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Which came first, orange the color or orange the fruit? And what's a busman's holiday? Martha and Grant talk about bumbershoots, brollies, nursery rhymes, and alternatives to the word unicycle. Plus, an app-inspired quiz, favorite oxymorons, and the origin of "put that in your pipe and smoke it!" If the Google Books Corpus doesn't sound like fun, think again. And by the way, shouldn't more than one company be allowed to sell Monopoly?
This episode first aired June 20, 2011.
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Atavistic Words
You know those words whose meanings never seem to stick in your mind, no matter how many times you flip back to the dictionary? Martha wrestles with the term atavistic, meaning "the tendency to revert to ancestral characteristics." She now remembers it by the Latin root it shares with the Spanish word for "grandfather," abuelo. Grant, in turn, shares his revelation that upwards of actually means "more than," not "up to."
Unicycles
A unicycle enthusiast wonders if his unicycle can be properly called a bike. To avoid the four-syllable mouthful, the unicycle community (yes, there is one) sometimes calls it a uni, but for the general public, the term "bike" works. Martha reveals that she once spent a summer teaching herself to ride a unicycle, and doesn't mind calling it a bike. Grant notes the general rule that once a word has left its etymological root, it can be used for whatever we need it for.
Bumbershoots
Rihanna's hit "Umbrella" may not have had the same ring if she'd referred to being "under my bumbershoot." Nonetheless, bumbershoot, bumberell, brolly, and bumbersol, among others, are all playful alternatives to umbrella that even Mary Poppins would appreciate. Grant explains that bumbershoot, itself an American slang term, derives from the Latin umbra, meaning "shadow," and chute, as in "parachute."
Comedic Tweets
Twitter's 140-character format has made way for a whole new brand of comedy writing. See Judah Friedlander: "More than one company should be allowed to sell Monopoly," or Stephen Colbert: "It doesn't always pay to get up early. If you're a worm, you just get eaten by that early bird. So sleep in, worms."
There's an "App" for That
In the mood for a word puzzle? Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has an app for that. This week's quiz features solutions starting with the letters app. Someone afraid to take care of the bug problem in their apartment doesn't want to "app-roach" them!
Not My Forte
Is it worth using proper pronunciation if it makes you sound ignorant or misinformed? Contrary to the common understanding, the word forte is actually pronounced "fort." Grant describes forte as a skunked word; it's a losing situation no matter how you use it. For the sake of clarity and conversational flow, it's best instead to say that something is a "strength," a "strong suit," or is "in one's wheelhouse."
Busman's Holiday
Do you ever spend your off-time doing something work related? This is known as a busman's holiday or a postman's holiday, as in the British understanding of holiday as a vacation or time off work. Research for a dictionary entry on postman's holiday led Grant to an old French ragtime song called "Le Facteur en Balade," or "The Postman on a Walk". In the proper sense, a postman's holiday might consist of a leisurely walk along the same route whereon he delivers the mail. Let's just hope it doesn't involve getting chased by dogs.
Listeners' Oxymorons
Some listeners are madly in love with oxymorons, and they continue to share their favorites. One listener has a great T-shirt that reads "An oxymoron a day keeps reality away." Another says his favorite oxymoron is "Dodge Ram."
Buckeye Game
A listener from Richmond, Virginia, remembers an old game called buckeye that consists of metaphorically pulling someone's leg, then calling Buckeye! and tugging one's own lower eyelid. Martha suggests that it may be related to a 19th-century use of buckeye that refers to "something or someone inferior," like a country bumpkin or a rube. Thus, calling "Buckeye!" may be equivalent to calling someone a sucker for getting tricked, or punk'd. Still, any explanation for the eyelid exposure is still pending.
Google Books Corpus
Grant is pleased as punch about BYU Professor Mark Davies' new Google Books Corpus, which contains entries for every word ever in the entire Google Books database. In addition to parts of speech and definitions, the site provides contextual examples for each word. For example, the database has revealed that the word suitcase is often preceded by the adjective battered. Writers, teachers, English learners and language enthusiasts will love prospecting in this lexical goldmine.
Jiggity-Jig
"Home again, home again, jiggity-jig!" A listener wonders about the origin of this phrase her Mother often used. Grant and Martha trace it back to another mother: Mother Goose. The full line goes, "To market, to market, to buy a fat pig, home again, home again, jiggity-jig." It does not, contrary to a highly visited Google result, originate from the movie Blade Runner (though it's a cute scene nonetheless).
Scrabble Rules
Listeners have been sharing some of their personal Scrabble rules, including new uses for the blank tile. For example, one variation allows for the tile to be removed and reused, so if Grant were to play the blank tile as an "E" and Martha has an "E" in her tray, she can swap the tiles and then use the blank for her own play. Just be sure to use it, because nobody likes someone who bogarts the blank tile!
Like It or Lump It
Downton Abbey, a program featured on Masterpiece Theater, provided a handful of colorful expressions that date surprisingly far back. "Like it or lump it," meaning "deal with it," is found at least as early as 1830 and takes from the old verb lump meaning "to look sulky or disagreeable." "Put that in your pipe and smoke it," a contemporary favorite meaning "Take that!" actually shows up around 1820. As for the phrase "you're sailing perilously close to the wind," meaning "be careful not to overstep"-- well, we haven't caught wind of the origin of that one.
Words from Women's Suffrage
Databases like the Google Books Corpus can also be used to follow text over time. For example, as the women's suffrage movement grew around 1910, words relating to women's rights grew in popularity and frequency of usage.
Original Orange
What came first, the color orange or the fruit? The original term is Sanskrit and refers to the fruit. As the fruit traveled west, the word came with it. Grant notes that, like the terms for parts of the body, the names of colors travel very well in language because we're constantly speaking and writing about them. The term "orange" became what it is in English after the fruit made it to the French town Orange.
Meeting Expenses
Martha shares a quip that's all too true: "I don't find it hard to meet expenses. They're everywhere!"
This episode is hosted by Martha Barnette and Grant Barrett, and produced by Stefanie Levine.
Photo by Joe Lewis. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Music Used in the Broadcast
| Title | Artist | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| Summer In The City | Quincy Jones | You've Got It Bad Girl | A&M Records |
| Dig On It | Jimmy McGriff | Soul Sugar | Capitol Records |
| Museum Camera | David Holmes | Ocean's Eleven Soundtrack | Warner Brothers |
| What's Going On | Quincy Jones | Smackwater Jack | A&M Records |
| NT | Kool and The Gang | The Best of Kool and The Gang 1969-1976 | Island Mercury |
| Shake Your Body | The Jacksons | Shake Your Body | Epic |
| Smoke Two Joints | The Toyes | Smoke Two Joints | Ginger Coffee Records |
| The Dude | Quincy Jones | The Dude | A&M Records |
| Let’s Call The Whole Thing Off | Ella Fitzgerald | Ella Fitzgerald Ella Fitzgerald Sings The George and Ira Gershwin Song Book | Verve |
"Sailing perilously close to the wind" is a phrase that means you are about to stop making forward motion, or in this case, as it was said to an employee (if I recall the reference correctly), he is about to lose his job. Here's where it comes from: a sailboat can not sail directly into the wind; it needs to sail at angles to the wind. When a sailboat is sailing "upwind," or towards the direction from which the wind is blowing, it is also said to be sailing "close to the wind." (The angles, in this case, might be something like 35 to 45 degrees from whence the wind blows.) As a sailboat tries to squeeze its way even closer to the prevailing direction (and it would actually be an "apparent" wind direction that it would be sailing towards), the forward edge of the sail, or "luff," begins to, well, luff, or shake a bit, showing the sailor that he is beginning to sail "to close to the wind." At this point, the sail begins to lose its laminar flow, and the sail stalls thus making the boat slow and lose its momentum.
Hope this helps.
Best etc.
BCC
To Martha's atavistic and Grant's upwards of I'll add my own personal vocabulary blind spot: dilate. It's always felt to me like it should mean exactly the opposite of what it does. I sense that I'm being influenced by such words as "diminish", "decay" and "deteriorate", where the initial "d" implies a feeling something "becoming less".
I suspect some people have a similar problem with drought; many's the time I've noticed someone using it to describe conditions I'd associate with flooding. Maybe it's the initial "dr-" that links it to words like "drink" and "drown".
Ron Draney said:
To Martha's atavistic and Grant's upwards of I'll add my own personal vocabulary blind spot: dilate. It's always felt to me like it should mean exactly the opposite of what it does. I sense that I'm being influenced by such words as "diminish", "decay" and "deteriorate", where the initial "d" implies a feeling something "becoming less".
Dilate was once a problem for me too. It is much less so now, but I cannot explain why except maybe by memorization.
Emmett
Ron Draney said:
I suspect some people have a similar problem with drought; many's the time I've noticed someone using it to describe conditions I'd associate with flooding. Maybe it's the initial "dr-" that links it to words like "drink" and "drown".
I suspect you're right about the "dr" start of the word. "Dilate" was never a problem for me, nor was "drought." "Draught" (as in beer) had me screwed up for awhile, until I saw it in print.
Where I see a lot of confusion and misuse is with "dearth" vs. "plethora." And that's a bit weird, since it's got the "d" starting it.
A unicycle has one wheel, a bicycle two, a tricycle three, a quadcycle four, etc. As a longtime League of American Bicyclist member, I am protective of cycling language; I'm ok with people riding unicycles or trikes but not with talk of "three-wheel bikes".
A cyclist could be riding a cycle with various numbers of wheels. Not the case with a bicyclist or triker.
Martha and Grant are pretty loosy-goosey about whether something can be a "bike" when it doesn't have the "two" of what the name refers to, but that's no surprise. They handily dismissed my suggestion that you can't use "between" with three or more things because the very word contains a form of the number "two".
(And in English, too. You don't even have to wait for a break with a Greek root for that one.)
Ron Draney said:
Martha and Grant are pretty loosy-goosey about whether something can be a "bike" when it doesn't have the "two" of what the name refers to, but that's no surprise. They handily dismissed my suggestion that you can't use "between" with three or more things because the very word contains a form of the number "two".
(And in English, too. You don't even have to wait for a break with a Greek root for that one.)
As for personal choice, I, too, agree with Ron and tromboniator about between. But I think we are in a minority in maintaining a distinction between between and among.
It seems that the difficulty with pressing bike into strained service has to do with the lack of a common collective term for the class of vehicles. What word should one use to refer to unicycles, bicycles, tricycles, etc.? Cycles doesn't work well, because it already means something quite distinct. I propose we start using the word pedalia as a collective for foot-powered vehicles of any wheel count. Short of that, I suppose bike will have to fill the role of the collective.
I don't like "bike" as the collective, since it also includes motorcycles. And it's a truncation of "bicycle" which implies "two wheels." That's why we also have the word "trike." And what would we truncate "unicycle" to? Monike? [tripod, bipod, monopod]
"Cycle" is also used to refer to motorcycles, and has the other connotation of "periodicity" that Glenn pointed out.
The suggestion of "pedalia," though a bit obscure, seems the most accurate to me. That would also include those 4-wheeled toy cars kids play with. Otherwise we'd be stuck with something far more cumbersome, like "human-powered vehicle." Does "anthropomotivator" work? Nahhh ... got spell-checked, as did "pedalia."
Re "buckeye", I've posted in another thread:
The French have the same gesture, pulling down the lower eyelid with the index figure for an index. BUT it has the "opposite" meaning. It doesn't mean that the person making the gesture has tried to fool the second person, but that the person making the gesture doesn't believe something said by the second person. It's more like "yeah, right, I'll buy that" with a sarcastic tone, or "you're pulling my leg" or "stop joshing me". It corresponds to the expression "mon oeil" (my eye). The expression and the gesture can be used together or separately.
About "orange", you could have talked about why the "n" disappeared. I forget that phenomenon where "un napperon" becomes "un apperon*". Similarly the "n" got transfered to the article at some point (Spanish? Italian? French?). Certainly in France "un narange*" would easily be heard as "un orange", especially under the influence of the city of Orange.
And in a twist, the color orange became the symbol of the House of Orange, a title held by the House of Nassau, who became kings of the Netherlands.
Hence Ulter's "Orangemen" after protestant King of England William of Orange, the colors of Princeton University, etc. etc.
I'm sorry, but allowing people to make up foreign words is simply not acceptable to me. When someone pronouncing forte says "for-TAY," they are not just employing the wrong language of the chosen word, they aren't even using a real word! The Italian word for "strong" is pronounced FOR-tay. There is also no such word in French or Spanish. Accepting this is akin to accepting quince (kwins) as a susbstitute for fifteen (hey, it's how they spell it in Spanish). Also, based on general usage, Italian uses forte more often for ethereal applications, like music or the wind (a vento forte)
But at the most basic, use of the French 'forte" is not a substitution for a missing English word or phrase; it is an idiom used for specific meaning and emphasis. My strengths may include maths, reaching items on high shelves, and mowing the lawn. But arguing is my forte.
To add my two cents to the unicycle/bike falderal, my exhibited precision (who said "nit-pick?") rejects bike as a substitute. My first idea was to refer to them as "ukes," but that's already taken. Instead I suggest "uikes," pronounced: yikes. I hope Martha finds it appropriate.
imajoebob said:
I'm sorry, but allowing people to make up foreign words is simply not acceptable to me. When someone pronouncing forte says "for-TAY," they are not just employing the wrong language of the chosen word, they aren't even using a real word! The Italian word for "strong" is pronounced FOR-tay. There is also no such word in French or Spanish. Accepting this is akin to accepting quince (kwins) as a susbstitute for fifteen (hey, it's how they spell it in Spanish). Also, based on general usage, Italian uses forte more often for ethereal applications, like music or the wind (a vento forte)
But at the most basic, use of the French 'forte" is not a substitution for a missing English word or phrase; it is an idiom used for specific meaning and emphasis. My strengths may include maths, reaching items on high shelves, and mowing the lawn. But arguing is my forte.
To add my two cents to the unicycle/bike falderal, my exhibited precision (who said "nit-pick?") rejects bike as a substitute. My first idea was to refer to them as "ukes," but that's already taken. Instead I suggest "uikes," pronounced: yikes. I hope Martha finds it appropriate.
Yikes. I will backpedal on the discussion of bike.
However, I will weigh in on the forte melee. English is full of spellings, pronunciations, and entire words that have resulted in errors, misunderstandings, and orthographic pronunciations. (Employee ends in the sound -ee, not -ay, as in fiancee). In fact, the fairly prolific ending -ee, c.f. mentee, is universally pronounced as spelled.
Do you remember a previous podcast in which Martha and Grant discuss the pronunciation of coyote? They mention that the now rarer and dialectic two-syllable pronunciation is actually truer to the original word than the common three-syllable pronunciation. Guess What: coyote
The fact is that many native English speakers have taken a word of French origin forte, originally pronounced like "fort", and have begun to pronounce it "fortay." After all, more people are familiar with music than are familiar with fencing. It is possible this pronunciation change happened because people were unfamiliar with the specialized French noun, and have been influenced by a more common and identically spelled Italian musical term forte, pronounced "fortay."
This kind of mistake is neither shocking, nor a reason to dismiss the alternate pronunciation. It is one important mechanism by which English has enriched over the centuries.
Glenn said:
This kind of mistake is neither shocking, nor a reason to dismiss the alternate pronunciation. It is one important mechanism by which English has enriched over the centuries.
Despite my apparent vehemence, I generally agree. Anglicizing a word is very different from substituting one foreign word or phrase for another. I say "On-velope." If you want to say "En-velope," that's fine with me. Like Thee and Thuh. But fort is part of an idiom. Substituting the French forte for Grant and Martha's less self-conscious "strong point" is one purpose of using the phrase. It's a specific construction. That's why I have the opposite reaction when people say "for-TAY." You want me to recognize how talented you are by your display of ignorance? Somebody who claims a certain "jenny sez kwoy" obviously lacks it.
Despite its French origin, I have no doubt that most people would reject "nave" or "nive" as a substitute for naive. Or worst, "na-eeh-vay," which would be the Italian pronunciation. Depending on your Latin teacher, you may say "Veni, vidi, vici,' or you could be saying "Weni, widi, wiki." But that's a matter of dialect, not vocabulary. I'm sure most everyone would reject "Carp dye um" as an acceptable idiom, because it's not in anyone's dialect. Just like for-TAY.
Glenn said:
...I will weigh in on the forte melee. English is full of spellings, pronunciations, and entire words that have resulted in errors, misunderstandings, and orthographic pronunciations. (Employee ends in the sound -ee, not -ay, as in fiancee). In fact, the fairly prolific ending -ee, c.f. mentee, is universally pronounced as spelled.
Having established this principle, it remained only for English to do exactly the opposite for the word lingerie.
About "buckeye"
I don't know where we got it from but we have the gesture with a very similar meaning but with a different phrase accompanying it. The difference in meaning is that it's not the person pulling somebody's leg that does this but the person who thinks their leg is being pulled ;P. In other words, if you hear an incredible story that seems completely made up and unbelievable you pull your lower eyelid down with your index finger and usually that's enough of a signal of your incredulity. But every now and again this gesture is accompanied by the phrase "tu mi jedzie (pociÄ…g)" - in loose thanslation "see the (train) going here?"
I never heard the phrase explained in terms of its etymology, but if I may be allowed a jab at how this relic can be explained - the message sent with this gesture/expression combo is that the story you're being told is as believable and credible as a dream you might see "on the inside of your eyelids". At least that is what I would intuit from the context in which the gesture and phrase are typically used 🙂
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