Cool Your Soup (episode #1495)

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. As I have for the last couple of years, I taught a workshop at the San Miguel Writers’ Conference and Literary Festival in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, and I was reminded of a couple of food-related idioms in Spanish that I think you’ll appreciate. In English, if you’re really scared about something, you might describe yourself as shaking like a leaf, right? But in in Spanish, the phrase is temblar como un flan.

To shake like a flan, like the dessert?

Yeah, to tremble like a flan, which you can just picture it, right, when somebody sets down the plate on your table and it’s just…

Yeah, because it’s kind of like a firm jello, firmer than jello, right?

It’s not quite as wiggly, but still wiggly.

Yeah, I love that image.

And I also love darle la vuelta a la tortilla, which literally means to flip the tortilla.

And you would use that in the context of, say, you’re watching your favorite soccer team, and they’re just losing and losing and losing.

But all of a sudden, something happens, and they end up winning the game.

You say they’ve flipped the tortilla.

Oh, and we would say flipped the script, maybe, in English, or to turn the tide.

Yeah, yeah, you turn the tide.

But I like that they’re both food-related.

Outstanding.

Well, we know that a lot of you speak other languages at home.

I know you’ve got idioms and things that just don’t quite translate into English as clearly as they are in the original language.

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, or spill it all on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Lennon. I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hey, Lennon, what’s going on?

Well, I was having a debate on Facebook, of course, with a buddy of mine about the Mac in mac and cheese.

And we’re discussing and we’re wondering if the Mac was short for macaroni or if the Mac was an acronym for macaroni and cheese.

I think it’s short for Mac.

He says that he’s been to, like, restaurants before, and on the menu it had, like, Mac, just Mac as a side.

Because if Mac is an acronym for macaroni and cheese, calling it Mac and Cheese would be redundant.

But if you just refer to it as, I need a side of Mac, or I made a bowl of Kraft Mac, then it would be an acronym.

Kraft Mac, did you say?

Yeah, the famous KD, the Kraft Dinner.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

The question is, let me summarize this, the question is, is MAC short for macaroni and cheese as a whole as an acronym, or is MAC short for macaroni and cheese without being an acronym?

Right, exactly. Like, is MAC short for macaroni, or is MAC an acronym for macaroni and cheese?

Alright, MAC has been an abbreviation of macaroni for just the word macaroni since at least the 1930s.

Macaroni and cheese has been around since the 1840s, and it started, I believe, as an American dish.

Mac is short for macaroni and cheese and short for macaroni, and it is not an acronym for macaroni and cheese.

I know that’s what it is.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, so MAC does not stand for the letters at the beginning of macaroni and cheese.

Okay, got it.

That’s right.

I knew it.

All right.

The thing is, the British tend to call it macaroni cheese without the and, which is interesting, too.

Oh, I didn’t know that.

And a lot of people just call it, give me some mac, and they mean the whole dish macaroni and cheese.

Right, but it’s not an acronym.

It’s not an acronym.

Although people have reinterpreted it as an acronym, and that’s known as a bacronym.

When you have a word that already exists and someone invents the thing that it supposedly stands for or re-assumes after the fact that it stands for something, that’s a bacronym.

Interesting. Okay.

So, Lennon, does this mean that you won an argument? Is this what’s going on?

I think technically, yes.

I think I’m on board so far.

All right.

One to zero.

Algorithms are awesome.

I love it.

Hey, you know, we should do a show about language.

There’s so much fun stuff to talk about.

Yeah, definitely.

Lennon, thank you very much.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, I love the show.

You guys are awesome.

Thanks for having me on.

Oh, yeah, great to have you.

All right, bye, guys.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

We heard from Kelly Hallmark, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, and she writes,

My mother has always been very into geology.

She never pursued a degree in it, but is incredibly knowledgeable.

As a kid, we traveled in a trailer all across the western U.S., visiting and revisiting parks.

Being far more inquisitive than anyone can tolerate, I had to stop and ask her about every single rock.

Eventually, she started calling them all leverites, as in, leverite there.

And Kelly wondered if this was just her mother’s term, but it’s not.

It’s a thing.

This is geologist slang for a specimen that isn’t worth picking up, or the kind of rock that you might collect early in your career, but then toward the middle of your career, you’ve seen plenty.

You’ve got enough of those.

You leave her right there.

Leave her right there.

But when I was first reading that email, I thought, oh, leave her right.

That’s a type of mineral that I don’t know about.

I love it.

It reminds me of, we’ve talked about this on the show, unobtainium.

Unobtainium.

It’s a substance you want but can’t get.

Unobtainium.

We love getting your emails, and sometimes we read them on the air.

So send them to words@waywordradio.org or call us with a language question, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Joan Berry from Hobart, Wisconsin.

Hi, Joan. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Well, I was listening to your show last Saturday, and so many people mentioned things that my mother used to say.

There was one that I didn’t hear, but she used to say, save your breath to cool your soup.

If someone wasn’t listening to advice or if I felt bad about something, she would just say, oh, honey, just save your breath to cool your soup.

Yeah, that expression sort of substitutes for talking.

You know, instead of talking, you’re telling somebody to do something that’s more useful than the thing that they’re gabbing about.

Exactly.

They’re prattling on.

And it’s got a little dig to it because you would think that you would save your breath to keep yourself alive.

But we’re talking about just cooling your soup or there are lots of different versions of it, like to cool your coffee, to cool your broth, to cool your pottage or your porridge.

Yeah, yeah.

But it’s a little dig there.

And it’s hundreds of years, at least 400 years in English, right?

It’s very old.

I’ve heard that there’s a version of it in Cervantes.

Oh, I would be surprised.

Which would be 1615, something like that?

Because throughout the history of humankind, we’ve always looked for nice and mean ways to tell people to shut up, right?

Yeah, in other words, yeah.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, so it’s got that little dig, but it’s also sort of polite.

And that was exactly my mother.

Joan, thank you so much.

She sounds like a wonderful woman, and I can hear the love and affection in your voice.

We really appreciate you sharing these memories with us.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

What a perfect illustration of what we always say on the show, right?

Words aren’t just transmitted from generation to generation.

They’re transmitted along with love.

Yes, yes.

They’re handed down, as we like to say, like linguistic heirlooms that you give to your offspring and for them to remember you by in some ways.

Yeah, and Joan has done that with her mother.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hi. My name’s Ian Neal. I’m a local from San Diego, and I got a question about pronunciation of a word.

Excellent, Ian.

Let’s hear it.

My wife always ribs me for pronouncing the word E-X-A-C-T-L-Y exactly with pronunciation on the T.

She says that it should be exactly.

And so every time I say exactly, she gives me this glare from across the room, and it’s become a running joke in our family.

So I figured I’d call in and put the debate to bed once and for all.

Are you supposed to be exact when you say exactly, or should it be exactly?

Where did you pick that up, Ian?

I’ve just always said it that way.

And where’d you grow up?

I grew up in San Diego.

Okay.

What does your wife say?

My wife says exactly.

With a K sound.

Is she a San Diegan too?

She is, yes.

Okay.

But she’s more worldly than I am.

She did a Fulbright in Turkey for a few years and has done a lot of study abroad stuff.

Okay.

So a house divided in San Diego.

Exactly.

And she’s in the Department of Linguistics at SDSU, so she’s very firm.

All right, then.

Well, then.

So when she glares at you across the room, it’s with degrees on the wall behind her.

Indeed.

So exactly versus exactly.

Mm—

You’re both right. Thanks for calling.

That’s what I figured.

Look, there’s two common pronunciations that are this word throughout the English-speaking world, no matter where English is spoken, and in your household, they both exist.

Exactly with a T and exactly without the T sound.

If you look in dictionaries, which have done a thorough job, depending on the dictionary, but most common dictionaries have done a lot of research on this sort of thing or talked to experts, you will find that some dictionaries include both pronunciations, and some only include the T pronunciation.

So if we’re actually looking at dictionaries, more dictionaries agree with you than agree with your wife.

Interesting.

Yeah, but that doesn’t mean that you’re more correct.

Oxford dictionaries, Merriam-Webster dictionaries, and Macmillan dictionaries are the ones that include both pronunciations.

And I think they more accurately reflect the state of the language when it comes to the word exactly.

And actually, now that I’m self-conscious about it, I don’t even really know what I say when I’m not thinking about it.

Martha, you’re going to have to tell me later.

I say exactly.

Exactly.

But I have a friend who says exactly.

Exactly.

And it sounds so exact.

It sounds exact, yeah.

Yeah.

And it’s fine.

And there’s not a British-American split.

It’s not educated versus uneducated.

It’s just simply the tradition that you come from.

It’s just the way that you learned the word.

Yeah.

Very interesting.

And I can tell you one more thing.

The reason that T disappears for a lot of speakers, like your wife, is because that K and T sound next to each other, the consonant clusters tend to reduce to one consonant sound.

And she will understand that as a professor of linguistics.

Excellent. Well, thank you for clarifying those for me.

Okay, cool. Appreciate it.

All right.

Take care, Ian.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Now I’m thinking of et cetera, too.

Et cetera. That’s a great one.

A lot of people say et cetera.

Right, yeah, because that T, that T, S sound there together, your mouth wants to do some simplifying with it.

You’ll find that happens again and again and again.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk with us about any aspect of language, whether it’s pronunciation or grammar or slang.

Give us a call or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

This show’s about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stick around for more.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and on the line is our quiz guide, John Chaneski from New York City.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hi.

What’s up, bud?

I thought we’d start with a really interesting quiz.

That’s my code word for something that’s really weird, of course.

I grew up in New Jersey and in New York where police cars sound like this.

Like that, you know?

I have a dog.

They used to have a dog who sounds like…

They sound like hounds?

Sort of, yeah.

Now, the first time I ever heard a UK police siren, I was like, what?

It goes like…

Right?

At least they used to.

They’re sort of changing.

Now, before the old UK police sirens have completely dropped from memory, I thought we’d do a quiz where I made you guys sound like UK police sirens.

We’re looking for answers.

Sure.

We’re looking for answers that contain both the sounds ee and aw.

For example, if I said, this is the sound a donkey makes, you would say, hee-haw, hee-haw.

But now you have to say at least three times to get the traffic out of your way.

Okay?

Let’s give it a shot.

All right.

This is a typical piece of playground equipment.

Seesaw, seesaw, seesaw.

I don’t think any cars are going to move out of their way from that.

Well, I’ll bellow if you want me to.

Just, you know, put some heart in it.

Here we go.

Now, speaking of playgrounds, this is a game where children jump over one another.

Leapfrog, leapfrog, leapfrog.

Oh, boy.

That’s just as a…

Is that it?

Don’t you take improv classes, aren’t you?

Yeah.

Don’t you get up on stage?

Come on, do it.

Let’s put some heart in it.

Come on.

Yeah.

All right?

I’ll commit to that leapfrog.

Say yes.

Say yes and.

Okay.

Here we go.

In the UK, they typically use this container to brew a hot beverage around 4 p.m.

Teapot, teapot, teapot.

That’s good.

Very good.

Much better.

If you come from the southern U.S., you might refer to your grandmother this way.

Me, ma, me, ma, me, ma.

I actually did.

All right, yeah.

You did?

Oh, that’s very sweet.

The cars are definitely getting out of the way for that.

Now, bechamel or velouté are examples of this kind of cooking ingredient, usually made with milk.

Cheese sauce, cheese sauce, cheese sauce.

I’ll accept that cream sauce will also work.

Cream sauce.

How about the NFL franchise based in Seattle, Washington?

Seahawks, Seahawks, Seahawks.

Seahawks, yeah, that’s probably what the sirens sound like in Seattle.

You know, the late Tom Petty could have told you that this is the motion of a body where gravity is the only force acting upon it.

Free fall, free fall, free fall.

Very good.

This is the range or distance over which someone can hear.

Oh, earshot, earshot, earshot.

Very good.

This is insincere praise used to persuade someone to do something.

Sweet talk, sweet talk, sweet talk.

Very good.

And that was some very sweet talk from you guys.

You guys did great.

Congratulations.

This quiz was our sweet spot, sweet spot, sweet spot.

Very good.

Nice.

John, thank you so much.

Thanks, buddy.

Really appreciate it.

Talk to you next week.

Talk to you then.

Cheers.

This show is not just goofing around.

Oh, there’s a lot of that, too.

There’s a lot of that.

We talk about words and language and slang and things that happened at work where somebody was arguing over the right way to put something in a PowerPoint slide.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mariana from Argentina.

From Argentina.

Where in Argentina?

Well, right now I’m in Buenos Aires in a town or a part of town called El Tigre.

I have a question.

Actually, I started to take some mindfulness classes and courses.

And in some of the readings that I’ve been doing, you know, of course, a lot of what mindfulness talks about in the practice is loving kindness.

And one of the words that comes regularly is compassion.

So I am usually very curious about etymology, about words.

And I wanted to understand, and, you know, it comes that when you search compassion, it comes from to suffer with.

Now, when I, or to suffer with somebody.

So when I was looking for the words, I also came to sympathy, which comes with the same etymology.

And when I tried to figure out what’s the difference between compassion and sympathy, I really could not find it right.

You know, they sort of, it seems to be shades of the different things, but I’m not sure about that, so I figured I could call you guys and you let me know.

Oh, what a good question.

Well, you have similar words in Spanish, right?

Compasión and simpatía.

Simpatía.

Yeah, there’s one more, it’s empathy, empatía.

Right.

It comes up, too.

So I wasn’t sure.

Right.

And what’s your sense of the difference between those two words in Spanish?

Or is there a difference?

Well, when I think about sympathy and compassion, it seems almost that from sympathy, you’re coming from the outside, looking in.

Like, you’re not really a co-sufferer, almost.

And then when I think about compassion, I almost think that I am actually sharing the feeling much more with the person.

But it might be just subjective.

I’m not sure.

That’s what I think about.

In my mind, they’re very, very similar.

And as you suggested, they both come from roots that have to do with suffering.

They’re related to the word patient, for example.

Very, very old roots that mean to suffer. Like the passion of Christ is the suffering of Christ.

They’re all connected. And the calm in compassion and the sim in sympathy both mean with. But I do have a sense of those two being different.

And I think differently from the way that you’re describing them. At least in my mind, compassion is more for somebody who’s at a different level.

And I mean, I’m almost picturing this visually, that sympathy is when you’re side by side with somebody. You’re sitting down with them, you’re being present there for them.

And compassion to me is something that you feel for someone maybe less fortunate than you, or maybe even more fortunate than you, but not on an equal level. And that’s just kind of my gut feeling.

You know, for me, I guess when I think of compassion, it seems to connote a little bit more agency or potential agency. If you have compassion for somebody, then you’re going to act on it.

Whereas if you have sympathy, you’re going to sit down with them by the waters of Babylon and weep with them or whatever.

I see. Yeah. You mean like you’re less willing to actually act on it and compassion and be more like you’re feeling it at a deeper level? That’s an interesting way to put it.

Or not willing to be involved? Yeah. Or you don’t have to act on it, I think, with sympathy. You’re just there beside the person.

I had a friend who died a few years ago who always said, love shows up. And I think that showing up in that way is sort of what I’m thinking about when I think of sympathy. You’re just there. You’re alongside somebody.

There’s a couple of things that I would throw in here. One is not to get too hung up on the origins of these words because they have hundreds of years of history in both Spanish and English, and they’ve taken different paths in both English and Spanish.

We really need to be looking at these in context because like so many words, they cannot really stand alone. These are complex ideas that require a situation to give them their full meaning. They require the company of other words to give them their full meaning.

I would say that I generally agree with what Martha was saying.

I think of compassion as being about helping somebody because you were sharing their feelings.

I think about empathy as sharing their feelings.

And I think about sympathy having a little bit of pity in it, actually, because you were feeling their feelings as well.

But all of three of these words really require, we really need to be talking about a specific case or a passage in a book or a particular environment we’re encountering, to really understand what they mean in that particular circumstance.

Because in another circumstance, at another time and place, they may have different nuances and different flavors.

Yeah, there’s some overlap and some difference there.

And I bet we’re going to have a lot of people who also want to join this discussion and weigh in on this, Mariana.

Thank you for a really thoughtful call and a very thoughtful question, Mariana.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you for everything you do.

I’ve been listening to you for ages, and I’m so thankful about podcasts.

But even in Argentina, I can still listen to you.

Terrific.

Bye-bye. Thank you.

Bye. Have a great day.

We were talking earlier about Spanish idioms, and I like this one that goes, estar en la edad del pavo, which means to be…

Being a duck’s age?

A turkey.

Turkey.

To be in the age of a turkey.

And that describes that period in adolescence where you’re just kind of clumsy, awkward.

Isn’t that great?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Or if you go to a dance and you’re just kind of being a wallflower and nobody’s asked you to dance, you’re just kind of standing there next to the wall.

That’s comer pavo, to eat turkey.

Yeah, turkeys are pretty awkward, aren’t they?

Yeah. And what’s also interesting about this is that the word pavo in Spanish for turkey actually goes back to a Latin word pavo, which means peacock.

And there’s an English word pavanine, which actually means like a peacock.

But really, a turkey is kind of like a bizarro world version of a peacock, right?

A turkey kind of wants to be a peacock, but never makes it.

A peacock wannabe?

Yeah, turkeys are kind of peacock wannabes.

Yeah, yeah, they want to be pavanine.

But to be in your turkey’s age is to have the awkwardness of adolescence.

Yeah.

Okay.

Right?

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Michael Pippen from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Michael.

What’s going on?

Well, I was interested in hearing a little bit more about a word I stumbled upon when I lived in Tallahassee, Florida.

The term was bear caught.

And the only time I ever heard it was there in Tallahassee, and it was from two people that resided or lived or were raised in north central Florida, basically the area west of Tallahassee, I’m sorry, east of Tallahassee, west of Jacksonville, Florida, and kind of the panhandle.

And as best I can understand, it means sunstroke.

But outside of that, I haven’t heard a whole much more about it.

It always caught my interest.

Bear caught? B-E-A-R-C-A-U-G-H-T?

Yes, sir.

Like you were caught by a bear.

Like you were caught by a bear, which is what got me.

Okay, good. What year would that have been?

Oh, this is 15, 20 years ago.

Something really interesting about this term, that as soon as I heard it, I was like, I don’t think I’ve ever heard this before.

Yeah, I haven’t.

But upon a little digging, I discovered what I think is the point of popularization for the term bear caught to mean sunstroke.

And so by point of popularization, I mean something different than the point at which it was coined.

So a lot of times a word is out there in the ether and it doesn’t really catch on until somebody well-known uses it.

And in this case, it’s the book and the movie Cool Hand Luke.

Really?

Yeah, there’s this book published in 1965 by Don Pierce, that’s Don with two N’s, called Cool Hand Luke, who became a very well-known movie.

And in the book and the movie, they use bear caught to mean heat exhaustion or sunstroke or kind of just passing out from not having enough water or the heat being too much, that sort of thing.

And there’s a passage in the book that I want to share with you that I think really describes the term as Don Pierce meant it.

Way out there in the middle of nowhere, many a good man has been bear caught, which is to be stricken with heat exhaustion and sunstroke.

Your muscles cramp.

Your mouth is dry.

Your face is cold and yet sweating.

Your stomach knotted and nauseous.

You’re dizzy and your vision is blurred.

You’re weak.

You stagger.

Even your voice is affected and becomes a mere croak.

So that’s a beautiful passage, right?

Yeah, that’s really kind of cool.

I’ve seen the movie, never read the book.

You know, I had heat exhaustion once and almost got carted away by the EMTs.

And what I remember is that it came on me so suddenly.

I mean, it was almost like something came up from behind me and just pulled me down.

Pulled you down.

Yeah.

So I’m wondering if that’s part of the idea there.

Possible.

Michael, do you remember the movie well?

No, it’s been a long time.

I remember it had, you know, I think it was Paul Newman in it.

Yeah, Paul Newman.

That’s right, yeah.

Wonderful movie, Bears…

And a few other things, but I don’t remember the phrase being used.

The scene is, they’re talking about heat exhaustion.

One of the characters says, Bear’s going to be walking the road today.

And another person replies and says, You ever seen a man bear caught?

And then two of the other characters look kind of concerned or frightened.

And this guy says, All the salt goes out of his body, and the water follows the salt, and the brain shrivels up like a dried pea.

Impulsions, shivering, very unpleasant to watch.

And then somebody else says, man’s never the same, makes him lose his sex drive.

So that’s, the movie took it one step.

As beautiful as the passage is in the book, the movie took it like up another notch, I think.

Interesting.

Wow.

So there you go.

Wow.

That’s what I know about there, Todd.

Yeah.

That is really cool.

Well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Appreciate the call.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Michael.

877-929-9673, email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Avis, and I’m in Arizona.

And I had a question.

When I was a little girl, and this was in the 40s, my grandmother used to do this thing.

She would pull down her lower lid of her eye and say, do you see the green in my eye?

What she meant was she was meaning that she doubted the veracity of whatever I was saying.

-huh. -huh.

Okay, so when you were a little girl, you said something that she didn’t quite believe, and she would look at you and put her finger on her lower eyelid and lower it and say, do you see the green of my eye?

That’s it. Exactly.

This is a pretty universal gesture among a lot of different cultures.

If you hear somebody giving you a tall tail, you lower that eyelid with your finger to indicate that you’re alert.

You’re paying attention. You’re being skeptical of what they’re saying.

And this is used, for example, in France.

There’s an expression that translates as my eye.

Monoi.

Monoi.

And in Japan as well, in a lot of anime drawings, it translates as red eye.

And it’s that same gesture.

Italy and Germany as well.

Yep, yep.

It’s used in a lot of cultures.

And I was curious about where your grandmother was because in this country, the version I’ve heard is buckeye.

Buckeye?

Yeah, somebody will just make that same gesture and look at somebody skeptically and say, buckeye, but I’ve not heard the green of my eye.

That’s really interesting.

And the more universal, though, is my eye, right, or all my eyes.

Yeah, yeah, just as a—

My eye, and maybe even without the gesture.

Yeah, like, you’ve got to be kidding.

So she was part of a long tradition there.

Avis, thank you so much for calling.

Okay, thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks for sharing that story.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So in English, at least back to the 1700s in print, but no doubt that the folklore gesture of my eye goes back much further than that.

Much further.

And we probably got the my eye from the French monoi, where I think it goes back to at least the 1400s.

Well, I’m thinking of that gesture, too, that I see more often today, at least in the circles I move in, where you point two of your fingers toward your eyes and then turn them around as if they’re pointing at the other person.

I’m watching you.

Yeah.

I do this with my son.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It’s like you’re focusing on your eyes and you point your eyes at them.

You’re supposed to feel the death glare.

It’s a variety of stink eye, right?

Or skunk eye.

Parent eye.

Dad eye.

Dad eye.

It never stops him.

No, of course.

It doesn’t work.

877-929-9673.

More nerdy wordy goodness coming up.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

In 1994, the great Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe gave an interview in which he talked about how he got started writing.

He was a student at the University of Ibadan in Nigeria, and the English department there held a short story contest and said they would give a prize to the best story.

So he thought, well, what the heck, I’ll write a story.

And he waited and waited, and no prize was given, and no prize was given.

And finally, after months, the English department announced that there was not going to be a prize offered because no story that was submitted was up to their standards.

And he said, I went to the lecturer who had organized the prize and said, you said my story wasn’t really good enough, but it was interesting.

Now, what was wrong with it?

She said, well, it’s the form.

It’s the wrong form.

So I said, can you tell me about this?

She said, yes, but not now.

I’m going to play tennis.

We’ll talk about it.

Remind me later and I’ll tell you.

This went on for a whole term.

Every day when I saw her, I’d say, can we talk about form?

She’d say, no, not now.

We’ll talk about it later.

Then at the very end, she saw me and said, you know, I looked at your story again, and actually there’s nothing wrong with it.

So that was it.

That was all I learned from the English department about writing short stories.

You really have to go out on your own and do it.

Wow.

Yeah, that’s a great story, right?

Yeah.

Don’t wait for the approval of other people.

Right.

And those meaningless prizes.

Right, right.

Sometimes you have to find your own way, and you can only learn to write by doing it.

Yes, of course you need instruction in grammar and style and form, but at some point you have to break free and just do it and have a whole lot of failures before you have success.

He also mentioned that one of the professors there at that university gave him some advice that he really appreciated.

His professor said, we may not be able to teach you what you need or what you want.

We can only teach you what we know.

Yeah.

Right.

There’s a limit on all stages of the writing process, right?

Yeah.

There’s these parts of the knowledge are eclipsed from you until you move to the next stage.

And Achebe said that this was a big lesson for him, that what he took away from that school more than anything, more than any type of learning, was just an attitude.

It reminds me a little bit of the common writerly advice, butt in seat.

That’s how writing gets done.

Polish a chair.

You put your butt in the seat and you do it.

So keep writing out there, y’all.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mandy Stringer calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Hey, Mandy, welcome.

Hi, what’s up? What can we do for you?

My question for you all is that over the Thanksgiving break, my husband and I and our kids met my parents in London for a week.

And so as you’re wont to do, you know, when in London, we had a little ritual every night of going to a pub.

And so one day, a few days into the trip, I said, I looked at my watch, and it was about five o’clock, and I said, hey, it’s five.

I’m jonesing for a pint.

Let’s go to the pub.

And my mother said, jonesing? What does that mean?

And my father then looks at me and says, I don’t think you should say that in polite company.

And I said, what are you talking about?

And he said, he then explains to my mother what he thinks it means, which I cannot repeat on air.

And so I said, that is not at all what it means.

It means that you’re craving something.

And then we had a little discussion about it.

And then I vowed to get in touch with you two when I got back to the States and ask you about the origin of that word.

Mandy, was he thinking it was something like a sexual arousal?

Indeed, he was.

For a man?

Yes.

Okay.

Okay.

Oh, boy, that’s an issue.

So where does jonesing come from?

That’s your question.

That is my question.

All right.

And in fact, I think you can’t say it with the proper I-N-G.

It has to be Jones-en.

Jones-en.

All right.

I find it all over the place.

I will tell you one thing.

I don’t think your father is right.

I don’t know where he picked that up from.

It means a craving.

And the craving originally in the 1960s had to do with craving for heroin or other very addictive drugs.

So as early as 1962, we find a Jones being used as a noun.

And then very shortly after, we find to Jones or to be Jones-ing, the verb form of it.

And then not long after that, not only does it mean a craving or an addiction or really needing it, it refers to the process of withdrawal.

It refers to suffering the symptoms of not having that drug around you anymore or not having the thing that feeds your addiction.

And then as happens to a lot of slang, underwent semantic bleaching, as it’s called, where the kind of negative aspects faded away.

And now you can say, oh, I have a jonesing for a hamburger.

So it’s not anything illicit or anything that’s truly dangerous for you, at least unless you have hamburgers every day.

Anyway, so the origin, though, is what you want to know.

And unfortunately, it’s mostly origin unknown.

But I’m going to share the two predominant theories with you for what they’re worth.

Okay.

One of them, which I kind of like, has to do with the phrase keeping up with the Joneses.

So this phrase has been around, oh, for decades before you could Jones for heroin or have a Jones for heroin.

And that means to try to keep up with the neighbors when they get something nice and like a new car and above ground swimming pool.

You get a new car and you get an above ground swimming pool.

And the idea is if you’re keeping up with the Jones, you’re keeping up with this thing inside of you that demands attention and demands this particular kind of satisfaction.

And I could see that.

Unfortunately, drug slaying doesn’t ever really carry with it the history of its origins.

It doesn’t travel alongside its origin story, so we’re only guessing at this point.

The other theory, which I like a lot less, is that it has to do with Great Jones Street or Great Jones Alley in New York City,

Where supposedly drug addicts would hang out either to buy their drugs or to shoot up.

The problem with this theory is nobody can find anything in the printed record that shows that Great Jones Street or the alley ever was a haven for drug users.

All right. Very interesting.

Anyway, your dad, God bless him, was not really spot on on the meaning.

You have the meaning down, Pat.

Well, good.

And little does he know what I will say in polite company.

So it’s better if he doesn’t know.

All right.

Mandy, you’re a delight.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you so much.

You guys have a great day.

Okay.

Thanks, Mandy.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us about language, 877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can hit us up on Twitter at WayWord.

Grant, you and I are so spoiled by word processors.

You can just cut and paste.

But you’re not literally cutting and pasting, right?

Right. Right. But exactly. And that’s where I was going. Not anymore.

I don’t know if you used to do this, but there were times when I was in college when I would cut out something like literally cut out something from a paper and paste something in.

But that wasn’t always the case. What did people do before that?

Before cutting and pasting?

People used straight pins to patch in a new bit of copy in a manuscript.

I’ve seen that. I think I have seen that.

Yes.

Well, in the Bodleian Libraries in Oxford, there are pins that Jane Austen used in her unfinished novel, The Watsons, where she just made these little patches of text and pinned them to her manuscript.

Oh, that’s very cool.

I think I have seen images of something like that, if not actually that.

Isn’t that cool?

That’s very cool.

Yeah. And the librarians have to take those pins out just to help preserve the manuscript.

But you can actually go there and see the pins, or you can see pictures of them online.

Jane Austen’s pins, P-I-N.

That’s right. They’re mightier than the Post-it.

You’re reminding me of how Hunter S. Thompson often delivered his articles when he wrote for Rolling Stone.

How is that?

He would fax them in, and then the editors on the other end would take his faxes and cut them up

And literally lay them out on the floor and rearrange on the floor his writing,

And then they would re-key it into their composition system, the compositing system.

Is that right?

Yeah.

So that’s a true kind of gutting pasting as well.

Literally, huh?

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is John, and I’m calling from Fargo, North Dakota.

Hi, John. Welcome to the show.

Hi, John.

I’m a little bit older than a lot of people. I’m like 70 years old.

For the first 50 years of my life, I’d hear people say, you know, they graduated from college, or she graduated from high school.

Now I hear people say, she graduated high school, or he graduated college, and it just doesn’t sound right.

What do you think?

Graduate, the verb, has a really interesting history that goes back to the early 16th century when graduate was a transitive verb.

It was used to speak of what the colleges or universities or schools did to the students.

It goes back to an old Latin word that means step.

We get words like grade from that or gradual, step by step.

And originally it was a transitive verb, meaning you do that to the students.

You graduate your students.

And then later it took on different meanings.

Like a student could graduate from a university or another school.

Yeah, now the from is starting to drop out.

Is that the right way?

It’s a little bit more informal, I guess,

But I’m throwing in the towel on this one.

Yeah, what’s interesting to me, John,

Is that the older usage of something like L. Woods

Was graduated from California University,

The was graduated used to be seen as the only way to say it.

And there are many grammar experts on the record kind of decrying any other form or usage of graduate to mean to matriculate from a college and so forth.

Really?

Yeah.

And so what’s happened, we’re now on the third version of graduate.

And so even the version that you prefer to graduate from would have been seen as wrong.

And that was at one time an abomination in the eyes of some grammarians.

Okay.

But the from is disappearing, like Martha says.

I’m with Martha.

I’ve long since given up on that.

I only find a few people holding the line on it.

I find that the usage guides and the style guides are behind probably 20 or 30 years on acknowledging that this transition and this transformation has already happened.

Interestingly, recently I heard an NPR reporter dropping the from from that as well.

Yeah, it’s almost like the from is contained within the word graduate.

Yeah, it’s kind of like the word left.

Like few of us would say, I left from work and went home.

We would say, I left work.

And so graduate is more like that now, more like a verb like to leave.

Very good.

John, thank you.

I hope we’ve helped you sort this out.

You have.

Thank you.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

On our Facebook group, Brant Stoner posted a photograph that he had taken of a yellow box with the letters S-U-O-O-D-S on it.

And he says, I spent a good 10 or 15 seconds this morning staring at this box on our counter wondering what the heck suads were.

I’m not a morning person.

Suads.

Suads.

And I stared at that photograph too wondering what in the heck he was talking about.

But he was just looking at the box upside down.

You turn suads upside down, it’s spoons.

Which reminds me, I may have shared this story before, but when I was in college and had a snooze alarm,

That had the letters S-N-O-O-Z on it.

I hit it really hard one morning when I didn’t want to wake up

And sort of knocked it.

And I got up a little bit later,

And I picked up this metal thing on the floor

That had the letters Z-O-O-N-S on it.

And I thought, Zunes, what in the heck?

Zunes.

It took me a while to realize I had broken my snooze alarm.

But yeah, Zooms.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Whitney calling from Lakeland, Florida.

Hey, Whitney, what’s going on?

Nothing much.

I was actually calling about the word floodin’.

Floodin’.

Floodin’.

I saw a young person walking and their pants were intentionally above their ankles, their long pants.

And so I was reflecting.

I was like, man, when I was a kid, we would call that floodin’.

But there was like this negative connotation to it, almost as if like, you know, your family couldn’t afford to have pants that went all the way to your ankle.

And that made me start to think, where did flooding, how did it even come about? Are there geographical instances for it? When did it get the negative connotation?

What a good question.

I know that feeling. Your parents buy the school clothes in August, and then by springtime, you look like a potato on two toothpicks because your pants have crawled up your ankles and exposed so much ankle.

You look like soft pine waiting to be milled.

Right.

I know that feeling.

Yeah.

My brother, I grew faster than my brother and he used to tease me relentlessly. Actually, the word he used was high waters, as if you’re going clamming out at the shore or something like that.

But I know that feeling.

And there’s a bunch of other words for this, not just flooding, which is just a general description of what someone’s doing when they’re wearing their cuffs or their pants too high, but variations like flash flooders to refer to the pants themselves or flood pants or just floods.

Flood pants.

And high waders as well.

And these all go back. Like I find high waters referring to as an adjective referring to pants that are too short back to the 1850s.

Wow.

Yeah, so I think people have been making fun of each other for clothes that don’t fit quite right for a long time.

Certainly kids can be heartless.

Oh, yeah.

No, that was the context that I remembered it in. Like, you didn’t want someone to tell you you were flooding because, you know, they’re talking about your family and your means.

Yeah, exactly.

Absolutely.

I think high waters tends to be more in the Midwest.

Does it?

Than any place else.

But flooding, as far as y’all know, only refers to the clothing. Doesn’t have another application.

Well, not in this. I mean, obviously it refers to flooding as in water flooding a place.

So the idea is you’re wearing your pants high as if there’s a flood around you and you’re trying to keep your clothes dry.

So as if you’ve worn capris or waders on purpose just to, you know, just to not get wet.

Yeah, I mean, I would ask different people in terms of generations as trying to get a feel for, you know, if they use the word flood and how they use it.

And high water did come up a couple times, but it was mostly from folks from the northeast or out west.

Oh, interesting.

And so I figured that there was, like, flooding might be more southern and root.

Also just, you know, the missing G, that’s just so.

Yeah, flooding instead of flooding.

Right, right.

Yeah, missing G.

Well, cool, Whitney. Thank you for your call. Really appreciate it.

No, thank you all, and thank you for what you’re doing on this show.

Take care now.

Oh, thanks, Whitney. How are you, too?

Stay dry.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

There’s a beautiful Spanish idiom that, Grant, you probably know, and it’s dar a luz, which literally means to give to the light, but it’s giving birth.

Oh, yeah.

How cool is that?

Bring something to light.

Right?

Bring a baby to light.

Yeah, yeah.

That’s cool.

Yeah, from the darkness to the light.

Dar a luz.

Dar a luz.

Yeah, in fact, if a mother is giving birth, you might say she’s alumbrando.

It’s the same idea.

She’s illuminated?

Yeah, she’s illuminating.

Illuminating, gotcha.

Kind of like being glowing when you’re pregnant.

They often say that pregnant women look like they’re glowing.

Right, right.

But I just love the idea of the baby going from the dark to the light.

And that’s a very common expression.

If you speak Spanish or another language and you’ve got an idiom, tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show on any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.