly.

She’s close, though.

That’s charming, though.

I like little kid mispronunciations.

There’s something adorable about them.

Yeah, and any excuse to talk about language with your kids, right?

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Well, cool.

Thank you, Sundance, so much for calling us.

We really appreciate this.

And let us know what the little cuties have been saying next, all right?

Yeah, edumacate us.

All right, will do.

Thank you both.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I’d love, by the way, to get these intentional mispronunciations from everyone.

We know you’ve got a bunch of them.

Just share them out, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or put them on Twitter, and we will retweet them like mad.

Our handle is Wayword, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Want more Way With Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org, or find the show in any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language.

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye. you