Pickle, baboon, cupcake, snorkel, pumpkin, Kalamazoo—let's face it, some words are just plain funny. But what makes some words funnier than others? Martha and Grant consider this question with an assist from Neil Simon's play (and movie) The Sunshine Boys. Also in this episode: "There are three words in the English language that end in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them." The hosts explain how this aggravating riddle works—and doesn't work. And what's a shivaree?
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Do you know this diabolical riddle? "There are three words in the English language that end in -gry. Angry and hungry are two of them. What's the third?" The hosts explain that the answer's not as simple as you might think.
Does the expression to boot, as in "I'll sell you this Hummer and throw in a free tank of gas to boot," have anything to do with booting up a computer?
In an earlier episode, the hosts discussed the phrase all over it like a duck on a junebug, which refers to doing something with great eagerness. Martha shares an email from a Wisconsin listener who's watched plenty of ducks interact with junebugs and offers a vivid description of what that looks like.
In this week's puzzle, Quiz Guy John Chaneski is looking for phrases in which the only vowel is the letter A. Try this clue: "This person said, 'I have spent all my life with dance and being a dancer. It's permitting life to use you in a very intense way. Sometimes it is not pleasant, sometimes it is fearful, but nevertheless, it is inevitable." Hint: The speaker's first name is the same as one of this show's hosts.
What do you call the wheeled contraption that you push around the grocery store? Shopping cart? Shopping carriage? Shopping wagon? Buggy? A former Kentuckian wonders if anyone besides her calls them bascarts. Check out this dialect map featuring these and other names for this device.
One definition of a shivaree is "a compliment extended to every married couple made up of beating tin pans, blowing horns, ringing cowbells, playing horse fiddles, caterwauling, and in fine, the use of every disagreeable sound to make the night hideous." Also spelled charivari, this old-fashioned form of hazing newlyweds often involved interrupting them in the middle of the night with a raucous party. A former Hoosier calls to discuss boyhood memories of a shivaree and wonders about the source of this term.
How do you pronounce February? Is it FEB-roo-air-ee or FEB-yew-air-ee?
A husband and wife have a long-running dispute over whether the word scissors is singular or plural. Is it a scissors or a pair of scissors?
Grant recommends a couple of favorite children's books by Kate Banks and Georg Hallensleben: Baboon and The Night Worker.
Martha explains the story behind the expression "richer than Bim Gump." Find out more about the long-running comic strip that inspired it here.
The names Australia and Austria are awfully similar. Is it a coincidence?
The H1N1 virus has a lot of people wondering about pandemics vs. epidemics. Grant explains the difference.
Martha explains the origin of the word coin, as in "to coin a phrase."
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In addition to words with K, I've found (from many hours of trying to make up my own joke responses listening to "Wait Wait... Don't Tell Me!") that words with "dark L" are also funny. When the structure of a question requires a verb, "yodel" always works, and if a noun is needed, "poodle".
The implication, of course, is that "pickle" simply can't miss.
Now, about that "pair of scissors" thing....
Not long ago, I was witness to a multinational discussion about the pluralness of "compass". (That's the thing you draw circles with, not the one that tells you which way is north.) Many of the Brits insisted that the drawing tool was "a pair of compasses".
I've been on a shivaree... When I was around 10 (this would have been in 1972 in central Iowa) my cousin got married and a bunch of reletives and neighbors got together a month or two later after dark and after the lights had gone out at my cousin's house. We all quietly slipped up to the house, propped a horse fiddle up against the outer wall under their bedroom window and, on cue, suddenly started making an outrageous racket all around the house. The horse fiddle alone, could do that, especially propped up against the house to conduct the vibrations.
I remember thinking the whole thing was very strange. Especially after hearing stories from my aunt and Mom and others about other sivarees. My aunt talked about putting baby chickens in their bed and my mom talked about how, when she and my dad got married, she labeled all the canned goods in the pantry with a grease pencil because she expected a shivaree and that someone would take the paper labels off all the cans.
Maybe my cousin had heard those storied too, because they never opened the door and eventually we all went home. Waking them up with a lot of noise and a sort of party I can understand but the pranks sounded kind of mean.
The question I have about all this is...does a horse fiddle serve any other purpose than to make a really loud obnoxious noise? I'd never heard of it before and never heard it mentioned in any other context.
Arte
! ! ! ! Sounds wild, Arte. But now you have me wondering: What IS a horse fiddle?? Is it like a musical saw?
Well, you have to remember I was only 10 at the time...and that was the only time I've ever seen one. But I remember it being a wooden box sort of thing, several feet tall, with a big cogged wheel in the middle attached to a crank. There were sheets of metal that touched the cogs so that when you turn the crank it would strike the metal plates with each tooth of the wheel as you turned it. It's kind of like sticking a playing card in the frame of a bicycle so that it makes noise when you ride the bike. Only we're talking serious cog teeth and metal here. The thing makes an unholy racket.
That's why I can't envision it having any other purpose than to make noise. It's not at all musical and it's very loud.