Deep-Fried Air (episode #1589)

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. On our Facebook group, Arlene Westhoven wrote,

After certain gatherings, my family sometimes said, I haven’t had so much fun since the horse kicked father.

Poor dad.

Yeah, and that reminded me of the one that I heard growing up, which was,

I haven’t had so much fun since the hogs ate my little brother up.

No. They would, too. Hawks can be mean.

Yeah, you know that from experience, right?

Absolutely.

A lot of people chimed in with their own versions that they’d heard.

Ken Jones said that his family said,

I haven’t had so much fun since the barn burnt down.

And Sarah Bradley said, I haven’t laughed so hard since Maggie fell out of the hearse.

And these are all usually said when you didn’t really think it was funny?

You know, maybe it’s sarcastic.

Maybe it’s ironic.

Or both.

It’s sometimes genuinely sad and sometimes sarcastically sad.

Well, we haven’t had so much fun since the last time you called us,

So pick up the phone, 877-929-9673.

That’s toll-free in the U.S. and Canada.

Everyone else can talk to us on Twitter @wayword

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Dexter Strong calling from Huntsville, Alabama.

Hi, Dexter. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

So we got married. I got married about a year and a half ago.

And my wife is from the Midwest. She’s from Minnesota.

And she calls our conversations a rhetorical adventure because they are littered with southern idioms and phrases that she just never heard.

And I sprinkle in southern vernacular and black vernacular into all our conversations, like indiscriminately.

And she just has never heard many of the phrases that I use.

And once, this was early when we were dating, she sneezed.

And instinctively, I said, scat cat.

And she looked at me with this puzzled face.

She said, what did you just say to me?

I said, little scat cat.

And it’s a phrase that I’d always grown up with.

My mom, ever since I was young, each time I sneezed, she said scat cat more frequently than she said, bless you.

And I’m wondering where that phrase comes from.

-huh.

And did you both grow up in Alabama then?

My mom grew up in Shelbyville, Tennessee, which is about 70 to 80 miles northeast of Huntsville, which is kind of like the Tennessee Valley right on the border.

Outside of my mom, I have never heard anybody else say that.

My dad didn’t say it growing up, but my mom always said that.

I’m wondering where that phrase comes from.

Well, Dexter, this makes a lot of sense to us because it’s pretty much across the southern United States,

And there are lots of different versions of it, and you just say scat cat, right?

Yep, scat cat.

Yep.

But there are lots and lots of different versions of this.

There’s scat cat, your tail’s on fire.

Scat there, your son bit your tail off.

Scat tom, your tail is on fire.

Scat cat, get your tail out of the gravy.

And scat cat, get your tail out of the butter.

There are a whole lot of variations of this, different elaborations of this expression.

We’re not really sure where it comes from, although it might have to do with that old superstition that a sneeze is some kind of evil spirit leaving your body, you know?

And you just want that thing to get out of there.

Wow.

Are all of those phrases different responses to sneezes that you just enumerated, all of those?

Yeah.

That is interesting.

I always assumed that it had something to do with cats being, I don’t know, something that people were allergic to.

Well, that’s another possibility for sure.

I never thought that my mom was kind of symbolically warding off an evil spirit every time I sneezed.

No.

But now I’m thankful for it.

Yeah, maybe not, but the expressions lasted so long that whatever it was in the beginning, it may not be that thing now.

So she might have just learned it without any kind of…

Oh, no, my mom’s super superstitious.

Oh, is she?

If it’s linked to some type of cat superstition, I’m almost positive she means it almost. Maybe not literally, but playing her card is safe.

Yeah, so it goes back to at least the late 1800s, although surely it’s older than that. So she’s part of more than a 100-plus year tradition of this particular bit of idiom.

So, Dexter, what does your wife say when somebody sneezes?

Bless you. If she doesn’t say ill, now that we’re in the age of COVID.

And why do we say bless you when people sneeze? It’s the similar reason, right? Because that association with there’s something unnatural happening in the body.

Interesting, yeah.

Yeah, you need blessing in order to make sure that nothing bad happens.

Yeah, same idea with the German word gesundheit, which just means health. Or, you know, in Spanish, salud, you know, you’re wishing somebody well.

But I’m just loving the idea of your rhetorical adventures. You’ll have to let us know.

Oh, yeah. Keep us up to date on those.

Dexter, thanks for calling. We really appreciate it. Thank you for explaining this.

I can’t wait to tell my wife that I’m not as weird as she thinks I am.

Oh, absolutely not. Well, you might be, but not for this.

All righty. Take care.

We’d love to hear about your rhetorical adventures with a partner or friend or co-workers. Give us a call. 877-929-9673.

Recently I’ve read a couple of references to electric eels and that got me wondering how do they work and that led me to stumble into a lovely little volume called the book of eels.

It’s by Patrick Svenson, translated from the Swedish by Agnes Bruma, and it’s a fascinating mix of natural history and metaphysics and metaphor. And it has all these surprising anecdotes about eels.

Like, for example, did you know that when he was 17 years old, Sigmund Freud, as a young medical student, was sent to Italy to dissect 400 eels to try to figure out their reproductive systems? I mean, it’s just kind of amazing stuff.

And there are other are historical figures in there like Rachel Carson and Aristotle. And even the author of The Book of Eels describes it as a very strange and nerdy book. But even so, it won Sweden’s most prestigious literary prize.

So I’m glad I read it, but I was about three quarters of the way through the book when I was wondering, when is he going to talk about electric eels? And it turns out that electric eels are an entirely different animal. They don’t have anything to do with the eel.

Oh.

Electrophorus electricus is not an eel, but a knife fish.

Oh, okay.

A little lesson in how one word might not mean what you think it means, but it was a cool book to read in any case.

Yeah, misnomer. It’s common names versus Latin names. It’s a thing.

What are you reading? What have you learned? Share it with us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

I’m Jen Wassenberg in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Jen. What’s up? What’s on your mind?

Well, I was calling because I was talking to my dad about a, well, I was talking to him and he used a phrase or an idiom that was not on your tintype.

Not on your tintype.

Yeah, and I had no idea what that meant or never heard it before. And so I thought I would call the experts.

How did that conversation go?

Yeah, so I was talking to him, telling him a very overdramatic long story involving a friend. And when I was done, I said, what do you think I should do? And he said, basically, not on your tintype would I begin to offer advice on this.

I felt like was rude, but I didn’t know why. Because I didn’t know what not on your tintype.

So when I asked him, he said, not on your life. So I confirmed, checked, it was rude. But then he didn’t really have any additional clarification or idea of what a tintype was or where that phrase originated or anything like that.

So that’s what I wanted to know.

Yeah, he’s right that not on your tintype is synonymous with not on your life, which means no way, no how.

A tintype, neither one of you knew what a tintype was?

No.

So my best guess was obviously something invaluable if it equates to your life.

But I was thinking printing press for some reason popped into my head.

So many valuable pieces there.

He thought, I think, photography of some sort.

But that was the best that either of us could even get close to.

Yeah, it’s an old photographic method used in the mid-1800s.

It was the kind of thing that you would get taken at tourist sites, maybe fairs or public attractions, because it was relatively instant.

The photos could be processed in just a few minutes.

And because they were made with a backing of iron, not tin usually, they weren’t very fragile.

Not like the glass-based daguerreotypes.

So you could carry them around, get your photo taken, come back a few minutes later, and there was a photo of you.

You know, at the beach or in the fair or whatever.

And it was nice.

Also called ambrotype or melanotype, stanotype, ferotype, a bunch of names for that.

I don’t know why people are betting on their tintype.

I’ve never determined that.

Apparently, they were not that expensive, relatively speaking, but they were precious once you had them because photos were unusual.

So they might be the kind of thing that you would take and maybe give to your sweetie or that you would put in or near the family Bible, that sort of thing.

Okay. All right. So neither valuable nor made of tin.

I mean, precious, sentimentally precious.

You know, the kind of thing that you would appreciate because you and people you love are in the tintype.

Okay.

All right.

That makes a lot more sense.

All right.

Is it a common phrase by any chance or used often anymore at all?

Not really.

I wonder if he picked it up from his reading.

It dates back to at least the 1860s.

It does feel dated.

Yeah, really.

I mean, tintypes had a little bit of a comeback as people do retro photography.

And it still really works very well.

And it’s got such a luscious, deep black look to it, just this clear black.

Yeah, it’s just wonderful to look at.

But, yeah, it’s pretty dated.

Maybe he picked it up from reading historical fiction because it is often used in historical fiction.

Yeah, he is a very, very avid reader.

And he often peppers his speech with just very colorful idioms or quotalisms, quotes and things like that.

And I know he does read a lot of historical fiction as well.

So that would definitely make sense.

Wonderful.

Okay.

Well, Jen, thank you so much for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Absolutely.

Thank you both.

It’s such a pleasure.

All right.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Jen.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

In Dutch, there’s a great expression that means, oh, he’s all talk and no action, or he’s all hat and no cattle.

In Dutch, you say the equivalent of they’re selling fried air.

Hebache lucht. I just love that.

What is it in Dutch?

Hebache lucht. Something like that.

I mean, my Dutch isn’t what it should be.

In fact, it’s practically non-existent.

But, yeah, they’re selling fried air.

Oh, that’s good.

And it’s got the nice correspondence to hot air in English.

Mm—

Mm—

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And here he is with a feather in his cap and a glint in his eye.

Our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

You know, as a puzzle guy, it would be remiss of me to ignore the big thing that’s going on.

Everybody’s into Wordle.

It’s sort of a combination of mastermind as a word game.

You take a guess of a word, and it tells you how many letters you have in the right position and how many are not in the right position and how many you have wrong.

And through process of deduction, you try to deduce the correct word.

You guys have played Wordle, yes?

Oh, yes, definitely.

Oh, good, good.

Now, if you’re lucky when playing Wordle, your penultimate guess is a word with three letters in the correct position and two letters switched.

Easy peasy, right?

Three greens and two yellows.

Sure.

I’ll give you a word.

Two of the letters can switch places to make the goal word, but which letters those are for you to determine.

So here we go.

Just like in the standard game, these are not just strings of letters.

They’re Scrabble legal five-letter words.

All right?

Here we go.

All right.

Now, first off, I’ll hit you right in the midsection with the word waste.

W-A-I-S-T, waste.

Tell me which two letters to switch and what word that makes.

That’s not twist.

Remember, you’re only switching two letters.

Right.

Weights, I see.

That’s it.

Okay, yes.

Well, I hope you’re satisfied.

The word is sated.

S-A-T-E-D, sated.

Tased?

That’s a fine word.

I’m not sure that’s a Scrabble legal word.

I think it might be a capitalized trademark name, but that’s not what I was going for.

I’m not sure either.

Yeah.

But what else can you get from sated?

Sated.

Okay, your colors are yellow, green, green, green, yellow.

Oh, dates.

Dates.

States, yes. Very good. Now, use it to insert a letter. The word is carrot. C-A-R-E-T. Carrot.

C-A-R-E-T.

Cater.

Cater. Yes, exactly. Green, green. Green, green, yellow, green, yellow. Cater. C-A-T-E-R.

Now, careful. It’s explosive. The word is nitro. N-I-T-R-O, nitro.

Intro.

Yes, I should have begun with the intro. That’s very good.

From nitro to intro, switching the N and the I to intro.

Now, go buy yourself a clue.

In Sri Lanka, the word is rupee. R-U-P-E-E.

Puree.

Yes, puree.

Delicious.

Finally, you’ve finally worked your way through this whole thing.

The word is slogs.

S-L-O-G-S, slogs.

Can you do gloss?

Yes, you can do gloss.

That is the perfect answer.

That was the answer I was going for.

Nicely done.

This was like trying to dictate on my phone and all the autocorrect.

Exactly.

Sort of like what you’re saying.

Now we’ve done it.

We’ve done the Wordle thing, and we’ve put it to bed.

Congratulations, you guys.

You were fantastic.

You did it in a very few number of moves.

Nicely done.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next time.

Take care.

Thanks, John.

And we’d love to talk with you about language, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about your experiences with language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

My name is Julia Suttis, and I’m from Jacksonville, Florida.

Hey, Julia. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Julia. What can we do for you?

I’m interested in the expression, ta-da, and how that came about was my husband and I are both at the age where we’re losing words.

And sometimes the words have just gone, and sometimes we know them, but we can’t speak them.

And so he has come up with this expression where he says, ta-da.

And we were with our grandson who just turned three and he is gaining words.

And so when we say something and he doesn’t know what it means, he says, what does that mean?

And he asked me that when Mike said ta-da to him about something, he said, what does grandpa mean?

And I was trying to figure it out.

And I and I have I’ve thought about it for the last couple of months.

And I think what Mike is saying is I have something that I needed to do and I’ve done it successfully.

So like if he’s climbed up the stairs to go see Jesse at Jesse’s house and Jesse opens the door, Mike will say to him, ta-da, like I’ve arrived, you know, or yesterday morning when I was getting him up and he opened his eyes and he said to me, ta-da.

So I think that’s what he means, but I don’t know what that means to other people.

Right. Are there any associations in your mind with performers, professional performers?

Oh, with that word? No, I had never heard it.

And it’s not something that he used to say.

He only has started saying it within the last few months as he’s having more and more trouble saying what he wants to be saying.

So no, I’m not familiar with that expression at all.

Yeah, that kind of aphasia can be frustrating, but it sounds like he’s found a pretty decent solution to his problem for now.

I hope it works out in the end.

Yeah.

Ta-da!

So what it does is it imitates the sound of a musical flourish meant to embellish the big finish of a performance, like the big moment of a reveal in a magical act.

A lot of people associate it with that.

So it’s like it’s supposed to represent a short note and a long note.

So it’s us imitating instruments.

So the instrument would actually perform those two notes, however that would sound.

Yeah.

Oh.

Horns, maybe.

Yeah, I’m thinking of trumpets.

Ta-da!

Or trumpets.

Interestingly, the first thing we know of ta-da in print, spelled T-A-D-A-A with no hyphen, is about a music act where there’s this magician, this conjurer, tells the orchestra that he doesn’t like what they’re doing.

And he says he wants something, you know, he’s disgusted with their performance.

He says, I want a ta-da from you.

And so at the moment that they’re supposed to give him a ta-da, instead of playing their instruments, they all shout out loud, ta-da!

Just to irritate him further, I guess.

That’s so funny.

I can’t imagine where Mike would ever have heard that, though.

It’s really pervasive in our culture, wouldn’t you say?

Yeah, I would agree with that. When I do improv and we play games among ourselves on the team, you know, the idea of the game is to just go faster and faster until somebody screws up.

And we we have embraced that ta-da, you know, and if you’re the one who screws up in this game, you just say ta-da.

And it’s a way of embracing that mistake. And it almost sounds like that’s sort of what your husband is doing as well, you know.

Except that he’s not saying I messed up.

He’s saying I did it correctly.

Yeah.

So it’s kind of the opposite idea.

That’s so interesting.

But he is claiming what he just did.

Yeah.

He’s claiming what he just did.

Yeah, voila.

Yes, like voila, right.

Except that he doesn’t know French either.

Yeah, that’s interesting, isn’t it?

Yeah, he is definitely claiming that he just did something that was of some significance to somebody.

Mm—

Yeah.

Well, Julia, thank you for sharing this little tidbit of your life.

Love is such a healer, isn’t it?

Love is very important, yeah.

All right, take care.

Well, thank you for letting me be on.

That was fun.

All right, bye-bye.

Thanks, Julia.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the magic number.

Or you can email us, words@waywordradio.org.

We read everything, and we love to hear from you.

You can also talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Gene Holler, who lives just north of Asheville, North Carolina, wrote us to say,

I was reading Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman,

And he used the phrase, piling pelion upon Asa.

With no further explanation, he evidently assumed his readers would get the illusion.

He wanted an explanation for what Pile Pileon on Assa means,

And it means to make an already difficult situation even more difficult by adding an extra task.

And it’s an allusion to Greek mythology.

It involves two mountains in Greece called Pileon, P-E-L-I-O-N, and Assa, O-S-S-A.

And there are various versions of this myth, but basically there were these two nine-year-old giants who stood 40 feet tall.

And they decided that they were going to declare war on the gods.

So they got this bright idea to get up to the heavens to fight the gods by piling Mount Asa on top of Mount Olympus.

And then Mount Pelion on top of everything so they could climb up there.

So the expression to pile Pelion on Asa is sort of the story of what happens when you have two out-of-control nine-year-old boys.

Yeah, when I saw that email, I had never heard that either.

So I was delighted to look into that and learn that as well.

We’re always grateful when you send us down an interesting etymological rabbit hole.

And you can do that by sending your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello.

This is Kristen.

I’m calling from Cincinnati.

Hi, Kristen.

Welcome to the show.

Hi.

Well, I was just wondering, you know, I lived in the UK for many years, nearly three decades.

Mostly in the south of England in Sussex.

And we had a particular word for the little footpaths, public footpaths that run between sort of houses and shops. Maybe as a sort of a shortcut from one street to another if the streets were parallel or maybe from your street between some houses and public buildings to where the shops were or something like that.

And we called them Twittons down south. And I know up in Yorkshire, where my friends live, they called them Ginnells up there. But since I’ve moved back to Cincinnati four years ago, I’ve noticed these around the city. And there’s even one on my street that cuts through from my street between two houses to a park where the elementary school is, but there aren’t any particular name for them.

And I’ve discussed this with a few of my friends. And I was just wondering if there are any sort of regional names in the United States for those kind of public footpaths that are just shortcuts from one street to another or something like that.

Yeah, I grew up down the Ohio River a little ways from there in Louisville, and I think we just called them alleys, honestly. Yeah, alleys. Alleys sometimes, yeah. Yeah, I could see that. I mean, to me, an alley runs behind a house, and it’s actually a place where you could drive your car. But these are strictly just for people to walk on.

Right. I think most Americans, if they were in the U.K. and they had to name that, they would probably call it an alley, though, even if it were more formal. But alleys take so many different kind of appearances in the United States. But so let’s spell Ginnel and Twitten for everyone. So Twitten is T-W-I-T-T-E-N from the south of England. That’s in Sussex. And Ginnel is G-I-N-N-E-L, northern England and in Scotland.

But those aren’t the only terms for those paths in England. There’s chair, which is C-H-A-R-E, and snicket in northern England. Yeah, snicket I’ve heard of, yeah. Yeah, sometimes gully or tinfoot or gentle, spelled as another version of the genel, and Jigger and Jiddy. And in Scotland, you might have a WIND, W-Y-N-D. Oh, okay. So there’s a bunch of them in the UK.

Yeah, I really had only ever heard Snicket. Yeah, that’s interesting. You know, I’m with Martha. I think we would all call it an alley. But we do have a wide variety of names for trails and paths. And I’m thinking of the kind that are more casual and less maintained, which is why I asked you that question. I’m thinking about things like hog paths or deer runs or pig trails, cow trails, deer trails. So these are, even if they’re not made by those animals, they look like they were. They’re just, you know, small paths worn by people from one place to another.

We’ve also talked about desire paths where people cut across a lawn or, you know, a grassy area on a college campus. And that’s called a desire path. Right. So there’s no concrete there. So they cut a corner off and over time it just turns into dirt with grass on either side.

Used to, I don’t know if they still do, but in Chicago, this is a term closer to what you’re asking for, Kristen. A passage between buildings was sometimes called a gangway in Chicago. And the Dictionary of American Regional English says it was formerly widespread. But again, I don’t know if that’s still widely used in Chicago. Some of our listeners will let us know, no doubt.

But again, a lot of the words that we have are about the outdoors in general and outside of urban areas where you might find senderos in Texas or in the southwest, bahadas. That’s interesting. Right. I’ve never heard any of those. Well, trace. Let’s not forget trace. Like trace, when you read old writing about the settlement of the West and the move westward, trace comes up again and again and again in fiction and nonfiction for paths or trails that people take.

That’s something I’ve seen here in Ohio, actually. I never knew what it meant, but there’s sort of some housing developments and stuff around. I’ve seen that such and such trace, like sycamore trace. There we go. Yep. It’s a path or a trail. Kristen, that’s really interesting. It sounds like your experience in the U.K. versus your experience in the U.S. is going to generate a lot of questions that we would love to hear in the future.

So keep our phone number handy, will you?

Okay.

Thank you.

It’s a very interesting show.

I really enjoy it.

Thank you.

Bye.

Be well.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

What do you call those paths in your part of the country?

Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send us your thoughts about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Jane Kenyon in Tippecanoe County, Indiana.

Hi, Jane in Tippecanoe County.

Yes, hi. I have a question that came to my mind when I was reading a book by Kinky Friedman.

The book is Armadillos and Old Lace and he used a phrase crazy as a Betsy bug the name Betsy several times in the book and then it made me remember that as a child I remember saying crazy as a bed bug so my questions are who is this poor Betsy and how did she come to be associated with craziness and bugs, and how do we know that bedbugs are crazy?

Wow, that’s quite a list, Jane.

Well, I’m sure you can answer them.

Have you ever had an experience with bedbugs?

No, I just remember, don’t let the bedbugs bite when we went to bed.

Right, right.

Well, I haven’t either, but if you see video of them, they move around in a kind of erratic way. And I guess they also have an effect on the bed owner too, right? Oh, I bet. Sounds like lots of itching. Yes. I would say that the far more interesting insect here, though, is the Betsy bug that you mentioned. It goes by lots and lots of different names, particularly in the South, like Best Bug or Bessie Bug or Best Betty or Betsy Beetle. They’re sometimes called patent leather beetles. They’ve got this glossy back that does make them look like patent leather, and they’re an inch or two long, and they usually live in decaying logs. And they’re super interesting in terms of the insect world because they’re a kind of rarity in that they live as families. The parents look after the eggs until they hatch, and then they feed the little ones, and it’s really unusual in the insect world.

But they also make 14 different kinds of sounds that are usually a kind of hissing or wheezing. Or some people think it actually sounds like the word Bessie if you disturb them. The technical term for that is stridulation, which comes from a Latin word that means to make a harsh noise. It’s like our word strident.

So it’s really the sound that makes us or the bugs seem crazy.

In the case of the Betsy bugs, for sure.

Well, thank you. That’s very interesting.

And I learned something from you as well as from Kinky Friedman.

We’re in good company.

You can always learn from Kinky.

So thank you for the enlightenment and the fun.

Take care, Jane.

All righty. Bye-bye.

All righty. Bye-bye.

Well, you know when you’re reading and you highlight that passage or you write it down on a note and you say, oh, I’m going to look that up later and find out what that means.

Well, sometimes you don’t and sometimes you do.

And sometimes you call A Way with Words to find out.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or Twitter @wayword.

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.

A few weeks ago, we had a conversation about elevator terminology.

You know, it’s technical language like door dwell, which is the amount of time that it takes for the door to close after you board an elevator, and terminal landing, which is the top and bottom elevator landing area.

But it struck me as poetic, and I was saying, wouldn’t it be great if somebody wrote a poem about it?

Well, somebody did.

We heard from LaDonna Orada, who listens to A Way with Words in CUNA, Idaho, along with her son Jojo.

And she wrote to us to say that she was thinking about how an elevator could be a metaphor for life.

And she sent this really lovely sonnet using some of that language.

Oh, isn’t it the best? Isn’t it just gorgeous?

Yes. I know you enjoyed it as well, Grant, and I’d love to share it with everybody else.

It’s called Terminal Landing by LaDonna Orada.

The gaping doors before me call me in. Transition waits beyond this bare hallway.

This traveler lingers, anxious to begin, yet also hesitant and feigned to stay.

What lies before me? Opportunity or maw of beast to ferry me away?

A step, a turn, a pause to choose my dream, my finger poised to punch my destiny.

A breath, a gasp, a wait for the door dwell.

With sigh, ’tis time to shed this earthen chore.

No fear of fiery fiend from lower hell, perchance a hope of rest on yonder floor.

With shudder, chariot begins to rise.

What terminus awaits me in the skies?

That is a metaphor for life, isn’t it?

I love the mix of the modern idea of an elevator.

I mean, obviously they’re a couple hundred years old, but also just this could be a 500-year-old verse in some way.

Some of the language that she’s chosen.

I just love it.

Yes.

In sonnet form.

I thought it was gorgeous.

Punch my destiny.

Right?

What terminus awaits.

Yes.

I don’t think I can ever get on an elevator now, Grant, without thinking of this poem.

It’s going to be momentous from here on out, right?

Every time I get on an elevator, I’m like, something’s going to happen.

Things will change.

You never know.

You never know.

Thank you.

And her name again is?

LaDonna Arada.

LaDonna, thank you so much for that poem.

And we will share that on our website.

And if you’ve got something that you’ve been inspired to write based on this show, we’d love to read it.

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

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. This is John Foonz.

I’m calling from Waverly, New York.

Well, welcome to the show, John. What’s on your mind?

My mother was a character.

We all usually have somebody in our life that they have their own vocabulary.

She’d have her own sayings, euphemisms, and words.

And long before Ron Howard and Henry Winkler in Happy Days, she was calling us kids nerds.

And I always thought that that was a word that she made up.

But of course, as a teenager, I tuned into Happy Days and pops out of Fonzie’s mouth.

So I’m kind of wondering what you might have on that.

Okay, nerd.

And so give me an idea. What decade are we talking about here when she would have used this?

This would have been the early 70s.

Okay, good.

Well, I was just wondering if she was like on the cusp of the early slang use for this, but it sounds like she was just a little past it.

Nerd meaning?

Yeah, what did she mean?

I don’t remember if she specifically, you know, what we know is a nerd today.

I don’t remember the context.

I was much too young, but I just remember her calling us it.

So it wasn’t like you nerds clean up your room or you nerds, you don’t know anything?

Oh, you nerds.

Oh, John, stop being a nerd.

Yeah.

You’re not wearing that outside this house, nerd.

Well, not so threatening, but yeah.

No, okay.

But nerd meaning somebody who’s unfashionable or uncool dates back to early 1950s.

The earliest print use that we have is 1951.

But there’s an asterisk to that, is that in 1950, the word nerd is used in a Dr. Seuss book.

We don’t know, word researchers and etymologists, if Dr. Seuss is the origin of the slang nerd.

We just don’t know.

The line in the book is something like, then just to show them I’ll sail to Couture and bring back an itch catch, a pre-penna-pru, a nircle-la-nerd, and a seersucker too.

And we really just don’t know.

This is If I Ran the Zoo by Dr. Seuss from 1950.

So it’s weird that a word from a kid’s book would show up in teen slang.

It wouldn’t be impossible.

And it’s very interesting that that’s 1950 and then nerd shows up in 1951.

Maybe teenagers read to their younger siblings.

Who knows?

Yeah, or they were exposed to the word and as they got older it just became part of their vocabulary maybe.

Well, maybe.

But again, there’s like a one-year gap from when the word appears in print in Dr. Seuss and then starts being used as teen slang.

Huh.

Yeah.

Yeah. One other theory is that it’s from drunk backwards, but there’s just no evidence really to support that except that it kind of looks like it.

Silent K.

Okay.

Yeah, I think when I first heard that word, I pictured it with a U rather than an E.

There is a word called a nurdle, which is used for if you put the kind of wavy drop of toothpaste you put in a toothbrush, it’s called a nurdle.

Or little blips of styrofoam that are used for packing material are sometimes called nurdles.

So some people have tried to connect those, but nurdle tends to be much later.

So it sounds like your mom was right there in the mix.

Did she read Dr. Seuss to you as a kid?

She read, but it was never Dr. Seuss.

It was always poetry stuff.

Do you think of yourself as a nerd now?

In many ways, yes.

I mean, I went through my teenagers, big fan of big bad music.

I am a huge word nerd.

Grammar nerd, punctuation nerd.

So in a lot of ways I am.

And in a lot of ways I’m not.

Yeah well this is a safe space for nerds.

I know.

Nerds have taken over already.

So anyway.

John that’s what we know about nerd.

Thank you for joining us nerds.

I really appreciate your help out of it.

Thank you very much and it was a pleasure being on the show.

Take care.

Bye bye.

Give us a call.

877-929-9673 or send your questions and stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Charles Darwin was, of course, one of the greatest scientific minds ever.

And I was interested in a line from his autobiography where he says, if I had my life to live over again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week.

And I don’t know, Grant, that’s really stuck with me.

The fact that this brilliant scientist, you know, looking back over his life, wished that he had read more poetry.

Yeah, that reminds me of something that has been making the rounds of the Internet since the pandemic started.

And it’s something along the lines of just I want you to realize what you turned to when things got tough.

You turned to the arts.

You turned to books.

You turned to movies.

You turned to television.

You turned to poetry.

You turned to theater.

And that’s where you go when life needs to be explained or things are difficult.

Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

And all the more reason to support artists in all forms, right?

Yeah.

We’d love to hear what you’ve been reading, the poetry, the literature, 877-999673.

Or tell us about it on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Christine.

I’m calling from Santa Cruz, California, and I really enjoy your show.

Thank you very much.

I have a question.

My father sailed all over the world in the 1930s and 40s, and then later we had a family boat and sailed up and down the West Coast.

And he used to say something frequently to us that I think came from his sailing experiences.

But he would say, I’ve seen the elephant and heard the owl.

And to me, that meant you can’t pull the wool over my eyes.

I’ve been there.

But I don’t know really the origins of that saying.

And I just wondered if you had any history or experience with seeing it in other places.

I have not.

So, Christine, when he said, I’ve seen the elephant and I’ve heard the owl, what was happening?

Were you trying to fib as a kid?

No, nothing like that.

I mean, I think he was just more saying, I’ve had that experience.

So I don’t know.

It was just something he said regularly to imply that he’s had a lot of world experience.

Right.

He’s worldly.

That makes a lot of sense.

And that is the way that I’ve seen it, too, that he’s experienced in the ways of the world.

Or sometimes you see it a little different where somebody says, I’m up to date or I’m informed or I’m no greenhorn.

You know, I’m no spring chicken, meaning that I’ve got some years under my belt and I know how things work.

And maybe he meant some of that too.

Yeah, like this is not my first rodeo.

Yeah, not my first rodeo, exactly.

Do you have any origins for that term?

We do, as a matter of fact, absolutely we do.

And I think you’re going to love this.

Those are both separate expressions.

I’ve seen the elephant and I’ve heard the owl.

I’ve heard the owl.

We don’t know very much about at all.

It dates back to around the 1930s.

Pops up in Western fiction, you know, cowboy stories, and it might have just been invented for those.

There’s some idea that it might come from Native American tales, but it’s hard to sort out how much of that was invented by white people making up Native American tales and how much of it was authentic.

It’s really difficult to untangle that mess, but we know it’s from the 1930s.

However, seeing the elephant, we know a lot about that.

This is an American version of an expression that actually goes back to the 1500s.

The American version starts in the 1830s, but the version before that is to have seen the lions.

And this is probably a reference to a menagerie that was kept at the Tower of London from about the year 1200 onward.

There were all kinds of strange creatures kept at the Tower of London.

Polar bear, lions, leopards, ostriches, monkeys, and other creatures.

So if you had seen the lions, you had been to London, which of course was a major world city, and it meant that you were worldly just to be in London.

But also you had seen these strange creatures from other parts of the world.

You knew some stuff that anybody from the boonies or the sticks or the bush didn’t know.

And likely by the time I’ve seen the lion made it to the United States, the lion was replaced with an elephant because in the U.S. you were more likely to have seen an elephant, say, in a traveling circus.

Right. That’s really interesting.

Well, thank you so much for the research.

And your program is fabulous and fascinating, and I appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, Christine.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

And the term to see the elephant was often associated with having seen military combat, right?

I mean, in some instances of that expression, it’s a world weariness too.

It’s not, you know, I’m so smart or I’m no greenhorn, but I’ve seen a lot of the world.

I’ve been, yeah, I’ve seen the elephant and I’m done with it.

A lot of times it was like, you know, I’m not doing this again.

I’m finished.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Veronica.

Where are you calling from, Veronica?

San Diego, California.

Oh, San Diego, I know it well.

You must be neighbors.

We are indeed.

What is going on?

Well, my brother and I were raised with my mom, and she was taught from a young age to leave what is called an ort on your plate for dinner.

So it’s basically a small, yes, O-R-T.

It’s basically a small piece of your meal.

And she said it was dinner etiquette.

And we have no idea where it’s from.

My grandmother’s sisters had never heard it before either.

So it’s kind of a family mystery that my brother and I really would love to know the answer to.

Before we get into this, let me ask you, Veronica, do you also leave an ort on your plate now as an adult as a bit of etiquette at dinner?

It’s something I think about. I don’t necessarily know if I’m very proactive with it, but it is something that crosses my mind.

How interesting. So an ort being the last little bit of food on your plate.

Correct.

Well, it turns out that the word ort is a really old word.

It’s been around since at least the 15th century.

And in Middle English, it referred to the fodder that farm animals haven’t yet eaten.

You know, the stuff that they leave behind.

And it may come from a Dutch word we don’t know, meaning to leave behind.

But ort is an old, old word that means a fragment or a leftover, as you said.

And it’s been used metaphorically by lots of different writers over the years.

Virginia Woolf famously wrote about scraps, orts, and fragments.

And in fact, Shakespeare used the word ort a couple of times in his work, talking about the orts of someone’s love, meaning, you know, the last little bits of it.

And D.H. Lawrence wrote about orts and slarts. Slarts is an old word that means leftovers as well.

And I’m interested that she talked about it in terms of being mannerly. Because sometimes we call that last little piece the manners bit. The idea being that you don’t ever want your host to think that they didn’t make enough food for you. So you always leave a little bit.

Yeah, that little manners bit.

Okay, well, that would totally make sense then.

Yeah, there you go.

Or the manners piece, or sometimes even it’s just called the manners. You might say, don’t take the manners, or I’ll eat the manners. Or leave the manners in the dish.

But I’m really interested that the word ort survived in your family, because we really don’t hear it that much. We usually see it. If you do a lot of crossword puzzles, it’s a really handy word for crossword puzzles.

Oh, good to know. Okay.

Well, thank you so much for that explanation. It does put the rest of family mystery.

Thanks for calling, Veronica. We appreciate it.

Glad to do it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

I’m thinking about Martha’s Orts. You had a blog at one time, Martha’s Orts.

Yeah, about 100 years ago. Back when blogs were a thing. I think it must have been like 2004, 2006, something like that. Yeah, I had a blog called Martha Barnette’s Orts, which were the leftovers, the things that I was researching that I didn’t have any place else to put.

Yeah, maybe your commonplace, right? Your commonplace blog was a place to put your orts.

Yes.

Language and culture and folklore and custom, they all go hand in hand. And we’d love to hear the intersection of those things in your world, no matter where you are in the world.

877-929-9673 is toll free in the U.S. and Canada.

Or you can write us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Hey Grant, why can’t you trust atoms?

This is a pun.

What?

How dare I?

Why can’t I trust atoms?

Yeah.

Because they’re always eating fruit given to them by Eve?

I don’t know.

No, atoms, A-T-O-M.

A-T-O-M, because just when you need them, they’ll split.

I like that better than my answer.

My answer was they make up everything.

Oh, yeah, that’s a good one.

They make up everything.

I remember that one.

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Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler, and quiz guide, John Chaneski.

We’d love to hear from you, no matter where you are in the world.

Go to waywordradio.org slash contact.

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Whenever you have a language story or question, our toll-free line is open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

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A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.