Crazy Crossword Clues (episode #1347)

On May 16th, join Martha and me as we go to Dallas, Texas, to the Lakewood Theater for a live event in conjunction with Aberg Center, a literacy organization and KERA.

You can get tickets and more information at abergcenter.org. That’s A-B-E-R-G center dot O-R-G.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Back when I was a news reporter, all of us in the newsroom lived in utter dread of making a mistake.

Yes, I remember it.

It was awful.

You’d have to write out a correction that starts, due to a reporter’s error, and that would be published the next day.

Get it approved by the editor, that slow walk to the office where you’re like, I did it again.

That’s right, the perp walk.

It was awful.

But Grant, I don’t know if you have this experience.

The farther I get away from daily newspapering, the more I sort of enjoy reading the corrections.

Yes, yes.

You know, you do it with a sort of mix of schadenfreude and survivor’s guilt.

You know, that it’s not your error.

And, of course, the one that got the most attention recently was the one that ran in the New York Times.

I’m sure you saw this one.

It actually said, the nerdy intellectual, not Fluttershy, the kind animal lover.

That ran in the New York Times.

They got my little pony wrong.

And there was another one in the LA Times, wasn’t it?

I know.

Also about the ponies.

It was epic.

I have to share my favorite with you.

I think this has made the rounds, but it deserves to be shared.

This is a real one from last year from the Centralia Morning Sentinel.

It’s about a man in a Christian rock band, and that’s important.

It says, due to a typing error, Saturday’s story on local artist John Henninger mistakenly reported that Henninger’s bandmate Eric Lide was on drugs.

The story should have read that Lide was on drums.

The Sentinel regrets the error.

I’m sorry.

What do you do when you’re that reporter, right?

You want to blame autocorrect, but really, how many times do you make an autocorrect mistake before you just turn off autocorrect, right?

That is awful.

I know Jay Leno shares these on his show, but if you’ve got some you think we should see, we’d love to have them.

Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org or post them on our Facebook page.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys. This is Zach calling from Franklin, Indiana.

Hi, Zach. Welcome to the show.

Hello.

Thanks.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question.

I think this is something that’s probably happened to everyone in the world at some point in their lives.

And I’d never heard a term for it.

So it’s when, if you’re out in a public place, like on a sidewalk or in an airport, and you’re walking towards somebody else, just a stranger, you know, naturally the two of you will turn and, you know, veer to one side to avoid a head-on collision.

And sometimes, you know, the two of you will just continue to turn the same way, to zigzag in the same direction so many times that you end up face to face.

And it turns out to be a really awkward situation.

And I was wondering if you guys had ever heard a term for that.

I know the experience. Definitely.

It’s like if you were playing Rochambeau or Rock, Paper, Scissors and you kept coming up with the same answer every time, right?

Exactly.

How could we do this?

Yeah.

It’s like bad game theory, right?

What’s he going to do next?

What should I do?

Yeah, and then you can think about it too hard, right?

Yeah, exactly.

But yeah, bad game theory, that’s a great way to put it.

Well, that’s a good name for it then, unless you have a better one.

Do you have a term for it?

That’s pretty good.

No, you know what?

I’ve never actually thought about it, but I just wanted to call you guys and see if you had anything.

Because, I mean, I literally think everybody in the world has probably had this experience.

Yeah, yeah, and I’ve seen a couple of examples of words that I think are good candidates for this, one of which is slidewalk.

I kind of like that if you’re on the sidewalk and you do a little slidewalk.

Okay, sure, okay, nice.

But I tell you, Zach, the one that I really love and the one that I actually use is polka dodge.

Polka dodge?

Yeah.

Don’t you like that?

It’s sort of like polka dots.

It’s sort of like polka, and it’s sort of like dodging each other.

So I was, you know, polka dodging that guy down on the street.

Nice, yeah, and I like slidewalk as well because it’s like, you know, you’re just sliding back and forth.

And it’s a, yeah, that’s a good description as well.

Zach, did you look in Urban Dictionary?

I didn’t.

Well, Urban Dictionary is one of these sites that’s so terrible that it’s wonderful.

Like Wikipedia.

Like certain radio shows.

There’s a slew of terms on there for this.

I think most of them were invented by people who are really hoping they catch on.

But what the hey, I’m going to share some of them with you.

Indecisigig.

Okay.

Sidewalk boogie.

Nice.

Stranger dancing.

I like that one.

Stranger dancing.

Yeah, that’s nice.

And similar to the one that Martha said, same stepping.

Okay.

Yeah.

I like it.

I don’t even know where they get this one from, but a lot of people liked it.

They gave it a thumbs up.

Walken schlafen.

It’s like fake German.

Yeah, it just sounds like a made-up German.

And here’s another one.

Find me.

Here’s another one that I think has an ulterior motive.

They wanted to stop that old canard that there’s no such thing as a word that rhymes with orange.

Oh.

And so their word is florange.

And it means the same thing.

And I don’t know why.

Why would you say florange?

I have no idea.

To rhyme with door hinge.

But I like Martha’s polka dodge a lot.

I do, too.

The polka dodge.

I was in the airport trying to decide whether to go right or left.

I was doing the polka dodge.

It is very much a dance.

Doesn’t it feel like that?

You look.

Your eyes connect.

Your hands are in sync.

Your bodies are moving.

We’re polka dodging right now.

You just can’t see it.

So, Zach, of all these, we need a verdict from you.

What’s your favorite?

You know what?

I think I’m going to stick with polka dots and try to spread it out amongst my group of friends, see if it catches on.

Excellent.

Thank you guys very much.

Thanks, Zach.

Take care.

You too.

Definitely one of those universal life experiences, right?

Yeah, it’s one of those universal life experiences.

But I was thinking about this.

I mean, I don’t think a word has actually caught on because whoever talks about it, you know, it’s just a situation that you want to get through, sort of like whoever talks about the experience of being at a salad bar.

You know, you just want to get your stuff and sit down.

Right, right, right.

Although the sneeze shield is automatically kind of funny.

Yeah.

Love those sneeze guards.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a military term that I came across that I love.

Okay.

It’s a name for duct tape.

They call it 100 mile per hour tape.

100 mile per hour tape?

Because supposedly it can withstand the speeds of 100 miles per hour when slapped on holes.

So you can actually duct tape your airplane and go up to 100 miles per hour and be okay.

But if you’re just going 100 miles per hour.

You’re not taking off.

Maybe you’re just like, I don’t know.

Maybe it’s just on your motorcycle.

Pass that gas tank.

Your wagon.

Your bike.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Singh calling from San Diego.

Hi, Singh, welcome to the show.

Thank you very much.

How can we help?

Oh, I was chit-chatting with some friends, and we came across a word that I thought was right up your alley, and the word is ruthless.

And I started thinking about it, and it actually has three parts to this question concerning the word ruthless.

We have words like thoughtful, thoughtless, careful, careless.

But I don’t know if there’s a ruthful compared to ruthless.

Villains and bad guys are ruthless, but are heroes and great people, are they ruthful?

Good question.

Yeah. And also, does it have any roots in the book of Ruth, excuse me, in the Bible?

Right. We can help you with that. You might guess that it’s related to Ruth and the Hebrew name Ruth, but it’s not.

However, it is related to the word rue, like if you rue the day that something happened.

It has to do with regret and repentance. And there’s an old word, Ruth, that means the quality of being compassionate.

Huh. So you can actually say someone is full of Ruth.

Yes, you can say they’re Ruthful.

I’ve never heard that in my life. At least no one’s ever accused me of being full of Ruth.

Ruthless maybe, but not Ruthful.

Right, right. It feels right. It’s Ruthiness, right?

But these aren’t common. They exist.

No, no, they’re not common at all.

They’re fairly literate, right? They’re not the kind of thing you would say in day-to-day conversation, if at all.

Yeah, pretty archaic. I mean, you make a good point that you have thoughtful and thoughtless, but you don’t really have ruthful and ruthless.

The third part of the question that is centered around this word ruthless, are there other words that fit this pattern that has the less in it but without the full in it?

So that might be a brain teaser right now.

Well, there are what we call zero positives where it seems as if the positive form has gone missing.

Ruthless is one of those that people come up with.

What are the other ones?

Well, I don’t know.

Couth. Uncouth and couth.

We don’t usually say that someone has couth.

We say that they are uncouth.

So there are a few of these.

If you Google the word uncouth and ruthless,

You probably will come right away to a long list of these things

Because they’re kind of a classic trope of the puzzler crowd.

And, Singh, I would say that Grant and I are both very gruntled that you called.

Indeed.

There is an old term, gruntled, but usually you hear disgruntled.

Yeah, the negative form is far more common.

But this is the nature of language.

The negative and positives of an antonym pair don’t travel together.

They live their own lives in the language and succeed or fail by their own merits,

Which is why we end up with these curious circumstances

Is where the positive form has disappeared and the negative form continues on.

Singh, thanks for calling.

Oh, thank you very much.

Our pleasure, of course.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

You know, Grant, talking about newspaper corrections,

I’m struck lately that more and more of them tend to have a little more human touch to them.

They’re not so officious as they used to be.

And I think maybe that’s because newspapers tend to be more accessible on the Internet now.

There was one that ran recently in the Arkansas Democrat Gazette, and it had to do with a mistaken book title.

And it goes, leave it to a middle school librarian to catch us.

Those people notice everything.

We recently praised the Hunger Games trilogy in this column.

We liked it so much that we got the name of the second book wrong.

Of course it’s catching fire, not whatever we said last week.

Imagine holding a book all those hours and then getting the title wrong.

In the statewide newspaper.

That takes some doing.

It’s like covering a football game and screwing up the final score.

Thank you to our loyal, literate, and observant readers for keeping us straight.

It can’t be easy.

I wonder if there’s going to be a trend that people give more humane corrections.

Well, one thing that newspapers have started doing, at least recently when I worked in newspapers,

Was making corrections an actual part of the paper.

Oh, yeah.

Actually drawing attention to them so that it’s like not just hidden among the classifieds

Or buried someplace where you wouldn’t find it,

But actually making a deal out of it, assigning a columnist to it,

Having the columnist research what happened, and making a story out of the mistake.

Yeah, and it’s great that so much is online now and that gets corrected right then and there.

But there’s still the problem of the old guard not, for example, wanting to run corrections at all

Or burying the corrections or insisting that they didn’t do anything wrong

Or that it’s not worth correcting a name.

I think if you’ve got a name wrong, you correct it.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Condoleezza would agree with you on that.

Yes.

877-929-9673.

Curious about a word?

We’ve got the answer.

Stay tuned.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. And on the line is John Chaneski, our quiz guy. Hello, John.

Yes. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Here’s the quiz.

I’m doing great.

You know, from time to time, I like to share with you some of the great,

Usually punny or witty crossword clues that I’ve come across in copyediting and solving crosswords.

Now, the ones I like best are indirect or play on words.

And in those cases, the clue will usually be followed by a question mark, like this one.

The example is green org with a period after org.

And so the question mark in crossword parlance means that there’s a pun in play, right?

It’s a play on words.

That’s right.

So green org, it’s three letters.

Green org.

Green org.

EPA?

Good guess.

I’ll give you a hint.

It begins with a P.

Green org.

Okay.

It’s not PTA.

It’s not.

I don’t know.

What is it?

It’s PGA.

Oh.

Very good.

I love the indirect puns.

Yeah.

That’s.

I’m just warning you now.

They’re all going to go this way.

Now, luckily, I’ve taken all of these from New York Times crossword puzzles, so we only

Have the constructors to blame.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah.

That’s a dog leg, didn’t it?

I mean, it went a couple different directions.

Right.

Those are the best puns, though, right?

That was by Ishan Mitra.

And let’s start with the first.

It goes like this.

Strands in a cell.

Three letters.

DNA?

DNA is right.

That’s Kevin Chosetz.

Very good.

How about this?

Peaskeeper.

Three letters.

Peas?

Peaskeeper.

Peas…

Pod.

Pod is right.

By Mike Buckley.

That one’s a little different, red than herd.

I could have been even more cheeky with you and said, peacekeeper?

How about stable father figure?

Four letters.

Stable father figure.

Is it a male horse that’s four letters?

That’s what I was thinking, yeah.

Beginning with an S?

Stag?

No.

Sire?

Sire is correct.

Very good.

That was from Liz Gorski.

Okay.

Yeah, never mind.

How about red letters, four letters?

Red letters, four letters.

USSR?

USSR is correct.

Let’s thank Neville Fogarty for that one.

And let’s thank Martha for the answer.

Nice work.

Okay, let’s see if we can get this one.

This one’s very tricky.

This is from Brendan Emmett Quigley.

Oh, yeah.

London jazz duo, four letters.

London jazz duo.

Jazz has two of what in London?

Oh, Zs.

Think again.

Zeds.

Zeds is right.

Very good.

Love it.

That’s great.

London jazz duo Zeds.

Perfect.

Wonderful.

That’s a winner.

This is from Alan Arbusveld.

We’re going to stay in Europe for a while.

This clue is stop over in Paris.

Five letters.

Five letters beginning with an A and ending with a T.

Arret.

Arret is correct.

Oui.

Very good.

This one has been Karen Young Bonin.

Biblical fellow who was distressed.

Six letters.

Joseph?

No.

Oh, Samson.

Samson is right.

Distressed.

I was thinking he lost his robe.

Distressed.

Karen even has a hyphen between the dis and the trust.

So if you’re reading, it’s a little easier.

Yeah, Samson goes, hey, cut off.

But why should I be easy on you guys?

Right, right.

Here’s another one from Alan Arbisfeld.

Met expectations, six letters.

Okay, met, I’m thinking the Metropolitan Museum.

That’s what I was thinking too, or the opera.

Six letters?

Pluralize it.

Operas?

Operas is correct.

Nice work.

Now here’s our last one.

This one’s very tricky and a little cheeky.

It’s 11 letters long, but I had to do it.

It’s by Brendan Emmett Quigley.

Support for triple A.

It begins with a T and it ends with an A.

And it’s two words.

Support for triple A.

Now, think of things that give support.

Bra.

Bra?

Tiny bra?

No.

Eight letters in the first.

T-90 bra.

Training bra.

Training bra is right.

Thank you, Brendan, for training bra.

Thank you, Brendan.

That kind of triple A. Got it.

So those are some of my favorite crossword, excellent X-word clues. Tough ones in there. Some of them pretty tough, some of them pretty easy.

Thank you. Push-ups for your brain. Thank you very much, John. Thank you, Martha. Thank you, Grant. Thanks, John. Take care.

If you’ve got questions about words and language, this is the place. We’re A Way with Words, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, my name’s Chris Pacharka. I’m calling from Dana Point, just up the road from you folks. How’s it going, Chris?

Well, I had a question. There was something, well, I come from a big family. I have five older brothers, one younger brother. And my older brothers were very scholastic. You know, they took language in school. They, you know, they were accomplished. And so they were always tossing around books, you know, well, I don’t mean at each other. I mean, passing books, you know, from one to another. And I don’t know who came up with it, but this is something I remember from probably the time I was maybe 10 years old. But somebody came up with this extrapolated, what I call the extrapolated version of three blind mice. And, you know, everybody knows the tune three blind mice. They use it for the three stooges. That was kind of a theme, too. But it’s where they substitute all the words for as big and complicated a word as they can find. Right.

So. How does it go? You probably want to hear that. Yes, please. Of course. Okay. A trio of rodents with impaired vision. A trio of rodents with impaired vision. Observe their method of ambulation. Observe their method of ambulation. They attempted to pursue the agricultural spouse. She amputated their posterior regions with a sharp kitchen utensil. A trio of rodents with impaired vision. A trio of rodents with impaired vision.

And you learned this from your older brothers? I learned it from my older brothers. Oh, and you drove your parents crazy. Yeah, my parents. They were very patient with us. You had seven sons in that family? There were seven of us altogether, yeah. Good Lord. Oh, the humanity. You’re sainted parents. It was like a little platoon. Yeah, yeah. Boy, you could field a team in any sport almost.

So have you ever heard of anybody doing this with like a simple song and making it crazy like that? Oh, not exactly. We did have a caller on the show quite a while back who had this really long, obfuscated way of explaining that the foot was broken. That’s right. We’ll dig that one out of the archives maybe. That’s right. I read this passage on the show, oh, I don’t know, sometime this past year from a guy who wrote a novel using the absolute longest words he could find. It was just love letters between a couple. Do you remember that, Martha? Sure, yeah. And very Latinate phrases with these ten-syllable words where a one-syllable word would do. Yeah, I was exhausted when you finished reading that. And also, we have talked on the show in the past about inkhorn terms. These are these long words invented just for the sake of having long words. And so it kind of fits into this trend of playing with language, which is you do the opposite of what you’re supposed to do. Instead of simplifying and adding clarity, you obfuscate and occlude.

My question for you is, did you get any hints from your brothers where they picked this up? Did they make it themselves or from a book or where? I don’t know of any actual origins, but what I suspect is that it was probably something they came up with with their friends. Just playing around with the language, you know. We took Latin. Good for you. Yeah. So that helped. All right. Well, Chris, we’re going to put the word out to everybody, and we’ll find out what they know about this. Email us, words@waywordradio.org, or call us, 877-929-9673. Thanks, Chris. We’ll let you know what we find out, okay? Bye, Chris. Thanks for having me on. Bye-bye.

You know, Martha, I almost want to call him back and have him sing that again. But that’d be mean. I want to make a ringtone out of it. Maybe it could be the music that we play under our credits at the end of the show, don’t you think? We can learn today. Yeah. 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words. Hello, how are you doing? Doing well. Who’s this? This is Scott. I’m calling from Green Bay, Wisconsin. Well, we’re delighted to have you. What can we help you with?

I was wondering, I began attending NWTC, Northeast Wisconsin Technical College, and in my classes I had some younger students. I’m in my 40s, and some of these students are fresh from high school. And in some of these peer reviews and little group discussions we’ve had, frequently in taking notes, we had to read each other’s notes, and some of them simply couldn’t read my notes because they never were taught cursive writing. I was wondering what exactly is going on in the schools in America. Is cursive writing being phased out because of the Internet? And I find it interesting because for me, when I want to write fast, cursive writing is a key.

How good is your cursive writing? When I’m writing fast, chicken scratching. But when I take my time, it’s beautiful. So what the kids were reading was beautiful? Excuse me? What the young kids were reading was beautiful. In between. In between. Okay. Okay, but they weren’t reading it. They literally could not read it? They were taught how to autograph their names. That was it. How do they write? Do they just use block letters? Most of them were printing. Most of them said they do typing on a computer. Right. And they learned how to cursive write only to sign their names on documents and so forth. Some of them struggled, could read it with difficulty, but a lot of them were like, I never learned it.

That’s really interesting. There are a lot of questions here that you’ve just posed, Scott. Let’s see if we can untangle some of these. So the first one is, Martha, do you know about, do you know how difficult it is to read cursive writing if you’ve never been taught it? I’ve never been able to imagine that. You and I both learned it in school, right? Right. And I don’t, it’s hard for me to remember a time when I didn’t know how to do that. Well, we definitely need to ask our listeners. If you’re under, say, 22, were you taught cursive writing in school? Let us know. Send us an email or call us on the phone. And can you read it? And can you read it? Now, what I know from my reading, though, that not being, even if you don’t know how to write cursive, you should still be able to read it. It’s not that hard to figure out. It just takes a little bit of patience and an hour or two, and you’re set. You’re good, right?

Yeah, are you sure they weren’t joshing you? Or did they just not try? I’m sure they weren’t joshing, because like I said, some of them with the struggle could read it. Some of them just simply didn’t get it. Well, we’re going to poll our listeners about this. I’m curious now. It’s not being taught. It’s not being taught. That’s the other thing that I wanted. This is what I really wanted to talk about. There’s something known as the Common Core, which has been adopted by almost all of the states. And it’s not mandatory, and the states can make their own additions to it. But it does not include cursive writing. It’s something that this body of experts believes is necessary for being successful in modern life. Right. It includes keyboarding. You have to learn to type, right? And it’s hard to argue with their logic. Yet you can also have this sense of sadness that something could be so wonderful can disappear. And one of the most common things that’s brought up is this sunders us from the past. If you can’t read the letters that your grandparents send back and forth during the war, then you are separated from that family history. That was one of my biggest concerns right there. Yeah, we have some Civil War era letters in our family that my father’s ancestors wrote. And it is hard to read it, I have to tell you. Even though you know cursive. Yes, yes. But maybe it’s a different style of cursive.

It was a different style of cursive, and it’s kind of frustrating.

Because I can’t read it unless I see it typed out.

We have typed out copies of it as well.

But on the other hand, my mother had gorgeous cursive writing.

One thing my grandmother knew how to do was actual shorthand on a professional level.

She was willing to teach me when I was younger,

But being I was young, I thought it was useless,

Something I regret saying no to now.

I would love to have known shorthand.

Yeah, that’s amazing.

Especially for taking notes in class.

So let’s do a mini-survey here.

Scott, do you think that cursive should still be taught in schools?

Yes.

Martha?

Yeah, I would say so.

Not as a real art form, but just a useful thing to know.

Same here.

That’s exactly my take.

I think that cursive should be taught, not because I think you absolutely have to have it,

But because it can be a wonderful kind of way to train the mind and the hand.

There’s coordination involved.

You made an even better point earlier on in regards to reading letters from your grandparents that may have been in cursive.

Right.

That the hand-eye coordination that comes with writing well, writing cursive well, is a skill that will serve you in other places in life.

Yeah, I think it is connected to comprehension.

I think there has been some study on that.

So I think we should throw it out to our listeners.

Yeah, we want your opinions on cursive writing.

Should it be taught?

Do you know how to do it?

Is it something that you think is necessary?

Do you always write in cursive?

Do you never write in cursive?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Scott, thank you so much for opening this can of worms.

Oh, no problem.

Bye-bye. Take care.

You have a good day.

Or send your opinion in beautiful cursive writing to us here at

Wayword P.O. Box 632-721, San Diego, California, 92163.

On our Facebook page, Joyce Shirley Rogers wrote to us about a saying that she recently heard for the first time from her 80-year-old dad.

It seems that dad borrowed a piece of sandpaper from a neighbor and said, how much do I owe you?

And then before the neighbor could answer, her dad went ahead and said, how about we charge it to the wind and let the rain settle it?

Oh, nice.

I love that.

And so then she ran to our Facebook page immediately and wrote about that because she thought it was hilarious.

And then I started Googling it, and it seems that the more common expression is charge it to the dust and let the rain settle it, which I really like.

You know, that’s if you don’t expect to be paid for something or it’s something you can’t do a lot about, charge it to the dust and let the rain settle it.

Oh, that’s really nice.

That’s very nice.

I love it.

877-929-9673 is the number to call or find us on Facebook.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Katie from Dallas.

Hi, Katie from Dallas. How are you doing?

I’m good. How are you?

All right. What can we help you with?

Well, a couple weeks ago, I was putting a sound system into a convention center,

And I had to run a cable in front of a door.

So I asked the house electrician if he wanted me to take the cable up over the door.

He goes, no, no, just tape it down.

And I said, oh, of course I’ll tape it.

And he goes, yeah, well, I figured it weren’t no heel for a stepper like you.

Say that again?

Love it.

He said, I figured it weren’t no heel for a stepper like you.

Is that heel or hill?

Heel.

As in the bottom of your foot.

-huh.

-huh.

Interesting.

Yeah.

It weren’t no heel for a stepper like you.

What did he mean by that?

Were you offended or delighted?

No, I was delighted.

Oh, okay.

He meant that he thought I could handle the application of the tape, I suppose.

So he was an older gentleman, probably from East Texas, will be back.

And I asked him if he knew where that phrase had come from.

He said he didn’t know, but that he had just heard it his whole life.

And I thought, oh, man, what a great phrase.

I have to call A Way with Words.

I was hoping you could tell me where it was from.

Well, we have information about it for sure.

Yeah.

And I’ve seen both versions.

Both the versions that you mentioned, Grant, ain’t no heel for a stepper like you and ain’t no hill for a stepper like you.

Particularly in Texas.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah.

Throughout the South.

And my sense of it is that it’s no heel for a stepper, meaning a horse who’s really good at going up hills.

It’s not too big of an obstacle for a horse to get over.

Yeah, a stepper like you, a fine piece of horse flesh.

That ain’t no hill.

You just go right up it.

I’ve seen it in terms of money, too.

You know, if a car is really expensive, you say,

That ain’t no hill for a stepper like you.

Okay.

So what the guy was saying, of course, was that you’re very capable, obviously.

Yeah, nice.

I’m not surprised something like that’s popular in Texas.

We have a certain turn of phrase here.

Yeah, you do.

Boy, howdy, do you.

We aren’t going to mess with you.

Well, thank you guys so much.

Thanks, Katie. Much appreciated.

Great to talk with you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

Coming up, watching a word’s meaning change through time.

Stay with us.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett. We got a call from David in New York.

He serves in the military in the Army, and he had a question about the term battle buddy.

Do you know this term?

Battle buddy.

This is a term that’s used for the guy who’s your constant companion.

He looks out for you. He’s part of your training. He’s involved in your safety.

You probably will spend a lot of time with your battle buddy.

And in the Army, they abbreviate that as your battle.

They’ve turned the battle there into just a noun to refer to the whole phrase.

Really? Here comes my battle.

Yeah, well, he’s my battle. He’s got my back, right?

And so David’s question was, how can you tell what’s going to happen to a phrase like that?

You’ve got this two-word compound, battle, buddy.

Battle is serving as an adjectival noun describing buddy, which is just a noun.

And yet it’s shortened to battle, and that doesn’t seem to happen all that commonly in English.

I put the word out on Facebook and Twitter after we got his call and asked for examples that other people could think of where this has happened.

And we came up with quite a few things like Upstate New York is often abbreviated as Upstate.

Or high school is often called High, but only if you’re referring to the name of the school, like Westside High, right?

And mashed potatoes, particularly in the UK, might be referred to as mashed.

I’ll take some mashed, please.

Oh, really? I didn’t know that.

Wireless, right? The wireless radio or cell phone.

It’s actually cellular phone or cell phone is abbreviated as my cell, or my mobile phone becomes my mobile.

So we have some examples of this.

And what’s really interesting, it almost seems to happen that that two-word compound is shortened to the first word

When shortening to the last word would make some confusion.

So battle buddy, you couldn’t just abbreviate it to buddy because that means something else.

Your buddy is probably a real friend friend and not somebody assigned to you by the bureaucracy of the army, right?

Right.

So you’re differentiating between your battle buddy and your regular buddy by saying, he’s my battle, but he’s my buddy.

Does it make sense?

Sure.

Just think about cellular phone.

Well, I have to abbreviate it to cell phone because phone, for the long time, while this is changing, always meant the thing that was hardwired at your office desk or at home, right?

Okay.

So that first word is restricting the meaning.

Yeah.

It’s restricting.

And you go to that first word for the abbreviation because it adds clarity where going to the last part would actually add confusion, right?

So it doesn’t always work that way.

I wanted to talk about that term battle buddy, though. It was introduced in the Army in around the year 2000 as part of this program to reduce suicides and to increase performance and kind of just make sure that soldiers were getting the kind of like personal emotional attention they needed in order to be good soldiers.

Right.

Oh, so this was by decree.

Yeah.

It was part of an official program. It didn’t grow up organically then.

No.

But the thing is, there’s a slang term that’s the opposite. And I can’t say the whole term.

Why not, Grant?

Well, it’s because the opposite might be Blue Falcon or Bravo Foxtrot, which stands for buddy and then a form of the F word that we can’t say on the radio.

No.

So Blue Falcon or Bravo Foxtrot is the opposite of your battle buddy. He’s somebody who doesn’t pick up his share of the work, who doesn’t do.

Yeah, who makes you kind of do what he’s supposed to be doing.

Oh, really?

Or kind of leaves you hanging high and dry.

Okay.

So not the same as a BFF.

No, not by any stretch of the imagination.

No.

You know, we love hearing from the military when they have slang that they want to share or questions about their language or a story to tell about what it was like to learn the jargon of that particular business.

If you’re in the military, I’d love to hear from you, 877-929-9673, or email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Chris Turman. I live in Allen, Texas.

Hi, Chris. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Chris.

Well, I hate to admit how old I am, but I graduated in 76. It was probably around 75, about 37 years ago. Me and an acquaintance of mine at a high school were talking about something. I can’t really remember what it was, if it was a hole in the ground or a pumpkin or something like that. But we had a little argument about what word is larger. One of us said humongous, and the other one said gargantuan. And pretty much for the last 37 years, we really haven’t agreed to disagree. We’ve just disagreed.

So my real question was, which one of those two words is larger? Which is larger, gargantuan or humongous?

You mean which refers to something that’s larger?

Exactly.

Is a humongous rock bigger or smaller than a gargantuan rock?

Exactly, exactly.

You’ve been arguing about this for three and a half decades?

No, 3.7 decades.

Well, I can use fractions. I was educated in a different era.

Wow.

Okay, what’s on the line here? Surely at this point there’s an accumulation of debt and promises.

A gargantuan amount.

Yes, right? Or maybe a humongous amount of debt. Something on the line.

Oh, man. He’s going to make you clean his pool for a year or something like that, right?

Well, like I said, there’s going to be either a humongous or gargantuan piece of humble pie that’s going to have to be eaten.

Wow, humble pie. We eat a lot of that around here. It’s quite yummy.

The real argument is which one of those two words are larger. I don’t want to influence your decision. But there’s a lexicographer down here in Dallas named Brian Garner.

Oh, yeah. We love Brian. He’s great. Good stuff.

I figured you guys would know him.

Sure.

Garner’s Modern American Usage.

That’s right. Great stuff. Black’s Law Dictionary. He’s a very brilliant man. He’s a gargantuan figure in the language world. He has a humongous intellect.

You guys are toying with me. But anyhow, it turns out he has a Twitter account, and I was able to tweet him with the same question.

Oh, okay. But I don’t want to influence you guys.

You just want to pressure us.

He has a great book. You guys have a radio show, so I’m not sure. I think you outrank him.

I don’t know.

I don’t know. We’re different classes of experts. How about that?

Okay. And what did he say?

Oh, he’s not going to tell us. He’s going to make us.

Hold on. I’m going to call up his Twitter account here. My acquaintance will say I’ve unduly influenced you guys, and then I’ll just mess up the whole thing.

Well, I think I’m going to go out on a limb. I’m going to go with gargantuan. It just sounds monstrous. And I know that it’s a much older word, so it’s got a much more august history. It seems much bigger and more solid to me than humongous, which is much more recent. It’s only the last half of the 20th century. I know that much. Humongous hadn’t been around that long when you all were first arguing about it in school. So I’m going to, it almost sounds like something mythically large.

What about you, Grant?

Oh, it’s a good question. I think I would go with gargantuan as well.

Would you?

For very similar reasons. But I actually would probably just use titanic if I wanted to be even larger.

Well, I was thinking about that too. Because the titans were bigger than gargantua.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, gargantua was rabelais. And he was different sizes at different times. But even at his largest, the Titans were much larger, right?

Yeah.

But so we’re developing a hierarchy here. But really what we have to do here, to be completely honest, Chris, what we have to do is we really need to do a whole rainbow spectrum of all the words for big or large and get people to figure out where on the spectrum they would put them, right? Is it qualitative or quantitative? You know, in other words, if it’s a magnitude 10 gargantuan versus a magnitude 9 humongous, then it’s 10 times bigger. Or is it just how you feel? Like, you know, well, I don’t know. I kind of feel like humongous is bigger than gargantuan. Some of it has to do with what sounds better. Does it fit well with the other sounds that I’m actually issuing from my mouth as I’m speaking? So sometimes our word choice has nothing really to do with the meaning so much as it does, oh, this word, it’s a humongous house, sounds better than a gargantuan house.

Yeah, that’s a little scary. I wouldn’t want to live in a gargantuan house. It’s a gargantuan garage because there’s an alliteration there and other things are happening. Sometimes the word choice has nothing to do with the actual, you know, it’s 10% bigger.

Well, now, Chris, you have to tell us, where did you come down in the gargantuan versus humongous debate?

Well, I have to admit, you guys will probably be surprised, but I actually agreed with Brian Garner.

Yes, and what did he say?

Gargantuan.

Oh, there we go. That’s four votes.

Okay. I’m telling you, I think it’s settled. Your friend needs to make a big, gigantic, humble pie.

Enormous. Ginormous. Titanic.

Titanic, even.

Chris, this has been gargantuan fun.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thanks, guys. I really appreciate your time. I love your show, too.

We really appreciate you taking the time to explain exactly how your friend is wrong.

Hey, I have a lot more time for that if you want.

We’ll do it offline. Thanks, Chris. Take care.

Bye, Chris.

Bye-bye.

And we should say that if you’ve got a dispute, you can come to us. We’ll help you settle it 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about newspaper corrections, and there’s a great book on this called Regret the Error. It’s by Craig Silverman, and he also continues to blog about current newspaper corrections on the pointer.org website. We’ll link to that blog because it’s really great.

One of the corrections in this book ran in the London Daily Mail. It was a correction on a story about a court case, and I want to share it with you. The correction went, Mr. Smith said in court, I’m terribly sorry. I have a dull life, and I suddenly wanted to break away. He did not say, as we reported erroneously, I have a dull wife, and suddenly I wanted to break away.

Oh, that’s a big one. We apologize to Mr. Smith and to Mrs. Smith. I wonder if they were still sued.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha. How are you doing?

I’m doing well. Who’s this?

This is Ralston. I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Well, welcome to the show, Ralston. Nice to meet you.

My question is, I’m a Jamaican by birth.

I’m a naturalized citizen.

But ever since I’ve been here, I’ve always had, you know, the last child.

I’m the last child of my parents.

And I’ve always heard them call me the baby boy.

So my question is really, in Jamaica, they call us wash belly.

And I’ve always wanted to find out what the history, why did they call it wash belly?

And where does baby boy come from?

Why did they call the last child of any parent baby boy versus Jamaican versus American?

So in the United States, you are the baby boy.

But in Jamaica, you would be the wash belly.

Yes, I’m the wash belly.

W-A-S-H-B-E-L-L-Y, wash belly?

Yes, perfect.

That’s a really interesting question.

So how many kids are there in your family?

There’s seven.

My mom has seven.

So it’s one boy, Michael, and she’s got five girls, and I’m the last one.

I’m the wash belly.

And, Ralston, can that be applied to either boys or girls, wash belly?

Yes.

My understanding is it can be applied to either boy or girl.

I’ve just always been curious about it.

And the funny thing is I went to Jamaica a couple of weeks ago and I forgot to ask Ma about it.

I totally forgot to ask her.

Mm-mm—

You know, I came across this term for the first time, oh, I don’t know, six or seven years ago.

I collected a citation for it that I founded in a Jamaican newspaper,

And I made a little note on my website of this term wash belly, and then I didn’t think much of it.

But it turns out that this term wash belly is in the Dictionary of Jamaican English

Written by Frederick Cassidy and Robert LePage.

This is probably the single most comprehensive work

On Jamaican English that there is.

Fred Cassidy also did another book called,

Let me get this right, Jamaica Talk as well,

Which is a little more narrative and less like a dictionary.

But these two works together do a pretty good job

Of summarizing the way Jamaicans speak

That’s different from the rest of the English-speaking world.

Washbelly’s in there.

Unfortunately, what LePage and Cassidy say about Washbelly

That it simply means a child whose belly needs to be washed,

Which doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.

Because when I went looking in newspapers

And found a lot more uses of the term wash belly

And personal blogs and that sort of thing,

What I found was there’s another component to it.

Now, you’re the youngest child, and so I don’t mean to offend,

But a lot of times when people call the youngest child the wash belly,

They also mean that they’re lazy.

Or that they’re spoiled and they don’t have to do anything

Because they’re the youngest and the rest of the family takes care of them

And does their chores for them.

And washes their belly?

Well, I don’t know about that.

But I found again and again in newspapers and books even,

Fiction written by Jamaican writers about their lives and their histories,

That’s the way the wash belly is seen as spoiled,

As a mama’s boy or a daddy’s little girl.

I may agree with a spoiled part of it

Because they usually say to me as a kid or to my mom,

Say, he’s going to bite your ears off.

I mean, I always used to hear that, hey, you keep spoiling him, he’s going to bite the ears off.

But I never thought of it as being lazy.

So maybe spoil.

I probably could agree with that hearing.

But where does baby boy come from?

Why does American call their child baby boy?

Oh, because I think it’s related to the way that babies are announced in newspapers.

So if I have a child and I send the announcement to the newspaper, they will put as the headline, baby boy Barrett.

Or if I have a little girl, they’ll say, baby girl Barrett.

I think it’s related to that.

This is a very typical small town way of announcing the birth of your child in a newspaper.

It’s almost universal.

I think it’s got something to do with that.

And so it kind of sounds like a term of affection.

But they actually literally are the baby of the family, the baby boy of the family.

Which is the last child.

Yeah, I have a baby sister.

There were five kids in my family.

She’s 36, but she’s still my baby sister.

So it does carry us into adulthood.

There was just one more thing that you might be interested to know about wash belly.

It’s not only heard in Jamaica.

It’s been found in Belize, in the English that they speak there,

In Guyana, in the English they speak there,

And in the English-speaking part of Cameroon.

So it looks like this term probably came from the United Kingdom at some point

And settled in these parts of the world

Where there is a secondary English that is now spoken,

Where the English was an add-on language brought in by the colonials.

Well, thank you so much for your answer. I appreciate it.

Our pleasure. Call us again sometime when you have another question, Ralston, all right?

I will. Actually, I’m going to check out that book by Jamaica Talk.

I’m going to see if I could pick up some more from there.

Great. Thanks.

Take care.

Thank you, Martha. Have a good one.

Okay. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

I have another newspaper correction for you, Grant.

Okay.

This is, again, from the book Regret the Error by Craig Silverman.

It’s a classic from a Canadian newspaper.

It goes,

The Ottawa Citizen and Southam News wished to apologize for our apology to Mark Stein, published October 22nd.

In correcting the incorrect statements about Mr. Stein, published October 15th, we incorrectly published the incorrect correction.

We accept and regret that our original regrets were unacceptable, and we apologize to Mr. Stein for any distress caused by our previous apology.

I read that he had a hand in that correction.

You must have because somebody had a ball with that.

Yeah.

Clearly they had some fun there.

I don’t think corrections are supposed to be fun, are they?

No, sometimes they’re awful.

You didn’t win the lottery.

No, that really happened.

Oh, really?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Oh, they misprinted the lottery numbers.

Yes.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, I mean, sometimes it can be really painful, those corrections.

Oh, that’s terrible.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty pass.

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Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Take care.

Ciao, ciao.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

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