Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paints, anyway? Martha and Grant ponder that mystery. They also explain why those annoying emails go by the name spam. And Grant explains the difference between being "adorbs" and "bobo."
This episode first aired October 24, 2009. Listen here:
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Bavarian Chalet. Mushroom Basket. Moose Point. Who in the heck comes up with the names of paint, anyway? Must be the same people who get paid to give names like Love Child, Sellout, and Apocalypse to shades of lipstick. Martha and Grant discuss wacky color names.
Hurly-burly, helter-skelter, zigzag, shilly-shally — the hosts dish out some claptrap about words like these, otherwise known as reduplications or rhyming jingles.
If someone's naked as a needle, just how naked are they? Why "needle"?
Grant and Martha discuss more goofy names for lipstick. Mauvelous Memories, anyone?
Quiz Guy John Chaneski's latest puzzle requires players to guess the last word in a two-line verse. For example: "He's seven feet tall and big as a tank, The meanest Marine that you've ever BLANK." (Stumped? Take a letter out of "seven.")
An Episcopal priest in Toledo worries that her sermons are cluttered with dashes. This works just fine when she's preaching, but when the same text appears on her church's website, it looks like a messy tangle of words and punctuation. The hosts discuss the differences between text written for oral delivery, and text written to be read silently.
Why is that annoying stuff in your email box called spam? Grant has the answer. Here's the Monty Python skit that inspired it.
Can a first-time event ever be called "The First Annual" Such-and-Such? Members of a Cedar Rapids group planning a social mixer disagree.
Is that snazzy new car adorbs or bobo? Grant talks about adorbs, bobo, and a few other slang terms collected by Professor Connie Eble of the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill.
Theories about how Latin Americans came to use the term gringo as a disparaging word for foreigners. We can easily rule out the one about the song "Green Grow the Lilacs," but what about the rest?
An insurance fraud investigator in Milwaukee wonders if he's correct to use a semicolon immediately after the word "however." Grant suggests that the word and the punctuation mark should do a do-si-do.
Many of us learned the rule about using the preposition between when talking about two items, but among when talking about more than two. In reality, though, the rule is a little more complicated.
Someone who's extremely busy may be said to be busier than a cranberry merchant. What is it that keeps cranberry merchants so busy, anyway?
as far as I know zig-zag and itzy-bitzy are expressions brought from Hungary with the late 19th century wave of immigration. Zig-zag is a little mysterious though as the Hungarian meaning (of zeg-zeg) is somewhat different.
When I was in England in 1997, Yardley had a lipstick called "Mary Shelley". I still wish I had bought it, not for my personal use (it was a purplish shade, something for Gothic raven-haired women, I suppose), but just as a curio.
COLORS:
1. Some companies used to name colors in a way that was clever but still identifiable. The examples I remember are "Zane grey" and "tuckered-out plum."
2. An old story tells of a husband and wife getting ready for a yard sale.
She suggested they print up fliers in an attention-getting color like "sunflower."
"Why do you have to give it a fancy name?" he replied irritably. "Just call it 'yellow'."
When they get to the copy center, he took control and spoke up first: "We want 20 copies of this on YELLOW paper."
To which the clerk responded, "Did you mean 'marigold'?"
"first annual" - At work, our publications style guide tells us to use "inaugural" instead. From dictionary.com, the American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language, Fourth Edition, definition includes "To cause to begin, especially officially or formally." So this might be an alternative that avoids the argument.