Color Me Surprised (episode #1676)

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And Grant, sometimes I dream of just getting an RV and hitting the road, you know, just spending a year or two visiting national parks and just driving around. One of those big recreational vehicles with all the amenities inside. It’s your home away from home.

You’re kind of like a human tortoise.

Yeah, exactly.

Do you ever have any desire to do that?

100% of the time.

Okay.

Always, but it’s so impractical when you have a digital lifestyle.

Well, yeah, that’s a good point. But, you know, if you and I were to do that, we’d have to bone up on some of the slang that RV enthusiasts use, like stinky slinky pups and gassers.

Stinky slinky pups, P-U-P-S, and gassers.

Yeah, these are three different things. It’s not stinky slinky pup. Roll these out for us, Martha.

Okay. Well, a stinky slinky is a very common term that refers to the sewer hose of your RV.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. You have to maintain that. And a gasser is a motorhome powered by gasoline. You know, one of those that you drive.

As opposed to, what, diesel or a trailer that’s pulled behind another vehicle?

Yeah, yeah, I think so. And then a pup. A pup is actually an acronym for pop-up camper.

Oh, okay. Yeah, I’ve heard that one before. Yeah. That’s cool. I bet there’s just pages and pages of this stuff.

Yeah, yeah. And I would love to hear from folks who have done this or are doing it right now.

Well, you can call us or text us from anywhere in the United States or Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or go to our website at waywordradio.org and find all of our past episodes and all of our social media handles.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, hello, this is Kiko calling from Lorain, Ohio.

Hi, Kiko, welcome to the show. What’s up?

My language question was the word happy. I’ve been told that happiness isn’t even a word that existed a long time ago, and that it actually kind of came up as like a marketing ploy or something like that. So I was wondering if you guys can kind of elaborate on that and let me know where the word happiness comes from, because everybody wants to be happy. And are we chasing something that doesn’t even exist?

Happiness as a marketing ploy.

Well, Martha, I don’t know about that. I’m so glad you asked about happy and happiness because those two words have been around for centuries. But they’ve changed a little bit in meaning over the years. Because originally the words happy and happiness had less to do with how you felt and more about what happened to you.

They both come from a very old English word, hap, which means chance or luck. And you see that same root in words like happen and mishap, which is when something happens that’s not good for you, and hapless, when somebody is unlucky.

And so in Middle English, hundreds of years ago, the word happy meant fortunate or somebody who has good luck, you know, like a happy accident. And so back then, the idea of happiness, these two words, happy and happiness, referred to something that arrived from outside, you know, if fortune smiled on you. And it was only over time that happy became something that came from within.

And in fact, think about in the 1700s. Happiness began to be thought of as more of a legitimate aim of life, you know, something that you tried to get, a project. And we see that, of course, enshrined in the Declaration of Independence, which talks about this fundamental right to the pursuit of happiness. So at that point, it wasn’t so much about the luck you got, but this state that you had a right to cultivate and aspire to.

That feeling that you get when you have good luck, right? That positive, overwhelming emotion.

Yeah.

How about that? So they have a long history, both those words.

That was awesome. I’m very glad you guys shared that with me.

Are you happy?

Yeah.

Yeah, I am. I am. I am happy right now.

Perhaps.

I got a big smile on my face.

Well, Kiko, that’s what we know. And thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you guys very much. You have a blessed day.

All right. Take care. Appreciate it.

Yeah.

So perhaps is related. Happenstance. Happy go lucky.

Yep.

Still has that notion of luck in it right there.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Kind of doubled up.

Yeah.

Happy and luck, both kind of referring to luck. And then haphazard. It’s kind of about that dice throw that is hazardous by chance.

Yes.

And it’s not as if the idea of what we think of happiness today didn’t exist necessarily. I mean, there were other words in English.

Right, right. There were words like bliss and merriment and yeah, things like that. But I just find it fascinating that those words originally had the sense of luck enshrined inside.

There is a quote from Ivor Brown, the language commentator. He says, happiness is a chubby, fubsy, comfortable word. And while suited to all the minor pleasures of life, it cannot be applied to the major joys with any feeling of verbal perfection.

Fubsy is an archaic word meaning fat or stout, but a chubby, fubsy, comfortable word.

I love that.

Sounds like a baby.

We’d love to hear from you. What are your chubby, fubsy, comfortable words that you’d like to talk about? Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org or call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

Another term you’ll hear among RV enthusiasts is the term boondocking.

I think you and I have talked about that before, haven’t we, Grant?

Yeah. Am I remembering that that is when you are far away from home and finding places to hook up your RV and kind of stay a while?

Yeah, well, it’s when you’re camping off-grid in an RV, so you don’t have a hookup to water, power, or sewer. And there’s also, in addition to boondocking, that docking suffix has been applied to the situation where you’re camping in a parking lot, like you’re wally docking or you’re cracker docking.

Oh, so cracker barrel or Walmart parking lots.

Exactly. Exactly. And of course, we know the history of boondocks comes from the word mountains in the Tagalog language. So it means far away kind of at its base.

Exactly. Yeah, bonduk from Tagalog. So it was brought over here by U.S. Military. And it’s just fascinating, I think, that that term has traveled so far.

We’d love to hear the language of your recreational vehicle lifestyle. If you’ve got something you want to share, 877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, I’m Kathy Martin, and I’m from Lexington, Kentucky.

Hey, Kathy, we’re glad to have a fellow Kentuckian, or I’m a fellow Kentuckian. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you. I’ve been thinking about something in my childhood. When I visited my grandparents in Meadville, Pennsylvania, or actually it was Blooming Valley, Pennsylvania, they would have a treat, and I thought they called it potty tootie. And it was toast with cream, I’m sure fresh cream from the cow, and sugar and cinnamon. And then they would put coffee on it. And I was, I cannot find it anywhere. And I was wondering if you had ever heard of it.

Now, I’m trying to picture this. It’s a piece of toast with coffee and cream poured on it?

Yes. It was like a special snack and sugar.

Okay.

Okay. And you called it a hotty tootie, like H-O-T-T-Y-T-O-O-T-I-E, something like that?

I would think.

Okay, yeah. Oh, I think we’ve got answers for you here.

Oh, that’s exciting. But let’s explore that name first. Hottie tootie is probably just related to hottie toddy, or hot toddy, you know, the alcoholic drink. We’ve just had a lot of different spellings and variants over the long years. And it’s usually spelled with hot with T’s and the toddy part with D’s.

Hotty Tootie isn’t a name that I’ve come across, but I don’t think it’s a stretch because that toddy part kind of becomes a generic for any kind of drink, whether or not it has alcohol. But the definitive part of the hot toddy was alcoholic. So toddy just kind of stands in for any drink.

But I’m also maybe more interested in the food part of this because what you’re describing, so bread with cinnamon and sugar and cream and then coffee poured on top is amazingly like what is known as coffee soup in the Pennsylvania Dutch country.

Sometimes called coffee soup, K-F-F-I-S-U-P-P.

And so it might be pieces of bread or toast broken up and put into coffee, or it might be hot sweetened coffee poured over cubed pieces of toast in a cup.

Sometimes you use stale bread.

Sometimes you use fresh bread.

Sometimes it’s toasted.

Sometimes you have milk and sugar.

Sometimes it’s just a poor food for when you’re really poor.

So you use stale bread and coffee, and that’s it.

That’s your meal.

And some people have really strong memories of having coffee soup.

Or another version is cracker soup.

Crackers crumbled into water or milk if you could afford it.

So, yeah, it’s a thing.

Many, many versions of that dish, sometimes called bread soup or cracker soup, but usually coffee soup.

Well, Catherine, I’m curious how you would eat it.

I mean, because what you’re describing doesn’t sound like a soup to me.

No, it’d be on a saucer.

And actually, as I think about it, I’m not sure there was cinnamon in it.

But anyway, they would put it on a saucer or a plate.

And I think they would eat it like with a spoon or a fork or knife, cut it up.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Yeah, usually you’ll find that with these pass-along dishes where everyone has their own spin on it and does their own thing.

But the key part here is, I think, the coffee and the bread.

They almost all have that in common.

Cup soup is another name for it.

And then, like I said earlier, toddy is just kind of a name that means drink is definitely a thing in English.

So, Catherine, did you like it?

Do you have it now?

Or does it bring back memories?

Well, right now I’m doing a kind of a recollection of my childhood visits to my grandparents.

I don’t know that I even ate it because I don’t think I would have liked coffee in the day,

Because I would have been about five.

So I just remember them serving it up and, like, making it, to me, it seemed like a big deal about it.

You know, like, oh, this is such a treat.

Yeah, well, I think Pennsylvanians have a lot of pride in that.

Thanks for sharing your memories with us, Catherine. We appreciate it.

Well, thank you so much for letting me learn more about it.

Oh, yeah.

I appreciate it.

You take care now.

Thanks for calling.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Grant and I love questions about food and words, so call us, 877-929-9673.

You can text us at that same number or send us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

You know when somebody’s getting ready to leave your home and they just kind of linger at the door.

Sometimes we call that doorknobbing.

You know, they keep starting additional conversations.

Yeah, the whelp and you slap your knee, but you just don’t leave.

Yeah.

Yeah.

We heard a really good expression for this from Sharon Kahan in Wind River, Wyoming.

She sent us an email about a friend of hers, Charlie Beck, who used to say,

If you’re going to go, go.

If you’re going to stay, stay.

But for God’s sake, don’t ooze out.

I think I’ve heard that one, too.

Really?

Ooze or eek your way over to the phone.

Call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here he is, looking like a million dollars, but a little less in his pocket.

It’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

What can I do with only a quarter of a million in my pocket?

I mean, you can’t even buy an apartment in New York.

Not in New York, at least. That’s for sure.

This is today’s quiz. I call it D for T.

Now, D and T, as you know, are both stop consonants made with the same mouth position.

D is, of course, a voiced sound made by vibrating the vocal cords, and T is unvoiced.

This does not stop me from confusing the two, either unintentionally or intentionally, for comedic effect.

Hopefully.

I’ll give you a clue to a famous name that has an unvoiced T sound in it,

But also a clue to the name if you voice the T into a D.

For example, he wrote,

Raindrops keep falling on my nest, and what the worms need now is love.

That would be a clue for…

Bert and Baccarat.

What kind of Baccarat?

Bird.

Bird, that’s right.

Bird Baccarat.

Bird Baccarat, instead of Bert Baccarat.

If you say it quick enough, I might not even think you’ve got it correct.

So on radio, these T’s and D’s are hard to hear, but maybe we’ll spell them.

We’re going to overdo it, I’m pretty sure, as we always overdo everything.

Okay.

Here we go.

Let’s spell the D.

This brother was not only the first pilot on the first plane, he was the first passenger.

Was it Wilbur or Orville?

But their last name is Ride, whoever it is.

That’s right.

It’s Orville Ride.

Orville Ride.

That’s correct.

Instead of Wright.

Very good.

Now, if I were an Olympian who was known as the fastest man alive, I, too, would be confident and courageous.

Usain Bolt.

Usain Bolt.

Yes, for Usain Bolt.

Jimmy Kimmel loves having Ben Affleck on his show.

Maybe that’s why this actor is so angry about their pretend feud.

Mad Damon.

Mad Damon, yes.

She once sang, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene.

Oh, please excuse me.

I thought you were someone else.

Aha, Dolly Pardon.

Dolly Pardon.

Sorry.

Sorry.

The first saint of country music.

That’s right.

Very nice.

Dolly Pardon for Dolly Pardon.

I think it’s appropriate that this home entertaining cooking and lifestyle guru manages the domestic

Concerns of her own household.

Martha stewards her

Belongings in her life. That’s right.

Martha Stewart. Wait, I was going to say

Ina Garden.

Yeah, that’s not bad.

She gardens, yeah.

Those hedgerows are immaculate.

Gardens, gardens, gardens.

I’m sure hosting Reading

Rainbow and being a Star Trek legend

Were heavy loads to bear.

LeVar’s Burden.

LeVar Burden.

LeVar Burton, yes.

A key figure in Western and ancient Greek philosophy,

And also great for keeping the kids busy,

Making arts and crafts projects.

Plato.

Plato, that’s right.

The great philosopher Plato.

Also in the good but terrible column.

Very good.

Big green checkmark.

That column is getting longer and longer.

It is.

So we’re just going to end that column right here.

We’re going to end the whole thing right here.

You guys were fantastic.

We are not going to mention today Archbishop Desmond Tutu

Or musician Peter Tork.

So we’re just going to end it right there.

Thank you, guys.

That was fantastic.

Oh, thank you so much, John.

That’s great.

We appreciate all the hard work you put into these, John,

And we’re looking forward to next week.

Thank you.

You can call our listener line 24-7 in the United States and Canada,

Toll-free 877-929-9673,

Or email us wherever you are in the world,

Words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Jeffrey, calling from Cincinnati, Ohio.

Hi, Jeffrey. We’re glad you called. What’s up?

I guess the reason why I’m calling today is because there’s a phrase that I’ve been using for many, many years.

And I’m not really sure if there’s an origin to it.

And if there is, am I using it differently than other people do?

The phrase is, color me surprised.

And how do you use it?

I usually use it almost sarcastically.

One of the places I work is at a bar, right?

And so we have some regulars coming in and, you know, I’ll get a text from one of the other bartenders and they’ll be like, oh, Joe’s been here since two o’clock.

And I’ll be like, oh, well, call me surprised.

Meaning that you would expect that of Joe.

That’s just how Joe is.

Exactly.

Joe is somebody that I would expect being there from, you know, two to six.

Gotcha.

And so your question is, where did you get that?

What is that construction about Color Me Surprised?

Exactly.

I don’t remember anybody in my family really using it, so I’m not sure where I picked it up from.

And I tried doing a little bit of research online.

I didn’t get much information, but what I did find is it doesn’t look like anybody else really uses it in the same sarcastic sense that I do.

Yeah, but just about anything can be made sarcastic.

That’s the nature of English.

Just about anything like earnest can become sarcastic on the flip of a tone.

But Jeffrey, there is a history to this, and it’s wider and bigger than you.

Your version, color me surprised, is noteworthy for having surprised as the adjective there.

But the color me whatever, color me any adjective, is deeper and longer than that.

It actually connects to John F. Kennedy, believe it or not.

Really?

As far back as the 1920s, when you would open up a coloring book for kids, it would have instructions on how to color the images.

I might say color me brown for the dog or color me blue for the sky.

Just to let the kids know what’s supposed to happen here so that you could get the desired results.

Your coloring would turn out.

But in 1962, something called the JFK Coloring Book was published.

And it was a huge bestseller.

I mean, enormous bestseller.

And it’s at least until JFK’s assassination.

And there are images you can find online.

And it was a satirical book.

So it was kind of gently mocking the family that was now in the White House.

And so there are different images that are captioned things like, this is my daddy.

He has a good job.

And it’s a picture of JFK, of course.

He works for the government.

Color him red, white, and blue.

Or this is my mommy showing, you know, Jackie.

She is very beautiful.

She is the most beautiful mommy ever.

Color her beautiful.

And so this book caught the attention of the public and really kind of caught its fancy.

And that phrasing of color me whatever came out of that.

Of course, once the assassination happened, the coloring book didn’t really sell anymore.

But it was already entrenched in the language.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So it kind of started as being a bit wry from the get-go.

Like from the very start, it was just this little gentle irony and jokiness about coloring books.

Because the idea that you would have a coloring book about the first family is unusual to start with.

But then they borrowed the language that was already out there.

To make it even more a little jokey piece.

Huh. I didn’t even know such a coloring book existed.

So now I’m just curious how maybe it would have come into my lexicon.

Well, the Color Me Whatever is out there.

It’s a part of, and I can’t say it’s that common.

But you can find a zillion examples in print and speech.

And transcripts of television shows.

Whether they’re scripted or unscripted.

It’s just a part of the American language now.

I do use it the way that you use it, though, Jeffrey.

Color me surprised means I’m not surprised at all, you know?

Exactly. That’s how I always meant it as.

Oh, well, thank you so much. That solves a mystery I’ve had for many, many years.

Yeah, Google it. Google the 1962 JFK coloring book and you will find images out there.

I think they go for a fair penny on eBay, but you can at least see some images of it.

And you’re supposed to color the president red, white, and blue? He was a patriot!

That’s why it caught people’s fancy, because it was just a teasing document from another era.

We don’t tease with that gentleness quite as much anymore.

But thank you, Jeffrey, for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Good talking with you, Jeffrey.

Bye-bye.

Well, color us happy if you give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Here’s a bit of slang from the language of professional dog walkers.

They describe a dog that is obsessed with carrying sticks or branches during their walks as a branch manager.

Oh, yeah, I’ve heard that one.

Oh, have you?

And then, of course, there’s the assistant branch manager, which is the smaller dog with the smaller stick.

That’s right. Or the one that tries to help by grabbing the other end of the stick.

They’re a branch manager. I love that.

Share the slang in your life. words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Well, this is Ken from Argyle, Texas.

Argyle, Texas. Welcome to the show.

Well, my grandson was in the attic stirring around the other day.

And he came down with a green canvas bag about three feet long.

And on it was stenciled my name and my Army service number.

And inside, the only thing was a pair of combat boots that I was issued when I was in the Army in 1963.

Oh, my.

Well, you know, we got a laugh about him finding that.

And then I got thinking about, you know, at that time, we called that a duffel bag.

My question is, where’d the word duffel come from, from this bag that, you know, when you’re in the Army, when you go from one place to another, everything you have has to go in that bag.

And that’s how you carry it from one place to another.

Ken, my father was in the Army at about that time, so I know exactly the bag that you’re talking about.

And he gave it to me, and I used that bag until it was nothing but rags.

But I remember very distinctly having the stenciled name on the side, very sturdy stitching, just a really great utility bag.

Right, right. It was.

Yeah, and you’ve summed it up very well.

You can spell it either D-U-F-F-E-L or D-U-F-F-L-E, but the original spelling was with E-L.

And that’s because duffel bags were originally produced from a thick, coarse woolen cloth that was called duffel.

And this cloth was manufactured in the Belgian province of Antwerp.

There was a town called, it was spelled like duffel, but it was pronounced more like diffel.

And so the duffel bag is made from that cloth and therefore called a duffel bag.

And so duffel is actually one of many, many names of cloth that come from the town where they were produced.

Like a damask is from Damascus, and what else?

Kashmir is from the Kashmir region in the Himalayas.

Jeans, denim, and madras.

Yeah, madras.

Muslim comes from Mosul in Iraq.

So it has to do with the name of the cloth.

But I have a question for you, which is, did you refer to the contents of the bag as your duffel as well?

If you were returning to the entirety.

Yeah.

You might say, is your duffel on the truck?

Right, right.

Well, you understood that meant is the bag, but is also the contents, because they were all one thing as far as we were concerned.

Right, right.

Ken, we appreciate the call.

Thank you for your questions on this.

This is so interesting.

Well, I appreciate you thanking my call.

Thank you very much.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

For so many of the words that we say on a daily basis, there’s a story and a history.

And Martha and I love to explore those stories and histories with you.

Call or text toll-free 877-929-9673.

And if you’re anywhere else in the world where that number doesn’t work, you can always go to our website at waywordradio.org and drop us a line.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Nancy.

Well, I’m calling you from western New Jersey in a county called Hunterdon County, but I’m actually asking about a word from my childhood where I grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

Okay, great. Well, Grant lived in Brooklyn for quite a while.

Yeah, that’s where my son was born. Tell us about your language there, Nancy.

Okay, so I grew up in an area of Brooklyn called Bay Ridge, and it’s along New York Harbor. And I’d really like to know the origin of the local name for a piece of playground equipment. When I was growing up, we called the piece of equipment that the kids slide down, we called it a sliding pond.

P-O-N-D, pond, like the body of water, sliding pond.

P-O-N-D, like a body of water, even though there’s no water involved.

Yeah, yeah.

When I moved away from Brooklyn, I went to college in Philadelphia, and I realized that everybody called it something else.

My roommate called it a sliding board, and some of my fellow students called it a slide.

And I realized what a peculiar term it was, because there’s no water involved.

And, you know, I was really curious.

I’ve always wanted to talk to a linguist about it.

And here I am.

I have an opportunity.

Yeah, you found the number.

Here we are.

All right.

So there’s several layers to why this is so interesting.

One is most of the country is listening to you now going, sliding a pond?

The thing I slide down?

The metal thing at an angle?

Climb up the ladder, sit on your bottom, and you slide down.

Sliding pond?

Yes, yes. As a matter of fact, it’s so centered on New York City and even northern New Jersey.

Interestingly, it did originally start out as frozen water.

So you might have just an actual, I don’t know if it was the Lake and Prospect Park or what have you,

But you might have actual water in the gutter or the sidewalk, whatever, a frozen patch of some kind,

Where you could run and glide as a child, the kind of thing that children love to do.

And so that could be a sliding pond.

But then the term became applied to the playground equipment.

But that P-O-N-D is an English misunderstanding of a Dutch word.

Oh, that makes total sense.

There’s a Dutch word, B-A-A-N.

B-A-A-N.

It means a path or a course.

And you will find it in compounds like Glybon, which means a slide path.

But that Dutch heritage of New York, you know, when it was New Amsterdam, left behind that word bond.

So you would get an interesting combo of English plus Dutch.

You’d have a sliding bond, which is misunderstood by English speakers who did not know Dutch as sliding pond, sometimes with a D and sometimes sliding pond with no D.

Now, there is a folk etymology that says that sliding pond comes from the idea of sliding upon the thing.

But that is a false etymology that is not the origin of it.

It does come from Dutch.

We have concrete evidence for this.

Well, you’ve solved my mystery for me.

But if you don’t look at old newspapers, as Martha and I love to do, you’ll find sliding pond mentioned all over the place in New York.

And you see it’s changing from being just any kind of frozen section of ground or water that you could slide upon.

You take a run on the land and then you coast on the ice to turning into the word for the playground equipment.

Oh, that is very, very cool.

Which I think is a natural semantic extension.

It just seems like a really normal path for that word to take.

Let me just note here that most of my reference works say that sliding pond is now archaic, not even old-fashioned, but that the new generation of children does not use it.

Yes.

So it’s definitely a remnant of a different time.

Isn’t that interesting? That’s really interesting.

Well, now I have to ask all the children I know who still live in that area what they call it.

And I would love to be wrong on that.

Yeah, do some more field work. Let us know.

If there was some residual use of it in Brooklyn still, I would love to hear about it.

Oh, that would be great.

Well, thank you so much.

It’s been a pleasure to talk to you.

And I can’t wait to hear more about – I love your program.

I really love that program.

Thank you very much, Nancy.

You take care of yourself, all right?

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye, Nancy.

Toll free in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

I just learned a great bit of Venezuelan slang.

You can describe something very irritating as a piña bajo el brazo, which is…

Pineapple under the arm?

Yes!

That is prickly!

Right? Right?

You can tell them, you’re a pineapple under my arm.

I love the comparison, though, to like a burr under a saddle, a thing that irritates.

Oh, I didn’t even think about that.

Yeah.

A little match there.

Different culture perspective, though.

Right?

And the pineapple would at least smell better.

words@waywordradio.org.

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.

Jhumpa Lahiri was born in London and was raised speaking Bengali at home and then later English while growing up in Rhode Island.

In 1999, she won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for her debut story collection,

The Interpreter of Maladies, about the immigrant experience, Indian American identity, and cultural dislocation.

But years before that, as a college student, she fell passionately in love with a third language, Italian.

And eventually she and her husband and children moved to Rome, and she threw herself into learning by immersion.

And in 2015, she published a remarkable memoir about that process.

The book is called In Other Words, and it’s not so much a travelogue through Italy,

So much as an account of her step-by-step journey into another language.

She writes about the daily struggle of being reduced to simple vocabulary and grammar,

And about the unattainable goal of ever being fully at home in another language,

Making her something of a linguistic exile in three different languages.

And she writes,

I read slowly, painstakingly, with difficulty.

Every page seems to have a light covering of mist.

She writes about how she constantly hunts for new words in the streets of Rome

And in conversations and reading books.

And she compares that process to going out in the woods each day with a basket

And scooping up all the words she can.

But then she writes, when I come out of the woods, when I see the basket, scarcely a handful of words remain.

The majority disappear. They vanish into thin air. They flow like water between my fingers.

And eventually she did get to the point where she was speaking and writing only in Italian, and she went on to write this entire book in Italian.

But interestingly, she was adamantly opposed to translating the book into English herself, because she felt that trying to render it in English would mess with the language that she was still working so hard to learn.

She writes,

So that book was translated, in fact, by Anne Goldstein, the translator of Elena Ferrante’s novels.

And the book is unusual in that the print version has Lahiri’s own writing in Italian on one side

And the English translation on the facing page.

Or for an auditory treat, you can listen to the audio book that’s read by Lahiri herself,

The first half in English and the second half in Italian.

And Grant, even if you don’t know Italian, it’s kind of lovely to listen to.

Oh, I’m sure. She’s a lovely writer.

And at that base, surely anything from her has got to be a treat.

I love the image of her as a linguistic truffle hunter.

Well, that’s exactly it.

And the idea of there being a mist over the page, you know?

Oh, it’s so true.

And you can see a word here and there.

How many times do you have to see a word when you’re an adult, you know?

Yeah.

For it to stick?

50?

100?

It feels like a thousand.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So if you’re trying to learn another language, I think you can really relate to this book.

I will add that I’ve seen it criticized by some Italians who say that her Italian writing

Sounds too much like English, and others who say the English translation lacks her usual grace and

Sophistication.

And I can sort of see that, but I think it’s still delightful, you know, especially

If you’ve had any experience with Italian or are trying to learn another language.

And I think those two quirks, even if they’re valid criticisms, are part of the explanation

Of who she is. They’re part of her imprint on the world and on the language world.

Exactly, exactly. It’s a very honest book in that way.

What is the book again?

It’s called In Other Words by Jhumpa Lahiri.

That’s L-A-H-I-R-I, and we will link to that book, of course, from our website.

Martha and I are always delighted when you share your reading with us.

Tell us what’s on your bedside table.

What’s going on the Kindle right now?

Send it to words@waywordradio.org.

Call or text toll-free from the United States or Canada, 877-929-9673.

Daphne McMahon lives in western Nevada

And she wrote to us to say that after a large family meal

When she was a kid, she and the other kids

Who were helping with the cleanup

Were asked to go collect the pearls.

Do you know what that would be?

Oh, interesting.

Is this to get the dishes out of the dishwater

That had sunk to the bottom?

No.

Well, that makes sense in a different way, actually, because what her family meant was to gather any unused plates or utensils, you know, the ones that didn’t need to be washed.

Those were the pearls.

And she wondered if anybody else said that.

And I couldn’t find that.

But I do know that in Australia, an unused plate on the table is called a sunbeam.

A lot of people use that expression.

Oh, that’s nice.

I like that one, too.

I like both of these because I am at that stage of life where if a dish can be reused, I won’t use it.

Like the famous knife that you just rinse between uses, you know.

Call or text toll free in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Kinsey and I’m calling from Pittsburgh.

Hi, Kinsey. Welcome to the program. What’s up?

Thank you.

I heard your show and immediately thought of something I’ve been thinking about for years, which is I’ve always felt that there should be a word for the silence that falls around a dinner table when the food arrives and everyone is really enjoying it.

It’s just such a nice moment of camaraderie and shared experience.

And I want to call it something.

Oh, that is a really nice moment, isn’t it?

Particularly because to make that moment happen, a lot of people had to put their sweat and energy and talents into making that meal, right?

Yeah.

And gathering everyone together and setting the table and all that sort of stuff to make the event of the meal.

Do you have any candidates for that expression?

I don’t.

My brother-in-law told me one that was a German expression, and I can’t remember it right now.

But I was thinking of something along the lines of like sobre mesa in Spanish describes that moment when after dinner everyone is having conversation and nobody wants to leave the table yet.

Like something that kind of embodies that feeling.

But at the beginning.

Yeah, you’re thinking about the beginning.

Yeah, when the food arrives.

There are two possible German expressions that might be the one that you heard.

One is gefregeses schweigen, which kind of means a gluttonous or voracious silence.

Does that sound like the one your brother-in-law told you?

I think so, yeah.

But the other one is genushtela, which basically means enjoyment silence.

I like that.

Yeah, I like that one.

One little linguistic note on that last word.

It’s a strange compound, so two words made into one, that has three S’s in a row, which is really rare.

Wow.

So as a linguist, I really love that.

That’s nice.

Konnichiwa.

Yeah, and that first one sounds like that French phrase, silence gourmand.

Yeah, silence gourmand or silence de gourmandise.

Oui, oui.

Yeah, there’s a passage in a Guy de Maupassant book where he’s talking about the silence when somebody is carving the bird at the table.

And everybody’s like sort of salivating, you know, waiting for that moment.

But as foreign expressions, both that German and that French are just a little,

I think they’re a little too complex for English.

But there is an expression that we have in English, Kenzie, that might work here,

And that’s companionable silence.

Yeah.

When you’re able to sit comfortably with a friend

And neither one of you feels the need to start a phony conversation

Or do useless small talk because you can just sit together

Because that’s how bonded you are as friends.

Yeah.

And you know both islands.

And think about the origin of the word companion.

It comes from Latin words that literally have to do with eating bread together.

It’s a relation of pantry and words like that.

The other word that I was thinking of is insipid,

Which is the term for the first few notes of a work of music.

Insipid.

So it’s not insipid.

It’s not. It’s I-N-C-I-P-I-T, right?

Yeah. I don’t know. Companionable silence might be the best of all of these in English. What do you think?

I really, I like companionable silence. I like the one word nature of insipid, of like that initial moment that everyone is enjoying together.

And I’ve already forgotten it, but the one in German with the three S’s, I thought also kind of encompassed that feeling.

E-N-U-S-S-S-T-I-L-E.

Basically means enjoyment silence.

Cool.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, something tells me we’re going to hear from a lot of listeners about either suggested terms or terms that they’ve heard in other languages or in English.

So thanks for asking that question.

Well, I’ll be sure to keep listening.

All right.

Yeah, thanks for asking that question.

Bon appetit.

Bon appetit.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

There’s a magical number toll-free in the United States and Canada.

Call or text 877-929-9673.

I’m reading Dorothy Sayre’s 1935 novel Gaudy Night.

It’s a mystery novel that takes place at a fictional women’s college in Oxford, England.

And she has such wonderful turns of phrase in there.

And one of them that I really liked was she started a sentence with,

February was sobbing and blustering its lacrimose way into March.

It’s sobbing and blustering its lacrimose way.

I love it.

Isn’t that wonderful?

Her books hold up amazingly well.

I’ve read the whole series, but maybe it’s time for a reread.

This is about much more than just a mystery novel.

It’s about women’s lives and roles in that era.

Yeah, and you’re right. It does hold up very, very well.

We’d love to hear what you’re reading and the language that you came across in your books.

877-929-9673 is toll-free in the United States and Canada.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carol Kenney calling from King of Prussia, Pennsylvania.

Hey, Carol, it’s good to have you. What’s on your mind?

Well, I have a mysterious word.

The word is meckle or meckling.

I’ve used that my whole life.

And my brother says he remembers our mother talking about things with that word.

And I don’t know anybody else who’s ever heard or used that word.

I’ve looked it up.

I’ve, you know, of course, gone to the Internet and done my due diligence.

And I don’t know why that word, which is kind of unique, it seems, to my family, meckle.

I would spell it M-E-C-K-L-E.

And the way my mom used it was kind of as a synonym for messing around with something.

Like as a kid, I would mess around with my cereal in my cereal bowl and she would say, stop meckling with your cereal and eat it.

She would also use it in the context of maybe doing some kind of a sewing project, which had a lot of complicated steps or a knitting project or any kind of project that had a lot of steps to it.

And she would say, oh, I gave up on that.

There was too much meckling involved.

So have you ever heard the word or can you give any insight?

The one other one thing I would say is that my mom’s family came from a German background in New York, in Long Island, Brooklyn and Queens.

So, Carol, German by heritage, but not by birth.

Right.

Her grandparents spoke German naturally.

They were German by birth.

And just to make sure that we’re hearing you correctly,

When you spelled it, that first letter M as in Maria, right?

M-E-C-K-L-E, Meckel?

Yeah, I’m inventing the spelling because I can’t find it anywhere else.

I’m not 100% sure on this, but I think we have a connection here.

There’s a tenuous connection to two verbs or three verbs,

One each in German, Yiddish, and Dutch.

And they’re all basically the same word

Represented in each language.

And it’s mekern, M-E-K-E-R-N in Yiddish,

Or M-E-C-K-E-R-N in German and double K in Dutch.

And just bear with me here.

The thing about this verb is it really means to bleat,

Like a sheep bleats,

But it’s used figuratively or euphemistically to mean to complain or grumble or to moan and complain.

And I’m just wondering if it didn’t go one step further beyond that at some part.

Because we have this word fuss in English that has these two meanings.

One is about complaining, but other one is about tinkering or overhandling or having to do a lot of fiddly stuff.

And I’m just wondering if this word from German or Yiddish or Dutch also made that leap over from, you know, because if you’re complaining or grumbling about something, it’s often because it is complicated or requires a lot of fussy work.

Mm-Mm—

So that’s my thinking.

Maybe that’s it. Yeah.

And so then you have these, you of course have meckerer, somebody who meckers is a grumbler, a complainer.

And just this phonological and semantic connection is pretty strong here.

I’d put my chances of being right, let’s say, under 75%, but I still think it’s pretty strong.

Yeah, yeah.

Well, it’s a nice family word, and I appreciate you sharing that with us.

And if it turns out that it’s just your mom’s word, well, that doesn’t take anything away from its usefulness.

Yeah, I really like it.

I do, too.

And I’m transmitting it, of course, to my kids and my four grandkids.

So maybe it will spread and someday be an addictionary.

That’s how it starts.

Excellent.

Carol, thank you so much for spending some time with us.

We really appreciate it.

Thanks.

Thank you for trying to solve my mystery.

Yeah, sure.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Have a great day.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, if there’s a family word that you’ve been wondering about, we might be able to help.

So give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Grant, have you been watching this series, Pluribus?

Oh, no, but I’m looking forward to it.

Many people say it’s great.

Yeah, it’s really different from anything I’ve ever seen.

I can’t even begin to tell you what the plot of the show is.

But one thing you’ll appreciate in it is a great Norwegian expression that I learned from it.

There’s a part of the show where this couple goes on a romantic vacation to one of those ice hotels in Scandinavia, specifically Norway.

And the guy who’s showing them around their room explains that their guest suites are slightly warmer than the rest of this frigid hotel.

He says it’s not too, too cold and it’s quite invigorating once you get used to it.

As we say, you will feel som plumen jeget, which means like a yolk in an egg.

Oh, that’s cozy as all get out, isn’t it?

That’s super cozy.

Yeah, it didn’t look cozy at all, but that is.

I would do a nice hotel just for the experience, but maybe only a night.

But also, I don’t think I would call that a romantic getaway.

That does not prompt romance.

Icy hotel doesn’t prompt romance for me.

Well, I guess if you’re snuggling under lots of covers.

But I did love this Norwegian expression that means, you know, just really comfortable, feeling just right, like a yolk in an egg.

Like a yolk in an egg.

Well, we hope you’re comfortable enough to pick up the phone, text us or call us toll free in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quiz master.

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

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

1-877-929-9673.

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

It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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

And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board.

Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidmorm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

So long. you