Enough about the Word of the Year. How about the Word of the Decade? Bailout? Google? Martha and Grant discuss some candidates. Also in this episode, does speaking a different language make you feel different emotions? What did Don Draper on Mad Men mean when he called Betty a Main Line brat? And why do we talk about throwing someone under the bus?
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Where'd we get the expression mind your p's and q's? A Barcelona native wants help understanding exactly what it means, and shares a few other English idioms that caught her up short.
A die-hard fan of television's Mad Men is puzzled when Don calls Betty a Main Line brat.
Grant's been collecting contenders for 2009's Word of the Year, including Dracula sneeze, Government Motors, and...unumbium?
Quiz Guy John Chaneski sums up the events of 2009 in the form of limericks, all with a blank to be filled. Here's one:
NASA really put on a great show
A new lunar crater did blow
To the glee of mankind
The rocket did find
That the moon contains much __________.
A dogsledder in Vermont wonders why he and his fellow mushers direct their furry packs by shouting gee for "right" and haw for "left."
If you ask a salesclerk for change in the form of a case quarter, what are you asking for?
An upstate New York woman says her British husband makes fun of her for saying lookit!
Does speaking a particular language make you feel certain emotions? The hosts talk about a blog post by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson musing about whether this might be true.
A woman from Indianapolis is trying to convince her grandmother that it's okay for restaurant servers to refer to both male and female customers as you guys. Grandma says it's sexist. Our caller maintains it's fine, drawing an analogy with Spanish, where the masculine pronoun ellos encompasses both sexes.
Why do we describe the sudden abandonment of someone as throwing him under the bus?
A Dallas man says his grandmother used to carry around washcloth a plastic bag in her purse. When he and his siblings would get their hands dirty, she'd say to them, "Show me your paddywackers," and they'd hold out their hands to be wiped clean. He wonders if she made up the word paddywhacker.
Two more expressions that characterized 2009: El Stiffo and drive like a Cullen.
Seen in a local restaurant: a notice just inside the kitchen, warning the servers not to refer to customers as "you guys". The management apparently felt that it was not the right way to address patrons.
Hello,
I'm new to the forum, this is my first message. You do a good
show Grant and Martha.
On the saying "Watch your p's and q's.", I learned p's and q's in
grammar school mathematics. Those are the standard variables
used in formal logic, a branch of mathematics. In print,
I've seen them used in "Principia Mathematica" by Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), a three
volume blue hardcover edition printed in the 1950's, published
by Cambridge University. I was dismayed to hear the hosts say
that the origin is unknown. Although I can't say that I know
the history of the saying, I do know that p's and q's are used
when logic is taught and published. So I think that logic is
what the saying is talking about.
You can search for the title and the author "Whitehead" at this web
site under the Indianapolis libraries (click "Guest Access" first):
Jump-in, "P's and Q's" were used before either one of those men were born, dating to the very early 1600s, which, I believe, is also earlier than when today's notation for logic became standard.
Minor correction: Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel peace prize by Norwegians, not Swedes.