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Discussion Forum—A Way with Words, a fun radio show and podcast about language

A Way with Words, a radio show and podcast about language and linguistics.

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Secret Gibberish (full episode)
Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
(Offline)
21
2012/08/20 - 4:27pm

Oops! I'll fix the text.

hippogriff
37 Posts
(Offline)
22
2012/08/22 - 11:27pm

Ron Draney: There is no term for a young great anteater (which prefers termites), but another ant eating endentate, the armadillo, has pups, so maybe that will work.

P'kahn is the state tree of Texas, but the state nut is the governor. A pea can is a cylindrical metal container for monocote legumes.

Bullnettle seeds can substitute for the pecans. Use kitchen tongs to pick the pods as soon as the part between the lobes turns white. Put them in nesting cans in the sun until they pop (without the enclosure, they will pop several feet and never be found). Shell with a pocket knife and use a pecan recipe for the pie. They taste between a peanut and sunflower seed. The disadvantage is they take a long time shelling to get enough for a pie.

The guide's false etymology sounded disgustingly like the treatment of "second class" citizens under Jim Crow and I would have pointed it out had I been there.

EmmettRedd
859 Posts
(Offline)
23
2012/08/23 - 7:21am

hippogriff said

... A pea can is a cylindrical metal container for monocote legumes....

According to this wiki (and my experience), peas (and most legumes) are dicot.

Emmett

EmmettRedd
859 Posts
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24
2013/04/03 - 8:44am

EmmettRedd said

She might end up "off in the weeds" if you don"t "Hold "er Newt!" Might weeds and rhubarb be interchangeable in the added expression?

Emmett

After watching an encore episode of History Detectives last night, I was reminded of my brother's expression of being or running "off in the toolies". The famous Modoc, Toby Riddle, weaved baskets from tule reeds (from Tule Lake?). The picture of them were pretty thick and they hid the water's edge. Obviously, if one were "off in the tules", it would be muddy ground and significantly entangling.

Where he might have picked it up is only open to speculation (he died in a tractor rollover). But, he was a "gear head" which might have been his only contact with California (I do not think he ever traveled further west than Kansas or Oklahoma).

Does anyone know an origin? The phrase gets 74,100 hits on Google [added in edit: Google only counts about 20 when I select the second page].

Emmett

Ron Draney
721 Posts
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25
2013/04/04 - 2:18am

My guess is that "the toolies" comes from the ancient Greek "Thule", a mythical land said to be in the farthest northern reaches, more remote than any other place.

polyorchid
26
2014/07/03 - 4:26pm

There is a single open quotation mark instead of an apostrophe in " 'Hold ‘er Newt! She’s headed for the barn!' "

Word curls up the apostrophes the wrong way when they come at the beginnings of words, but Word is assuming they are meant as single quotation marks. So this is an error.

Grant Barrett
San Diego, California
1532 Posts
(Offline)
27
2014/07/03 - 4:27pm

polyorchid, it's a function of the open-source editor that WordPress uses and quite an annoyance. I'll manually put the curvy quote in there but I know there are lots of other places like this on the site. I change them when I see them.

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