Do you say something happened on accident or by accident? Is text-messaging is destroying our kids' writing ability? Where do horseradish, zarf, and ignoramus come from?
This episode first aired October 10, 2009. Listen here:
[audio: http://feeds.waywordradio.org/~r/awwwpodcast/~5/zouBpkbFdrE/100405-AWWW-awkward-turtle.mp3 ]
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Grant and Martha discuss a new collection of college slang compiled by UCLA linguistics professor Pamela Munro. Learn more about it and order a copy here.
A Burlington, Vt. caller wants to know: Is horseradish so named because of this root's strong resemblance to part of a horse's anatomy?
The word zarf means "a metal cupholder," but a Scrabble enthusiast says other players always challenge his use of that word. He wants to know its origin.
What word in the English language is an anagram of itself? Hint: It's a trick question.
Puzzle Dude John Chaneski has a quiz about the unofficial terms for familiar things that have less familiar official names. "The Academy Awards of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences," for example, are unofficially called the Oscars. So what's the unofficial name for what's officially known as Chomolungma?
If you use the expression on accident rather than by accident, it probably says less about where you live and more about how old you are.
Is there a word in the English language that means "to read by candlelight"? A listener in Kittery Point, Maine, used to read the dictionary every night as a teenager and came across such a word. She's been racking her brain to remember it.
An Orange County, California, listener describes how both his left-handed parents were forced as children to learn to write with their non-dominant hand. Their handwriting looked unusual, to say the least. Grant discusses myths about handedness and recommends the book Handwriting in America: A Cultural History by Tamara Thornton. By the way, if you're looking for the word that means "written toward the left," it's levographic.
Here's a bit of campus slang accompanied by a hand gesture: awkward turtle. Grant explains what it means and how it's used. Need a visual?
Text-messaging is destroying our kids' ability to write, right? Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
In a few parts of the country, such as eastern Wisconsin, the more common term for "water fountain" is bubbler. A man who heard the term frequently in Rhode Island wonders: How did bubbler make it all the way over to Rhode Island, but seemingly skip the states in between?
The story behind the word ignoramus is big fun. It involves a bumbling lawyer, a six-hour farce from the 17th century, and a Latin legal term. See? Big fun.
If you need proof that language is powerful, here's some. Researchers at Cornell recently reported that kids are more likely to eat their veggies if they're told the food has enticing names like "X-ray Vision Carrots" and "Dinosaur Broccoli Trees." Wonder how big a grant the researchers got to study what every parent already knows.
Did you learn the vowels as "a," "e," "i," "o" "u," and sometimes "y" and "w"? A caller who was taught that in second grade was left wondering: When and where does "w" function as a vowel?
I was so glad to hear the caller from California, who was also taught A, E, I, O, U, and sometimes Y and W! Mrs. Bassett taught us that in second grade in 1974, but could never give us an example. I had started to think that I never really saw that W on her bulletin board. I would be interested to know if that caller also was using the Houghton-Mifflin second grade reading series.
I went to a Catholic elementary school in New Jersey, and we were also taught that the vowels were a, e, i, o, u, and sometimes y and w. We were never given any examples of the y and w being used as vowels, as far as I can remember.
Y as a vowel is easy: by, cry, dry, fly. Or if you want longer words, there's that beloved set of five-letter ones for the crossword fans: crypt, glyph, lymph, nymph, sylph and tryst.
I once asked someone if he could think of a five-letter word with no vowels other than Y, wondering which of the above he'd come up with first. He surprised me with "thymy", then asked me if I could use it in a sentence.
I responded, "Thymy kangaroo down, sport?"
When I first saw, "thymy", I thought it was a culinary term. That is, a food which has thyme in it might be said to taste thymy. (Maybe that really should be spelled, "thymey.")
Emmett