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What does dog hair have to do with hangover cures? Also, where'd we ever get a word like "dude� And what's the word for when unexpected objects form a recognizable image, like a cloud that looks like a bunny, or the image of Elvis in a grilled cheese? We have the answers.
Portions of this episode first aired November 1, 2008.
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Apple core, Baltimore! Ever play the rhyming game where you eat an apple, then shout "apple core," and then the first person to respond "Baltimore!" gets to decide where (more specifically, at whom) the core gets tossed. This old-fashioned game is hours of fun for the whole family! We promise.
"A fish stinks from the head down." When an Indianapolis woman is quoted saying that, she's accused of calling someone a stinky fish. She says she wasn't speaking literally, insisting that this is a turn of phrase that means "corruption in an organization starts at the top." Who's right?
Dude, how'd we ever start using the word "dude"? The Big Grantbowski traces the word's origin--it's over 125 years old. Here's a poem about dandy dudes from 1883, the year the word zoomed into common use. Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus also has a very good summary of what is known about "dude."
Quiz Guy John Chaneski drops by with a puzzle involving overlapping words. He calls it, of course, "Overlap-Plied Linguistics."
If you're hung over, and someone offers you a little "hair of the dog," you can rest assured you're not being offered a sip of something with real dog hair in it. But was that always the case? Grant has the answer, and Martha offers a word once proposed as a medical term for this crapulent condition: veisalgia.
A new resident of Pittsburgh is startled by some of the dialect there, like "yinz" instead of "you" for the second person plural, and nebby for "nosy." For a wonderful site about the dialect of that area, check out Pittsburgh Speech and Society.
If someone says he "finna go," he means he's leaving. But finna? Grant has the final word about finna.
Good news if you've wondered about a word for recognizable images composed of random visual stimuli—that image of Elvis in your grilled-cheese sandwich, for example. It's pareidolia.
In this week's "Slang This!," a member of the National Puzzlers' League from Boston tries to guess the meaning of four possible slang terms, including labanza, woefits, prosciutto, and moose-tanned.
At Murray's Cheese in Grand Central Station, the workers who sell cheese are called "cheesemongers." The store's opening up a new section to sell cold cuts, and workers there are looking for more appetizing term than "meatmonger." (Meat-R-Maids? Never mind.) Martha and Grant try to help.
At sports events in North America, we enthusiastically root for the home team, right? But a woman from Kenosha, Wisconsin, says an Aussie told her that they most assuredly don't do that Down Under. There, he tells her, rooting means "having sex." Is he pulling her leg, she wonders?
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Regarding "grinnies"...
I grew up in central Iowa and we have squinnies ('squinny' singular)...but they aren't chipmunks. Squinnies are 13-stripe ground squirrels. They look similar to chipmunks in that they have the same coloring and stripes but chipmunks are, well, chubby or more mouse-shaped...they'll sit on their haunches hunched up like a squirrel... whereas squinnies are long and low to the ground, more like a weasel or mink only a lot smaller. They will perch up on their hind legs like a prairie dog; they don't hunch. Chipmunks tend to live in wooded areas and you won't see them much unless you're hiking in a quiet area. Squinnies live in more open areas...usually yards or ditches...and will often dart across gravel roads or driveways in rural areas (they're FAST). They also tend to live in large-ish communities, like prairie dogs. Where there's one, there are many and the ground will be riddled with their den holes which are maybe a little larger around than a quarter. Chipmunks are more solitary.
I'd never heard them called anything but squinnies until I was a young adult. I was talking with someone who wasn't from around here and said something about "squinnies" and he looked at me and said, "Oh come on...what are they really called?" and I didn't know.
After I graduated from college I was working with a woman from a different part of the state (Marshalltown) and she called them grinnies. That was the first time I ever heard that term. I remember thinking it was odd that Marshalltown was only about an hour away, yet they have a different word for the little critters.
Anyway, at least around here, grinnies/squinnies are not chipmunks.
Apple core…
I'm 63 years old, I grew up in southern California, and as a child in elementary school this was a common game. Many of us had apples in our lunch sack or lunch box, and when we finished eating the apple we played “apple coreâ€. The rhyme was exactly as Grant said at the beginning of the show. Naturally, with perhaps a dozen kids sitting around, friendships and rivalries came into play when picking the “friend†who got the apple core chucked at him or her. My mother told me she also played this game as a child (she was born in Illinois in 1910), also with friends after school or in school.
We grew up mostly in Northern CA and used to play this as kids (during the 1970s)... but we saw took it from a Donald Duck cartoon because, of course, we found it hilarious to have an excuse to throw stuff at each other. the episode is on YouTube:
Donald Duck and Chip and Dale - Apple Core episode
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=woxP8Ak-nbc
Anything we know about the rules is from that cartoon.
Maybe I missed an important point in your discussion of the rotting or stinking fish.
While these are clearly figures of speech, they seem equally clearly negative references to the leadership. At best, they seem to be saying that the leader is bad at the job, if not corrupt. So, even with nobody making the mistake of taking the expression literally, it would be easy to see how this comment might get people up in arms.
Figures of speech, by their graphic nature, tend to be vivid and, when negative, more inflammatory than their less colorful equivalents.
I certainly would not consider making this kind of statement in a public criticism of someone I otherwise like or admire.
Ablestmage, William Saroyan used it in his 1935 story, Five Ripe Pears.
At Murray's Cheese in Grand Central Station, the workers who sell cheese are called “cheesemongers.†The store's opening up a new section to sell cold cuts, and workers there are looking for more appetizing term than “meatmonger.†(Meat-R-Maids? Never mind.) Martha and Grant try to help.
how about - "salami-ier"? 
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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