We all know that the color pink is for boys and the color blue is for girls — at least, that's how it was 100 years ago. Grant and Martha share the surprising history behind the colors we associate with gender. Plus, we go rollin' in our hooptie, play a game of guess-that-Google-search, and get some tips on how to avoid getting swindled by our real estate agent! Also, new terms for failed software upgrades, some sugar-coated snark from across the pond, and a new way to show sarcasm in a text message. Yeah. Sure.
This episode first aired October 22, 2011.
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Bad Upgrades
Hate it when a software upgrade is worse than the previous version? We call that a flupgrade, or a new-coke. As in, "Skype really new-coked it with version 5.3.0." Come on, Skype!
Hooptie
What is a hooptie? Though it started in the 1960s as a term for a sweet new car, it became the common moniker for a beater, or a jalopy. Maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot said it best: "My hooptie rollin', tailpipe draggin'/ heat don't work, and my girl keeps nagging.'"
No Better Than She Ought to Be
If a lady is no better than she ought to be, her sexual morals may be in question. The saying, recently popularized by the BBC program Downton Abbey, is what's known as a charientism, or a bit of sugar-coated snark. By the way, if you'd like to hear more about such thinly veiled insults, check out this episode.
Swivet
If someone's in a swivet, they're flustered or in distress. For example, you might be in a swivel if you're late for a meeting or you've shown up to the SAT without a No. 2 pencil.
Google Search-Completion Puzzle
Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game based on Google searches, or at least what Google thinks you're searching. For example, what do Elmo, pink, and plant all have in common? Google suggests them, in that order, after you've entered the words "tickle me."
Constructed Languages
Did the movie Avatar make you imagine creating an entirely new language, like Na'vi? Conlang.org and the Language Creation Society have plenty of information on how to go about it and what others, including J.R.R. Tolkein have tried. Mark Rosenfelder's book The Language Construction Kit is a great resource for getting started.
Call for Tender
What does it mean to call for tender? This British phrase for soliciting a job is rarely seen in the United States, though tender, from the Latin for "to stretch or hold forth," is used in North America in two different senses: "to tender," as in "to offer," as well as the noun "tender" for something that's been issued, such as a dollar bill, hence legal tender.
'Puter Principle
What do you call an upgrade gone wrong? Perhaps the 'Puter Principle could be the software equivalent of the Peter Principle, which in business means that every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.
To a Tee
If something's right on, it suits you to a tee. But why a tee? Tee, or the letter T, is short for tittle, or something really tiny. So if something's exactly perfect, it's right on point, with no room to spare. Or, simply, it suits you to a tee.
Gendered Colors
Why is pink a girl color and blue a boy color? In the 19th Century, pink used to be associated with boys, since it was a stronger, more decided color. Blue, on the other hand, was regarded as a girls' color, because it was considered dainty. It wasn't until the 1940s that marketers started to switch it around. Jeanne Maglaty has a great article about this in Smithsonian Magazine, called "When did Girls Start Wearing Pink?"
Slake Your Thirst
To slake your thirst is to quench your thirst. But some people have been switching it to slate your thirst or other variants. It's a classic case of an eggcorn, or one of those words that people mishear, and then start pronouncing incorrectly; for example, when misheard, acorn can become eggcorn.
Gazump
What does it mean to gazump someone? This phrase, specifically meaning "to swindle a customer in a real estate deal," came about in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s before disappearing and then popping up again in England in the 1970s. Whether or not the term is in vogue, the practice seems to be a mainstay.
Sartalics
How do you indicate sarcasm in a text message or an email? If winky emoticons aren't your thing, try left-leaning italics, as recommended by sartalics.com.
Arabic Sayings
The Arabic idiom in the apricot season translates to "in your dreams," presumably because the growing season for this fruit is so brief. Incidentally, the etymological root of "apricot," which means "to ripen early," is shared with the word precocious.
The Egyptian Arabic saying "ate the camel and all it carried" is the equivalent of "to eat someone out of house and home."
Photo by gtall1. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Book Mentioned in the Broadcast
| The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder |
Music Used in the Broadcast
| Title | Artist | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Hooptie | Sir Mix A Lot | Seminar | Nastymix Records |
| Sniffin' and Scratchin' | The Soul Snatchers | Sniffin' and Scratchin' | Social Beats |
| Afrostrut | The Nite-Liters | Instrumental Directions | RCA |
| A Man And A Woman | David McCallum | Music - It's Happening Now | Capitol Records |
| The Bump | George Freeman | Franticdiagnosis | Bam-Boo Records |
| Funky Thithee | Shuggie Otis | Here Comes Shuggie Otis | Epic |
| If I Were A Carpenter | David McCallum | Music - It's Happening Now | Capitol Records |
| Wagon Wheels | Grant Green | Goin' West | Blue Note |
| Let's Call The Whole Thing Off | Ella Fitzgerald | Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George & Ira Gershwin Song Book | UMG Recordings, Inc |
Sartalics is an interesting concept, if you can get the font, and if the font is on the recipient's machine (otherwise you get a substituted font).
For close to 10 years now I've been trying to use the following to convey sarcasm: -)
The two characters imply "tongue in cheek." Picked it up on a pre-emoticon website that had all the text character combos then in use. Unfortunately, it never caught on. After receiving enough "What does that -) mean?" comments, I just gave up on it.
How does Thomas Gainsborough's Blue Boy fit in here? It was painted in the 1770s.
Although I like the idea of left-leaning italics, to my knowledge, the use of /sarcasm after the phrase, or (/sarcasm) if the phrase is in the middle of a sentence, is already fairly well established. I presume it has to do with the use of tags in programming (a word I use loosely) HTML. For instance if you wanted to bold something in HTML, you would put a <b>whatever text you want</b>, and whatever text is between the b and /b is bolded by the browser reading the HTML, just as typing out <center>text here</center> would center that text in the middle of the space the text would appear. The use of /sarcasm, therefore, would indicate that the previous phrase up until that point if unclear by the language itself.
Example:
A: So I was thinking about using grape soda instead of milk on my cereal. Would that work?
B: Well, I can't imagine how that wouldn't.. /sarcasm
Switching topics, there's a typo in the summary of the episode where this is episode is more formally listed.. under the swivet section, the example uses "swivel" as if spell-check caught it and changed it. Also, the link for "this episode" at the end of the charientism section has a stray carriage return tag (or a misplaced double quote from the anchor tag) in the address linked, creating a 404.
I think "downgrade" is already well enough established and is a bit more intuitive than having to guess what another term might mean -- but I quite like "new-coked" over flupgrade, or perhaps flubgrade to emphasize the "flub" since the "up" still seems to suggest improvement to me.
You might have mentioned that newspapers nowadays do post lengthy classified ads (the paper locally does anyway, in north Texas) titled "Call for Bids" before describing at length a proposed construction details and necessary specs of the project.
A possible other phrase that I just thought up, when reading my own post back to myself to edit it, is "using the entities" when one finds oneself needing to go into deeper-than-expected detail to get a point across. Web browser programs read HTML (hyper-text markup language) to display things onscreen, which are generally enclosed by less-than and greater-than symbols to tell the browser, "this is the start of something you need to format, instead of display as typed" such as <center> to center something instead of showing the word "center".. In order to get an HTML tag to show up as if it were regular text, I had to use "special entity" codes that would tell the browser to display the less-than/greater-than symbols instead of interpreting them as tags. And, in order to type out the special entity code, I have to use a special entity code even still. The special entity code for less than, < is typed out in the coding as < (and in order to make the browser display < and not interpret it as instruction to display a less-than symbol, I had to type in &lt; .. and in order to display &lt; I had to type &amp;lt; ..etc)..