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Enough about the Word of the Year. How about the Word of the Decade? Bailout? Google? Martha and Grant discuss some candidates. Also in this episode, does speaking a different language make you feel different emotions? What did Don Draper on Mad Men mean when he called Betty a Main Line brat? And why do we talk about throwing someone under the bus?
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Where'd we get the expression mind your p's and q's? A Barcelona native wants help understanding exactly what it means, and shares a few other English idioms that caught her up short.
A die-hard fan of television's Mad Men is puzzled when Don calls Betty a Main Line brat.
Grant's been collecting contenders for 2009's Word of the Year, including Dracula sneeze, Government Motors, and...unumbium?
Quiz Guy John Chaneski sums up the events of 2009 in the form of limericks, all with a blank to be filled. Here's one:
NASA really put on a great show
A new lunar crater did blow
To the glee of mankind
The rocket did find
That the moon contains much __________.
A dogsledder in Vermont wonders why he and his fellow mushers direct their furry packs by shouting gee for "right" and haw for "left."
If you ask a salesclerk for change in the form of a case quarter, what are you asking for?
An upstate New York woman says her British husband makes fun of her for saying lookit!
Does speaking a particular language make you feel certain emotions? The hosts talk about a blog post by evolutionary biologist Olivia Judson musing about whether this might be true.
A woman from Indianapolis is trying to convince her grandmother that it's okay for restaurant servers to refer to both male and female customers as you guys. Grandma says it's sexist. Our caller maintains it's fine, drawing an analogy with Spanish, where the masculine pronoun ellos encompasses both sexes.
Why do we describe the sudden abandonment of someone as throwing him under the bus?
A Dallas man says his grandmother used to carry around washcloth a plastic bag in her purse. When he and his siblings would get their hands dirty, she'd say to them, "Show me your paddywackers," and they'd hold out their hands to be wiped clean. He wonders if she made up the word paddywhacker.
Two more expressions that characterized 2009: El Stiffo and drive like a Cullen.
Hello,
I'm new to the forum, this is my first message. You do a good
show Grant and Martha.
On the saying "Watch your p's and q's.", I learned p's and q's in
grammar school mathematics. Those are the standard variables
used in formal logic, a branch of mathematics. In print,
I've seen them used in "Principia Mathematica" by Alfred North
Whitehead (1861-1947) and Bertrand Russell (1872-1970), a three
volume blue hardcover edition printed in the 1950's, published
by Cambridge University. I was dismayed to hear the hosts say
that the origin is unknown. Although I can't say that I know
the history of the saying, I do know that p's and q's are used
when logic is taught and published. So I think that logic is
what the saying is talking about.
You can search for the title and the author "Whitehead" at this web
site under the Indianapolis libraries (click "Guest Access" first):
Grant Barrett said:
... dating to the very early 1600s, which, I believe, is also earlier than when today's notation for logic became standard.
That date takes us back to John Wallis' time (1616-1703) and the
founding of the Royal Society (circa 1660's), England. The Royal
Society has been influential in mathematical notations, I'm an
engineer not a historian, I wonder if those people wrote about
logic, used p's and q's, and if so where they got the notation
from.
Maybe I have it backwards, maybe mathematicians took the p's
and q's from the saying? Your early 1600's date predates the
Royal Society.
Grant, on the air you two said there was no known origin for
"P's and Q's", should I assume that the people who researched
the phrase talked to the mathematicians?
There's no way to know who they talked to, but we can be sure that they surveyed nearly all of the available English-language texts of the 1600s, since, relatively speaking, there aren't that many and they've had plenty of time and manpower to go about it. "They" being the etymologists for the Oxford English Dictionary, mostly.
Hi Grant and Martha:
This is my first post, but I'm a regular podcast listener.
I always assumed the P's and Q's came from the field of Economics, where P and Q are used as labels for Price and Quantity on those infamous supply and demand charts. I gathered from this that "Mind your P's and Q's" meant pay attention to your business.
Do the timelines match up with this possible origin?
Troy
Grant Barrett said:
Enough about the Word of the Year. How about the Word of the Decade?
Isn't it a little early to pick out a word of the decade?
Maybe this is a math thing instead of a word thing (I'm an accountant), but when I count to ten, I hardly ever stop at nine. The first decade consisted of year one through year ten. So, the 201st decade began in January 2001 and won't end until December 2010.
Let's give the Word of the Decade another year. 🙂
You make a good point about counting. Still, I think any consecutive ten years can correctly be called a decade. In this case, a lot of people elect to use the "odometer" method of conceptualizing decades. Don't you just love to see those numbers roll up? Besides, it makes it a lot easier to talk about a decade as, for example, the 90s, eliminating the need for some messy periphrase.
Sure, the same applies to the miles my truck has travelled, but who takes a picture of the dashboard when the odometer rolls up to 100,001? My advice: don't invite that person to your next party.
Troy said:
Hi Grant and Martha:
This is my first post, but I'm a regular podcast listener.
I always assumed the P's and Q's came from the field of Economics, where P and Q are used as labels for Price and Quantity on those infamous supply and demand charts. I gathered from this that "Mind your P's and Q's" meant pay attention to your business.
Do the timelines match up with this possible origin?
Troy
Grant and Martha,
I enjoy your podcast regularly, and, like Troy, post for the first time. Let me speculate further and take my Q from the theatre shorthand - just speculating, of course: now, as an actor in a theatre company, you have to mind your POSITIONS and your CUES. An obvious shorthand expression results from (let's say) a marginal note: cue > Q and position > P, and so, in alphabetical order, "mind your ps and qs". I can easily imagine a Marlowe or a Shakespeare jot this down to a forgetful actor's sides... The advantage of this approach is not taking this idiom, well, too literally.
Agree with you, Grant and Martha, and your dogsledding caller that the commands "gee", "haw", etc probably evolved to feature different vowels so they'd be unambiguous to the dogs.
I have trouble believing, though, that I was the only listener to think of the Kliban cartoon featured
here.
Yes, Betty Draper is from Philadelphia. She attended Lower Merion High School which is located on Philadelphia's Main Line (Ardmore, to be precise). She has a BA in Anthropology from Bryn Mawr, so a double Mainliner. I would take issue with the description of the Main Line as a neighborhood. I think it's better described as suburbs of Philadelphia, rather than a neighborhood (for me, a neighborhood would be within the city of Philadelphia).
Grant, you said that caser referred to a crown coin. Might it be derived from caesar? My Latin is nearly non-existent, but I believe that the classical pronunciation is very close to kaiser, so from caesar to caser would not be a big leap, and the crown makes sense. I understand that obviously logical transitions are not exactly de rigeur in word derivations, but it's worth a try.
Thanks,
Peter
Martha Barnette
Grant Barrett
Grant Barrett
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