Crash Blossoms: When Words Collide

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Don’t you love headlines that make you do a double take?

You know, like McDonald’s fries the Holy Grail for farmers?

Or how about this one?

Genetic engineering splits scientists.

We do need two Stephen Hawkins.

Time travel is just one clone away.

Recently, language columnist Mark Peters had a piece in the magazine called Good,

In which he talked about a term that linguists and copy editors are increasingly using for these kinds of bloopers.

They call these verbal collisions crash blossoms.

And I love this expression.

Grant, when I think of crash blossoms, I picture words that are crashing together and a whole new idea blossoming out of that.

Like, for example, child’s stool, great for use in garden.

I believe in composting.

But crash blossom comes from a crash blossom itself, right?

There was a headline that used that pair of words?

Right.

Sadly, it was about a violinist whose career flourished after surviving a plane crash,

And the headline was, Violinist Linked to J.A.L. Crash Blossoms.

Some of these are funny and a little bit lewd, like, Big Busts Indicate Drug War Working.

Oh, no.

And subtle ones, like, Farmer Bill Dies in House.

Oh, no.

Some legislation wasn’t passed. It wasn’t a man named Farmer Bill who died.

Oh, thank goodness.

And sometimes, you know, you think that the copy editor or headline writer was up to something and they knew what they were doing.

Lingerie shipment hijacked.

Thief gives police the slip.

Now, Grant, how often do you think copy editors are just having fun?

Every day.

Really?

Every day.

You think that’s a perk of the job?

Copy editors, it depends on your institution, your newspaper or magazine.

Sometimes the headlines are written by different staff members, but generally copy editors have a role in that, right?

It’s a thankless job.

You take whatever pleasure you can find, right?

Well, you also have the limitations of headlineese, you know?

Right.

Right.

So this is why they’re constantly verbing nouns and nounning verbs.

And so you get the word like fries that can do two jobs, right?

Yeah, exactly.

Well, I’d love to hear other people’s favorite crash blossoms.

So give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Why, yes, I’ve been told I do.

She was setting us up.

She was ready for it.

Hello, who is this?

This is Betty Anderson calling from Coronado, California.

Well, Betty, you’re a snappy one.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

I have a question.

All right.

They’re selling like hotcakes.

Yeah, what are they?

Well, I can’t imagine a hot cake stand doing a brisk business.

Oh, maybe, maybe.

So I don’t understand where that came from.

I remember seeing a cartoon like in Mad Magazine when I was young,

And it showed this guy at a hot cake stand, and they’re, you know,

Piled high, and he has no business, and he’s got this confused look on his face.

So I’m just wondering where that came from and where that came from.

That’s great.

That’s great because you’ve sort of crystallized the idea there.

It’s an expression that’s been around since the 1830s or so.

And ordinarily, unlike in Mad Magazine, if you’re at an outdoor event and somebody’s cooking up hotcakes,

He’s not going to pile up a whole bunch of inventory.

They’re going to cook them up and they’re going to sell the second they come out of the pan

Because you’ve got to sell them while they’re still hot.

Absolutely.

Yeah, so you can picture them just coming right out of the pan.

I mean, if you said selling like muffins or selling like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, it just wouldn’t be the same thing.

I got it.

I love that.

That’s great.

And by cake, we might not mean something that looks like a pancake.

It might be something a little more like a small biscuit or a small cakey roll, something like that.

But the key being hot.

Hot, yeah.

Nobody wants to buy a cold one.

Yeah, hot off the griddle.

And it’s just so funny that that Mad Magazine sort of is the joke right there.

Yeah, he looked very confused.

Like, why do I have all these hotcakes nobody’s buying?

That’s it.

That’s it.

That’s fair.

That’s exactly it.

Well, I’m glad that you’re a Mad Magazine fan.

I love those little ones in the margins, too.

Don’t you?

Oh, absolutely.

Spy versus spy.

And the foldout.

Well, thank you, guys.

I love, love, love your show.

Oh, that’s nice to hear.

Oh, man.

It’s great to hear from you.

Thank you so much for calling, Betty.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call with your food questions, 1-877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Michael from Pensacola, Florida. How are y’all doing today?

Super, Michael.

Doing well. What’s up?

I have got a question about how do words become and how to create a word, basically.

I used to go to college about four years, and this has been bugging me ever since I was in college,

And they would have you write he slash she

Because there is no way to do a singular.

And I’m wanting to know why you can’t take the vowel

That is common to those two and capitalize it

And make a capital E equal he slash she.

Okay, let’s hear an example of what that would sound like, Michael.

And he went to the store to buy coffee.

-huh. And then the barista behind the counter gave it to Emma?

The person.

I mean, do you have an objective case for this, too?

Well, the concept is in writing, and especially in the paperwork in schools,

You’re constantly typing out when you need to speak of an individual to hand it to just one person,

But it’s not so much that it’s a gender-specific.

That you would not refer to it as just male or just female,

But that you would say the person.

And now that we have all of these E representing electronics,

Which represent everybody, but to capitalize it,

A capital I represents I,

A A represents object, a apple,

But when we have to give it to an individual without saying they,

Because it’s not plural, it’s singular,

To represent it without having to he slash she it.

Okay, so did you use E in the papers that you turned into your professors?

Tried it.

Tried it? How’d it go?

They didn’t necessarily care for it, but it was easy to do a find and replace

To punch them all in there, so I used to type it that way

And then let the computer do the work of replacing them.

What did your professors say?

They said that’s not a word yet, and said, you know,

If it becomes to be, then you can use it.

But at the moment you must put he slash she.

I was like, but I put a little note that this is what this represents

And notated it that in the future of the paragraph this would be what it was replaced by,

And they just didn’t care for it, maybe because it was a communications degree

And they won’t get the way they want.

Yeah, I can see how that might be a problem.

Well, that is creative, Michael,

And I appreciate your trying to come up with what they call an epicene pronoun,

Which is a genderless pronoun.

And do you know what?

That has been tried before.

Very E. I’m not capital E. There was a psychologist at UCLA in the 1980s who was promoting that in

Part because there had been psychological research showing that when people read sentences that had

He for the generic pronoun, they tended to think of a male person. And so he was trying to change

That by proposing that we use E and I think M. And the fact is that people have been trying to

Do this for centuries now.

And they’ve proposed all kinds

Of different things, and it just hasn’t caught

On. Well, sometimes I just

Wish I could spin the wheel by a valve

And say, this is what it is, you know?

So your question when you started out was, how can you spread

This? And Michael, the only

Answer is, keep on using it, and maybe

Other people will too. I hear you.

And every now and then in cards and stuff, I’m trying to convince

People, try it. But I haven’t found anyone

Brave enough that had a need for it yet.

Well, good luck with your mission.

Thank you all, and I love the show.

You all have a great week.

Our pleasure.

Bye-bye, Michael.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

If you’d like to call us with your story about the windmill that you would like to tilt at,

By all means do so.

The number is 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-Wayword.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Carol.

I’m living in Hamden, Connecticut.

Okay, but you’re not from there, are you?

No, I’m from Tennessee.

Okay, that’s what I thought I heard.

Well, welcome to the show.

Welcome to the show, Carol.

What can we do for you?

Thank you.

As you know, I grew up in Tennessee, and so did my stepfather.

And most of my adult life, I’ve heard him use the term unthaw,

And in context he means unfreeze or whatever most people say, thaw.

And I’ve always thought it was an illogical negative

And it was not really a proper word.

And then I saw it in the National Food Magazine recently and was very surprised.

So I thought I would ask the authorities and see what you had to say about unthaw versus thaw.

-huh.

Well, now, Carol, what did you see exactly in the magazine?

Well, the magazine gave an ingredient and it said so much corn unthawed.

They meant frozen then.

Well, perhaps they did.

But do you think that maybe they meant thawed, but they said unthawed, just like your father-in-law?

It’s a good question.

In context, it was a cornbread recipe calling for frozen corn kernels,

And in parentheses it says unthawed.

So maybe they really meant put them in the recipe frozen.

Yeah, that could well be.

It’s tricky, isn’t it?

Because people do that all the time.

They’ll mix those un-words with their direct opposite,

And they’ll say one thing but mean another.

To me it’s unnecessarily confusing,

But I’ve heard my stepfather use it truly to mean thaw.

And that has to be incorrect.

Well, it’s a dialectical form.

You’ll see it both in this country and in places like Tennessee and also in Britain.

And you see that with other words, too, like unloose.

I remember my dad used to say, unloose your shoes.

And there are a couple things happening here.

Sometimes, Carol, this is what’s called a performance error.

It doesn’t mean something that happens in the bedroom.

It means somebody doesn’t say quite the thing they meant to say.

But there’s also something called haplology, which is somebody might mean un-unthawed, but they say unthawed.

That is, they’re leaving out one syllable, which should be repeated.

Hapology is H-A-P-L-O-L-O-G-Y.

And there’s a couple other things happening here.

There are really great cases where somebody can use the un-form for emphasis.

You might talk about your house being still unpacked,

And you actually mean everything is still packed,

And you mean you haven’t unpacked it yet.

So there are a lot of different things happening here,

And I hesitate, Martha, to call this always a performance error

Because so many people are doing it.

Yeah, and it’s weird.

So unthaw can mean thaw, but unthawed usually means still frozen.

So I don’t know if that was your father’s kind of locution in the magazine.

I’m thinking maybe you should put in frozen corn.

I think so, too.

Did you try making the recipe?

Not yet.

Oh, yeah.

Try it both ways and see which one works.

Yeah, and then call us back, okay?

Okay.

Send me some corn bread.

Thank you so much for your answer.

All right.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take good care.

Bye-bye.

1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for a word puzzle.

That’s coming up next right here on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us once again is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

John, what’s up?

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

How are you doing?

Doing great.

Nice to talk to you.

I want to give a shout out to the people in Madison, Wisconsin, by the way,

Because my wife and I were out at the University of Wisconsin-Madison a couple weeks ago,

And they were very, very nice to us out there.

She was giving a lecture at a conference called What is Human?

Oh.

Yeah.

And she brought you along as an example.

Actually, the name tag said on top, it said, What is Human?

And then it said John Chaneski.

So there you go.

I asked and answered right there.

But what was cool is that somebody was giving a lecture on genetics,

And the word previvor came up.

And I thought of you guys.

Previvor.

It’s a great word, previvor.

This is somebody who is the relative of somebody who’s at high risk for dying from a disease,

Such as breast cancer.

Right, or who has discovered through their genome that they are at risk for disease,

And they sort of avoid the disease.

They call themselves previvors.

So that’s a great word.

Okay.

Let’s do a cool puzzle.

Here we go.

I call this scronsonance.

I don’t know exactly why, but you’ll find out.

The number of common words in English that begin with three consonants are relatively few.

Now, I’ll give you a clue to a pair of words, each of which begins with the same trio of consonants, okay?

For example, many people purchase poinsettias for the Yuletide holidays,

But my mom prefers to import the official flower of the Emperor of Japan.

She calls these her…

Christmas chrysanthemums?

Exactly.

Christmas chrysanthemums.

It’s the C-H-R, we call it trigram in the NPL.

So Christmas Chrysanthemums.

Nice work.

Shall we try a few more?

Yeah, sure.

I gained a particular joy from the pain of others, but I had to learn how to do it.

So I attended.

Particular joy from the pain of others.

Schadenfreude School?

Schadenfreude School, yes.

Very good.

Just as an aside, I’ll mention that there are several words that are borrowed from Yiddish

That begin with several trigrams, constant trigrams.

Here’s a clue.

At Passover Seder, my Uncle Max always trots out his tired old clown routine

About life in a small Eastern European village.

What’s it called?

Clown routine.

I want to say schettl spiel, but that’s not right.

Close. It’s close.

Stettl-stick?

Stettl-stick.

Correct.

Very good.

Here’s the next.

I love to eat a delectable, delicious food which is made of ground pork and cornmeal fried and sliced.

I call it…

Oh, Lord, Grant, this is your department.

Fried pork and corn…

Spam something.

I don’t know.

No, it’s not spam.

Three consonants.

Oh, I don’t know.

Let’s work with the adjective first.

Selectable, delicious.

Scrumptious.

Scrumptious.

Scrapple.

Scrapple.

Exactly.

Nice work.

Scrumptious scrapple.

Every year my dad gives up shellfish for Lent, but just before Lent, he indulges in a feast of crustacean eating.

He calls the prawns that he devours during this time his…

Shrimp.

Yeah.

Shrove, I don’t know.

Yeah, you’re close.

Shrove shrimp?

Shrove-tied shrimp.

Shrove-tied shrimp, okay.

Yes.

Shrove-tied is the time just before Lent.

Very good.

Now, my cousin owns a factory that makes bicycle parts.

Specifically, he makes the thin-toothed wheels that engage the chain.

Now, to keep track of his financial data, he uses Microsoft Excel to create a grid-like ledger layout.

He calls this his…

Sprocket spreadsheet.

Sprocket spreadsheet, Grant, right on it.

Nice work.

Here’s the last one.

The town we visited harbored exactly 60 commercial businesses

That sell used goods at reduced prices.

Collectively, they are known as?

So these are thrift stores.

I’ll take that.

Thrift shops.

Thrift.

Three score.

Three score.

Yeah, the three score thrifts or something.

The three score thrift shops.

Oh, three score thrift store.

Then you get the rhyme.

Oh, nice.

Very good.

Okay, good.

Three score thrift stores.

Harder to say.

Say that three times.

It’s always hard to say.

But it’s good.

That was great.

You guys were fantastic.

Congratulations on getting scronsonance.

Well, John, thanks a lot.

Thanks, John.

My pleasure.

See you next time.

All right, bye-bye.

Well, if you want to talk trigrams or letters or words or grammar, slang, any aspect of language, call us 1-877-929-9673.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Karen. I’m from Flower Mound, Texas.

I was just wondering why they call it white noise.

Is there a particular reason it’s called white noise?

Do you think it should be called something else, Karen?

I thought maybe gray noise because it’s kind of in between.

It’s not anything exact or specific.

-huh.

-huh.

What do you know about light, Karen?

Not a lot.

Okay.

Because I think there’s an answer in there somewhere.

-huh.

Yeah.

You know how they have those pictures of white light going through a prism

And then it changes into all the different colors of the rainbow?

It breaks into colors like that?

Yes.

It’s the same idea with white noise.

White noise is analogous to white light.

It’s all the noises all mixed in together.

Okay.

And if you want to get super technical about it,

There are other kinds of noise that people who work professionally with noise,

There are all different kinds of phrases like that.

Like pink noise is white noise that’s been filtered a little bit

And actually supposedly sounds a little bit more natural.

I thought that was techno music.

Oh.

Never mind.

I don’t think so.

Well, what about the term acoustic perfume?

Do you know that one?

No.

Yeah, that’s another term for white noise.

Oh, really?

Because it’s kind of background noise.

It’s kind of the lay expression of white noise.

We often use white noise just to mean any kind of noise that you’re not really paying attention to that’s always around.

And that’s not actually true white noise.

And so it’s kind of like acoustic perfume.

It’s just this, it’s like a smell that’s kind of pervasive and you don’t really notice until you think about it.

Interesting.

I like that.

So is there a gray noise?

You mentioned there’s pink noise.

I believe there is a gray noise.

Okay.

But, yeah, these are highly specialized terms.

But the one that has made it into common usage is white noise,

And I think it’s been around since the 1940s or so.

That’s what I think, too.

Well, my daughter loves to listen to white noise.

It’s her favorite of the noises.

Oh, really?

You have an infant at home?

She’s a baby, and she’s comforted by it.

Yes.

My son does the same way.

We often would put on the air filter or even the hair dryer,

And we would just lull him to sleep.

Oh, really?

How old is your daughter?

She’s five months.

Oh, five months.

So do you have a white noise machine, or do you just turn on the TV?

Well, it’s one of the clock radio things that make different noises,

But the one she likes the best kind of sounds like waves,

But we just call it white noise.

Very nice.

Maybe it’s a type of white noise or something.

Yeah.

Yeah, well, it’s just all the different frequencies mixed together.

Mm—

Thank you so much for calling, Karen.

Thank you.

All right, bye-bye.

Gray noise, that one’s easy.

I just looked it up while we were talking here.

It’s a lot of high-pitched noise and a lot of low-pitched noise, but very little in the middle.

If you’ve got a question about a technical term that’s befuddling, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Pat Ambre from San Diego.

Hi, Pat.

Hi, Pat. Welcome to the program.

Thank you.

Hey, I was wondering, what’s the origin of the word knucklehead?

I’ve heard it applied.

Sometimes to me.

-huh.

I’m real sure about that.

It’s not a nice thing, is it?

I don’t think so.

There’s some negative connotation in there, like dumb or not thinking or something like that.

Yeah, somebody who’s a little dense, right?

Yeah.

And it’s not so bad when they’re talking about somebody else, but when it refers to me, I go, oh, my.

Oh, my.

Now, when would that come up?

It came up probably when I was about five years old and about two weeks ago.

Okay, well, we have to ask what you did.

Well, what did I do when I was a little boy?

I’m not sure.

But what I did just the other day was I didn’t carry something through to completion.

The guy said, well, that knucklehead over there.

Yeah, it’s an insult, but it’s not too offensive, right?

It’s something you can kind of take and accept, right?

Being called a knucklehead isn’t going to make you upset?

Well, it did make me upset.

Oh, did it?

I was mad at her, my feeler.

Oh, okay.

Oh, her feeling.

But when you’re five, pretty much all five-year-old boys are knuckleheads, right?

I’m raising a knucklehead of my own.

And it changes when?

Actually, it doesn’t.

I once had a roommate that said that all young men should be frozen solid from, like, the age of 10 to 22.

So knuckleheadedness does not go away.

There’s an interesting story behind this, Pat.

Often when we talk about word origins, we always stress that there’s a point of coinage,

That is when the word was created, and then there’s a point of popularity,

Which is when it kind of burst through and really started to show how strong it was

And people started to use it everywhere.

And knucklehead is one of those terms.

You can find it used as far back as 1890 in a bit of short fiction

Published in Bedford’s Magazine out of New York.

It’s fiction targeted at young men.

And you can find it again by 1916.

But Knucklehead really didn’t take off until the 1940s during World War II.

Get this.

The U.S. Army had a comic character, you know, in cartoons by the name of R.F. Knucklehead.

He was always doing the wrong thing in airplanes and on the airfield.

As long as a pilot didn’t do what R.F. Knucklehead did, then he was probably a good pilot.

So this guy, this character was doing things like looking at a map while he was flying, you know,

Obviously, it was covering his field of vision.

Or he was walking away from his airplane after landing and leaving it unguarded,

Which is not something that you would do in a time of war.

And so you can find copies of these cartoons in Life magazine in 1942,

And they’re online in Google Books.

And just really, it’s funny stuff.

And you can see how this little, he looks goofy.

He’s got a goofy face, a goofy walk, and he doesn’t look like a regular fellow.

You can see how this RF knucklehead might have come to popularity,

Particularly when you read the accompanying text and you can see there that the army plastered this little guy everywhere.

He was in films, he was in books and magazines and posters.

And the whole idea was to kind of approach these do’s and don’ts from a funny angle so that the message would stick.

So did his head look like a knuckle?

No, it did not look like a knuckle.

So, Pat, that’s where most of us first heard of knucklehead.

From this character, R.F. Knucklehead.

And like I said, we’ll link to this stuff and put it online.

He’s a funny-looking fellow, and it’s interesting to see this military approach

Because you think of the military as being this strict organization

Where everything is like a command from your CO, and there’s no humor there.

But in this case, they put some humor there, in any case.

So what do you think, Pat?

World War II slaying still alive?

I’m going to come over and check out the cartoon.

Yeah, yeah, sure.

Look for it in Google Books.

Life Magazine 1942.

We’ll link to it as well from the website.

Thank you very much. I appreciate this.

It’s our pleasure.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Knucklehead. I use knucklehead all the time, but I use it as the mildest of insults,

A kind of thing that you might say somebody to their face.

You knucklehead, you can’t do that. Something like that.

Did somebody call you something and you’re not quite sure how offensive it is?

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Martha, here’s another crash blossom for you.

Okay.

Dr. Ruth to talk about sex with newspaper editors.

Wow, I wonder if that’s before or after.

The copy never read better.

How about this one?

This one’s a little hard to parse.

Kicking baby considered to be healthy.

What?

No, I mean, a baby who kicks is considered to be healthy, not actually giving the baby the boot.

Those are terrible.

But funny.

Yes.

Give us a call with your crash blossoms, 1-877-929-9673,

Or your language questions to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

My name is Samantha.

I’m calling from Dana Point, California.

Hi, Samantha.

Hello.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

I called because I wanted to share how a 12-year-old made me question language, at least my own language.

One day I was with a friend of mine, and she brought along her 12-year-old niece.

I believe we were talking about food, and I was very excited about a type of food, and I described it as being the bomb.

Her 12-year-old niece looked at me bewildered and asked me, what does that mean, and why would you say that?

And at that moment, I was reminded I was 26 years old.

You’re old.

Time to retire.

It’s all downhill from here, Samantha.

Granny, it doesn’t get any better.

Yeah, and this experience made me formulate two questions for the two of you.

My first question is, as we get older, does our language need to adapt as we enter different stages in our lives?

And my second question is, where does the phrase, the bomb, or that’s the bomb, come from?

-huh.

Two questions.

I think we can dispose of them both fairly quickly.

The first one, it’s interesting.

We always update our language as we get older.

We do, even if we don’t realize it.

We change, we adapt, we modify it.

But, you know, we grow old with a peer group.

And so all of the people who are your age, Samantha,

They’re also still using that old slang.

And so it’s easy for that slang to stick around

Because you can use it with other people who are, right, 29.

You said 29 or 26?

I’m 26, yeah.

26, okay.

So you can use it with other people who are 26 and be understood and not really feel like you’re out of your element or that you’re not, you know, that you sound like an old fogey, right?

Yeah.

So we do keep it up and you don’t really have to make a conscious effort.

You could, but a 12-year-old, if you pick up their language, is going to think you’re a weirdo and a creep.

So don’t even bother.

Yeah.

So that’s no good either.

But the other thing as far as where the bomb comes from, there are surprisingly a lot of positive senses of the bomb.

To bomb in baseball has been to hit a home run or a long ball since the 1950s.

Football has a similar use in the forward pass.

Basketball has it, although it’s a little less common there.

It’s a long throw to the basket is a bomb.

To defeat somebody soundly in the 1960s was bombing them.

And, of course, the nuclear bomb was often seen and still is sometimes

As something that’s stupendous or huge or powerful.

So that’s kind of a positive association.

There. Well, it’s funny. In Spanish, you say pasamos bomba. Literally, we passed the bomb,

But it means we had a blast. There we passed it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And of course,

You ever heard a fast car called a bomb or a bomber or even an A-bomb? So there are all these

Positive associations. We’re not quite sure which one of these the bomb comes from. I lean towards

The nuclear explanation because of the article the, which is attached to it. We say the bomb.

If we say it is a bomb, we mean it’s a failure. If we say it is the bomb, we mean

At something great, right?

Yeah.

So I think it probably comes from the late 1960s,

Early 1970s by association with the atomic bomb.

Huh.

That’s very interesting.

Well, thank you.

And as far as keeping up with your slang,

The best way to win a 12-year-old’s heart

Is to ask her or him to teach you some.

Even if you think you shouldn’t use it,

They would love to share.

Some of it they’ll love to share.

Oh, no, you think?

Some of it.

I just picture them rolling their eyes.

Do you think that this kid would roll her eyes?

Yeah, I think she would.

She might, but she may also want you to be interested in her,

And she may want to tell you about herself, and that might be the trick.

Well, I would think, too, they have a sense of curiosity.

They might be charmed by your use of the bomb.

This is something that they didn’t know before.

I mean, I’m charmed when I hear people of an earlier generation

Talk about the bee’s knees or something.

And groovy.

Groovy.

Well, Samantha, how did we do?

Did we help you out?

Yes, you did.

Thank you so much.

I’ve been wanting to call you guys and just ask you about it.

I’m like, how did this 12-year-old stop me in my tracks, at least, with what I was saying?

I felt it dated me like circa 1996 or that’s when I used it more.

I don’t know.

Well, thank you guys so much for having me on the show.

Sure.

Pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

You’re the bomb.

You’re the bomb.

Thanks.

No, really.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Poor thing.

She’s feeling old at 26.

Bless her heart.

If you’ve heard a slang term that has your brow furrowed,

Call us, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Coming up, more of your calls,

And if you have a book lover on your gift list, stick around.

We have some ideas.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

You know, Martha, we did a segment a little bit ago in which I mentioned some slang used at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.

It was a list collected by Professor Connie Ebley.

Remember that?

Yeah.

Well, one of the words that I mentioned and said I didn’t know was bobo to mean something that’s kind of, I don’t know, crummy or not so great.

Oh, yeah, bobo.

Yeah, and you know what’s crazy?

This one word, four letters, reduplicated, Bobo, has generated so much traffic, so much email, phone calls, so many things just showing up where people say, I’ve got something to say about Bobo.

And it’s kind of wonderful.

From all over the country, Jeff from Virginia responded and said, in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, it meant shoes that were not of a popular brand name or of no brand name.

And apparently there was a brand name of cheap shoes called the Bobos, or so many people swear.

And his response was very typical of this.

Tracy Stiegel emailed us and she says,

My daughter is 17 in Atlanta, and she uses bobo to describe something that is cheap or poorly made.

A rickety chair would be all bobo.

And then we got an email from Adrian Akers who said,

My uncle married a Korean woman several years ago,

And our family began to hear the word bobo quite frequently as a Korean way of saying that something was shoddy or kind of stupid.

And so I did a bit of digging on that.

And it turns out there is a Korean word pabo, P-A-B-O, in English, which means idiot.

And so maybe that’s what she was hearing and not bobo.

In any case, there’s a ton of this stuff where people just have something to say about this word bobo.

I was really surprised that it was so widespread.

Yeah, it is.

And, of course, it’s reinforced by Spanish bobo, which means foolish.

Yeah, I’m sure there’s some influence there.

Molly in Arlington, Virginia said you would use it in her elementary school in Boston.

She said it was almost always a pejorative.

But there was this bizarrely proud and upbeat song that went with it.

The Bobo song, she said, was set to the tune of

Conal Bogie’s March from the movie Bridge on the River Kauai.

And she said the lyrics, I can remember, went as follows.

Bobos, they make your feet feel fine.

Bobos, only $8.99.

It’s something like that, right?

Anyway, thanks, Molly, for that, for the laugh.

And thanks to everyone else, including Derek in Nashville

And Karen and Elizabeth and Victor and everyone else.

Well, if you have a question or comment about language,

We want to hear about it.

Call the Bobos at 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAY-WORD.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John in New Hampshire.

Hi, John.

Hi, John. How are you doing?

Well, I have a question.

Maybe you can clear up for me

Something that’s been bugging me for a long time.

Oh, we love those.

There seems to be two ways to pronounce the word jewelry.

And the other way, of course, rhymes with foolery.

The first half of my life, I said jewelry.

And then when I was looking closely at the word and the way that it’s spelled,

It seemed obvious to me that the correct way would be jewelry.

So I changed the way that I say it, but I seem to be in the minority.

The way I hear it on the radio and whether it’s NPR or commercial radio.

Yeah.

So I’m very confused and I wondered if you can clear this up for me.

Yeah, I think we can help you with that a little bit.

What you’re talking about is what linguists call metathesis, which is the transposition of internal sounds or letters.

And it’s interesting because L’s and R’s tend to be particular culprits for people.

So you get not only jewelry, but you get realtor instead of realtor.

You get foliage instead of foliage.

There’s the L.

And it happens a lot with R’s too.

You know, some people say southern or larynx instead of larynx.

Do you find that it’s a pet peeve for you?

Does it bother you when you hear people say it?

Well, maybe.

Yes.

Yeah, I used to feel this little sense of sort of, I don’t know, superiority because I knew that it was jewelry rather than jewelry.

But then I started noticing how many times I transpose letters.

Like I say introduce instead of introduce and temperature instead of temperature.

So you’re right that people pronounce it a couple of different ways.

Well, I started to feel that I was in the minority, so maybe they were right.

Yeah, well, I would say that the preferred pronunciation is jewelry, as you say.

But, Grant, you will find it in other dictionaries, right?

Yeah, you will find it.

The non-standard pronunciation is so common that, of course, the dictionary editors have started to record it.

Sometimes they make a comment on its standardness or lack of standardness.

Sometimes they just include it silently and just accept it as another pronunciation.

I think what’s throwing people to is that the J-E-W-E-L looks like it should be two syllables every time.

And, of course, there are two standard pronunciations for the word and one non-standard one.

And so there’s plenty of room for getting the wrong one out of your mouth.

So that jewel could rhyme with tool.

It could.

Jewelry.

Yeah, it could, yeah.

And, of course, there’s also the dialectical variants around the country and so on and so forth.

Thank you so much, John, for raising this question.

Hopefully some people will decide one way or the other how they prefer to pronounce it,

And we’ll have more people agreeing with you.

Well, all right. Thanks very much for your answer.

Sure. Thanks for calling today.

Thanks for calling.

Good luck. Bye-bye.

Well, I hope he’s comfortable.

And I just noticed that that’s another one, right?

Comfortable.

Comfortable.

Comfortable.

I say comfortable.

I took me forever not to say relator.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because I learned it as a kid from just hearing the word.

My parents would go house hunting or something or sell our house, and that word would come up constantly.

And I just repeated what I heard from all of the people, including the realtors themselves.

And they said realtor or relator?

They’re relator.

Relator.

Relator.

Is that an Ozark thing, you think?

No, it’s a—

Relator.

It’s from Missouri anyway.

Interesting.

They’re tricky little letters, aren’t they?

Call us with your pronunciation bugaboos.

1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Janet Bomey from Spokane, Washington.

Well, welcome to the program, Janet.

I had a word that I want to discuss.

The word is fomite, and I think it’s a very useful word, but I don’t hear it very often.

I think that it’s especially useful right now in our days of H1N1 influenza,

And our increased awareness of fomites.

So I would like to know about the origin of the word.

Janet, you’re saying fomite. How are you spelling that?

F-O-M-I-T-E.

And where would you have run into this word?

When I went to nursing school in the 60s,

It was probably one of the first things I learned

At the University of Washington School of Nursing.

Really?

And I’ve used it for years,

But I found that a lot of people don’t really understand it.

They think you’re talking about mites.

Well, tell us how you would use it in a sentence.

A doorknob is a fomite.

Yes, a fomite being an inanimate object that can transmit an infectious agent.

Correct.

Yeah, it’s a great word, F-O-M-I-T-E.

And you’re going to love this because it has a very picturesque origin.

It goes back to the Latin word for tinder, you know, a readily combustible material.

Oh.

Isn’t that cool?

Yes, it is.

Yeah.

So a fomite would be like a comb with head lice or a doorknob that has bacteria on it or germs that are…

Blankets infested with smallpox?

Yeah, yeah, blankets infested with smallpox.

Exactly.

They’re all fomites, right?

Yeah.

You will see this word in print around if you look, and usually it’s pronounced fomite.

Some people say fomities, but to me that sounds like vomities or something.

But that’s closer to the original Latin pronunciation, right?

Yeah, yeah.

The Latin fomitus means of touchwood or of tinder.

But I like that picturesque image of something that could just sort of burst into infectious flame, you know?

Yeah.

You were saying that you think that this word would be handy in this day and age, right?

Well, I think there’s so much more awareness right now of inanimate objects that carry disease.

When you go to the grocery store, you have the little wipes that you wipe your grocery cart down with,

And there’s hand sanitizer everywhere.

So I just think there’s a lot more awareness of fomites.

Right.

Keep those shopping carts from being fomites.

Exactly.

And do you know the expression, by the way, Janet, Dracula sneeze?

No.

I love this expression.

I’ve only seen it recently.

Dracula sneeze?

Yeah.

I’ve seen health professionals suggest that if you have a cold or something, you should use a Dracula sneeze,

Which is when you sneeze, you should put your face and nose into your elbow like Dracula.

Oh, because he’s holding his cape up.

So two great expressions, fomites and Dracula sneeze.

What do you think?

I think it’s great.

I do, too.

We’ll keep wiping down those handles.

Okay.

Thanks, Janet.

All right.

Bye-bye.

So call us with your medical words, 1-877-929-9673,

Or tell us your OCD stories at words@waywordradio.org.

Tell us all about your aches and pains.

A lot of times people ask us for book recommendations if somebody wants to give a gift to a book lover or a word lover.

And the one that I’ve been recommending to people lately is Jeffrey Nunberg’s new book, The Years of Talking Dangerously.

He’s, of course, a linguist. You may have heard him on NPR, where he often reads essays.

This is a whole collection of them, and it’s what he calls snapshots of the language during the final years of the Bush administration.

And all of these essays, like all of his essays, are elegant and pithy, and they cover things like how the word entrepreneur is used to make the self-employed feel more important.

And one of my favorite essays in here is on a topic, Grant, that you and I have talked many times about, the fact that text messaging is in fact not ruining the English language.

I always like the little twists and surprises in Nunberg’s essays.

I love this line from the one on text messaging.

He says, the Victorians developed a breathlessly compressed style for sending telegrams, like the message Henry James had one of his characters cable in Portrait of a Lady.

It went,

But that telegraphic style, he writes, didn’t leave any traces on Victorian prose.

When you think of James’ own writing,

Terse and condensed are not the words that come to mind.

And he just makes a lot of points like that.

I just, I really like recommending this book to people.

How about you, Grant? What are you recommending lately?

Well, you know, I often get requests for books as well,

And these days I tend to talk about children’s books.

Books are an important part of the life of my son.

The part of his imagination is creativity.

He watches a little bit of television,

But it’s the books that he brings to us

When he wants time alone with one of his parents.

So we like to pay attention to what he’s reading.

And there are collections of books or paths of books that we recommend.

One is a set by David Shannon.

David has a character named David, after himself,

Who gets into trouble.

And it’s an interesting art style.

He has a round head and jagged shark-like teeth and a triangle nose kind of like the scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz.

And David is constantly getting into trouble.

And my son is enthralled with David.

David is always doing the wrong thing.

He plays baseball in the house.

David throws vapor airplanes when he should be listening in school.

David is a troublemaker.

But at the end of the book, David always finds peace with his parents.

He always gets the hug from his mother or the words of praise or the, you know, I love you, those kinds of things.

And my son loves the simple plots.

He loves the mischief of it.

And all of these books are fantastic.

We only have a few of the David books in our home,

But one of them that we’ve checked out from the library a couple of times is Good Boy Fergus,

Which is about David’s dog Fergus.

And Fergus, of course, does the same things.

Fergus will knock over and eat the plants in the house,

And Fergus will refuse to sit down when told to,

And Fergus will beg for food at the table.

But in the end, Fergus is always loved.

And it’s fun stuff. My son loves these.

Okay, so that was Good Boy Fergus by David Shannon.

Yeah, there are several books by David Shannon, Good Boy Fergus and Oh David and No David and David Smells and David Gets in Trouble.

Right, collect them all.

And for adult word lovers, there’s The Years of Talking Dangerously by Jeffrey Nunberg.

If you’d like to recommend books to us or to your fellow listeners, send us an email to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kimber Miller. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Hello, Kimber.

Hiya, Kimber. Welcome to the program.

I’m great. Thanks. Thanks. I’m excited to be here.

I’m calling to ask about a verbal habit I noticed where I grew up in South Louisiana.

I’ve since moved away, and it’s the only place that I’ve ever heard of having this habit of the use of repetition for emphasis.

And an example would be, well, it’s hot, but it’s not hot, hot.

And that is for anything you could possibly imagine.

And I want to know, because linguistically, Cajun French is a very isolated dialect,

And it certainly has morphed into Cajun English more than French,

Because the language has just about died out.

And I’m very curious.

Is it related to the medieval French that’s close to the roots of that language?

Is it just a verbal habit?

This has a name, and we can tell you a little bit about this.

I think this will get you excited,

And we can refer you to some places online where you can read more about this in specific,

In French and in Louisiana Creole French.

Oh, cool.

She is excited.

All right.

Yeah, yeah.

I knew she would be.

I’m going to bring you lots of language love here, Kimber.

But the short story is this is called reduplication.

When you reduplicate, you repeat either a word or a part of a word in order to add some semantic value to it,

Meaning you could be adding meaning or you could be emphasizing it

Or you could somehow bring it into relief or even change the meaning just a little bit.

English does this on its own.

It doesn’t need French.

French does this on its own.

And I’m not surprised to find that it’s predominant in Louisiana Creole

Because it’s definitely one of those things that happens in colloquial language

Or in less formal language or in the language of people speaking to their children.

And frankly, it happens in almost every language that’s been tracked.

And it’s particularly common in Polynesian languages or Austronesian languages.

So in any case, to go back to the French, the French do this.

Albert Valdman has a couple of sections about it in his book French and Creole in Louisiana.

And one of the things that he talks about there is that this appears in the language of children,

And yet it seems to be used in a knowing way, in a way that adds—it doesn’t add meaning, but it just drops the register.

For example, you probably know dodo means to sleep, right?

Right.

Okay.

You go dodo or something.

You say dodo, yes.

You say dodo.

So it comes from the French word dormir.

Now, the thing is you can just say the normal word for sleep, or you can say dodo,

And it still means basically the same thing, but it means it in a gentler, softer way.

But there’s another person that I should refer you to.

And her name is, hold on a second here, Mary Ellen Scullin.

And she has a couple chapters about this in a book, which has a section called New Insights into French Reduplication.

And she has a ton of forms here where people take the word elephant and they call it fen-fen.

Or they take a spider, which is araignée, and they do nignée.

And these are so common in French that it’s almost a sport to reduplicate a word to create a sex report.

I’m going to link to a ton of stuff online about this.

There’s just so much beautiful material there and some studies that have been done.

And the best thing, of course, is the list of the reduplicated words, the child language or even the adult language.

It’s great. It’s fun.

Well, this has been so much fun.

Thanks for calling, Kimber.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, speaking of reduplication, we’d be really, really, really, really, really glad to hear from you.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

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Things have come to a pretty…

That’s our show for this week.

If you didn’t get on the air today, you can leave us a message anytime.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Or drop by Way With Words online.

You can chat with fellow word lovers by going to waywordradio.org slash discussion.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Hurdell and Jennifer Powell.

From Studio West in San Diego.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Howard Gelman for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Bye now.

See ya.