Have a Dingle Day!

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. In March of 2018, an international team of 26 researchers and support staff were deposited at a research station in Antarctica, and they were left to conduct six months of scientific studies there. They were totally isolated. They were at the bottom of the world in the dead of winter. There were a few Germans, some Scots, a speaker of Welsh, and a couple of Americans, and somebody from Iceland. So the language they all shared was English.

And during their stay, they took part in a study by phonetics researchers in Germany. And every few weeks, they would go off by themselves and record themselves saying the same 29 words. And a funny happened because at the end of those six months, their accents had changed ever so slightly. Now, not so that you could hear it, but the researchers back in Germany could see those changes by analyzing the acoustic waves on computers. It’s a fascinating study and we’ll link to it online.

Another interesting thing that came up in news reports about all this was some of the vocabulary that the researchers used.

For example, they used the word dingle. And they used the word dingle to mean clear weather, a dingle day, or the weather is dingle clear. And that was a really positive term. It’s dingle outside.

Another term that they used is electric soup. Any idea what electric soup is, Grant?

Oh, no. Electric eels turned into soup? I don’t really know. Electric soup. The bouncing of their own lights off of the fog? I love all of these. I’m just going to let you go. I don’t know. Tell me.

Electric soup is wine. And again, this isn’t a term that they came up with themselves because apparently they use this term in Scotland to refer to fortified wine, fortified different ways. And what strikes me about it is the kind of language that you pick up when you’re working in the workplace with people who aren’t from your own background, you know?

Yeah, just this mix and from all these different people. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s a full history waiting to be written of all of this language.

Well, whether you work in the Arctic or Antarctic or somewhere in between, we’d love to hear the language of your workplace. What’s that special word or that special phrase or the in-joke that just seems to last and last and last?

We’d love to hear about it. 877-929-9673 is toll free in the United States and Canada. And if you’re somewhere else in the world, there are lots of ways to reach us. Go to our website at waywordradio.org and find them all.