Has the age of email led to an outbreak of exclamation marks? Do women use them more than men? Also, is there a word for the odd feeling when you listen to a radio personality for years, then discover that they look nothing like your mental picture of them? And what's the origin of the verb "to bogart"?
This episode first aired June 6, 2009. Listen here:
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Writing in the Guardian, Stuart Jeffries contends that our email boxes are being infested with exclamation marks, known as bangs or bangers (without mash) to some people. Jacob Rubin also wrote on the subject a couple of years ago in Slate.
If you tell a buddy, "Don't bogart that joint," you're telling him not to hog the marijuana cigarette. Ahem. We know phrase was popularized in the film Easy Rider (performed by The Fraternity of Man) but does it have anything to do with Humphrey Bogart?
You know that odd feeling when you've listened to a radio personality for years, but when you finally meet them, they look nothing like you'd imagined? Is there a word for that weird disconnect? Radiofreude, maybe?
Martha shares what F. Scott Fitzgerald and Elmore Leonard had to say about exclamation marks. Short version: Neither is a fan.
Quiz Guys John Chaneski and Greg Pliska lead a couple of rounds of Chain Reaction, a word game that's great for parties and long car rides. Two players try to make a third one guess the word that the other two are thinking of. The trick is that they have to give alternating one-word clues to build a sentence. Hilarity ensues. Hillary sues.
Why do some people refer to a couch or a sofa as a davenport?
How should you pronounce the word gala?
Grant reports some etymological news: A recent article in the journal American Speech suggests a new source for the term that means "drunk," blotto.
If you're in New Zealand and are told to "rattle your dags," you'd better get a move on. Literally, though, the expression has to do with sheep butts.
Martha reviews the new book, Dreaming in Hindi, by Katherine Russell Rich, a memoir about setting out to learn a second language in mid-life. Rich spent a year in India to learn Hindi, and became so fascinated with the process that she went on to interview experts about the mechanics of second-language acquisition and how it affects the brain. Publisher's Weekly has an interview with Rich.
Grant discusses an article about what happens to the mother tongue voice when first-language speakers of indigenous languages in India learn English and then spend years focused on speaking and writing in their adopted tongue.
How did the word pigeonhole come to mean "classify" or "categorize"?
An employee who gets a great termination package is said to leave the company with a golden parachute. Where'd that term come from?
A caller is adamant honorifics should be used to address the President of the United States, as in "President Obama," never "Mr. Obama." He thinks it's disrespectful and divisive when news organizations use "Mr."
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A Way with Words is sponsored by Mozy:
After coming to the website and seeing your pictures, I think the word to use when the expectations don't meet the face is " Wreckanize" . Obvious play on recognize. What do you think? This can be positive as well as negative. It means how YOU feel not the hosts.
Tom
La Mesa
I'm thinking we need to go with a foreign flavor here for the wrong visual impression one has of someone before seeing them in a photo or in person. How about either, "mal-ver" or "vu-gauche" (my personal favorite as it implies a certain awkward feeling about the moment, like how deja-vu refers to the feeling of having seen previously). I was also wondering about your use of an exclamation point at the top of your "Reply To Topic" comment, Courtesy Matters. Are you just emphasizing the courtesy aspect or as you discussed in the radio broadcast, are you just making fun of the statement?
BC
Palm Desert
Another fine show, thanks.
One question about Presidential honorifics (hm, that looks like something to buy on QVC): I thought it was the original George W. who declined any references to royalty, not the plurbus people as mentioned in the show. This great humility was supposed to be another facet of the First President's super awesomeness—that and his ability to fly without a cape.
Grant, would you direct me to a reference about which party wanted to avoid royal references in early U.S. history?
As a security alarm dispatcher for many years, I spoke on the phone with the same people regularly who were checking in overnight (such as cleaning crews) and people who routinely set off their security alarms and had to call in or answer the phone -- and I also formed mental imagery of what they looked like, later to discover them to be drastically different, in truth. You might augment the requirements for the new word to be merely in a situation where a voice is routinely heard and its speaker unseen (phone, radio, by the blind, etc).
My grandparents (born ~1922, Texas/Oklahoma border area) have always called their couches a "devan" (uncertain spelling). "Get your shoes off the [deh-VAN]!" is something they would say to me or my brother if committing such a deed.
Touching on what Martha noted as "second reference" regarding the president/mister title when referring to Obama -- I've found that a significant portion of the public is not aware of varying styles of written or spoken newsreporting, such as AP Style or Chicago Style journalism and consider on some occasions newsreporters who speak or write with such styles (such as hyphenating adjectival phrases, or writing out numbers) as poorly educated in proper writing. I've had to explain on more than one occasion that it's based on a different system of rules than the schoolhouse grammar teacher of yore, rather than being incorrect. I think this caller was one such person to misunderstand -- that once a person has been identified in the lead/bridge/what-have-you, simply using "Mr. Obama" or calling someone purely by their surname ("Thursday, Obama spoke with..") is not at all disrespectful. While in college, a fellow English major who was also in journalism told me his professor wrote on his term paper for a literature class that, "You could write great articles for the New York Times. However, this is an English class."