Like Death Eating a Cracker

Even though you’re listening to this on podcast and not on the air, you can still call our toll-free number 877-929-9673.

And you can still send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

And you can still find us online at waywordradio.org.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Recently, I was having dinner with a friend when she looked up and she said, oh, my gosh, it’s Bob O’Clock.

And, you know, it only took me a second before I understood what she was talking about.

On a digital clock, like a clock radio by your bed, those boxy numerals, they look like Bob if it’s 808.

Oh, I see.

It’s not time for Bob to arrive or anything like that.

Well, I suppose that’s a secondary meaning.

You know, there’s a bunch more of those.

Well, yeah.

As soon as I got home, I Googled Bob O’Clock.

Of course, you know me.

I ran home and Googled, and sure enough, there’s already a Facebook group called, oh, my God, it’s Bob O’Clock.

No, I mean more words that you can spell on the clock and then add a clock at the end of it.

Yeah.

Like, hello clock.

Hello clock.

It’s 1134.

Oh, wow.

You turn 1134 upside down, it looks like hell, so it’s hello clock.

And lol o’clock, lol o’clock is 707.

Oh, man.

Yeah.

I hadn’t thought about that.

But you’re right.

I mean, I did start thinking about the way that those digits could start changing the way we talk a little bit.

I mean, you could say she was supposed to be here at boo o’clock, but she’s not here yet.

Maybe she’ll get here at big o’clock, you know, 8 o’clock and 819.

Grant, I don’t know.

I mean, you’re probably skeptical, but I think this has legs.

No, no, no.

I think it’s fun.

I love this kind of playing with language.

Yeah, pi o’clock, for example, is 314.

Pi o’clock?

Pi.

3.1415926.

Pi.

The value of pi.

At 3.14, it’s 5 o’clock.

It’s time to eat pie, maybe.

I don’t know.

Oh, okay.

There’s a bunch of these.

Lego clock.

Leg?

Lego clock?

Yeah, the entry on Urban Dictionary says it’s the time your alarm goes off again when you hit the snooze at 6.30.

So it goes off again at 6.37, which you’ve probably thrown your clock across the room.

It’s upside down, and so the 6.37 looks like L-E-G.

Wordplay, number play, is fun.

It’s good stuff.

You get those words and those numbers together, and things happen.

And if you get your words and your numbers together and you want to share them with us, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Send them an email to words@waywordradio.org and look for us on Facebook.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Barbara from Dallas.

Hello, Barbara. Welcome.

Hi, Barbara.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Well, I have a question regarding a word for an iPhone gesture.

An iPhone gesture? You mean like gimme, gimme, gimme?

Well, there’s a specific gesture that you need to enlarge an image on an iPhone, and I wondered if anybody had come up with a good word for that.

Do you have one?

I have an iPhone, and because I’m older, it’s hard to see the image sometimes or to read the word, so it needs to be enlarged.

And the way you do it is you put your tips of two fingers together, put them on the screen, and then slide them apart while you’re still in contact with the screen, and then the image will enlarge.

So it’s kind of like a pinch, but it’s the opposite of a pinch.

Well, what do you call it?

Well, I call it un-pinching, but I was hoping that there was a more elegant word for it.

Un-pinching, though. That’s nice.

Un-pinching. This is very Germanic.

Barbara, you just came up with that on your own?

I did. I haven’t researched it, but I thought somebody must have come up with a more snappy word for it.

Un-pinching is good, though.

I think it’s a good choice.

You said that it doesn’t sound elegant, but I don’t mind it so much.

It’s straightforward.

It doesn’t mean anything else.

That’s true.

That’s true.

And, you know, there are different words.

Like, you could say spread your fingers, but that implies a different motion to me.

Yeah.

Yeah.

What about flick or foop?

Well, flick is a different thing, because you can flick things back and forth on the interface.

Oh, I guess that’s true.

That’s right.

Yeah, I’m a Blackberry girl, so I wouldn’t know.

Oh, yeah?

How’s that stone tablet working out for you?

Cuneiform is alive and well?

Barbara, it turns out that a lot of people use unpinched for that same gesture that you’re talking about, where you take the two fingers and you spread them apart, and then the image that you’re looking at or the text that you’re looking at grows larger.

And it’s got some history behind it.

The multi-touch interface, which is what that’s called, where you have more than one finger on the touch screen, goes back decades.

And so this is a gesture and a movement that’s been very familiar.

And if you look in the brochures and if you look in the scientific papers even for this gesture, most people call it things like zoom out or unzoom.

And a few people, including Apple on their website, when they talk about the iPhone and the iTouch and the iPad, they call it unpinch in a few places.

But for the most part, most of the technical documentation and most of the users call it zoom out, which is less interesting really as a word.

I think I like unpinch better.

I do too.

Well, zoom out isn’t as descriptive of the gesture itself.

Yeah, and the problem with zoom out is that you can zoom out just by hitting the negative magnifying glass on some interfaces, on some machines.

Yeah.

So, Barbara, go forth and unpinch freely.

Okay.

Thank you so much for your help.

I appreciate it.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call about your questions.

Technical language, everyday language, something that Grandma said or your son said.

Three-year-olds are really funny.

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

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Michael Gorn calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Michael.

Hello, Michael.

So I have a question regarding a word I’ve been using for maybe 20, 25 years that I’m just now realizing may not, in fact, be a word.

But the word is, and I’m not quite sure how to spell it, but I pronounce it quicksybar.

Quicksybar.

Quixibar. Do you buy that in a health food store or what?

I haven’t seen one yet, but I’m still looking.

How do you use it?

So if something’s confusing, befuddling, unexpected, and someone says, oh, this happened, I would reply with, well, that’s a Quixibar.

And hence the puzzling look. And then happens the puzzling look.

So it’s one of those words that kind of means what it is.

I guess so, yes.

Well, you know, I assume for the longest time I picked it up from family.

But, you know, I recently asked uncles, grandfathers, parents, etc.

And they all had no clue what I was talking about.

Oh, really?

I looked in, like, Yiddish dictionaries.

Obviously, without knowing how to spell it, it was kind of a wasted endeavor.

So I tried that because my grandfather speaks Yiddish.

But nothing.

And where’s your grandfather from?

From Philadelphia, but the family background is kind of a European-Russian-Polish mix.

This is quite a puzzle.

It’s a quick-see bar, even.

It’s a quick-see bar.

I’ve never heard of it, Michael.

I really don’t even know anything about this.

The spelling thing is a bit of a difficulty, but I’ve done a little bit of digging on this, and there’s nothing here.

We’ve had some communication with Michael Wex, who is an expert in Yiddish, about this.

And Michael suggested that it might be related to quicksilver.

Quicksilver in German is something like quicksilver.

And it’s used kind of in German to mean if you have quicksilver in your body that you have ants in your pants.

And it’s your fidgety or restless.

And I’m not saying that that is definitely the word that you’re talking about.

But it’s the closest thing that we could think of.

There’s some discrepancy there.

Those meanings don’t really match.

But the phonetic similarity is there.

It’s a kind of superficial one.

Well, for what it’s worth, possibly German Quicksilver, I don’t know. okay

If you’ve been using this word for 20 years, my question for you is, have other people picked it up?

Have you been able to get other people to use it?

Only once I realized it might not be a word, and then I started using it more.

And I’ve started to convert some people, I think.

I’ve been hearing it a little bit more, and I think my plan now is to try and make it a word.

I think it has potential.

Quicksie bar.

I mean, this is a complete and total quicksie bar.

It’s kind of fun to say.

It’s fun.

Sounds like a quicksy bar.

Yeah.

Kind of why I think it’s stuck around for a little bit, but I don’t know.

So quicksy bar is something that confuses you or befuddles you.

Yeah.

Okay.

Very good.

Very good.

Well, there’s been a total quicksy bar.

It has been a quicksy bar, but the cool thing about this is that we can put the word out and see if anyone else has heard this word.

That’s right.

Right?

Crowdsourcing.

Crowdsourcing.

We’re going to source the crowd.

We’re going to find the crowd.

Crowd.

Listen, crowd.

The word is quicksy bar.

Have you heard this?

If you have, drop us a line at words@waywordradio.org or give us a call at 1-877-929-9673.

Let us know where you heard it, how long you’ve been using it, and what you think it means.

Hey, thanks, Michael.

Well, thank you very much.

This was fantastic.

Have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Fran Sherpa, and I’m from Midland, Texas.

Well, hello, Fran. Welcome to the program.

Well, thank you.

The other day I was emailing a friend of mine from Nepal.

He’s idiomatic in English.

He’s a doctor and well-educated.

But I used the phrase, I was just writing, and I went, well, fat chance, like as would translate nowadays as if like that’s really going to happen.

Mm—

And I was thinking, you know, I wonder if he’s going to understand that, even if he is idiomatic.

I wonder if he’ll understand it.

And then I started thinking, I wonder how many Americans still would understand that or use that.

So I just kind of was wondering where it came from and if it’s still in use.

Yeah, Fat Chance has been around for, gosh, since what, the 19th century?

I still use it too.

Don’t you, Grant?

Oh, yeah, sure.

It’s definitely something you say when somebody says something that really is just pie in the sky.

People are like, I’m going to get that big job and I’m going to win.

And you’re like, fat chance.

So, wow.

So it’s not just from the 70s.

Oh, no.

No, I’m a child of the 70s, so maybe that has something to do with it.

But no, no, it’s still around.

You’ll find it in literature and newspaper articles and blog postings and pretty much every kind of text that’s out there today, except maybe news transcripts.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s just one of those sort of verbal jokes, sort of like young folks today saying, that’s sick, meaning that’s really good.

Right.

What’s really interesting, do you ever say a fat lot?

Like, I know a fat lot about that, meaning I don’t know anything about that?

You know, very occasionally.

It’s the same fat in that. Fat chance and fat lot.

It’s the same fat where it’s the reverse of what you think.

I found a use of fat lot from 1844, and it’s in the lexicon of language from St. Gregory’s College.

It might be made up.

I don’t know.

It looks like it might be a little satirical.

But in any case, this is in the UK.

And they describe it this way.

I think it’s perfect.

This adjective fat denotes privation or negation, meaning and includes the idea of contempt.

So it’s this whole idea that it’s not just that you’re saying the opposite, but you’re also saying with a little bit of a knife in the gut, right?

Just a little bit of a twist there.

Yes, I have heard British friends say fat lot a lot.

Oh, really? I’ve never seen it.

I wonder if that’s more British than it is American.

I’m betting it is.

I think it very well be.

And I see here in one of the dictionaries that in New Zealand they might say a fat show.

A fat show?

I haven’t heard that one yet.

Yeah, me neither.

Is our show a fat show?

Is the way of words a fat show?

Fat, yeah, yeah.

Fat-headed.

No comment? Is that what you said, Fran?

What?

So, yeah, fat chance, still widely used, very interesting term in terms that it’s got so much more history.

It sounds contemporary, and yet it goes back to at least the mid-1800s.

It’s cool.

Well, Fran, it’s been great talking with you.

Yes, it’s been very interesting talking with you guys, informative.

I appreciate it very much.

We aim to be.

All right, have fun.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

If a word has you puzzled, give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for a word puzzle that’s next on A Way with Words.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, Greg Pliska.

Greg, howdy doody.

Howdy doody.

It’s howdy doody time.

Nice freckles.

What’s going on?

Where’s Bob Smith?

Well, what did you bring us this week, Greg?

Well, in addition to all the music I’ve been doing, I’ve also been playing around this week with heteronyms, which are words that are spelled the same as each other but differ in their pronunciation and their meaning, like moped and moped, for example.

So what I’ve done here is put pairs of them together to form one unusual, fanciful phrase.

For example, I might give you the definition, a bean from Peru.

Lima, Lima?

Lima, Lima.

A Lima, Lima or a Lima, Lima would be the right way to put it, right?

Lima, the capital, and Lima, the bean.

So here we go.

There’s not a lot of trickery here.

I just wanted to make sure that everybody was content with the content.

Okay.

All right.

Here’s your first one.

The fish with the lowest voice.

Bass, bass.

Or the bass bass, actually, as opposed to the tenor bass.

Sorry, some Spanish kicking in.

You know, those post-positive edges.

All right.

Here’s another one.

The food spread at Berkshire Hathaway’s annual meeting.

Oh, the Buffett Buffet.

Oh.

The Buffett Buffet.

Right.

Warren Buffett.

Well, Grant’s got his Berkshire Hathaway stuff, right?

No.

If only Dad had bought one in 1967.

Here’s another one for you.

An apartment house for many families of chickens.

Coop co-op.

That’s right.

Yes.

Or a co-op coop.

Exactly.

I’m sorry.

Or a co-op coop.

That can work either way, I think.

As long as you pay your maintenance, you can stay there.

The person who displays bathroom fixtures.

The…

The shower shower.

Oh, good.

The shower shower.

That’s good.

Exactly.

When you go to buy a new, you know, appliances, you got to visit the shower shower.

Too many teenagers at the 12 and under party.

Underage, no.

The opposite of that.

Overage, overage.

Oh, very good.

Exactly.

You’ve got an overage overage.

How about to get back to work on your CV?

Resume resume.

Oh, nice.

Resume resume.

Exactly.

It’s like a command.

Grant, resume resume.

Sorry, talk to my computer.

Exactly.

Exactly.

If we could speak to our computers, we could just have them do that for us.

Here’s one.

These are the people you probably hire all the time.

People who sketch underpants.

Drawer drawers.

Oh, good.

Drawers, drawers.

Good.

This next one is one of my favorites because I had never actually discovered this heteronym, and I thought, God, I’d never even seen this one.

This is the casino employee with a worse cough.

A croupier croupier.

Exactly.

Nice.

Croupier croupier.

What you might shed if your pants get ripped.

Tear.

No.

You might shed.

A tear.

A tear tear.

Yeah, a tear tear.

Okay, one more.

One more.

To provide like an acrobat would.

To provide like an acrobat would.

Wow.

Provide?

Provide?

Yeah.

Yeah, like a business has.

Supply?

Yes.

Supply, supply.

Supply, supply.

Supply, supply.

We said contortionist.

We would have been there.

Yes, exactly.

Well, I’m doing a backbend as I talk to you.

Thanks, Greg, for the quiz.

This is a fun one.

Oh, I’m glad.

It’s always good to be with you guys.

And if you’d like to talk about grammar, slang, punctuation, or words and how we use them,

Number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

Oh, sorry.

I was just doing my backbend.

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

And don’t forget, you can stay in touch with us all week through Twitter.

We’re there under the username WayWord.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Chandra, and I’m calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Chandra, how are you doing?

I’m doing very well, thank you. How are you?

All right, what can we do for you?

Well, in San Diego, there’s this really great breakfast place,

And it’s called Hash House A Go-Go.

It’s really great.

They have these huge pancakes,

Bigger than anyone could ever eat by themselves.

But I was just wondering.

You haven’t had breakfast with Grant.

Or my son.

You could try it out.

Oh, it’s pretty good.

But I was just wondering what the A Go-Go part meant,

Because I’ve heard that many times before,

So I hadn’t even really thought about it

Until I started thinking about it.

And I don’t know what it means.

My only guess is maybe it means, like, to go or you can take food with you if you want.

That’s what you come up with.

And what’s the name of that place again?

Hash House a Go-Go?

Hash House, yeah.

Okay, okay.

They’re not on roller skates or anything, are they?

No.

They don’t have people who skate to your car and give you your order?

No, it’s an indoor establishment, and it’s kind of a farm theme, actually.

Yeah.

A farm theme?

Yeah.

They also have another restaurant called Tractor Room, so it’s just kind of going with that theme.

Yeah, a go-go always makes me think of white boots and miniskirts.

Exactly.

That was my other question.

What does it have to do with the boots?

Is there any connection there?

Makes me think of my past.

-oh.

No, we do have an easy answer for you here.

Aha.

In French, a go-go means plenty or galore.

Oh.

And there used to be in France, I don’t know if it’s still there, Grant, in the 50s,

There was a discotheque in Paris called Whiskey-A-Go-Go that, you know, had a lot of whiskey.

So this was a famous joint and the name spread from there?

Yeah. In fact, there’s a Whiskey-A-Go-Go in Los Angeles as well now.

Very, very good.

So that probably influenced the Go-Go Boots too, which I always wanted to have when I was in junior high.

Did you have them growing up, Chandra?

No.

Do you have them now?

I can’t say that I do, unfortunately.

Maybe for Halloween.

I’m looking in the Collins-Wilbert Dictionary here,

And I see that a go-go in French, if we can get a little deeper into it,

Basically means with abandonment or to your discretion.

And it comes from the 1400s when there was a word that kind of meant,

Well, I guess the total usage means you’re using this thing, whatever it is,

Food in this case, you’re piling on it as if it’s

Festival time. You’re like serving

Up major portions of something,

Especially alcohol or especially

Drinks. Yeah, or in your case, hash.

Or hash, yeah.

Well, that makes sense. I like that. And it applies

Because the portions there are

Unbelievable.

Really big, huh? Yeah, so a go-go generally means

With aplomb

Or with gusto or with lots of

With galore.

You know, abundance.

Somebody who believes in the cornucopia of life.

Okay, I like that. Well, thank you very much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Food words are always a good topic with us.

If you’ve got a question about something related to food or restaurants

Or some recipe that you’re going to send us after you make it

And wrap it up in foil and send it nicely to our address,

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Edwin Lacey from Carmel, Indiana.

Great. Well, what can we do for you?

We are looking for the origin of a southern Appalachian phrase that I have heard.

It is said when you see someone who looks like they don’t feel very well,

You say, my goodness, you look like Beth eating a cracker.

Or if they look really bad, you say, you look like Beth eating a cracker walking backwards.

How long have you been hearing this?

Oh, years and years.

People are saying it to you?

Oh, no, no.

No one said it to me in a long time.

Oh, good.

Which is good.

So they’re just talking about like a regular old saltine?

That’s my understanding.

Boy, what a great expression.

I mean, you really do get a visual, don’t you?

You sure do.

But why is death eating a cracker?

I have no idea.

Yeah, so I can understand.

You guys would help with it.

Yeah, somebody looks like death and they look terrible, right?

They look like they’ve been brought back up out of the earth after dying or something, right?

Right.

But I don’t get the cracker.

Is his mouth parched?

Is he particularly dry-lipped or something?

I don’t understand.

Is the cracker, like, making him pucker up weirdly?

Well, yeah, the image I get is that a cracker is kind of dry and tasteless.

And, I mean, it’s not like they say you look like death eating an ice cream cone, you know?

No.

True.

Yeah, I think it has to do with just the dryness and blandness of it.

But Death, Eat, and a Cracker, Walking Backwards, I’ve never heard.

I mean, to me, it sounds like an elaboration, you know, just in the wonderful way that you hear in southern Appalachia when people are elaborating on something.

You know, the expression, you look pale as death, that kind of thing goes back to the 16th century or so.

And I could see where that idea might have been elaborated.

Either death like the image of death, being skeletal with the hood and everything,

Maybe eating a cracker.

That’s what comes to mind when I hear it.

The earliest use I can find of it is in 1962.

Oh, it’s got to be older than that, wouldn’t you think?

I don’t know.

All I’m looking at is the printed record.

Stuff tends to be oral for a long time before it makes it onto the page.

And it’s a book by Davis Grubb.

That’s G-R-U-B-B.

It’s called Voices of Glory.

He was a West Virginia fellow, so not quite Appalachia, but he wrote about a small town called Glory, and it’s a bunch of tales about the people who lived there.

And he used the phrase in the book.

He described somebody exactly like that.

They looked like death eating a cracker.

So I don’t know much about this.

It’s an interesting phrase to share.

I’d be curious to find out if anybody can, you know, trace it back further.

Do you remember from the 1940s?

Is it something that your grandpa used to say or is there some writing?

It seems kind of almost Twain’sian, right?

Like a kind of thing that Mark Twain would say or Bret Hart or somebody from that era.

You know, there’s so many wonderful expressions like that from that area.

My dad was from western North Carolina in the hills.

And when somebody looked really shocked, just pale and stricken, he would say,

He looked like somebody threw a quart of buttermilk in his face.

Have you heard that one?

You have heard that one?

Oh.

Well, I bet you have a whole bunch of those in your repertoire.

Well, we welcome email from our listeners or calls about Death, Eat, and Cracker.

If you know a little more about it or you want to share where you first heard it,

By all means send us an email to words@waywordradio.org

Or give us a call at 1-877-929-9673.

Edwin, thank you so much for calling us about this today.

Thank you. I enjoyed being on the show.

All right.

My pleasure. Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Martha, here’s a riddle.

Okay.

Can you name three consecutive days of the week without using the words Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, or Sunday?

What?

In English?

Yeah, in English.

Three consecutive days of the week.

Le weekend?

That’s not English.

That’s two words.

That’s French.

It’s French English.

I don’t know.

What?

Yesterday, today, and tomorrow.

They have the word day in them?

No, I didn’t say you couldn’t say the word day.

Oh.

You guys said you couldn’t say the days of the week.

Oh, okay.

It’s a riddle.

Riddles are supposed to stump you, right?

It’s a riddle.

It did stump me.

You were successfully stumped.

Send your riddles to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Renata Wilson, and I’m calling from Dallas.

Hello, Renata.

Welcome.

Hi, Renata.

Thank you.

Hi.

What’s going on?

Well, something that I thought of recently that I thought was very interesting. In Texas, we always say East Texas, North Texas, South Texas, and West Texas. And we normally use those words with cities, for instance, East L.A. But I started thinking about all the other states, and I can’t think of too many other states that do that. They usually say Northern California, Eastern New Mexico. And I thought that was kind of interesting and wondered if there was any, you know, history behind that.

So what’s up with Texas?

Yeah.

I guess we have to be a little bit different in everything.

Well, that’s true.

I wasn’t going to say that, but it’s true. Since you said it, that’s a really good question. You’re right. Northern California, Southern California. I think of South Florida. South Florida, that’s the only other one that I could think of.

Yeah, but you would say something like Western Massachusetts or Eastern Massachusetts.

Interesting.

Boy.

Well, let me ask you a question, Renata. Do you think that there’s something more specific if I call a place West Texas versus Western Texas? Does West Texas sound like it has borders or that it’s more formalized?

Well, we do have specific areas. You know, like when they do the weather, they have certain regions, certain counties that fit into West Texas, North Texas, so on and so forth.

Is there a river? Is there some kind of dividing line, like a river or a highway? And everything west of that is West Texas?

Well, I don’t have a map in front of me. I’m not sure where the dividing line is, but I know we have definite regions that we consider being part of this area or part of that area.

Huh.

But you never hear Western Texas.

No.

You just never say that.

Do you think Western and Eastern are more sort of like West-ish and East-ish? Do you think that’s the difference, you guys?

I mean, I have no idea. I don’t know. But it’s a great question. I mean, I used to live in Louisville, and you would never, ever say I’m going across the Ohio River to South Indiana. You would never call it South Indiana. It’s always Southern. It’s the same in New Mexico. We have northern New Mexico, southern, eastern. And on the weather, it’s the same. They have four different regions, but we don’t call them east, west, north, and south.

Wow.

So what’s up with that?

I think we can look at this.

Yeah, I thought it was interesting. Renata, if there’s some data that we can look at, and I’ve looked at this in the past. Do you know what a gazetteer is? G-A-Z-E-T-E-E-R?

I’ve heard it before.

So this is a list of places. And there’s one that’s put out for the United States and has a list of every place in the United States. Pretty much any place that you can get mail sent to and many places that you can’t, it’s in there. And if you look and you look up like say north or northern or south and southern, you’ll find that almost always, almost always place names that are kind of official, they use north and south and east and west. And then if you look, very few places will use northern. And in the whole world, in the English-speaking world, there aren’t that many. I can think of Northern Territory in Australia being a very well-known exception.

And so I think what’s happening is you guys are right, I think you’re right on the money. Bernadette, Martha, I think you guys are, Northern is descriptive. It just says, I’m going to this place that is northern of wherever I am now, or I’m talking about this place that is northern of wherever I am now. But if I say North, I’m actually talking about a place that has some kind of either actual geopolitical delineation or it is in the minds of all the speakers of the local language. We know that when I say North Texas, I’m talking about a very specific ring of cities or counties or roads. You just know because you’re a native and a local, you know. And it doesn’t require that there be a line on a map in order to make it specific. So if it’s northern or southern, it’s just kind of that-a-way.

Yeah, but, you know, you think of Southern California, and everybody knows exactly which region that’s talking about.

It’s true.

It would never be South Carolina.

Yeah, it’s true. I mean, obviously it’s not a clear-cut thing, but I think there’s something to that. And I’m from Missouri originally, and we would never say South Missouri. Never. Never. It would always be Southern Missouri. And even then, that’s not actually an area. That would be just to indicate that you’re going to the southern part of the state. There are areas without borders, like southeast Missouri and northeast Missouri, are very specific areas in the minds of the locals. And they think of certain towns being in those areas and certain towns not being in those areas. And so a lot of it is whatever is the custom of the locals in terms of describing the area. Language is just filled with directional information because it’s so important for us to know where we are and to be able to tell other people where we are. So we’ve developed these customs that say the northern is probably going to be used in a descriptive way and north is probably going to be used in a way that is a title or an official name or even a quasi-official name of a place.

Right.

Of course, in Texas, you all have your own rules anyway about everything.

Texas is the big exception.

I guess.

Well, thanks for a great question, Renata. We’ll keep musing about this.

Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

If you’ve got a question about places and place names and stuff related to the naming of things, give us a call. 1-877-929-9673. That’s 1-877-WAYWORD. Or send us an email as long as you’d like to words@waywordradio.org.

Stay tuned for more on A Way with Words, the show that connects people through language.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule. Learn more at nu.edu.

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

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A while back, we had a call about the difference between a lexicographer, a linguist, and a wordsmith. And we kind of touched on linguist and wordsmith, but Grant, I don’t really think we gave a good idea about what a lexicographer does all day. And since you’re a lexicographer, maybe you can tell us.

Oh, yeah, sure.

What do you do all day?

Well, a little Twitter, a little Facebook. I go to FARC once in a while, slash dot, Metafilter, all the big.

What?

No, I’m kidding. Well, I’ll tell you what I’m working on right now. I’m working on a business English dictionary for people who speak English as a second language. And this is for Cambridge University Press. It’s a great little project. You can imagine that if you’re coming from another country where you don’t speak English as a first language, you need some help with some of the more arcane jargon, right?

Oh, yeah, sure.

So the team of great lexicographers has gotten together and they’re putting this together.

Like you.

Well, you know, I’m just part of the team. Together the team is great. And so the first thing that we have to do, of course, is to find the list of words that need to be defined. What is the language that’s used out there that somebody might encounter? So you look in all the different aspects of business and finance and real estate and property and law and all the places that this language comes together and you make the list of the words. And then you go to your databases, and I said, you know, newspaper archives and corpora. Do you know what corpora is?

Well, I imagine it’s from the Latin for body.

Yeah, it’s a body of text where you take a lot of text from a wide variety of sources. You kind of balance it out so it’s not too much one kind of text or another. And then you set it up in such a way that you can analyze language within that text and figure out what words go together.

For example, if I was working on the entry for income tax, which I did indeed do, I might want to also do an entry for income tax deduction.

And by looking at the corpus, I can figure out how common the expression is, how people use it.

Is it an American expression or a British expression?

Is there any other kind of interesting stuff?

The verbs are, you know, for verbs, you look, is it transitive?

Is it intransitive?

For nouns, you look, is it a count noun or a mass noun?

All of these different things that a non-native speaker of English would really need to know.

Well, where do you find the corpus?

Is there one website?

Well, there are some corpora out there that are public.

There’s one done at Brigham Young University, which is really great.

But generally, the dictionary publishers make their own.

And so they’re very different from each other.

They might use the same software, but they’ve chosen to balance them in different ways.

Maybe a little more British or a little less technical or a little more Internet.

Or somebody has the economist and somebody else doesn’t.

And in this way, you can really show how language is used naturally.

You’ve probably heard me talk about looking at the databases when we take calls from listeners, right?

A lot of times I’m looking at that kind of corpus.

I’m looking at the corpus that can really inform my instincts.

Because, let’s face it, even though I have native speaker instincts, it’s not enough when you’re doing a dictionary for other people.

You can’t just trust yourself.

You need to look across the body of usage to find out if your instincts are true.

And if they’re not true, then you have to put that down, not just what you think.

It’s not what you think that matters.

It’s what you can prove that matters.

Well, hey, if you want to talk about language, call us 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD.

Or you can email us.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Howdy.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Alex speaking.

I’m from Wellesley College.

Hi, Alex.

How are you doing?

Good.

How are you?

Doing great.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

My friend and I had a very bizarre question.

We were talking about Victorian burial practices a few days ago, and it came up that there was this widespread fear that people would be buried alive.

And in order to sort of counteract that, they would be buried with bells attached to their fingers.

So they could ring the bells to alert people that they were, in fact, very alive.

And my friend Katie seemed to think an expression came out of that practice.

Oh, okay, okay.

So are you reading about this in a class, Victorian burial practices?

No, it’s reading period here at Wellesley, so you end up talking about everything except for academics.

Excellent.

And she’s a film major, so she always has crazy topics that she likes to bring up.

Oh, okay.

Okay, so you guys were reading about this morbid fear in Victorian times that people would be buried before they were really dead, right?

Exactly.

Yeah.

And one of you thinks that a term that we used today came from that, and that term would be?

We don’t know.

I think she’s wrong.

We do.

I could be right that she is wrong and that there is no expression that came out of this practice.

All right, well, put her on the horn.

Let’s hear what she has to say for herself.

Is she there?

Hi, this is Katie.

Hi, Katie.

Hi, Katie. How are you doing?

I’m good. How are you guys?

Doing fine.

So you’ve been reading all about safety coffins and escape coffins in the Victorian era, all those little contraptions that people were making so that they would not be buried before their time.

Or if they were buried before their time, they could be dug back up, right?

Yep, that’s what I do my recreational reading on.

-huh.

Sick. It’s just sick.

So what’s the term that you think came out of that practice of burying bodies with bells attached to their fingers?

Well, I wasn’t sure.

I did a little Googling and came up with graveyard watch.

And then I also got dead ringer and a few others.

Well, here’s what’s really interesting about this.

You’re right about the burial practices and all that.

There were these crazy contraptions.

And there was this morbid fear at the time that people would be prematurely buried.

In fact, I think, did you read about Edgar Allan Poe’s story about this?

Oh, I think so, yeah.

Yeah, I think it was called A Premature Burial.

And so people were coming up with all these kind of Rube Goldberg contraptions, like you said, or like your friend said, putting bells on people’s fingers or having breathing tubes that go all the way up to the surface of the, you know, so that people could either, if you woke up, you could breathe and people could hear you down there.

And you know what? There was an interesting term for this. It’s taphophobia.

Taphophobia.

Taphophobia. T-A-P-H-O-phobia. Taphophobia comes from the Greek word for tomb.

Yeah. And in fact, it’s related to another English word that I’m sure you know.

The stuff that’s written upon a tomb is called your epitaph.

Aha. But get to the dead ringer and all that.

Okay. All right. Here’s where the balloon deflates then. Yeah.

Yeah, the problem is that these stories are so great, but they have nothing to do with those etymologies about dead ringer.

I know some people say, oh, graveyard shift must come from the person who had to sit in the graveyard and listen for the tinkling bells in case somebody woke up and was ringing a little bell attached to their finger by a string.

But the truth is that we have etymologies for graveyard shift and dead ringer.

And what’s the other one? Saved by the Bell. Saved by the Bell comes from prize fighting.

You know, you get knocked down and the bell rings and then you don’t have to fight anymore.

There’s a book by Dave Wilton called Word Myths that has a pretty great, straightforward, easy to understand debunking of these.

Well, I’m a little sad I’m wrong. I have to buy her dinner now.

Oh!

Just one dinner?

Yeah, just one dinner.

Oh, okay.

Oh, that’s not so bad.

Well, can you put Alex back on the line?

Katie, thank you for talking to us.

Keep on reading.

Let us know what else you come up with, all right?

I will.

Thank you.

Thanks so much for answering our question.

Hey, Alex.

It was our pleasure.

Did you hear that?

Did you hear all that, or did you just see the look on Katie’s face?

I did see the look on her face, and I recognize it because she’s been wrong before.

All right, then.

Well, you guys are right about the whole weird cult of premature burial, but you’re also right that none of those expressions came from those practices.

So, Alex, what are you going to have her buy you for dinner?

I don’t know.

I also want her now, I think, to take care of my funeral arrangements, not just this.

There’s an idea.

Yeah.

Let’s see what we can do.

All right.

Well, thanks for calling, Alex.

Thank you so much.

Have a great day.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bring us your language disputes. We’ve got an answer, at least one, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And don’t forget, you can find us on Twitter at twitter.com slash Wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John from Georgia.

Hello, John, how are you doing?

I am doing well. How about yourself?

Great. Where are you in Georgia?

I’m in Beaufort, Georgia. It’s about 40 miles north of Atlanta.

Cool, cool, welcome.

Welcome. What can we do for you?

Well, I’m calling because I had a friend who, or I have a friend, who at one time told me that his name, which was Brown, ends with an E.

And he says you will find a lot of people with heritage that are slavery heritage that have an E at the end of their name.

And I hadn’t really thought about that until I met a guy with the last name of Green with an E at the end.

And then when I first found A Way with Words, I started looking at who you guys were and everything, and I saw Martha Barnette.

And I thought, well, that’s pretty neat.

Except she puts an E at the end of her name, and my mother, her maiden name is Barnette without the E at the end.

So we’re probably, well, we could be related.

Could be.

They’re all from Kokomo, Indiana area.

Okay. All right.

My family’s from Virginia and North Carolina.

Well, the Barnetts were from North Carolina.

Barnetts are from all up and down the East Coast, from what I gather.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And a lot moved to Indiana, actually.

So we’re probably, you know, like Big Chaney and Obama.

We’re probably cousins.

That’s something to think about.

John, let me ask you, what’s the story?

Did he explain more about the E on the last name and why he thinks it means that somebody comes from slave heritage?

We’re talking about somebody who was the descendant of slaves rather than the descendant of somebody who owned slaves, right?

Yeah, I gather.

No, he never really went in, and I never really checked him on it.

And we never discussed it a whole lot after that.

But he’s from the Caribbean islands himself.

-huh.

Mm—

And so if I’ve got the story wrong, maybe he said people from the Caribbean Islands area, and I just messed it up somewhere along the line.

But I thought he had said these were basically slave owners who would take the name and then change it, or somebody would change it for them.

Oh, really?

Like green or brown.

Oh, so this person was suggesting that adding the E sort of meant property of or something?

I don’t know. Maybe.

No, I’ve never ever heard anything like that.

I think that these variable spellings are just a result of English being so variable and names sort of forming before they were standardized by print and that kind of thing, especially in isolated areas.

I can tell you about the Barnetts.

The reason that I was saying that we might be related is that originally my family did go by the name Barnette without an E.

When they moved from the hills, they were hillbillies a generation or two ago, but when they moved from the hills to the big, teeming metropolis of Taylorsville, North Carolina, my Aunt Maisel decided that it would be really cool to add an E to the end because it looked French.

That’s really true.

And so your Aunt Maisel must have been a woman of influence, and she got the whole family to do it.

Yeah, well, I don’t think anybody cared.

I don’t know how many people were writing at that point, really.

Oh, I see. Okay.

I mean, I had an uncle who lived in a cave and made moonshine.

Seriously.

But so I’m just saying that names have been really variable throughout history.

I mean, you see Shakespeare’s name spelled a whole lot of ways in his day.

Even by him.

Pardon me?

Even by him.

I think so.

I think so.

So I’ve never, ever heard of it being connected with slavery at all.

John, did that help?

It did.

You know, now at least I’m going to check him on it next time I talk to him.

Oh, yeah.

And forward along whatever he has to say, because it’s a really interesting question.

If it turns out that it is supposedly a special clue with names, then that’s new information to us.

Yeah, and if you meet any rich relatives, don’t forget that we’re probably related.

In fact, I would love to be related to the Barnette Bank there in Florida, but alas.

Oh, no.

Absolutely.

John, thank you for calling today.

Thank you very much.

I appreciate your help.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Pleasure.

Of course.

Bye-bye.

Say hi to the family.

Bye.

Okay.

Do you want to call about onomastics?

That’s nothing naughty. It just means names.

You can call about onomastics or anything else, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Carmen Areola from Carlsbad.

Hi, Carmen. Welcome.

Hi, Carmen. How are you doing?

Good.

What’s up?

Well, I’m a physician, and my husband is not.

And I think in the last 22 years of marriage, I’ve used this word two or three times, and when I use it, I understand it to be one thing, and it’s full of all kinds of connotations.

And the word is turf, and it’s referring to patients.

So I say, you know, I had a certain patient who I found problematic, and I turfed them to a specialist.

I was a family practitioner, now I’m in occupational medicine.

And so when I transfer patients, I usually use the word transfer.

But if I use the word turf, my physician friends all know what I’m talking about.

My husband doesn’t.

And the connotation is usually that I’m removing a problem patient and that the receiving physician is in a worse position than me.

You’re getting rid of your bad clients?

Right.

And so anyway, my husband was saying, well, what’s the source of the word?

And the thing that I had come up with, and I didn’t know if it had anything to do with it, was like kind of military 19th century where people were being turfed off of ships.

You know, like the colonel will turf him onto the turf, you know, throw him out onto the turf.

That’s it. That’s exactly it, Doctor.

It’s exactly that.

And it’s not just from the military or naval usage.

Everyday language as well, you can turf somebody out of a pub, for example.

It definitely comes from the UK.

1880s is about as earliest as we can find it.

It’s probably earlier.

And it is literally to toss somebody with prejudice out of the place and onto the ground.

Like kick them to the curb, sort of.

Yeah, kick them to the curb, exactly.

It became figurative really fast.

And it’s just a way of demonstrating, as you said, that you’ve got some kind of problem with this person and they need to get out of the place.

You need them to get out of the place, right?

With a patient, I can see how they were uncooperative or disruptive or causing disturbance in the waiting room or that sort of thing.

So you’ve got to turf them out.

Or, you know, sometimes it’s a personality conflict, right?

Right.

I just, I was kind of shocked that that was actually what I was saying when I was using the word.

Main language, great.

Because I didn’t think of, you know, because I see some of the most polite, you know, little doctors who use the word.

And I think that we’d all be shocked if we knew that that’s what we were actually saying.

Oh, that’s really interesting.

If that’s where the word came from.

But you can rest easy.

There’s no problem with this, really.

The history of the word isn’t something that you have to hang on to.

It doesn’t necessarily have to guide the connotations and the subtext of where you’re putting it to work, right?

If you’ve somehow ameliorated the word, as they say, that is, made it a little less negative in your own usage, that’s fine, too.

And I noticed that you kept saying it without out.

Historically and traditionally, the expression is turf out, and you were talking about just turfing somebody.

And that shows another kind of transformation.

So you transformed the form of the expression as well as the connotations of the expression,

And that’s perfectly natural and okay.

So you’re not saying anything bad if you’re using it,

Although the subtext is definitely necessary there, right?

Right.

So, Carmen, feel free to go ahead and use TERF.

Okay.

I will not use TERF out.

No.

I mean, you could, but you could.

But TERF is totally cool, and thank you for sharing that word with us.

It’s pretty interesting to get inside the language of a profession

And find out what they say and why they say it.

Thank you.

Thanks for calling, Doctor.

Bye-bye.

Well, we love hearing about your language from your profession, your career, your workplace,

Those disputes that you have with your boss.

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

That’s our show for this week.

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

That number’s 1-877-929-9673.

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

And you can stay in touch with us all week on Twitter.

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Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

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

From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from San Francisco, I’m Grant Barrett.

Thanks to Ceil Muller for engineering our show from the studios of KQED Radio.

Adios.

Love ya.

Neither, either, 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.

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Learn more at nu.edu.

Hi, it’s Martha.

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