A Dancer Who Walks for a Living

Even though this is a recorded podcast, you can always call us anytime. The number is 877-929-9673.

Leave your questions and stories about language, and you might just end up discussing them on the air with us.

Thanks for listening.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you’re a writer or want to be one, then you know the pain of trying to arrange those words in just the right way.

And you also know the joy of hitting that sweet spot when you succeed.

But what if in order to pay the bills, you have to spend a lot of time writing in another genre?

Maybe you’re a novelist who has to write web copy by day or a poet who has to work as a grant writer.

Take Michael Erard. He’s a journalist and essayist.

But for his day job, he has to write reports for a think tank.

And he describes the tradeoff this way.

He says, I’m a dancer who walks for a living.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that great? So here’s a question, Grant. If you’re a writer who has to compromise that way to make ends meet, how do you keep your creative work from being polluted?

What a struggle that must be, right?

Well, I had it. I ran into this back when I was trying to support my etymological habit.

I was writing for a beauty magazine by day.

I was pouring all my energy into stories like how to get the perfect butt.

And then by night, I’d be trying to write gracefully about ancient Greek.

And it wasn’t easy.

It was really hard to make that transition between the two because you get a rhythm going.

Did you do something to clear your mind?

Was there something like a walk or even something simple like that?

Well, certainly walks and that kind of thing.

But in terms of language, you know what? Often I would just copy the kind of writing that I wanted to emulate.

I mean, literally, almost like an art student painting an old master.

I would read other writers aloud. I would read my betters, plenty of them, and I would read them aloud.

And sometimes I would actually either try to write in their style, literally, or I would just take dictation from them.

I would copy what they were writing.

And it helped.

And then it influenced you.

You could put that copy aside and then do your own thing.

But it would still carry the flavor.

Exactly.

Yeah.

It’s called structural priming in linguistics.

Where you do, you get this sort of muscle memory.

You go through the motions.

It’s like when you’re in physical rehab and you have what they call passive motion, you know, where they’re moving your limb for you before you’re able to do it.

And that’s how I did it.

But I’m really curious.

We have a lot of writers in our audience.

And it reminds me of what happens when you learn a foreign language.

I learned when I was learning Spanish and French that if you spoke those languages in a way where you were almost mocking or making fun of the native speakers,

You would fall back naturally to a more real, a more accurate kind of sense of the language.

Your cadence would be right and your accent would be better.

Yes.

Just by overdoing it and mocking almost.

Yes.

Interesting that you mention that because one of Michael Erard’s books is on polyglots.

And he goes into great detail about this one guy who just speaks a zillion languages.

And one of the things he does is goes on walks and shouts the language at the top of his lungs and really exaggerates it.

And that’s partly how he internalizes it physically.

It’s really interesting stuff.

We know that you’ve had writer’s block.

We know that sometimes you don’t have a block, but, well, you just can’t shift your tone.

How do you find that other register?

877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mary from Indianapolis.

Hi, Mary. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Mary.

Hi.

How can we help you?

Well, actually, I was calling because I have come up with a way to describe an awkward situation,

And I just thought it would be something that other people would be interested in hearing about

In case they’re going through something similar.

I was a painfully awkward child and always found that it was difficult to engage in conversations in a group because oftentimes the louder people would interrupt.

And then I would wonder, like, is it okay to start my sentence over or should I just give up?

And once while watching an episode of The Simpsons, I saw that Lisa, the young daughter, came upon a group of people and she wanted to be cool and try to make friends.

So she walked toward them, and as she was starting to say hello, a group of seagulls came through and interrupted her.

So she ran and hid behind a pole.

She later went on to successfully join the group.

But I sense have called that kind of situation being seagulled or seagulling.

If someone interrupts you while you’re trying to start a conversation or join one,

And it’s kind of caught on in my group of friends, I just thought it would be something fun to share.

I like it.

I do, too.

It’s very accurate.

Seagulled.

Yeah.

Even people who aren’t that shy have this problem breaking into a group, right?

Right.

That’s crazy.

Yeah, you’ve just worked up the guts to talk to somebody who is, I don’t know,

Maybe you think that they’re really cool or sexy or they could do you some good in your career.

And then sure enough, somebody like swoops in there and takes your spot and your line and your moment.

Right, and you have that moment of panic.

Like, is it okay for me to be part of this?

Yeah, and then you’re playing catch-up, right?

Because you want to bring the conversation back to where it was before.

And it is.

It’s like, I don’t know if you’ve ever held a piece of food up at the beach

And a seagull comes and swipes it.

That hasn’t happened to me.

But that’s exactly how you feel.

And I think that’s a great word, seagull.

Seagull, yeah, I like it.

I like it a lot.

The only other thing I’ve heard like that is steamrolled.

There’s a new book called The Introvert’s Way by Sophia Dembling,

And she talks about this and how you’re always playing catch-up.

And, you know, I would say, too, that, Mary, I don’t know if you feel this way, but I think that sometimes you can actually seem smarter that way.

You know, do you have this experience where you’re in a meeting and you don’t say anything, you don’t say anything, don’t say anything, and then finally you say one thing and it sounds really wise and people think that you were being wise all along?

Yes, and that’s the great thing about being a shy, quiet person.

You occasionally come up with something and everyone thinks you’re some sort of genius because of it.

Yeah, exactly. Quality, not quantity, right?

Right.

Yeah, but I like this, and your friends have picked it up as well, Seagull.

Yeah, and originally they made fun of me for it, but now I have several people, including my boss at work, saying it.

So I think it has potential.

Nice.

Well, we’ll help you spread it around, all right?

Great. Thank you.

Thanks, Mary.

Thank you for calling. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

This reminds me of a related word. Do you know what porelocking is?

Porelocking. How are you spelling that?

P-O-R-L-O-C-K-I-N-G. Porelocking.

It sounds like something I would put on my face.

You’ve got to remember this anecdote.

When Samuel Taylor Coleridge was writing Kublai Khan,

Supposedly he had this fever dream and he was whipping it out,

And then he was interrupted by the man from Porlock.

And then when he got back to his work about an hour later,

He couldn’t remember what he was writing.

It went away.

So he got 54 lines down and that was it.

Might have been the best poem ever.

Oh, gosh.

He got seagulled.

Yeah.

I like that seagulled.

Well, to be porlocked is to be interrupted in a bothersome way.

Yeah.

Well, call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Leah.

Hi, Leah. How are you doing?

I’m great. How are you?

All right.

What’s going on?

Well, thank you so much, first of all, for doing the show.

I just absolutely love it.

And I moved to Rehoboth Beach, Delaware about a year ago,

And I drive across this peninsula into Maryland for my job,

And I keep seeing signs and hearing people talk about Delmarva, Delmarva this, Delmarva that, whether it’s a business, a location, an organization.

And so I had my map open, and I was looking and looking one day trying to find this Delmarva.

And I said to my partner, where is Delmarva?

And she said, you’re standing at it.

And I didn’t realize that it’s the name of this geographic location.

And so my question is, who came up with that?

Oh, the who?

Well, the geography kind of dictated it, didn’t it?

Exactly as you said, I think it’s the only peninsula in the United States that’s divided among three states.

You have your Delaware, you have your Maryland, and you have your Virginia.

And so Delmarva is what we call a portmanteau word.

Are you familiar with that term?

No.

Yeah, this is a term where you mash elements of different words together,

Like spork is a combination of spoon and fork, or smog is smoke and fog.

And so, as you said, it’s Delmarva.

It’s not Marv the Del or anything like that.

But it’s dictated a lot by geography because you also have in that area,

I don’t know if you’ve been to Delmar, Delaware, which is next to Delmar, Maryland,

And there’s Marydell, Delaware, and Marydell, Maryland, and Veermar Beach.

And so they make these names of places by combining those things together.

And the earliest evidence I’ve seen of a similar name to that is Delmarvia.

Back in the 1880s, there was the Delmarvia Review, which was a newspaper in that area.

And people use that name from time to time.

Oh, okay.

And then maybe it’s like, you know, Baltimore becoming Balmer.

It just became Delmara.

I see.

It’s kind of slurred it a little bit, huh?

Yeah, it’s a little confusing because you’re right, all those different names of those locations that I drive through,

I started thinking Delmarva was an actual small city somewhere here.

Yeah, no, I don’t think it is.

I think it’s just that area.

The whole peninsula, right?

Yeah.

And if you are listening to us on your drive through the peninsula, you’re probably listening to Delmarva Public Radio.

Right.

Yes, I am.

Right, there at Salisbury University, right?

That’s right, exactly right.

It also has the NAB Center, which has a lot of great information on your area.

Oh, really?

I’m a new employee here at the university, so I will go check that out.

Yeah, check out the NABB Center there.

They have tons of information on your area.

Awesome.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

When I was growing up, these kinds of blends, I usually encountered them in the name of, like, independent gas stations and towing companies and, like, little…

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Or restaurants.

Yeah, but it was almost always like the first or last names of the co-owners of the joint, right?

Yeah, there’s something I didn’t like about that.

Yeah, me too.

Because usually they’re opaque, for one thing.

And they tend to say more about the owner than they do about the business.

Exactly.

Abdel Towing doesn’t tell me anything.

Yeah, yeah.

But Abby and Delmar, or Delbert, actually, they started their towing company.

Oh, really?

That was a real one?

I think it was a real one.

Yeah, a lot of those husband and wife things, too, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, well, we want to hear from you.

877-929-9673 is the number to call, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

There’s a little bit of copypasta that’s been making the rounds online that I want to share with you.

Copypasta?

Copypasta.

This is a batch of text that you just save on your computer, maybe with a keyboard command attached to it.

And any time you’re in a discussion thread where that topic is being discussed, you just paste it right in.

So let’s say that you have particular political views, and every time your opponents speak, you just paste it in.

That’s copypasta.

But sometimes copypasta is a joke or some kind of little funny ditty or some kind of image even,

Just a thing that you just constantly want to share.

And this one is linguistic.

It’s a long paragraph of egg corns all put together in a really awkward-sounding phrase.

Remember what an egg corn is, right?

Oh, sure.

Yeah, something that sounds like something else, like spreading like wildflowers.

Yes, exactly.

So I’m not going to read the whole thing.

We’ll post the copy pasta online.

Okay, and copy pasta is like spelled like the food?

Yes, copy pasta, and it’s a playoff of copy and paste.

Oh, okay.

Okay, all right.

So here’s just one line.

Mustard up all the strength you can because it is a doggy dog world out there.

It is a doggy dog world.

And make my words, when you get down to brass stacks,

It doesn’t take rocket appliances to get two birds stoned at once.

I love this stuff.

And the last sentence of this,

You might have to come to this conclusion through denial and error,

But I swear on my mother’s mating name,

That when you put the petal to the metal,

You will pass with flying carpets like it is a peach of cake.

877-929-9673.

Support comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies,

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us now is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

John.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Hey, buddy. What’s up?

Every so often we have to make a decision.

And today we’re going to choose words that begin with D-E-M or words that begin with R-E-P.

Get it?

Yes, I do.

I’ll give you a clue.

I’ll give you a clue.

The answer is a word that begins with either rep or dem.

Okay.

For example, acting like a spoiled and petulant child clues what word?

To always want, to want lots and lots of things.

Demanding.

Demanding is correct.

Very good.

How about, on the other side of the aisle, how about extremely sorry for one’s transgressions?

That clue is what word?

Repentant.

Ooh, nice.

Repentant is right.

Very good.

You got one of each there.

Now, let’s do some more and see who wins.

Ready?

Mm—

All right.

Good.

Late character actor Jesse White played a lonely one of these in a series of commercials for Maytag.

Repairman.

Repairman.

Very good.

Behaving in a strange or crazy way, like one certain radio DJ I know.

Demented.

Demented is right.

Dr. Demento.

I love that guy.

You might have a good one or a bad one.

It’s what people think of you.

Reputation.

That’s very good.

Now, any psychologist can tell you it means to not allow yourself to feel a feeling or memory.

Repress.

Repress, yeah.

Repress is right.

This is a comment that expresses criticism or blame.

Reproof.

Reproof.

Oh, nice.

Very good.

Now, tangentially speaking of politics, this is a political leader that attempts to influence people through emotional speeches.

Demagogue.

Demagogue is correct.

Swiss, American, and Dutch are three examples of this.

Swiss, American, and Dutch.

Well, they’re cheese, but what else are they?

Demonym.

Demonym is right.

Very good.

This is part of a song or other piece of music that is performed over again.

Gosh, right on the tip of my tongue.

Well, repeat, but reprise, hello.

Reprise, yes, very good.

She was the Greek counterpart of the Roman goddess Ceres,

The goddess of fertility and the protector of marriage.

Demeter.

Demeter is right.

This is what your body appears to do when you use the Enterprise’s transporter.

Dematerialize.

Yes, very good.

Finally, this Midwestern U.S. State is home to a famous annual car race and is the home state of David Letterman, Will Shorts, and Twyla Tharp.

Well, I know the state, but I’m trying to think of what it would be.

Well, what’s the state?

The state is Indiana.

Indiana is right.

They would do one for the independents out there.

Oh, man.

Nice, John.

Everyone’s represented here on A Way with Words.

Oh, John.

That’s it?

That was more of a workout than I thought it would be.

It was pretty good, though.

Yeah, good.

You were zip along there, Martha.

Nicely done.

Thank you.

Don’t forget to vote for your favorite words when it’s time to vote.

All right, will do.

We approve that quiz, John.

Great.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how you doing?

Doing well. Who’s this?

This is Naomi from Missoula, Montana.

Hi, Naomi. How you doing?

Hi, Naomi.

Well, I wrote on your Facebook page a question I had about an essay I’m writing

And using the term due diligence

And wondering if it could be used in a non-legal form

And it would be appropriate in an essay of the sort I was writing.

So a little kind of a personal essay that is going to be in, or hoping, I’m hoping it will be, in a kind of a mom’s magazine that’s based here in Missoula.

Do a little buzz marketing.

It’s Mama Load Magazine.

Like, I hit the mother load, but mama.

Mama Load.

Okay.

I had written an essay for them before, and this is kind of a follow-up piece to that.

Okay.

And what’s it about, may I ask?

Well, I’m friends with a publisher, and at one point I was looking for something along the lines of dating as a single mother, because it’s a mom’s magazine, and there was nothing there.

So I wrote her in frustration saying, well, is there nothing there?

She said, okay, there’s nothing, write it yourself.

So I wrote something from that perspective, and then so now I’m writing a follow-up to being recently married as a once single mother.

Oh, so it works.

Congratulations.

How are you squeezing the term due diligence into your essay?

I mean, it’s something about personal and about moms.

This is actually kind of then talking about bringing in a new dad to the life of my sons.

And, yes, they still have their dad.

That’s not a thing that’s going to change.

But they have a guy who’s at the house.

He’s doing the work.

This is the guy doing the due diligence, cleaning up the messes, helping with homework, saving for college, et cetera.

That he’s the one in the house doing the daily duties.

Yeah.

Due diligence usually is a term that means you are investigating something

Or researching something with thoroughness.

And I don’t think that applies here.

I don’t.

Okay.

Well, I think the audience, too, the tone of the magazine, I would think.

Yeah, there’s something legal about that term, something almost clinical.

And I think he’s there doing the daily duties, right?

Yeah.

I think that’s a perfect description of it.

And there’s no need to pull out this phrase from another register of English.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don’t know what it is about that phrase.

It kind of is just catchy to me.

It is catchy.

Maybe it’s because I’m talking about someone who at least was formerly a lawyer.

I will tell you that the term due diligence is on the tipping point of overuse in some circles.

It appeared in a list of newspeak put out by a London publisher in 2008 of words that you shouldn’t use.

And they say due diligence suggests thoroughness where there is none.

And then when I worked in journalism recently, there were a number of people in the office that would just roll their eyes at due diligence because it was the kind of thing that people would say when they didn’t actually have any details and had done no due diligence.

Like, you should have performed your due diligence to discover the background, meaning I don’t know anything and I don’t have any information, but there must be something there because I want there to be.

And it sounds good.

And it sounds good. It makes you sound highfalutin.

And I know that’s one thing I kind of put it in there and then I didn’t want to sound that.

Did you take it out in the end?

What’s that?

Did you take it out in the end?

Did you arm wrestle your red better?

I’m still in the process of writing it.

Oh, okay, good.

I haven’t completed it yet.

Okay.

I would say leave it out and look for another way to describe this man who’s become essential

For those day-to-day duties.

All right.

Well, it has been awesome talking to you guys.

Our pleasure.

My husband and I are very big fans, and he’s kind of jealous that I’m the one who gets

To do it.

Hey, send us a copy.

Yeah, send us a copy.

Send us a copy when it’s done, all right?

Okay, I will.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Here is an expression that I stumbled across in the Collins Dictionary that I have taken to heart, Grant.

I just love it. I don’t know if you’ve heard it.

The expression is, to not know whether one is Arthur or Martha.

Eh?

It’s Australian and New Zealand slang.

It means to be in a state of confusion.

I don’t know if I’m Arthur or Martha.

Who are Arthur and Martha?

Where do they come from?

Well, they sound alike.

Oh, okay.

Okay, very good.

To not know if one is Arthur or Martha.

I often don’t know.

Just call me Arthur.

Arthur.

Okay.

Thank Martha.

Call me at 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Scott calling from San Diego.

Hi, Scott.

Welcome.

Hey there, buddy. What’s up?

Well, I have a professional question for you about medieval knights and the language of chivalry.

Oh, my. Okay.

Okay. Well, I work with an educational program called Chivalry Today,

And we help teachers who are studying the Middle Ages and Renaissance

By coming into their classrooms and bringing historical displays of arms and armor in

For the students to see and try on.

And when I do that, there’s often a lot of talk about the terms and phrases that come from the medieval period.

Well, not long ago, I was reading a novel by the author Bernard Cornwell.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with him.

I’m not. Are you great?

I know the name, but I don’t know if I’ve read his work.

He writes a lot of really, really detailed, accurate historical novels.

And so I was reading the novel Agincourt, about the Battle of Agincourt.

And in it, he has a very detailed scene describing the arming of a knight, a knight being armed by his squire.

And when this knight has all the pieces of his harness on, the squire turns and says to him,

My Lord, you are dressed to kill.

And, you know, it’s fairly clear from this long build-up to this line that, you know,

The author is kind of saying, Hi, you readers, I bet you didn’t know that’s where this phrase came from.

And my question is, is this where this phrase came from?

Are you suspicious, then?

I am a little bit. It seems awfully convenient.

Yes.

Yeah. I mean, it would be great if it was. What a great origin to that.

But I don’t know if that really does go all the way back to the 15th century,

Or does it even have any military origin at all?

It doesn’t look like it, no.

I assume it’s literary license on his part.

The earliest that we find anything like that phrase is in the 1800s.

It turns out that in the 1800s, there was a trend to add to kill after certain kinds of verbs

To mean that you were going to do it with force or passion or that you were highly prepared.

So you might have, he is got up to kill, meaning he is dressed to kill.

And it doesn’t mean literally to kill.

It just means that whatever you’re going to do,

You’re going to do it with force and passion and energy.

So it just looks like Cornwell just decided to throw that little thing in there for fun.

I assume that when you’re writing these long historical novels,

You twist and turn a little bit to make it more interesting for you as a writer

And then make it more interesting for the reader.

And he didn’t explicitly say, this is where it comes from,

Or comma, thus coining a phrase or anything like that.

Correct, correct.

So he leaves room for doubt.

Right. And it certainly does make a very long and dry description of armor, kind of more colorful.

Yeah, but if it jumps at it, you like that.

You sensed that it was wrong, right?

Well, I have listened to you long enough to know when I should raise a red flag.

Yay. So the students actually get to wear the armor? That’s really cool.

Yeah, absolutely. Yes, we let them try on helmets and talk about phrases like throwing down the gauntlet or chirping at windmills, that kind of thing.

Great, yeah.

Very good.

It sounds dangerous. It sounds fun and dangerous.

And loud. It sounds really loud.

Hey, Scott, thanks for calling.

Thank you, Martha and Grant.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Take care.

That’s really interesting, though.

You can read historical fiction and pick up the general sense of a time and a place.

But if you’re looking for specifics, you’re probably making a mistake.

But to get the mood and the attitudes and the hierarchies of power and that sort of thing,

Historical fiction is usually pretty good for that.

We want to hear your language stories.

Call us 877-929-9673.

We keep talking about cursive handwriting and bad handwriting,

And I found a great expression for that.

It’s to say that something looks like it was written with a thumbnail dipped in tar.

That’s kind of the way my grocery list looks.

A thumbnail dipped in tar.

I’ve got to get you published again.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jay calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Jay, welcome.

Hey there.

What can we do for you?

Well, you know, the other day I was listening, well, it was a couple weeks ago, I was listening to NPR,

And they were having a pledge drive.

And, you know, there was two commentators on there, and they were talking back and forth,

And they were talking about the business model of NPR and how they’re different from other stations

Because other stations, they sell bits of your time and try to sell you things you don’t really need,

Like perhaps a cream for your elbows to make them as smooth as a baby’s bottom.

No, that’s cute.

So the other commentator comes back and goes,

You know, I think we ordered that as one of our thank you gifts for the pledge drive, right?

Of course, they were joking around.

And the other commentator came back with the statement,

We had to put the kibosh on that order.

And as soon as I heard the word kibosh, it struck me that that was a word that I had grown up with,

But I haven’t heard in many, many years since I left my home state.

And not only have I not heard that word in 15 years, but it struck me that that is not how we pronounced it.

Where I came from, up in Wisconsin, we pronounced it kibosh, not kabosh.

So I was curious both what that word means, and how come this guy pronounced it different,

And how come I haven’t heard it in 20 years, even though I now realize it was a common word when I grew up.

So you’ve got a pronunciation difference here.

You might have a regional difference here.

Can you tell us a little bit about what you think kibosh means?

Well, I mean, basically it would mean, just like the commentators use there on NPR,

To put a stop to something or to hold it or something.

And it’s a quick stop.

It’s usually something rather sudden, right?

We’re not talking about a gradual tailing away.

That’s right.

There are different pronunciations for this.

The kibosh pronunciation is the most common.

Some people do say kibosh.

Probably people who didn’t learn it by hearing it.

Probably people who learned it by seeing it and reading it in their books or comic books or wherever.

You might see that kind of thing.

Kabosh?

Yeah.

There are a couple really interesting things about this word.

The first known use that we have of this word in print was by Charles Dickens.

Oh, really?

Yeah, he was writing it under this pseudonym Boz in 1836.

And he uses it in the language of Cockneys.

And in the very first edition, he spelled it K-Y-E-hyphen-B-O-S-H.

But in all subsequent editions, he changed the spelling to K-Y-E-hyphen-B-O-S-K

To better represent what was happening in the language of Cockneys,

To people in this particular part of London.

So it’s really interesting.

And ever since then, it’s more or less meant the same thing.

So it’s an end.

It’s something final.

It’s a stamping out.

It’s a quick finish.

And it can also be a verb.

You can kibosh something or kibosh something.

That kibosh pronunciation is far more common, but it’s not necessarily the correct one because it’s slang.

This word is so variable over its history and its spelling and how it’s used.

It’s a noun and a verb.

Sometimes it’s just an interjection.

It’s just a really interesting kind of expression.

But you had another question that I don’t think I can answer.

But why do you think that you haven’t heard it very often in 20 years?

I don’t know.

I guess I don’t speak Texan or something.

Because I don’t think there’s a regional component to it.

I think it’s fairly widespread American, just good American English.

And, frankly, it’s used in the U.K. As well.

Okay.

Because you’ll find it in the mouths and the pens of people from all across the 50 United States.

Well, now, I don’t remember seeing it or hearing it until I was gone from Kentucky.

That’s for sure.

Really?

Yeah.

I wonder.

Kibosh.

By the way, we don’t know the origin of the word, the ultimate origin.

Some people have speculated that it comes from Hebrew or Yiddish.

Some people have speculated that it comes from Turkish.

Irish languages.

None of these have any data whatsoever to support them.

It is explicitly origin unknown and has been researched to the hilt, to the ultimate.

Like people have put too many years into trying to figure out where this word came from.

All right.

So there we go.

Jay, thank you so much for calling.

All right.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

We want to hear from you.

877-929-9673.

Grant, here’s another poem I think you’ll enjoy.

It’s by David Ignato, and it’s called The Bagel.

I stopped to pick up the bagel rolling away in the wind, annoyed with myself for having dropped it as if it were a portent.

Faster and faster it rolled, with me running after it, bent low, gritting my teeth,

And I found myself doubled over and rolling down the street, head over heels, one complete somersault after another like a bagel, and strangely happy with myself.

That’s nice.

I like it.

That’s great.

Who’s the author of that?

David Ignato, and this is, again, in Billy Collins’ book, Poetry 180.

I want a bagel now.

No, you’re supposed to talk about the imagery.

It reminded me of climbing into an old tire as a boy and rolling down hills.

Did you ever do that?

Not as a boy, no, but I did that.

We did it with big tractor tires and automobile tires.

When you’re five or six, you can fit nicely into an automobile tire

Until you fall into the ditch.

877-929-9673.

More language love to come.

Stay tuned.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

We talked earlier about writers who have to earn a living by writing in a genre other than their preferred one,

Like the novelist who has to write a technical manual by day.

And Grant, the larger question is, you know, writing is such hard work.

And if you’re spending so much energy and effort doing that kind of writing for pay,

How do you get back the joy of writing?

And I’ve been reading a lot of writers on writing lately,

And it’s almost like they say, if you don’t know, I can’t tell you.

Oh, that’s terrible.

I mean, I have the words of Zadie Smith ringing in my ears.

She says, resign yourself to the lifelong sadness that comes from never being satisfied.

Oh, yeah.

And I read something by Neil Gaiman where he said, chasing perfection is like chasing the horizon.

You will never give there.

At some point, you just move on.

Yeah.

But, you know, we do keep trying.

What keeps bringing us back there?

And how do we get the joy back?

Part of it, and what I’ve read, is that some writers feel that they are the only people who can say that particular thing that needs to be said.

And if you feel like you are driven, that you have cacowethi scrabendi, which we’ve talked about in the show before, right?

Oh, very nice. Very nice.

If you have this unassailable, unquenchable need to put a story down, then that’s what carries you through these moments of self-doubt, the moments of panic, frustration, and even just pure tiredness with your subject.

Yeah. And I think, too, it’s sort of like life.

You don’t really have to have a huge success necessarily.

You can have those little moments here and there, you know, a little favorite sentence that you crafted.

For some writers, it is enough to make a perfect book that their family loves or their peers respect, and then they’re done.

They don’t need to have a career that’s filled with 40 or 50 novels and all the best interviews and all the best reviews and million-dollar advances and that sort of thing.

And so if you set your expectations to something just above where you are, you will find yourself a little less frustrated.

And we should flip this around and say there may be people who are writing novels that actually have found joy in writing insurance documents, right?

They have discovered that this mundane craft can be a place for them to experiment or to get out this urge or just to feel like they’re perfecting how word A follows word B.

This basic fundamental craft of putting a sentence on a page and knowing that you’ve done it exactly right.

We know that you’ve gone through this.

We know that whether you’re a professional writer or an amateur, whether it was for school or for yourself,

You’ve had these moments where you’ve wondered why you were doing what you’re doing.

Could you finish it?

Should you do more of it?

We’d like to hear your stories.

How did you finish what you were working on?

Did the novel happen?

Was the article taken to press?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Gail from Mattapoisette, Massachusetts.

Hi, Gail.

Hey, what’s up?

Mattapoisette?

Mattapoisette.

Okay.

It’s a Wampanoag term, means place of rest.

Okay.

Learn something new every day, just like today.

What’s on your mind, Gail?

I have a friend who, he posts pictures of his breakfast on Facebook.

Not every breakfast, but, you know, spectacular, you know, interesting breakfast.

So one day he posted a picture of, it was some bread that had a hole cut in it and an egg fried in the bread.

And he said, this morning I had gas house eggs.

And I posted a comment saying, no, that’s toad in the hole.

And his wife posted back saying, no, toad in the hole is sausages and Yorkshire pudding.

And another friend of mine from up here in New England said, no, we call it toad in the hole.

So it went on to the website Chowhound.

The friends that post on Facebook are from Philadelphia.

And so we got this list of what it’s called in Chowhound.

So we were wondering, I said, it’s gone beyond culinary

And into the realm of vocabulary.

So I said, I’ve got to ask the way of the words, guys,

Because, you know, toe in the hole can mean both things,

But we’re wondering where, why.

This is a great question.

It happens a lot with food.

It sure does.

Food and flowers, you know, the same name can apply to two very different kinds of things.

Yeah, the common names for animals and plants tend to vary from place to place,

Even for the exact same species, and food is the same way.

And actually, there are at least a dozen terms for this dish.

I wrote a bunch down that she got from the Chowhound website.

So we’ve got eggs in a hole, egg toast, eggs in a basket, eggs in a frame,

Which came from, someone said it came from the Betty Crocker Kids Cookbook.

Gast house eggs, spelled the German way, so must mean guest house eggs.

Hole in one, and one that I would have used if I’d known about it, One-Eyed Pete.

Oh, nice.

That’s interesting about One-Eyed Pete, because when I grew up, it was pirate’s eye.

Oh, interesting.

I didn’t know it.

I learned it from some book I read when I was a child.

But since then, I’ve learned bullseye eggs and spit in the ocean.

Ew.

And many of the ones that you just listed off.

So appetizing.

Yeah, living near the ocean here, when I do, I can see how that would get that term.

But the toad in the hole thing is really interesting.

Yes, there is a dish called toad in the hole, which is bread wrapped around a sausage, right?

With the sausage poking out both ends.

Or sausages cooked in Yorkshire places.

Exactly.

Right.

That’s a thing.

But toad in the hole is also the name of the same dish.

And there’s no reason that the same name can’t apply to both dishes.

In my mind, I’m trying to imagine the kind of restaurant menu that would have them both.

And there would be confusion.

I can’t think of anywhere where there would be true confusion.

We could fake confusion.

We could pretend confusion.

But real confusion, I just can’t imagine it.

Oh, I know.

I know.

Well, Gail, as you know, as an avid listener to the show,

We love it when language and food come together.

So thanks so much for that.

Oh, good.

Yeah, so it can mean both.

And the gas house eggs is the most popular term.

And I have to report back to these people, too.

If anybody gets their knickers in a twist over it being one term

Applying to two different dishes, you should just tell them to have seconds, and they’ll

Feel better.

Yeah, okay.

Thanks, Gail.

All right, thanks, guys.

Thanks, Gail.

Bye-bye.

Gas house eggs.

Super easy.

We didn’t give how you make them.

You take a piece of bread.

You tear a hole out of the middle.

Some people butter both sides of the piece of bread.

You put it in the hot skillet.

You crack an egg right in the hole.

You let it fry for 30 to 60 seconds.

Turn it over.

Fry the other side.

Serve it.

Super fast.

Some people will take the piece of bread that they cut out of the hole and put it on top of the egg before they flip it.

Like a little hat.

Really? Okay.

That should inspire an even fancier name, wouldn’t you think?

So Topham Hat Eggs? I don’t know.

Yeah.

What do you call them?

Call us, 877-929-9673, or send your language stories, any language story, to us in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

Hi.

Jim Sobeck.

Hi, Jim.

Where are you calling from?

McCordsville, Indiana, just outside of Indianapolis.

Well, how can we help you?

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I were watching television, and some event had happened,

And I really don’t remember which one it was, but one of the air personalities made the comment,

I guess their party is going to have a heyday with that.

And my initial response was, yes, they will.

And then I thought, how would I know that?

Because I don’t really know the origin of the term heyday.

Oh, that’s very interesting.

But I said to myself, I think I know who does, so I’m going to get in touch with the way with words.

And how are you spelling Hay Day?

Well, initially, I was spelling it in my mind, H-E-Y space D-A-Y.

But it’s occurred to me since then that the origins may speak to H-A-Y,

And perhaps it’s a farm reference from years and years ago.

Like making hay while the sun shines?

Very much like that, but I never really thought to figure out what the term heyday is.

It’s part of my vocabulary.

It is H-E-Y, so you had it right the first time out, H-E-Y-D-A-Y,

And it’s usually these days spelled as a single word rather than as an open compound.

And it’s got an interesting and kind of opaque history.

It comes up in the 1500s as an exclamation or interjection of surprise or celebration or joy.

And the first citation in the Oxford English Dictionary, I just love it to death.

Ruddy bully, jolly rudder can heyday.

For baby buggy bumpers what?

It’s a series of nonsense, and heyday is part of that nonsense.

And as you read the citations and you look in the historical record, just old published books,

You begin to see that it’s the kind of thing that we might throw out, like, you know, wowza, you know, or woo-woo, or woo-hoo.

Yeah, it’s kind of like that.

It’s when something goes well for you.

And then by the late 1500s, it starts to be used as a noun or even an adjective.

So it’s talking about the moment or the place of celebration, the state of being excited.

So you are in your heyday.

You are excited at the moment.

So it goes from being an interjection to a noun.

And then it starts to move on.

And by the 1700s, it’s fairly well established.

Also, heyday is a term for the best possible time of something.

So the heyday of newspapers was the 1930s,

Or the heyday of public radio was the 2010s, or what have you like that.

And so we’ve got this slow change over time across centuries as it moves on.

And what strikes me about it, there’s a note here,

And most dictionaries say that it might be related to a German term,

Hey there, which is kind of a greeting.

But what really strikes me, with the limited amount of Swedish I know,

That there’s a word for goodbye, which is something like heyda in Swedish,

And you find very similar interjections in all of the Germanic languages.

They don’t always have the same role, so I’m wondering,

And cannot confirm if there’s a root there,

Where all these different languages all come from the same kind of one expression

That slowly is morphed.

So in Swedish it means goodbye, and in German it means hey there,

And in English it means like woohoo.

And none of it refers to any particular event.

No, no, there’s no one person, there’s no one place, there’s no one time.

There’s not even like really a popularizer, which I love about that kind of language.

The language that lurks there and comes out of daily usage

And doesn’t have to be chronicled as an event or a phenomenon

Is to me the most genuine language.

It exists because it needs to exist.

It exists because there is a use for it, not because it’s cute or funny

Or because some famous person is pushing it along.

Well, my best bet was going to be that it was an agricultural term, but clearly that’s not it.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

I will have to look up the old English dictionary reference that you called out because I’m not sure I could spell that or repeat it either.

We’ll put it on the website, all right?

Yes, sir. Thank you very much.

All right. Thanks for calling, Jim.

Bye-bye.

You’re welcome. Goodbye.

Take care.

Bye.

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

You know when you’re editing and you think you’re done and you have somebody else look at it one more time?

Oh, yeah.

And they find that you have like double thes in a row?

Yes.

You know what that’s called when you make that mistake?

Something I really hate.

It’s an I skip error.

It’s an I skip error?

Your I skipped over the double the.

It just passed right by it.

Oh.

This is a term for your pain.

Here it is.

It’s an I skip error.

An I skip error.

So they don’t call it a saccade.

Well, you could.

S-A-C-C-A-D-E.

That’s also a term for…

That’s too highfalism.

Yeah, I guess so.

Too sadiddy.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Clark Moss calling from Spokane, Washington.

Hiya, Clark.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’m curious.

Work in the ticketing industry, and we have one phrase in particular that is used for almost

Every event, and that’s deadwood.

And what that means is tickets that are printed, let’s say, for use at the door,

To sell at the door, let’s say they print 100 tickets and 75 of those are sold,

Then you have 25 deadwood left over that you would subtract from that to know what your total is.

And I’m wondering, there’s another phrase for comp tickets, complimentary tickets,

Tickets that you might win over a radio station giveaway or something.

It used to be called Annie Oakley’s.

And from what I understand, that has to do with how Annie Oakley would do her tours.

And she’d come to town, and she’d ask people to hold up a card, a playing card,

And she’d shoot it out of their hand.

So the playing card would have a hole in it,

And she would tell them to bring that card to the show for free admission.

Real showwoman there.

She literally punched their ticket.

So my question, I guess, is with Deadwood, I’m wondering if that comes from that same era or if there’s another meeting altogether.

Good question. Very good question.

It’s probably a coincidence that Annie Oakley has a term named for her and Deadwood appears as well.

These are both from like the settling the West gunfighter era, at least in my imagination, right?

But Annie Oakley is a legitimate etymology, right?

Yeah, she is. She lived from around 1830 to the 1890s, something like that.

The term deadwood has been used in a variety of industries and contexts since the early 1800s to refer to something that is unused or unneeded or is just holding a place.

For example, in typography, when you are setting type, they would put in wooden little placeholders where other characters were going to go later.

Say you were going to put a drop cap in later, you would put in a piece of wood in this big metal frame to hold the place, and that was called dead wood.

Like a blank scrabble tile.

Yeah, something like that.

And you’d also have dead wood when you’re clearing brush, or in forestry, dead wood is literally dead wood, stuff that’s completely useless and has to be cleared out.

So the earliest use that we know of this particular dead wood, referring to tickets, is from the 1890s.

I find it in a couple of different books, and one of them is really interesting.

It’s not quite the same thing, but it talks about these kind of bar room situations where you buy your drink ticket from one person,

And then you take the ticket to the bar and give it to the bartender, and he pours you a drink.

And what this does is stops the bartender from doing free pours, right?

And Deadwood would be if he took the ticket, instead of dropping it in, like, the register, the lockbox where he was supposed to keep it,

He would just, like, surreptitiously hand it to a friend who could then get another drink.

And so that was known as Deadwood as well.

And then just a few years later, Deadwood, referring to tickets, pops up right away.

And it’s almost always in this concept of we’ve got a 1,000-seat house.

We sold 800.

We gave 100 away.

We’ve got 100 Deadwood.

And it refers to paper because it’s paper made from wood, therefore Deadwood.

Sure, and that’s kind of where I figured it was from was some kind of reference to spoiled trees.

But it has nothing to do with the frontier town in the Badlands.

All right.

It has more to do with a bartender worth knowing.

There we go.

I like that.

Hey, thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bring us your language questions.

You can send them an email to words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

As far back as the 10th century, a clue that C-L-E-W-E was a ball of yarn.

So like if you have a little cat playing on the floor, it’s playing with a little clue.

Okay, put that aside for a moment and go back to ancient Greece.

Now, the Greek hero Theseus was the guy who had to fight the Minotaur.

You remember that?

The Minotaur was this horrible monster who lived in the labyrinth.

Like the head of a bowl or something like that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly.

And he lived inside this maze-like structure, and he would catch people there as they were trying to find their way out.

But in order to slay this beast, what Theseus did very cleverly was to take a ball of yarn with him into the maze.

Right.

And that’s how he found his way in, and then after slaying the beast, found his way out.

And by Chaucer’s time, people were using this word clue for a ball of yarn to metaphorically mean something that will lead you to a solution.

And the spelling later got standardized as C-L-U-E.

Isn’t that cool?

What a great origin story.

That’s wonderful.

Love it.

Who knew that language could be so interesting?

We did!

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Email words@waywordradio.org and find us on social media.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

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I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Neither, neither.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

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