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We all know that the color pink is for boys and the color blue is for girls — at least, that's how it was 100 years ago. Grant and Martha share the surprising history behind the colors we associate with gender. Plus, we go rollin' in our hooptie, play a game of guess-that-Google-search, and get some tips on how to avoid getting swindled by our real estate agent! Also, new terms for failed software upgrades, some sugar-coated snark from across the pond, and a new way to show sarcasm in a text message. Yeah. Sure.
This episode first aired October 22, 2011.
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Bad Upgrades
Hate it when a software upgrade is worse than the previous version? We call that a flupgrade, or a new-coke. As in, "Skype really new-coked it with version 5.3.0." Come on, Skype!
Hooptie
What is a hooptie? Though it started in the 1960s as a term for a sweet new car, it became the common moniker for a beater, or a jalopy. Maybe Sir Mix-A-Lot said it best: "My hooptie rollin', tailpipe draggin'/ heat don't work, and my girl keeps nagging.'"
No Better Than She Ought to Be
If a lady is no better than she ought to be, her sexual morals may be in question. The saying, recently popularized by the BBC program Downton Abbey, is what's known as a charientism, or a bit of sugar-coated snark. By the way, if you'd like to hear more about such thinly veiled insults, check out this episode.
Swivet
If someone's in a swivet, they're flustered or in distress. For example, you might be in a swivel if you're late for a meeting or you've shown up to the SAT without a No. 2 pencil.
Google Search-Completion Puzzle
Our Quiz Guy Greg Pliska has a game based on Google searches, or at least what Google thinks you're searching. For example, what do Elmo, pink, and plant all have in common? Google suggests them, in that order, after you've entered the words "tickle me."
Constructed Languages
Did the movie Avatar make you imagine creating an entirely new language, like Na'vi? Conlang.org and the Language Creation Society have plenty of information on how to go about it and what others, including J.R.R. Tolkein have tried. Mark Rosenfelder's book The Language Construction Kit is a great resource for getting started.
Call for Tender
What does it mean to call for tender? This British phrase for soliciting a job is rarely seen in the United States, though tender, from the Latin for "to stretch or hold forth," is used in North America in two different senses: "to tender," as in "to offer," as well as the noun "tender" for something that's been issued, such as a dollar bill, hence legal tender.
'Puter Principle
What do you call an upgrade gone wrong? Perhaps the 'Puter Principle could be the software equivalent of the Peter Principle, which in business means that every employee in a hierarchy tends to rise to his or her level of incompetence.
To a Tee
If something's right on, it suits you to a tee. But why a tee? Tee, or the letter T, is short for tittle, or something really tiny. So if something's exactly perfect, it's right on point, with no room to spare. Or, simply, it suits you to a tee.
Gendered Colors
Why is pink a girl color and blue a boy color? In the 19th Century, pink used to be associated with boys, since it was a stronger, more decided color. Blue, on the other hand, was regarded as a girls' color, because it was considered dainty. It wasn't until the 1940s that marketers started to switch it around. Jeanne Maglaty has a great article about this in Smithsonian Magazine, called "When did Girls Start Wearing Pink?"
Slake Your Thirst
To slake your thirst is to quench your thirst. But some people have been switching it to slate your thirst or other variants. It's a classic case of an eggcorn, or one of those words that people mishear, and then start pronouncing incorrectly; for example, when misheard, acorn can become eggcorn.
Gazump
What does it mean to gazump someone? This phrase, specifically meaning "to swindle a customer in a real estate deal," came about in the United States in the 1920s and 1930s before disappearing and then popping up again in England in the 1970s. Whether or not the term is in vogue, the practice seems to be a mainstay.
Sartalics
How do you indicate sarcasm in a text message or an email? If winky emoticons aren't your thing, try left-leaning italics, as recommended by sartalics.com.
Arabic Sayings
The Arabic idiom in the apricot season translates to "in your dreams," presumably because the growing season for this fruit is so brief. Incidentally, the etymological root of "apricot," which means "to ripen early," is shared with the word precocious.
The Egyptian Arabic saying "ate the camel and all it carried" is the equivalent of "to eat someone out of house and home."
Photo by gtall1. Used under a Creative Commons license.
Book Mentioned in the Broadcast
| The Language Construction Kit by Mark Rosenfelder |
Music Used in the Broadcast
| Title | Artist | Album | Label |
|---|---|---|---|
| My Hooptie | Sir Mix A Lot | Seminar | Nastymix Records |
| Sniffin' and Scratchin' | The Soul Snatchers | Sniffin' and Scratchin' | Social Beats |
| Afrostrut | The Nite-Liters | Instrumental Directions | RCA |
| A Man And A Woman | David McCallum | Music - It's Happening Now | Capitol Records |
| The Bump | George Freeman | Franticdiagnosis | Bam-Boo Records |
| Funky Thithee | Shuggie Otis | Here Comes Shuggie Otis | Epic |
| If I Were A Carpenter | David McCallum | Music - It's Happening Now | Capitol Records |
| Wagon Wheels | Grant Green | Goin' West | Blue Note |
| Let's Call The Whole Thing Off | Ella Fitzgerald | Ella Fitzgerald Sings the George & Ira Gershwin Song Book | UMG Recordings, Inc |
Sartalics is an interesting concept, if you can get the font, and if the font is on the recipient's machine (otherwise you get a substituted font).
For close to 10 years now I've been trying to use the following to convey sarcasm: -)
The two characters imply "tongue in cheek." Picked it up on a pre-emoticon website that had all the text character combos then in use. Unfortunately, it never caught on. After receiving enough "What does that -) mean?" comments, I just gave up on it.
Although I like the idea of left-leaning italics, to my knowledge, the use of /sarcasm after the phrase, or (/sarcasm) if the phrase is in the middle of a sentence, is already fairly well established. I presume it has to do with the use of tags in programming (a word I use loosely) HTML. For instance if you wanted to bold something in HTML, you would put a <b>whatever text you want</b>, and whatever text is between the b and /b is bolded by the browser reading the HTML, just as typing out <center>text here</center> would center that text in the middle of the space the text would appear. The use of /sarcasm, therefore, would indicate that the previous phrase up until that point if unclear by the language itself.
Example:
A: So I was thinking about using grape soda instead of milk on my cereal. Would that work?
B: Well, I can't imagine how that wouldn't.. /sarcasm
Switching topics, there's a typo in the summary of the episode where this is episode is more formally listed.. under the swivet section, the example uses "swivel" as if spell-check caught it and changed it. Also, the link for "this episode" at the end of the charientism section has a stray carriage return tag (or a misplaced double quote from the anchor tag) in the address linked, creating a 404.
I think "downgrade" is already well enough established and is a bit more intuitive than having to guess what another term might mean -- but I quite like "new-coked" over flupgrade, or perhaps flubgrade to emphasize the "flub" since the "up" still seems to suggest improvement to me.
You might have mentioned that newspapers nowadays do post lengthy classified ads (the paper locally does anyway, in north Texas) titled "Call for Bids" before describing at length a proposed construction details and necessary specs of the project.
A possible other phrase that I just thought up, when reading my own post back to myself to edit it, is "using the entities" when one finds oneself needing to go into deeper-than-expected detail to get a point across. Web browser programs read HTML (hyper-text markup language) to display things onscreen, which are generally enclosed by less-than and greater-than symbols to tell the browser, "this is the start of something you need to format, instead of display as typed" such as <center> to center something instead of showing the word "center".. In order to get an HTML tag to show up as if it were regular text, I had to use "special entity" codes that would tell the browser to display the less-than/greater-than symbols instead of interpreting them as tags. And, in order to type out the special entity code, I have to use a special entity code even still. The special entity code for less than, < is typed out in the coding as < (and in order to make the browser display < and not interpret it as instruction to display a less-than symbol, I had to type in &lt; .. and in order to display &lt; I had to type &amp;lt; ..etc)..
I need to disagree with Grant when he said that bar tender had the same root and definition as as the verb "tender" meaning to offer. A bar tender is one who tends or takes care of the bar. Even though it makes some sense to think of the the bar tender as one who makes an offer of drinks, the history of the word says you have another think coming.
I've always conveyed sarcasm with a simple emoticon. 😛 It's obstensibly a guy sticking out his toungue, but I find it a playful way to say "Don't take what I just said too seriously.
On a different note, my coworkers had an interesting theory on the reason for the blue/pink switch. Namely, that in Hitler's Germany, imprisoned homosexuals were placed in pink to designate them as such. This led to the connection with pink and femininity. I have no idea if it's true or historically accurate, but I thought it was interesting...
Regarding the phrase, "she's no better than she ought to be," I'm a little surprised that it doesn't have a connection to the accused family. I always assumed that not only was the "she" being talked about but that her family was being accused of being lower class or not "raising her right," so "she" really couldn't be expected to rise above her raising (to dust off an old chestnut) and that type of scandalous behavior should be expected.
bigjohn756 said:
How does Thomas Gainsborough"s Blue Boy fit in here? It was painted in the 1770s.
He also painted Master Nichols, AKA "The Pink Boy" in 1782.
I am the author interviewed in the Smithsonian article; you can probably find the answers to at least some of your questions at my blog, pinkisforboys.org .
new way to show sarcasm in a text message
I usually add the emoticon with the wink using the semi colon. Ex: I am never sarcastic. ;>)
Sometimes I will also caps or bold (or both) a word in a sentence to give it emphasis so when reading it the sacasm comes out. Ex. I am NEVER sacastic.
This also brings up for me the challenge of communicating the english language based simply on which word we emphasize in a sentence.
This was taught to me in a Leadership class while in Seminary.
The instructor wrote the following sentence of the board and asked us explain it's meaning.
"I didn't say you were ugly."
After a few guesses by several students, He went on to say they were all correct and that in fact there were 6 possible meanings from the sentence, all dependent on which word was emphasized.
I didn't say you were ugly implies it wasn't me that said it, but someone did.
I didn't say you were ugly implies I flat out did not say what you think I said.
I didn't say you were ugly implies I didn't say it, but I sure did think it.
I didn't say you were ugly implies I said your mama was ugly. (or simply just someone esle)
I didn't say you were ugly implies you are ugly.
I didn't say you were ugly implies I said something about you, just not that you were ugly, but still something insulting.
My understanding is that pink was associated with little boys because it was a paler version of red, which is still considered a masculine color. Blue was associated with girls and women by way of the Virgin Mary. Children in general were associated with pastels and lighter colors.
There is a reference in the classic novel Little Women to pink=girl, blue=boy being a French tradition. I wonder if the soldiers returning home from WWII would have been exposed to it while serving in France.
Hey, folks! First post, so apologies in advance for the inevitable faux pas. I had to jump into the sarcasm discussion. As sarcasm and the internet are both things that are near and dear to me, I feel I should point out my experiences conveying sarcasm online. I'm part of, or have had prolonged contact with, a good number of online communities. Webcomic fandoms, Tumblr and Youtube collectives and the like, places where sarcasm is thrown around with great frequency and rarely misunderstood.
I feel like people online, especially young people (with whom I identify despite being… not that young anymore), avoid established emoticons and emotes like 
or /sarcasm. It's almost as if they are rejecting the previous generation's emotes as being hokey or overstated. Probably mostly overstated. In fact, sometimes "LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" (with that many or more exclamation marks) will even be used as a sort of jab to point out that the joke was stale, old or obvious. I also really don't see Sartalics catching on, either.
Instead, just like with any other culture, when the language acquisition is truly organic and second-nature, whether or not sarcasm shows through is never even considered as an issue. This is how people who were born not knowing of an internetless time talk to each other. Check this out:
"Haha! Cool story, bro!"
"lol cool story bro"
I'm sure that second one looks familiar. It's that shorthand that we've simultaneously embraced as cute enough to greatly overuse and cited as a symptom of the death of youth literacy. But in this case, it's being used in a very consciously-chosen (well, less and less conscious as it's used more often) context. Can you guess which one of these had the deadpan delivery, and which one was sincere?
Most of the people doing this kind of communication online–that is to say, people savvy enough to properly use sarcasm anyway–are perfectly aware of the existence of proper punctuation. Many of them even have degrees in the stuff. However, in informal online situations, they will switch back and forth effortlessly between proper typing and "internet" typing to indicate level of sincerity. The level of grammar is your voice expression.
In short, internet shorthand is the syntax of sarcasm, and it's already solidly in use as such!
So the same person could write both of these things:
"Reblogging this. Ouch, right in the feels. Please take all my feels."
"right in the feels
plz take all my feels now thx" (this is probably less "sarcastic" and more "ironically emphatic." It is expressing that the weight of whatever the speaker just experienced has debilitated them to the point where coherent communication is difficult)
or:
"What?" (I didn't understand that.)
"what." (What kind of conversation did I just walk into?)
"wut" (Like above, but to the nth degree)
or:
"Yeah, I'm pretty much the best person ever." (Can range anywhere on the spectrum of true to false bravado)
"ya im pretty much the best person ever" (obvious self-depreciation)
or:
"How is that even a thing?" (You have a word for that?/Is that something people actually do?)
"how is that even a thing" (Like above, but with magnified incredulity)
Or finally, what I just wrote to a friend:
"I just spent an inordinate time out of my life explaining my views on sarcasm on the internet on A Way With Words' forums.
this is important
basically the best person ever
<–this guy"
Congratulations, Grant & Martha, on one of best podcast episodes ever. From New Coke through the Google-nyms to sartalics, this was entertaining, informative and fun -- I love it when a plan comes together.
My two cents: "Eggcorn" has always puzzled me as a choice for the phenomenon, because I believe the term itself is an eggcorn in very few American dialects, much less across the English language. I cannot contort the 'E' in my 'egg' to sound anything like the Ä (long 'A') I would need to confuse it with 'acorn.'
BS
I think flubgrade is as good or better than flupgrade.
radams and his shifting emphasis example reminded me of a great radio show in 1970s CBC Canada. This was a disk jockey show playing old folk tunes, veterans singing WW-I songs, Maori war chants, etc. - the sort of things not normally heard on the radio then or now. The DJ was Max Ferguson, a gifted impressionist and half way through the two hour show, he would do a satiric take on the current headline. He was the first to notice that Nixon's "I am not as crook" speech was delivered at Disney world. He also did not take the view the rest of the corporate media took, "See, he isn't a crook; he just said that he wasn't."
When You Wish Upon a Star is playing softly in the background. Nixon impression: "Ms Woods [they actually researched who Nixon's secretary was, long before the 18 1/2 minutes made it household], Let me try this for effect." He tries "I am not a crook" with varying emphasis like radams' example. A falsetto voice like Jimminy Cricket comes over the variations, saying, "It's getting longer, it's getting longer."
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