I wanted to thank you for your reading of the e.e. cummings poem! I first encountered this poem in the Michael Hedges song of the same name, which (as one would expect) uses this poem as a lyric. It is on Michael's Taproot album and, in my opinion, is one of his best pieces that include lyrics (he is much more well-known as an ahead-of-his-time guitarist.)
Thanks for your show. As a baseball fan, I had been curious about rubber match as well. Interesting thought that it could be related to an eraser. I always figured it had to do with the bouncy nature of rubber. Like, the match has been bouncing back and forth, and you don't know which way the next one's going to go. Thanks again, love the show.
I really enjoyed the show as well. At then end, "someone feeling some owly" came up in an example usage. I really like this sort of construction. To me, someone who does not have a flawless education in grammar, the word "some" in this case can both be an adjective, meaning a great deal, or an adverb, meaning a reduced amount. So this ambiguous usage forms a superposition in my mind between the two possible meanings with the sum of this resulting in a appreciation of the cleverness of the speaker.
You ask what I call rubber-soled shoes. My favorite is a term my older sister brought home back in the early sixties - I can't remember if she was still in high school in Spokane or off to Stanford. At any rate, she referred to them as her 'tenny-pumps' which my mother thought was hysterical, and so it became ingrained in the family lexicon.
I grew up outside of Rochester, New York and I suppose you could call that a "border area with Canada". However we usually didn't. My parents also used the term "owly". When they used it it always referred to the weather. Usually nasty, windy, disagreeable weather that you didn't want to be in. Because the weather was always windy when it was owly out I always figured that the term was a shortened form of howly, because the wind howled on these nights.