Dirty Laundry (episode #1520)

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 that call from Deborah in Gates, North Carolina, and she was asking about the phrase that her husband used, I don’t want to have to lick the cat over.

Oh, yes. Remember that? And it means you didn’t want to have to do something over.

Right. Start again.

Right. And it was puzzling, and we really puzzled over it. And I don’t think we gave her a good answer.

You don’t? I don’t.

I think there’s a second answer. There is a second answer.

I think it’s a better answer. I think it’s a better answer.

Let’s hear it. Well, for me, it was this forehead smacking moment because we got a lot of emails like this one from Joy Beard who said, My husband’s an old Tennessee country boy who says he knows the phrase as lick the calf over.

Oh, nice. And that’s when I started pounding my head because, of course, lick the calf over.

You know, a little newborn calf. Mama comes over and gives it some love.

Yeah. Yeah, well, and she’s licking the membrane off, and it’s a long, involved process.

Zora Neale Hurston used it that way, lick the calf over. And I found lots more references to that phrase than lick the cat over.

So it’s C-A-L-F and not C-A-T. What’s interesting about this is that both forms exist simultaneously and side by side and have abundant presence out there, right?

Well, I think the calf one is much more abundant, and it makes more sense to me. It makes more sense. It certainly does.

But cats do a lot of licking. Cats do.

So you can see why there’s a reanalysis. Somebody might hear cat instead of calf and think, oh, yeah, cats do licking. They’re known for licking.

But I was so happy that our listeners helped us out on that one. That was a good one.

Well, that’s a good moment when you get new facts. And our listeners, boy, you guys are field workers out there. Smart bunch.

We take what you send us. We use it to make the show. We spin it back out into new content so everyone else can hear it.

And we’re going to do that now. If you’ve got something for us that everyone else should hear, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org. Or find a lot of other ways to reach out to us on our contact page at waywordradio.org.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Melanie. I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Hello, Melanie. Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Awesome. I have a question about a pretty common word, but my family has always used it in a different way. It’s the word palette.

I’m honestly not sure how they would spell it, but they use it to mean just a bed of blankets on the floor. They’re both Southern.

My mom grew up in Indiana and Arkansas. My dad grew up in Dallas and Houston, and they both grew up using it, and I used it in Florida.

But when I moved to Southern California, no one had heard of it at all. I live in San Antonio now, and no one knows it.

They look at me like I’m crazy. So a palette came up in your life when and how?

It was, well, I’d always used it throughout my life just to say, oh, we’re having a sleepover, like let’s make a pallet.

Yes. But then I read it once in a short story in college. I wish I had written down the author or something.

It was a southern short story because they said the slave swept on a pallet. I assume it’s the same.

Mark Twain used it in Huck Fenn, so you may have encountered it there. It’s not a short story, but that is very southern, and there are slaves in that book.

My experience is the same as yours. I encountered pallet when the cousins would come over and we would put a bunch of blankets and pillows together on the floor.

We’d make a pallet. Or we’d go over to the grandma’s house who didn’t really have enough room for everyone.

You know, there’d be the kind of family get-togethers. And I kid you not, where somehow I would be assigned to sleep under the table, under the feet of the adults who are playing cards and drinking above me.

So it was a kind of weird pallet on the floor. And it is very Southern.

It’s southern, but it’s also what you might call the southern Midwest, what they call the West Midland. So in Missouri, where I’m originally from, it’s very well known in parts of the state.

You find bits and pieces here in Illinois and Indiana and Ohio, but mostly it’s the southern states and a little sprinkling here and there.

The origin of the term is different than the other palettes that you might like a painter’s palette. It goes back to a French word meaning straw.

So if you think of P-A-I-L-L-E, so if you think of a pile of straw on the floor as a place to make a bed. That actually makes sense.

I think the short story I read even said it was like a straw pallet. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

So we’ve kind of moved away from that. We don’t have straw in the households much anymore.

No. And I bet a lot of the Southerners probably picked it up from the Bible because there’s this story in the book of John about Jesus and an invalid who is brought to him.

And he can’t walk, and Jesus says, pick up your palate and walk. After he heals him, the guy picks it up and takes it off.

Well, I’m a eater, so I don’t know that. I have not read the Bible. That’s probably why I didn’t know that.

How would we spell it, though, in the sense that we use it? Would it be P-A-L-L-E-T?

Yeah, exactly, P-A-L-L-E-T. And that E-T is kind of the suffix that means to make small or to make cute.

Like you might have, we add E-T-T-E sometimes on a thing to say it’s a factette. It’s a tiny little cute fact instead of a big fact, right?

So it’s the same E-T. Yeah, like in Spanish. Very good.

Yeah, exactly the same. How about that? So you’re not alone and there’s millions of people who use this and they’re all nodding their heads right now going, yeah, she’s right.

Thank you because everyone in Texas, I’m like, you’re in Texas, you should know this.

All right. Thanks for calling. Call us again sometime, Melanie.

Awesome. Thank you so much. You guys have a good one. Take care.

Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Kevin, I’m calling you from Calgary, Alberta, Canada.

Hi, Kevin, welcome to the show. Thanks. What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about laundry. Actually, I have a laundry list of questions about laundry.

Specifically, I know laundry can be a noun to describe a building where clothes get laundered, but I’m interested in its use as describing clothes that are about to go to the wash, as in, when does a basket of dirty clothes become the laundry?

My wife says to me, grab the basket and take the laundry downstairs. And I say to her, don’t you mean take the dirty clothes downstairs?

Because they’re still closed until they’re being washed. She calls the laundry the minute they hit the basket.

But I say, what if I get up on a cold day like yesterday where it’s minus 25 in Calgary and I have to walk the dog and I grab my bunny hug out of the dirty clothes and put it on?

Am I putting on laundry? No, I’m putting on clothes. At least that’s the way I see it.

Wait. So at some point there’s got to be a phase change is what they call it in science where it changes from being dirty clothes to being laundry.

Oh, my gosh. And the magical device is either the laundry machine or the laundry basket, right?

Right. And I can’t figure out where it becomes laundry. To me, it’s automatically laundry once it’s being laundered.

But do you call the basket the laundry basket? Or the clothes basket?

No, I call it the clothes basket.

Oh, you call it the clothes basket. Does she call it the laundry basket?

She alternates back and forth.

Oh, she does. Okay.

But as soon as the clothes hit the basket, they’re laundry in her mind.

I would argue, Kevin, that this isn’t an either-or situation, that very often the clothes are both laundry and clothes.

At what point do they change from being one to the other, though?

If I take clothes out of the laundry…

Wait, let’s see if we can parse this and break this down.

Laundry includes anything that can be laundered, right?

So it could be bedclothes or tablecloths or cloth napkins or cleaning rags, right?

And so those aren’t clothes, but they are laundry.

When they’re being laundered.

Well, is it when you know they need to be laundered or while they’re being laundered or after they’re finished being laundered and are now folded and put away?

I guess that’s the thrust of our discussion, my wife and I.

I mean, it’s a question of intent, right?

What we really need to do is get a liminal semiotics expert on here to talk about this.

Yeah, we’re a philosopher on the edge of things here where it is completely about intent and it is very little lexical component here, right?

It is strictly what is in the mind of the speaker.

I think it’s strictly what’s in the laundry basket because I’m thinking about bedclothes,

You know, sheets that are just on the bed and you intend to launder them,

But they’re not laundry until you…

The magical moment is when you put them in the laundry basket.

Let me ask the opposite.

You’ve just finished laundry, you’ve folded everything,

And you’ve put it on somebody’s bed for them to put away themselves.

Right.

It’s no longer in the laundry basket.

It’s folded.

Yeah.

It’s closed.

It hasn’t been put in the dresser yet.

Is that laundry?

There also is another part of our discussion.

My wife considers it laundry until it’s in the drawer or on a hanger.

Oh, nice.

So if I fold up the clothes and put them on the end of the bed,

And then I put them back on, she says,

I’m putting the laundry back on, not putting clothes on.

I would say that if the sheets are folded,

Then they’re the sheets or the clothes.

I wouldn’t say it’s the laundry.

So you’re saying if I strip the bed,

But all the sheets and quilts and blankets are still piled in the middle.

They’re not yet laundry.

I haven’t taken them to the laundry room.

I haven’t put them in the laundry basket.

We all know that they’re going to become laundry.

Right.

The bed isn’t made anymore.

Right.

But it’s not laundry.

Right.

Wow.

You’re so messed up.

In my head, you answered it when you said they’re going to become laundry.

Yeah.

I was trying to get inside this real defective way of thinking that the two of you have.

I know, I’m kidding.

Hey, at least we’re doing our laundry.

For me, you can both be right, even though you call it different things.

Like, you can literally be looking at the same basket with the same items in it, and it can both be laundry and clothes.

Schrodinger’s cat kind of thing.

Schrodinger’s laundry.

Right, Schrodinger’s laundry.

Why not?

The other question that I have is, is there laundry on the line?

No pun intended.

Are you arguing about this to such a degree that the loser has to do more laundry?

No.

No, no, no.

Okay.

That’s already been decided.

Because I love that.

I do most of the washing.

She does most of the folding.

Okay.

That’s a fair, yeah.

We mix it up in our house.

Yeah.

I’m trying to think.

I recently accidentally threw my phone into the washing machine with the clothes.

Oh, no.

Oh, no.

I looked in, and there was this little light.

Oh, no.

This brave little light in the washing machine.

And I’m trying to think what I threw it.

Then I threw it in with the clothes.

I wouldn’t say I threw it in with the laundry.

Interesting.

But it was, yeah.

It was being laundered, though.

Interesting, I polled the people that I work with here.

We all spend our living working with words because I work in a newsroom.

And the opinion was split about 50-50 on it.

So I think probably there is some middle ground where both people can be right.

Oh, there you go.

I think as long as that basket gets emptied in a timely way so you can wear what you want to wear, it doesn’t matter.

Kevin, we can leave you with another fun word, sniff—entiate.

You might be able to guess what that is.

When you pull your bunny hug out of the basket,

You sniffer-itchy in it to figure out whether or not you can still wear it.

I can wear it one more time.

Sniffer-itchy-ation, yeah.

For our American listeners, do you want to tell everyone what a bunny hug is?

Because they’re all going, what?

I think the British call it a kangaroo jacket,

And in the States they might call it a hoodie.

Yeah, exactly.

A hoodie.

It’s a sweater where you can put your hands in the front to keep them warm.

Or a sweatshirt, as most Americans call it.

Or sweatshirt, yeah.

Thank you, Kevin, for your call.

You know, I get so much email about this.

I’m going to have to put a filter on the mail just to route it to another folder.

It’s going to be so much.

It was a pleasure talking to you.

You’ve unleashed the hounds of language, my friend.

Thanks for calling, Kevin.

If we figure this out, we’ll let you know, all right?

I appreciate it.

Thanks, Kevin.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Schrodinger’s laundry.

I like that.

When is it laundry?

When is it clothing?

Is it sometimes both?

Is it sometimes neither?

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This show is about language examined through family, history, and culture.

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Thank you.

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.

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

Hi, John.

Oh, hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey, bud.

What’s up?

You know, yeah, I might sound a little paranoid, a little crazy or something, but I’m convinced

That there are people trying to sneak into my house.

They’ve been gaining entry by hiding inside stuff that I’ve ordered online.

And for example, here’s a delivery at my door right now.

Yeah. Now, this is a nice piece of jewelry I ordered for my wife to wear around her neck.

And there, there’s some guy named Dan in this pendant.

Oh, I guess.

So Dan is in the pendant. We’re finding words in words.

Names in words?

Names in words. They can’t get past me. I mean us. We’ll do this together.

I’ll describe the item I ordered. You tell me if you can determine who is sneaking into my house.

Okay, don’t worry, John.

Now, note, all of these sneaks trying to get into my house, they have three-letter names,

And they’re always hiding inside, never at the beginning or the end, all right?

Okay.

Here’s the first one.

It’s a quickly flashing light from my 70s-themed basement discotheque.

Seems pretty harmless.

Is anybody in there?

Rob.

Oh, Rob’s in there.

Oh, how dare you.

Rob is in the strobe.

Oh, what a guy.

I was thinking about Lynn in the blinker.

Oh, there you go.

I ordered this detection system that uses electromagnetic waves to find storms or airplanes or other motor vehicles traveling near my house.

Now, is anybody in there?

Is Ada in the radar?

Ada’s in the radar.

Oh, man.

I think somebody is in all of these, I think.

I think.

Oh, good.

My lawn has been looking a little, well, frankly, crappy lately.

So I ordered a big bag of a substance used to provide nutrients to my grass.

Now, is anybody in that bag?

Is Anu?

In the manure.

A new in the manure.

A new garg,

Like the word of day guy,

Right?

That’s pretty good,

But there’s another word

On the bag,

A longer word.

Fertilizer.

Let’s see.

Who is in the fertilizer?

Is somebody…

Liza is Liza in the fertilizer.

No, I remember Liz.

Is Liz in the fertilizer?

Liz is in the fertilizer.

Get out of there, Liz.

Oh, this will be fun.

I saw that movie,

Crazy Rich Asians,

And I decided to start playing

That traditional rummy style game

That uses tiles

So I ordered one of those.

Is anybody in there?

Mahjong.

John?

Is John in the Mahjong?

John.

John is in there.

Yeah.

Sort of a Jonathan guy.

Yeah, I’m a J-O-H-N myself, but that’s, yeah.

Finally, this should help.

I’ve ordered a radio to keep track of local police activity.

This way, if there’s any nefarious dudes being chased out there, I can tell if they’re coming towards my house.

Unless they’re already here.

Is somebody in there?

Ann’s in there.

Ann’s in the scanner.

Anne is in my scanner. What is the point? How can I keep these people out of my house if there’s somebody in everything?

This is terrible. All right, you guys, I’ve got to go lie down or something. You guys are great. Take care.

Bye.

And if you’d like to talk with us about language, call us 877-929-9673 or share your stories about words.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Karen speaking from South Lake, Texas.

Hi, Karen. Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Yes, my word is toeheads. When I was growing up, my grandmother used to call my brothers and I, we were all light-haired and light-eyed toeheads.

And then when I heard my first kid, I hadn’t heard that term in a long time, and then my mother said it again to me.

So I asked her, you know, where did you get that word? And she said, well, my grandmother called you three kids toeheads.

So I’ve always wondered, you know, where it came from, and I’ve asked people, you know, I’ve lived all over the country,

And I’ve always asked people if they’d ever heard of that word,

And I haven’t gotten a positive response.

Wait, you’re saying lots of other people haven’t heard this term?

Not in some of the places I’ve lived.

Right now I live in South Lake, Texas, and no one around here has heard of it.

In Florida, no one had heard of that word.

I am surprised. Color me surprised because I thought it was more common than that.

Okay.

Yeah, me too.

Not sure why.

You’re not picturing like a toe, like T-O-E, right?

Like a toe head?

No.

Okay.

I mean, my mom, again, told me it had to do with light hair.

That’s right.

That we all had blonde hair and blue eyes.

But, you know, her family was Irish, English, and Scottish.

So I was thinking it came from my grandmother somehow.

-huh.

Yeah, it’s a fairly common term.

Toe is an old word, T-O-W.

Toe is an old term for flax, you know, the fibers from flax that look pretty much like that.

Same color.

A blonde whiteness, right?

Yeah, yeah, blonde, blonde, blonde.

And as you said, white.

Are your eyebrows kind of white?

Yes.

We used to fill them in for pictures.

Well, that’s very interesting because, yes, toe is a term for the filament from flax.

And so toe-headed has been around for a very long time.

Sometimes toe-headed also means tousled.

You know, like you wake up and you have bedhead and your hair is all messed up.

That can be toe-headed too.

But usually it refers to somebody with exactly the kind of fine, very bright, white, blonde hair that you have.

The literary synonym is flaxen-haired.

So did that come over from England or was that something that was, you know, started in America?

Well, toe meaning flaxen, that’s back as old as English itself almost.

Yeah, it’s a very old term.

And then calling people toe-headed is at least 200 years in American English and probably older than that in the U.K. Varieties of English.

Okay.

And you’re saying that it is commonly used and maybe I just talked to people who haven’t really used that term before.

Yeah.

I haven’t heard it commonly used.

Yeah.

I think, Karen, I think that you’ll find that you’ll get a lot of, if you keep asking, you’ll get more people that know it.

Maybe my understanding of the frequency of it is a little misplaced because I work in language.

So it just seems common to me.

And it’s something I encounter all the time.

Yeah.

Right.

And again, it’s not like I ask everybody all the time.

It’s just when it comes to other conversations.

Here comes Karen.

Here comes Karen with her question again.

Right.

She’s got the T-shirt on.

I appreciate this.

Sure.

We’re glad to help, Karen.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk with us about language.

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

And if you just can’t wait, find us on Twitter at Wayword.

A couple of weeks ago on this show, I dropped some etymology about the term jejun.

You remember this, the term jejun meaning simplistic or superficial or dry and interesting.

And I was talking about how it comes from the Latin jejunus, which means fasting or empty or barren, something like that.

And I talked about how it was related to the term jejunum, which is the part of your small intestine, which is usually empty on autopsy.

Right. That’s what I was thinking of when you said the word.

Yeah. But there were a couple of things that I forgot to talk about that will make perfect sense if you think about it.

How about the French word for breakfast?

Déjeuner?

Yes, same idea. It’s like break fast in English to breakfast.

Oh, gotcha.

And the same idea is in the Spanish word for breakfast, desayuno.

They all come from that same root, meaning empty.

Oh, how about that?

How cool, right?

I did not know that. Yeah, that’s cool.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Dave. I’m calling from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Council Bluffs, Iowa. Welcome to the show.

Well, thank you. I’m glad to be here.

What can we do for you?

When I was a young man, say pre-10, my aunt and uncle used to take me to a bakery in Cleveland, Ohio, called Huff’s Bakery.

And, by the way, that’s where my whole family came from.

And one of the most favorite things that I would get at that bakery is something called a lady lock.

And I devoured those very readily and always asked for more.

Now I’m 71 years old.

I’m out here in Iowa, and when we first moved this direction, I went down to the bakery,

And I asked the baker if they had ladylocks, and they said they’d never heard of such a thing.

And as I looked in their case, I saw something that somewhat resembled a ladylock,

Except it was about half the size.

And I said, well, that’s a ladylock there.

And they said, no, no, it’s a creamhorn.

Creamhorn, yeah.

Yeah. As far as I’m concerned, the Ladylock folks at Huff Bakeries have the edge on this,

And they’re Ladylocks, they’re not cream horns. So I’d like to have that battle solved.

Let’s just get some clarification here. So Ladylock, we’re two words, L-A-D-Y-L-O-C-K, right?

Yes, sir.

And describe what it looks like. How did you recognize it in the baker’s cabinet?

It’s shaped kind of like a horn, where they probably got the cream horn.

It’s a puff pastry done in a swirl, and there would be a cream filling inside.

It would be sprinkled with a rough sugar crystals on the outside of it.

Okay, that sounds wonderful.

I’ll be back in a minute.

I’m going to get some of those.

Yeah, so you’re wondering why they’re called Lady Locks?

Well, no, I believe they are called ladylocks because they look like a ladylock.

You mean like a lock of what? A lock of ladies’ hair?

Like a lock of ladies’ hair. That’s right. Kind of swirly or spoolie.

So your question is, what’s wrong with Iowa?

Yeah.

Well, I have to tell you, when I was growing up, I knew these as cream horns for sure. Did you, Grant?

I didn’t know these at all. I didn’t know them really at all.

Oh, you didn’t? Okay.

But I understand there’s a lot of other terms for this. There’s other terms?

Yeah, there are lots of other terms, and they all refer to how these things are made.

Some people call them clothespin cookies.

Some people call them foam rollers.

Wait, clothespin cookies is something else.

But, okay, we’ll get back to that in a minute.

For the foam rollers?

Well, lots of different names for these kinds of things.

But, yeah, they’re called ladylocks because of how they’re made,

Because you roll out the dough, and then you cut it into strips,

And then you roll the strips around something, whether it’s a clothespin covered with aluminum foil or some kind of specially made roller.

You roll them around and they’re called lady locks, like locks of hair.

So you cook them rolled around and they puff up and form like this cornucopia looking thing, right?

And then you jam the filling into the opening after you remove the roller or whatever is inside.

Okay.

And another version of this is an Austrian specialty called Schillerlocken, which refers to the 19th century poet Schiller, Friedrich Schiller, who had locks of hair like that.

There’s a famous portrait of him, and it looks like he’s got lady locks on the side of his head, if you can picture that.

And so they call it in honor of the poet who had this wild-looking hair.

Is anything that’s ringing a bell for you?

No, the only one that rings a bell with me is Lady Locks.

Okay.

And I kind of feel like our Huff Bakery in Cleveland has the exclusive right to the word.

It seems to me their bakery started in the very early 1900s.

Well, the term is older than that, just so you know.

It goes at least back to the 1880s.

Well, maybe they got me on that one.

So what was inside of yours?

So cream can go in there, whipped cream, or what are we talking about, custard?

Jelly filling? What was in yours, Dave?

Well, it wasn’t a frosting and it wasn’t necessarily a whipped cream.

It was a consistency somewhere in between.

Gotcha.

And, of course, that’s what, as kids, that’s what we wanted more than anything was the cream that was inside.

Well, Dave, thank you so much for sharing these sweet memories.

I’m sure you’ve brought back a lot of good ones for people who enjoy Ladylocks.

I miss them dearly.

Very good.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye. Thank you. Bye-bye.

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I came across a couple of references to peak and plum towns.

Do you know what this means?

Peak and plum towns.

Is this P-E-E-K?

Yes, P-E-E-K.

And P-L-U-M?

Right.

Are these towns with great leaf peeping in the fall?

Good fruit harvest?

Well, they might be.

Might be.

A peak in Plumtown is a really small town.

And I’ve seen it explained a couple of different ways.

A peak in Plumtown is when you take a peak around the corner and you’re plum out of town.

Or you’re driving through the town and you just take one peak and you’re plum out of town.

Plum done.

Peak in Plumtown.

But that’s a different plum.

The plum out of town is with a B in the end, P-L-U-M-B, right?

Yeah, I guess technically, but it’s a slang term.

Peek and plum, little bitty town.

Hit us up, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Andrea calling from San Diego, California.

Hi, Andrea, welcome to the show.

Hi, how are you doing?

Excellent, thank you.

What is up?

So I had a question for you.

I was driving around in the neighborhood and I saw a restaurant and I noticed something that marketing people seem to do.

And that’s where they take a word that you know and then they change the spelling of it to define like a new product or a new service.

And this happens all the time, but I saw this restaurant called Curiosity, which is a curry place but based off of the word curiosity.

So this happens a lot in marketing, and my question was, is there a term for this activity that marketers do?

Because since it’s been around for so long, I thought there might be a way that that’s defined.

Well, yeah, they’re literally creating new words.

It’s onomastics, which is the study of language and new words.

And there are companies out there, many of them, that you can hire to help you name your product or name your business.

And so it’s naming.

It’s just the naming business, yeah.

Oh, wow.

Onomastic.

Onomastic, yeah, is the study of words that are names, any kind of name, not just company names, but people name or thing names.

Yeah, and if you want to do some reading about this, there’s a great blog by our friend Nancy Friedman called Fritinancy, F-R-I-T-I-N-A-N-C-Y, which the name means the chirping of crickets, actually.

And she comments on—

She works in the field, right?

Yes, she comes up with names.

She’s a professional namer, and she’s got some great insights about these kinds of things.

I learned on her blog that a few years ago, Downey, the people who make the fabric softener, released this product called Unstoppables, but it only had one P in it.

So it looks like Unstoppables, but they got challenged by that.

And they responded, their PR people responded, that the name was actually designed to embody the playful and feisty spirit of the new product’s unique form.

The name puts a spin on the word unstoppable, similar to how unstoppables or unstoppables put a new twist on your laundry.

Now, whether you believe that or not, I think maybe they were just covering their tails.

I don’t know.

Andrea, one of the reasons that they do this is they want to own a word.

They want it to be theirs and they don’t have to pay to, say, buy the domain name or they don’t have to compete with others for the identities that might be associated.

So they come up with new words.

I worked in advertising for a long time and there’s a particular kind of copywriter who loves to do this and just mess with language because they think it’s creative.

And they don’t realize that a lot of their customers are getting stuck on this creativity and air quotes there.

And really, it’s confusing and diluting their message.

Well, I’m glad you were both able to clarify that because I did not think there was a word for it.

I thought there should be, but there’s no way I would have guessed on a mastic.

Well, that’s the study of names.

But naming, they just literally call it naming in the business.

They might have their own custom terms for it.

But it’s something that businesses do all the time, for public-facing words anyway.

Andrea, did you find it effective?

Do you like that kind of thing, or do you find it off-putting?

I like it.

And, you know, I mean, this particular use of the naming of this restaurant triggered me enough to email you guys.

So, you know, it’s been in my mind for several weeks.

So you haven’t gone there to have curry yet.

Not yet, but I think I should now.

Yeah, it’ll satisfy your curiosity.

Let us know how it goes.

Thanks, Adriana.

We’ll talk to you again sometime.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Share your stories about the workplace, 877-929-9673, or send them to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

You remember our conversation about traveling across the international dateline and losing a day or gaining a day.

Is there a word for losing the day, right?

Right.

And I don’t think we ever really came up with one.

No.

But it reminded Jacqueline Lambert of Ishpeming, Michigan of the term Beatles Week.

Beatles Week?

Yeah.

Like the beetle is the bug?

No, the Beatles like John, Paul, George, and Ringo.

The rock band.

Yeah.

She says that when she and her friends are talking about something that takes really long, they’ll say, oh, it’s longer than a Beatles Week.

Or if they’re casually mentioning something that’s nine days away, they’ll say, oh, that’s longer than a Beatles week.

Eight days a week.

Exactly.

Nice.

I like that.

A Beatles week.

Alright, sing the rest of it.

Now.

877-929-9673.

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 1854, a bright young Englishman who went by the name Robert John went off to Oxford University.

And he was something of a prodigy.

He taught himself to read at three.

And he was a very promising student.

But he soon received letters from a relative begging him to come home and take over management of the family estate in southwestern England.

And when I say estate, I mean estate.

Because this was Kinnersley Castle, which is on the border with Wales.

And it’s this huge medieval structure.

But he didn’t want to do that.

And so instead, he ran off to see the world.

He went to Australia.

He went to Tasmania.

And then he was shipwrecked off the coast of New Zealand.

And he was rescued by some of the Maori people who lived there.

And so he ended up living with them for a couple years.

And eventually, he made his way to Trinidad.

And he was really passionate about paleontology and biology and also education.

So much so that he eventually became the first superintendent of public education there in Trinidad.

He was fascinated by fish there in the tropics, and in particular a fish that was known as the rainbow fish or the million fish.

This was a little bitty, tiny, tiny fish, and they called them million fishes because there were so many of them in one school.

And so he gathered some samples of that and sent them off to the British Museum.

And they were so impressed with his work that they named this little fish after Robert John, whose full name was Robert John Lechmere Guppy.

Oh, how cool is that?

Wait, his last name was Guppy?

Guppy.

When you said his name was Robert John earlier, I was like, I don’t know anything called the Robert John.

The John is just going to be the origin of the toilet.

The Robert Earl.

But they named the Guppy after this guy.

After Mr. Guppy.

How about that?

Yeah.

And I think probably, as is often the case, somebody else had found this fish and written it up, but he’s the one who got the credit for it.

Right. It’s often the case.

Yeah.

The coiner or the originator often doesn’t get the glory.

Yeah. Well, that’s the story of guppies.

There’s lots of crazy stuff happening in language.

It’s happening in your home.

It’s happening where you work.

It’s happening in the books you read and stuff you read on the Internet.

Share it with us.

Ask questions.

Tell us what you know.

877-929-9673.

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And you can find a dozen ways to contact us on our website at waywordradio.org/contact.

Hi there. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Pat. I’m calling from Aubrey, Texas.

Well, welcome to the show, Pat. What can we do for you?

I have been wondering about an expression my mother used when I was a kid.

And she would say this whenever adults were talking about adult things.

And I might happen to be in the room.

And she would say to her friends, be careful.

Little pitchers have big ears.

So I always knew what it meant.

I always knew it meant, okay, everybody, don’t talk about this.

Sister’s listening.

Patty’s listening.

But in my little mind, I would think, okay, what is she talking about?

The women, the people in my family pronounce pitcher like a pitcher of water.

They pronounce it the same way as picture, like a picture of something.

And so I would try to think, well, is it a water pitcher with big ears or it is a picture of me with big ears?

So I don’t know which it was.

And I don’t know what in the heck expression does that mean?

When you heard it, you knew that things could not be discussed in front of the kids, right?

Right. So I did know that it meant that.

I just don’t know where it comes from, if anybody else says that.

Oh, yeah, absolutely.

Lots of people say it.

For centuries, well back into the 1500s, as a matter of fact.

Oh, really?

Yeah, it’s widespread.

And it has to do with the visual of a pitcher.

Like you might put water in and it’s got this big handle, the shape roughly of a human ear.

And it’s a comparison of the big ear on the pitcher to the big ears on the kids, meaning the kids are listening very carefully.

Because even my son does.

I did this when I was a kid.

I would always listen.

I would listen at the heater vents.

I would.

Absolutely.

Mom, sorry if you’re listening.

You’re kicking it out.

But yeah, because this is how we learn about the adult world by listening to the adults and figuring things out from what they let slip.

But anyway, so yeah, imagine a pitcher with a big handle, roughly the shape of a human ear.

Now, some people, when they hear this and they know that it’s meant the pouring, you know, the pouring receptacle, they think of the emptiness of the pitcher and they think of it as just waiting to be filled up with something that will later be poured out again.

And that’s the second part of it, the idea that the kids aren’t only hearing with their big ears, but they’re going to pour it back out later to somebody else’s ear.

It’s coming back.

Yeah.

-huh.

Yeah.

They’re going to tell their cousins the next time they’re with the family.

Exactly.

Children hearing things is not a dead end.

There is a loop there.

It moves forward and goes on.

That’s right.

That’s how you learn secret stuff.

It’s also how you learn to spell.

I remember my mother used to ask my older brothers if they wanted some C-A-K-E.

And I would say, I want some C-K-K.

Because I knew it was something good, whatever it was.

And they were not going to let little Martha Ann have any?

What?

Pat, I got to tell you, there’s another expression which we don’t use much anymore,

But you can find it in collections of sayings and proverbs and the like.

And it’s, great talkers are like broken pitchers.

Everything runs out of them.

And again, it’s the idea of this receptacle that just can’t hold a thing in.

Can’t do the job of keeping something in that it should be keeping in.

So there you go.

Yeah, thank you for that.

I love it.

The mystery is solved.

Thanks for calling, Pat.

Call us again sometime.

Oh, you’re welcome.

Thank you.

Take care.

Glad to help.

Bye-bye.

There’s an Australian variant, little rabbits have big ears.

Oh, that’s true.

Which is evocative, right?

-huh.

But it doesn’t have that extra little something about what goes in also comes out.

Yeah, it’s a whole different idea, isn’t it?

Just these really cute little things that also happen to have these ears that hear everything.

The wolf radar or whatever.

Right?

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send your emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you know how much I love coffee.

And I have a new way of talking about coffee.

Some people use the term build to mean prepare.

Have you heard this?

No, I haven’t.

I don’t hang out with people like that.

Well, you hang out with me, and I’m going to start saying I’m going to go build some coffee.

I really like this notion.

What does this mean?

Well, I looked it up in the Dictionary of American Regional English because I heard somebody talking about building some coffee.

And it turns out that build is an old term that means to prepare something to eat or drink.

So you might talk about building lemon pie or building an angel food cake.

And some people around the country still say, I’m going to go build some coffee.

Oh, so it’s not some pretentious hipster term.

It’s an old-fashioned thing.

Gotcha.

No, no.

It’s very old.

And I saw it in a lot of literature of the Old West, too.

It seems to be more common in the West.

I’m thinking about those old percolators where there was a certain amount of building of coffee, where you had to assemble the device.

Right.

Even more complicated than a French press, right?

Yep.

And get the coffee in the right place and make sure it didn’t get under it so you didn’t have coffee grounds and the liquid and so forth.

Yeah, and then it perks.

And then it perks, yeah.

Up with the little clear glass knob at the top that the bubbles go up into.

Yeah, and the ritual of preparing it is almost as much fun as drinking it.

But I’ve started to say that.

I’m going to go build some coffee.

Nice.

Or usually more plaintively, will you go build me some coffee?

I see how that is.

Hit us up.

We take your questions anywhere, anytime, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org,

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant.

How are you today?

This is John Seban from Seguin, Texas.

Hi, John.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I’ve got a question that dates back to something I heard 60 years ago or more.

In cold weather, my mother would say, it is colder than a well digger’s,

And she didn’t finish that the way most people would think.

She would say something like cladical or calavical,

And I don’t really remember exactly how she pronounced that.

That’s close.

Don’t know how to spell it, and I never asked her what it meant,

But I knew what the whole expression meant.

It meant wear layers.

Wear layers?

Yeah.

Wear layers.

So it’s super cold outside, and she’s making a comment, and she says,

It’s colder than a well digger’s, and it sounds like clavicle?

Right.

And do you think she meant the bone, the bone that’s kind of at your shoulder?

No.

I mean, I rather doubt that.

So I thought this was probably something she was substituting for a well digger’s rear end, to be gentle about it.

Well, there is, because the standard expression is colder than a well digger’s rear end, only usually it’s a crasser term than rear end, right?

Correct.

Although, if you dig around, no pun intended, you’ll dig around, you’ll find, the reason I think she might actually have been saying clavicle,

I don’t know of any examples of that, but some people have said colder than a well digger’s knee or colder than a well digger’s belt buckle or colder than a well digger’s elbow.

So there are other kind of things on the body that have been used in this way.

I just can’t imagine where she would have picked that up.

Well, maybe she just had a good ear for language.

Sometimes people read it in the newspaper or something or heard it on the radio.

Yeah, or maybe she just wanted to mess with people’s expectations, that they were expecting the naughty thing, and then she just throws in an anatomical term, clavicle.

She would have enjoyed that.

That’s a nice mix of registers, which is something I always appreciate when the low and the high meets in slang.

Right.

Sometimes people will add on the end of that, colder than a well digger’s behind in the Yukon or the Klondike, Wyoming, Idaho, Montana, or January.

Well, this was in rural Kansas, and so I don’t know if it was a regional thing.

Yeah, well, if another listener knows about that, we’d love to hear about it.

Maybe somebody else used that term.

Yeah, maybe somebody else has heard a word that sounds like clavicle but isn’t clavicle.

Colder than a well digger’s something.

Still in the blank.

Yeah, I’m sure we’ll hear about it.

Not bum, not rear end, not derriere.

Yeah, if you know one, call us 877-929-9673 or send it to us an email, words@waywordradio.org.

Well, thank you very much for considering my question.

I certainly enjoy your show.

Thank you, John.

We really appreciate your call.

Good day.

All right, take care.

Stay warm.

By the way, the expression is probably older than the 1940s, but that’s the earliest that I know of it.

Yeah.

Colder than a well digger.

Of course, there are so many expressions about colder than an X is Y.

This or that.

And a lot of them are naughty and we can’t say them on the air or won’t say them on the air.

Yeah.

I wonder if it was clavicle.

And, of course, I have to talk about the origin of clavicle, which comes from a Latin word that means little key.

And you might think, well, why would your collarbone, that’s your collarbone, it doesn’t really look like a key.

But it looks like the kind of key that was used in ancient Greece with doors.

It’s more elongated and subtle like that, like the clavicle in your shoulder.

Little keys, the clavicle.

Yeah, there’s a beautiful passage in the Odyssey

Where somebody closes a door

And locks it with a clavicle.

Oh, interesting.

877-929-9673.

Earlier, we were talking about

The term pallet, meaning

Like bedding. An informal bed

That you put on the floor.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s piled with blankets and pillows.

Yes, and you mentioned how it came from a French word for straw.

Yeah, P-A-I-L-L-E with a diminutive suffix

That makes it kind of like a small, cute straw or something.

Yeah, yeah.

I was reminded of the fact that the word for straw in Spanish

Is paja, related to that.

And in Italian, it’s palia, like Camille Palia, the writer.

P-A-G-L-I-A, okay.

Yeah, and the opera Pagliacci, which is about a clown,

And the traditional Italian character’s outfit for a clown was made out of the same fabric that they used to cover straw mattresses.

How cool is that?

So all these connections.

Yeah, all these connections.

Hiding there in plain sight.

Yeah, hiding there in plain sight.

Gotta love it.

But where easy to find, go to the website at waywordradio.org/contact, and you’ll find a dozen ways to reach us.

Or you can call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Claire McCullough.

Hi, Claire, where are you calling from?

Wilmington, North Carolina.

Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What can we help you with?

I’m looking for the origin of the saying,

Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

And I’ve heard that it’s a Shakespearean reference

Connected to the rope beds people use during that time.

But then I’ve also heard that that’s not true.

So I’m wondering what the real origin is.

Oh, your skepticism is well placed.

So the story that you heard about Shakespearean times was what?

That the beds used, the rope beds that they used,

People at night would have to pull the ropes really tight to have support to sleep on.

And then that would keep them off the floor so that the bugs wouldn’t get them.

And so you’re thinking that that sounds a little too neat, a little too good to be true, right?

It does.

Yeah, yeah. Well, you’re right about that.

For a long time, sleep tight has just meant sleep soundly, sleep really, really well.

The bedbug saying has lots of different forms that involve sometimes mosquitoes or fleas.

It’s not just bedbugs.

I grew up with the phrase, good night, sleep tight, wake up in the morning bright, do what’s right with all your might.

And don’t let the bedbugs bite.

No, the whole thing.

Yeah.

That’s a lot of, wow.

Yeah.

And that one goes all the way back to the 1860s.

And so there are just lots of different versions of this, just wishing somebody that they’ll have a good night’s sleep.

Especially children, right?

Just the kind of thing you say.

It’s kind of like the final thing I’m going to say to you before you need to shut your eyes and we’re not going to talk about this anymore.

No more getting up for water.

Yeah.

And so pretty much the sleep tight is a good rhyme with all those other terms like bedbugs bite and night and right and light.

The sleep tight, don’t let the bedbugs bite is firmly a kind of set rhyming phrase by what, Martha?

1880s?

Yep.

And then as early as the 1900s, it starts to pop up in exterminator ads.

So it’s so set that you can just throw it into a small classified ad and everyone kind of gets the reference.

It’s not really a mystery anymore.

Yeah.

Did you grow up hearing it or you say it to other people?

I did.

Yeah.

Yeah, I grew up hearing it, and then I’m a third grade teacher, and I told my students this morning that I was going to talk to you.

So they were curious as well, because they have also heard the saying.

And they’ve heard the version that you told us, which is what again?

Sleep tight, don’t let the bed bugs bite.

That’s all.

Yeah, just a sweet little rhyme.

It doesn’t have to do with bedding.

I mean, people did sleep on beds that the ropes were held, strapped around the frame, and they held the mattresses in place.

Yes, and possibly the ropes sometimes became slack.

Yes, but the phrase does not come from tightening those ropes.

The bed bugs, by the way, don’t need the ropes.

They climb up the post on each corner of the bed in order to get in the bedding.

That’s true.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right.

Thank you very much for your call, Claire.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah, and thanks for your work with the third graders.

Yeah, we like teachers.

You’re our people.

Well, thank you.

Take care.

Okay, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Is there a saying you’re curious about?

You can always call us and talk with us about it.

877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

We got a call from David who said when he was much younger,

He had a science teacher who had a sign on the wall that was intended to keep the students quiet.

And the sign simply said laboratory.

But by that, he put more of the first five, less of the last seven.

So more of the first five letters, which are labor.

Yeah.

And less of the last seven, which is oratory.

Laboratory.

Very clever.

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

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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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.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.

Thank you.