Do Me a Solid

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Grant, your family likes Mexican food, right?

And sometimes you like to cook together.

Yes, please.

Right? So let’s suppose that you’re making a big pot of chili.

Sure.

And you’ve decided that you need some more of that earthy brown powdered spice.

Yes.

And so you look to your wife and you say, honey, would you please hand me some?

Oh, no. You’re going to make me say it.

C-U-M-I-N.

Is that what you say?

C-U-M-I-N?

No, I say cumin.

Cumin.

But I think there’s a problem with that.

I’ve had a problem with that word all my life.

I think I’ve said it all different ways.

What do you say?

I say cumin.

So we’re talking about this spice.

Yeah.

It dominates like burritos and tacos and that sort of thing.

Yeah, delicious.

You do put it in chili.

Yeah.

I use Tex-Mex chili recipes.

Okay, all right.

But yeah, but the dictionaries have a different pronunciation.

I know.

They say cumin.

Who else says that?

Nobody but the dictionaries.

Well, I have seen it on cooking shows, but I’m pretty sure they looked it up too and then felt bad and thought, well, I need to look professional.

Let me say common because that’s what my dictionary says.

But I think this is one of those cases where the dictionaries have fallen behind.

I think they’re bringing up their ear.

By like 100 years or something, some incredible amount of time, they failed to keep up.

Now, we do find that the spelling used to reflect that pronunciation.

Sometimes people would spell it with a double M.

Right. C-U-M-M-I-N. Yeah. These days people say cumin or cumin. Right.

And most of the language authorities who’ve even looked at the word go like, wow, this is a thing.

You know, we’re doing a little avoidance here by saying cumin.

Maybe we were avoiding saying common because it just sounds awkward and weird in the kitchen.

It doesn’t actually sound like an ingredient at all. Right.

It sounds like you’re yelling to somebody in another room.

It’s part of the foreignizing. We think of this as a foreign spice.

Therefore, we give it that little extra zing, right?

Just to make it sound a little exceptional.

Exactly.

And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that in the show later on.

Give us a call if you say cumin or cumin or cumin or something else.

We want to hear about it and all your other linguistic weirdities.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jess Haberman calling from Saugus, Massachusetts, just north of Boston.

Hi, Jess.

How are you doing?

I’m good.

How are you?

Excellent.

What can we help you with?

Well, I had a question about a phrase that my grandfather used to use.

Either when somebody said something very smart or somebody said something really dumb or silly,

He would say you were as sharp as a marshmallow sandwich,

Or because he was from Boston, he would say sharp as a marshmallow sandwich.

So that was just a joking, affectionate term, or was it?

Yes, very joking and affectionate.

I have warm feelings about it.

Yeah, sharp as a marshmallow sandwich.

I didn’t grow up with that expression.

Did you, Grant?

No, no.

Googling around, I see it a few places online.

Yeah, but not much.

But usually not in exactly this way, right?

I mean, the only thing I could think it was similar to is like sharp as a marble.

And I Googled it, too.

I didn’t find a lot.

Oh, sharp as a marble.

I like that.

Yeah, and that’s part of what I love about the expression sharp as a marshmallow sandwich

Because it’s soft, right, and gooey.

But especially around the 1940s and 1950s, there were marshmallow sandwiches, I think, produced by Nabisco that were round.

Sort of like moon pies?

Exactly, like moon pies in the South.

I think they were smaller.

So they were both soft and chewy and round.

So the sharp worked both ways there.

The term that I’ve seen much more commonly is soup sandwich.

Oh, yeah.

This is a soup sandwich.

But that refers to like a mess or goat rodeo, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Just somebody who’s just a disaster.

He’s a soup sandwich.

But I can see saying sharp is a soup sandwich.

Because you’re going to see someone trying to put soup between two slices of toast.

Exactly.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I think that originated in the military, but I really like that one as well.

Not necessarily regional or a timey kind of phrase or anything like that.

No, it doesn’t look like it’s widespread at all.

If he got it somewhere, it’s lost in the mists of time.

Well, that only kind of makes it more lovable.

Right.

Exactly.

Maybe he’s just especially creative as a person.

Sharp as a martial artist.

Right.

Oh, definitely.

Well, for sure.

Yes, he was.

Okay.

Well, I’m going to adopt that one into my vocabulary.

Me too.

I really like it.

Love it.

Jess, thank you for sharing.

Well, my work is done here, then.

Your work is done.

Take care now.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thanks so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What’d you learn from your grandpa?

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Josh.

I hail from Indianapolis.

You hail from Indianapolis.

Hail, Josh.

Hail.

And well met.

How can we help you?

I am a server at an undisclosed restaurant here in Indianapolis.

Okay.

At one point I was waiting on a table, and I addressed the table, and I said, can I take your guys’ order?

And the woman at the table looked at me, and she said, sir, I do not appreciate being addressed as a guy.

Oh.

So what’s next?

Then what happened?

Was there a scuffle?

I don’t know if this is a feminist issue.

I don’t know if this is a colloquial issue.

Tell us a little bit about the group.

Are we talking what age?

Yeah, they’re in their upper stages of life.

60s, 70s, 80s?

I’d say late 50s.

Late 50s.

For sure.

That’s middle age.

What are you talking about, upper stages?

Well, I guess I’m a newly grad.

You’re in the lower stages.

Oh, so you’re in your 20s then.

Right.

I guess I can say I’m in my lower stages and anything thereafter is upper.

Well, sonny boy, I’ve got a thing to tell you about language.

All right.

We can figure this out.

There’s a couple of cool things that happened here.

I think you did the right thing just to move forward and not get into it with her.

So A plus for you for that because that’s the proper etiquette of that situation.

If someone says they’re offended, you say, oh, I’m sorry.

And you call them by the thing that they want to be called by, whatever it is.

If they want to be called, you know, Chief Fluffernutter of the Ambiguous Brigade,

Then you call them Chief Fluffernutter of the Ambiguous Brigade.

That’s how it is.

All right, from now on, Grant.

But the other thing about this that I think went well is she made it plain that she didn’t agree with that usage,

And I think she had the right to say that.

Right.

However, there is clearly an age split there, and the two of you perfectly represent that age split here

Because you guys are guys plural, plural, mind you, not singular,

Does in American English refer to groups of mixed genders.

It absolutely does.

And what kind of tip did you get?

Yeah, 20%.

Okay.

And a piece of language advice.

Yeah, some of that may have been just, again, apologizing and moving on

And righting my wrong.

Yeah, yeah, she got to say what she wanted to say.

Sure.

But I think Grant’s point is that you were okay in terms of—

Yeah.

I mean, it was a logical usage right out of the gate.

If you run into that woman again, if she comes back, you now know,

And you will give her the terminology that she wants

Because that’s the kind of server that you are, right?

You’re considerate, and now you know.

And you had no way of knowing that she didn’t conform to what is now very common colloquial usage.

I mean, so common that, like, the president does it when he refers to the press

When they’re in the press room at the White House, you know?

He says, you guys.

And he means the room full of men and women of all ages and backgrounds.

Towards the end of their meal, I thankfully stopped myself almost mid-word.

And I just about departed saying, thank you, friends, for coming in.

Nice. Good save.

It’s been a pleasure.

Friends, did you say?

Friends, yes.

Yeah, as Billie Jean King says, champions adjust, and you adjusted.

So good for you.

There we go.

So bravo, Josh.

I hope this helps you feel a little better about the encounter.

Josh, thanks a lot for calling.

Thank you very much for taking my call.

All right, take care now.

Okey-doke.

Bye-bye.

Hey, you too.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

I like y’all.

Y’all works?

Well, you’re Southern, though.

Yeah, but it’s so functional.

To the Northern ear, maybe it doesn’t sound 100%.

Well, Northern ear needs to get over it.

Y’all give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

We got a call from Nancy Baker who lives in the Chicago area,

And she was wondering if there’s a word for the beautiful ribbon of gold

That you see on water at night, gold or silver with moonlight on the water.

It’s like a, yeah, it looks like its own thing and the ripples control it and change its shape.

Yeah.

And there are a couple of words for that in English.

One of them is moonglade.

Moonglade.

And moon wake.

Moon wake.

And you can also have sunglade and sun wake.

And the glade there, if you think of a glade, it’s like an opening in the woods.

Yeah.

And the idea is that it’s a clearing.

It’s light compared to the dark part of the wood.

And so.

Is that related to the word glad?

I think it might be, actually.

I think it has to do with brightness.

So if you want a word for the beautiful moonlight on water, it’s moonglade.

Moonglade, nice.

Toss us your words that you found that you enjoy and you think everyone else will too.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Ben.

Hi, Ben. How are you?

Hi, Ben. What’s going on? Where are you?

I’m very good. Calling from Tallahassee, Florida.

Well, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, I’ve had a longstanding question.

I’m an archaeologist, and we have an odd term in North American archaeology for broken pieces of pottery.

In Britain and most of the world, they’re always called shards.

But here we call them sherd.

Well, we know that it’s a made-up word, more or less.

It’s not in any dictionary.

And I’ve always thought that it was to differentiate North American archaeology from European archaeology.

Ben, Ben, you’re reading way too much into this, buddy.

It’s simpler than that.

Shard, S-H-E-R-D, meaning a piece of broken pottery, is just simply a variant spelling of shard, S-H-A-R-D.

And what’s happened over the years, archaeologists have simply come to prefer shard as their term of art.

And everywhere else, people tend to use shard.

There’s a little bit of difference where you may, as an archaeologist, also say shard, but only for broken glass and never for broken pottery.

And the British do use shard.

Yeah, we definitely reserve shards for glass.

Yeah, the British do use shard, and they say pot shard as well, which is the longer form of it.

And both shard and shard go back to Old English, and they are variant spellings from the earliest day.

And they have lived side by side as twins, meaning almost the same thing for many centuries.

Yeah, Ben, I went through an archaeologist phase when I was in my 20s, and I worked on a dig in Israel.

And we definitely said shard.

You said shard in Israel?

Was it a British leadership or American leadership?

It was Israeli.

Were they more a British tradition or American tradition?

I would say more a British tradition.

But that’s when I realized that instead of sitting around washing shards, I wanted to write about sitting around washing shards.

That can be really tedious work, right, Ben?

Oh, yes, very tedious work.

Well, thanks for calling, Ben.

Well, thank you guys very much.

Take care now.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Let’s dig into the roots of English.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

English is a sexy and big topic.

Come join the discussion as A Way with Words continues.

¶¶

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us on the line from New York City is John Chaneski.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey, buddy.

What’s up?

Good to hear your voices again.

It’s great.

Yeah, what’s happening?

Today’s quiz is sort of a hodgepodge, which I call the word Olympics.

-huh.

Wait, have we done this one before?

Something like this?

Something like this, yeah.

You know, this is just an excuse for me to just throw a bunch of things together.

Oh, okay.

A little mulligan stew for us.

So these events are just a bunch of different questions about words, but let’s see if you get the gold.

Okay.

Here we go.

What two two-letter Scrabble legal words use the same two letters and express a sound of surprise?

O and ho?

And ha?

And ha is the one I’m looking for.

Yes, very good.

Gold.

What ho?

What, ho?

You know gargoyles are the stone rain spouts carved into grotesque shapes on medieval churches and buildings.

Yeah.

But what is the name for the grotesque shapes on those buildings that are the decorative and don’t channel water?

Oh, boy, art history.

You got your crockets.

You got your finials.

You got your flying buttresses.

Oh, you go.

Come on.

Bring it on.

But go give us a hint.

I gave you a hint in the clue.

Grotesque monsters?

Well, can you hit that word a little bit?

The answer is grotesques.

That’s very good.

Nice.

I did not know that there was a different name.

I know.

That makes my day.

I think most people actually call them…

They call them gargoyles.

No matter whether there’s water coming out or not.

Right.

Yeah, but the gargoyle is related to throat.

But if you’re a middle-aged pedant.

Yeah.

I’m working on being a middle-aged pedant, so it’s coming up soon.

You’re just about there, yeah.

Now, a mazurka is a Polish table, a Polish dance, or a Polish casserole?

It is all three.

No, it’s not.

It’s a Greek.

It’s a food dish.

Oh, yeah, it’s a dance.

It is a dance, yes.

Very good.

I don’t know.

So you get to stand slightly higher than Grant on that.

I had a 33% chance of getting an answer right.

Of course, I chose the fourth option for a 0% chance.

You still got it wrong, yeah.

What six-letter word when uncapitalized means to make shiny or clean?

Polish.

And when capitalized is the name of a country?

Polish.

Polish and Polish.

Yeah, Polish, as in the previous question.

Maybe not the name of a country, but people who live there.

Oh, right.

I’m sorry.

The demonym of a country, right?

Finish this quote by Mark Twain.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed.

If you do read the newspaper, you are?

Out a nickel.

I don’t know.

It’s something about still uninformed, but uneducated or miseducated or something.

Misinformed?

Misinformed.

Misinformed is correct.

Oh, good.

So the proper parallelism would have to be another form of informed.

Oh, okay.

If you don’t read the newspaper, you are uninformed.

If you do read the newspaper, you are misinformed.

Thank you, Mark Twain.

Yes.

Silver on that.

Congratulations.

Not being invited back in four years is how I feel about my performance,

But thank you for the compliments anyway.

Can we play the A Way with Words anthem, please?

Where is it?

We don’t have it?

I’m sorry.

Yeah, right. I’m tearing up.

John, it’s always a delight to have you on the show, and these were super fun. Thanks so much, buddy.

It’s always a pleasure for me, too. Thank you.

If you’ve got something puzzling that you want to share with us, please do, 877-929-9673, and email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Yolanda from San Antonio.

Hi, Yolanda. How are you doing?

All right. Thank you.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

I’m a native of the Netherlands and have lived in this country for quite some time.

But I remember when I first came, people would always say when they’re going out to a restaurant, we’re going Dutch.

Oh.

And I always wondered why they call it going Dutch when you pay for yourself.

-huh.

And do you have a particular feeling about it or are you just curious?

Curious.

And I do have a bit of a feeling about, to me, it almost seemed like, are they saying the Dutch people are cheap or don’t want to pay for someone else?

Yes, that’s definitely a fair question about the meaning of that.

You know, when I was growing up, it was such a benign term.

I used to think, when I think of going Dutch, even today, I think of Happy Days, the movie and the TV show, and sock hops and sharing a root beer float with two straws.

I think of it as really benign.

So I used it my whole life and didn’t think anything about it until I got to know some Dutch people.

And then I was more aware of it.

And it turns out that there are a lot of pejorative expressions in English involving the Dutch.

Like if you talk about a Dutch uncle, that’s somebody who’s particularly stern.

Or Dutch courage is supposed to be courage that you can get only if you’re drinking.

Drinking alcohol.

Yeah, drinking alcohol.

So I have tried to eliminate that from my vocabulary because of the implication that you’re talking about, that Dutch people are particularly cheap.

Tight-fisted or cheap, yeah.

And now this goes back to age-old disputes when the English and the Dutch were trying to control the seas, right?

The pirateer, buccaneer days, right?

Yeah, they had some conflicts back in the 17th century.

So what we do when we’re fighting people is we always make enemies of the other side.

We paint them in the worst light possible.

We say that they’re cheap and that they’re uncouth and uneducated and they don’t know they’re unclassy.

Yeah, even if we’re not fighting them, but we’re just rivals or friendly rivals.

I know in Argentina, you can talk about splitting the check in a way that is in the American style.

So the assumption is here with going Dutch is that ordinarily somebody else who wasn’t Dutch would be kind enough to pay for.

Or the idea of a Dutch treat when you get invited to the movies and you think you’re being the person’s guest and then you’re expected to pay for the ticket at the window.

Right, right, right. You think it’s a date and he doesn’t, that sort of thing.

Yolanda, does any of this sound fair or just or right?

Sounds fair, but of course then I always think it’s funny anyway, you know, only in the English language do we call somebody from the Netherlands Dutch.

Which really, of course, sounds like Deutsch.

Right.

And then people make the incorrect assumption that you’re from Holland,

Which we’re not.

We’re from the Netherlands.

Because Holland’s just really a part of the country.

Yeah.

Right.

And you all have some rivalries with…

The Dutch get a bad rap for something.

Yeah.

Yeah, especially in Belgium, right?

Right, right.

Oh, rivalry.

There is one expression that I know that is kind of positive about the Dutch,

And it’s to say that the sky is Dutch britches, which means very blue,

Because the Dutch used to wear very blue bright pants.

So you say the sky is Dutch britches, which means it’s a clear, sunny day.

Okay, well, that’s good.

You like that one.

I do like that one.

All right, thanks, Rhonda. Take care now.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, is there something that you say that you’re not quite sure of the origin

And possibly it’s offensive and we can talk about it on the air,

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or if you want to talk about it in an email, send it to words@waywordradio.org.

We got an email from Casey Gandy, who lives in Bethel, Maine,

And he’s a whitewater rafting guide.

And he applies his trade up on the Hudson River in the Adirondacks.

And he sent us some great whitewater rafting slang.

Have you ever been whitewater rafting?

I have in Ecuador.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, I’ve gone a couple of times.

But I never heard these words, one of which is dead sticking.

Dead sticking.

Dead sticking is when the guy does all the paddling while the rafters relax.

Okay.

And then there’s also lily dipper, which is when you want everybody paddling together.

And there’s one person who just barely.

Effectual barely wetting the surface of the oar.

Yeah.

And then the other term that I could completely relate to is dump trucking.

I mean, you can practically picture this.

It’s when a raft nearly flips.

Oh, everything comes out of it, right?

The whole load is thrown into the water.

Yeah, yeah.

I had that happen when I went.

Did you?

I still remember now, 20 years later, the look of panic in my friend’s eyes as we were nearly standing end on end, and end we were going there.

I guess it’s sort of like tombstoning and surfing.

I learned that one in my surf class.

But that’s when your surfboard comes up straight.

Yeah, straight up.

We’d love to hear the language of your hobbies and professions.

877-929-9673.

Email words at waybirdradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi.

Who’s this?

This is Marquis Todd from San Diego, California.

Hi, Marquis.

Marquis.

What’s going on?

Well, I had a question on grammar for you guys.

Okay, shoot.

So this is a question that may be a little different than you’ve gotten in the past.

I was listening to your show a couple of weeks ago where people were talking about correcting other people’s grammar and the best way to do that.

I’m one of the people that have been on the receiving end of having my grammar corrected.

And I’ve been very appreciative, actually, when it has been corrected.

And I have been trying to correct a specific grammar problem that I’ve had for many, many years with no success.

So this is really to get both of your advice on how maybe I can go about correcting this problem.

Okay.

Let’s hear it.

So I don’t know the official name of the tense, but it’s when you say something like, I have eaten or I have gone.

And what I do instead is I say I have ate or I have went.

And did you grow up saying it like that?

Yes.

So both of my parents do this.

And so I can hear them doing it now.

And that’s probably the most interesting thing.

I’m a scientist by training, so I find it all quite fascinating that I can hear when other people make the grammatical error.

I also do not write the grammatical error.

So in other words, I do it correctly always when I write, but when I speak, particularly in casual situations, I make the error probably about 80% of the time, even though I am aware that I have the issue, I can’t seem to hear it.

How do you find out that you did it?

Because I have asked my husband to correct me because I’ve been trying to correct the problem.

How good is he about that?

Is he reliable?

So he will correct me when we’re alone.

He does not correct me in front of others, which is very kind of him.

Yeah, good for him.

And he does correct me pretty frequently, but even with that, I just can’t.

Very occasionally I’ll catch myself, but it’s rare.

Boy.

So what we’re really talking about is correcting a habit of speech.

I mean, something that’s really, really ingrained in there.

You understand the grammar.

Yes.

Right.

Yeah, and I noticed there’s something significant about the two verbs that you’re talking about.

These are both irregular verbs, right?

-huh.

So go becomes a went is really irregular, and eat becomes ate is very irregular.

Well, and one thing, I was talking to my husband, and he suggested that part of it is that those two particular phrases are used a lot in common speech.

So probably I was exposed a lot to those two in particular growing up because you just say it a lot.

Your parents would say it a lot.

You say it a lot.

It is incredibly widespread, by the way, for the past form and the past participle forms of those two verbs to be confused.

To say the same thing that you’re talking about, exactly that, is very widespread.

Now, that doesn’t make it grammatical, and it certainly is seen, as one grammar authority put it, as low dialect and uneducated.

But it does happen quite a bit.

I’m not surprised that you have it in your speech.

It doesn’t make you rare or unusual.

But probably what’s most significant about you is the fact that you want to fix it.

And this may be the hardest thing of all.

Right.

And that’s why I thought it was an interesting twist, right?

To talk to somebody who says, okay, I’ve been corrected.

I want to correct it.

Now, how do I do that?

Well, it’s good that you recruited your husband to do that.

But he’s probably not with you all the time when you’re speaking casually, right?

No.

And I did ask him today, because I’ve never asked him this before, if he has observed me doing it in front of others.

Because I didn’t know if I was with others and maybe I was being a bit more formal.

I might not do it.

And he said, no, I do it in front of others as well.

I’m afraid my best advice for you seriously is going to be rote exercises where you come up with a series of dialogues from a variety of circumstances.

And you literally write out a script that you practice with your husband when the two of you are alone.

Interesting, like doing piano scales or something.

Yeah, seriously.

Or maybe singing even.

Singing can help.

Singing can actually ingrain things more firmly in your brain than talking can.

Yeah, and my husband actually is a musician and singer, so he might be able to come up for a little jingle with four.

Yeah, get him to write you a song.

That’s it.

I’m absolutely serious.

I think that’s a great way to learn a foreign language and to probably improve your grammar.

Yes, please.

Yeah, send us an update.

Will you in a few months?

Yes, I will.

I’m definitely going to try these techniques and see if I can get this corrected.

Okay.

Thank you.

Let us know.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to help you with your grammar.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Susan.

Susan from Roanoke, Virginia.

Susan from Roanoke.

Hi, Susan.

How can we help?

Well, I have had a question that has occurred to me in the recent months.

There’s an expression that I’ve heard here in Southwest Virginia since I was young.

I grew up here.

It’s a little phrase that’s used when people are referring to a time in the past.

And what they will say is that they saw their mother of an evening.

And this of a evening or of a morning, I’ve never really been able to tell if people were shortening of the, or whether it was really just a way of saying other.

And it’s an expression that I really just heard in this part of Virginia.

I’ve lived in other places in the South, and I’ve not heard it.

So I’ve wondered if it is an antiquated term.

Maybe it has some relationship to something in the past, since this is an Appalachian region of Virginia.

So I’ve just gotten curious.

That’s a good question.

Would you be surprised if I told you it goes back hundreds of years?

Yes.

You would be.

Okay.

Let me clarify something here, though.

When we’re talking of an evening, it’s not that your mother did it once.

It’s that she used to do it often, right?

Well, it’s usually just to talk about a specific incident in the past.

And the person will be, you know, in not far away past, but more recent past.

You know, they did something outside, mowed the grass of an evening, or they saw, you know, their relative of a morning.

Susan, that’s interesting because my mother’s family comes from the Shenandoah Valley right there.

And they used to say this when it was something continuous, like she used to like to have her coffee on the veranda of a morning.

So every morning she liked to do it.

I’ve heard it used that way too.

I have heard it as a habitual practice.

That’s typically what we find.

It almost always means it’s something that you like to do or that you tend to do or you have a habit of doing.

And we can find it as far back as the 1600s in the Diary of Samuel Pepys.

We can find it in the writing of Thackeray and Browning and Eliot and a bunch more of just these famous authors.

And it’s spread throughout the United States.

We’ll find it in the American South and in the South Midlands, that is, say, roughly the Ohio River Valley down to what we would call the true South.

And it’s not just of an evening.

You can say of a morning, as Martha said.

You can say of a Sunday.

Of a Sunday, I like to sit and read the newspaper.

Or you can say, of a Friday, our habit is to watch a movie together on the couch.

Well, that’s so interesting.

And is it, I mean, if you see it written out, how would you spell it?

Oh, it’s just OF, the preposition, A, the letter A, the article, and then whatever designation of time.

So it’ll be a day of the week or it’ll indicate a time of day.

So morning, evening, the day of the week.

You could probably get away with saying of a December.

We like to go all out and put up the Christmas celebrations and really celebrate the holiday.

Okay.

Well, that is very, very interesting.

Yeah, so widespread.

I’m not surprised to find it in your speech, Susan, given where you’re from.

Not at all.

It’s a good marker of somebody from the South.

Well, that’s good to know.

Thanks for calling.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you so much.

All right, take care now.

Bye, Susan.

Thank you.

You too.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear about the dialect in your part of the country.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org, and come on over and talk with us on Facebook and Twitter.

Speaking of spices, there’s one place where salt is in our language that people might not be aware of.

That’s in the word salary.

Oh, yes.

The Romans paid their soldiers in salt?

They did back in the day because it was a preservative, it was really handy, and easy to dole out, right?

So the Latin salarium, which means the soldier’s portion of salt, gave us the word salary.

Nice.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Earlier in the show, we were talking about the difficulty of pronouncing a certain spice.

Yeah, C-U-M-I-N.

Right.

We say cumin or cumin.

But the dictionaries mostly list common.

Exactly.

I don’t know anybody who says that.

It’s so weird.

And I was thinking about this because a lot of spices present this same difficulty, particularly peppers.

If you think about hot peppers.

Oh, really?

Well, think about that really hot, hot, hot red pepper that’s in Tabasco sauce.

It starts with a C.

How do you say it?

I don’t know which one you’re talking about.

C-A-Y-E-N-E.

Oh, cayenne.

You say cayenne.

Cayenne?

Cayenne.

I probably say cayenne when I’m not thinking about it.

Yeah, I know, right?

And now we’re thinking about it, and so we can’t remember.

But the spelling doesn’t conform to my pronunciation.

My pronunciation doesn’t conform to the spelling.

Yeah, and you look at different dictionaries, and they say different things.

Like the Collins Dictionary says cayenne.

Cayenne, but that’s more of a British publication.

Yeah, but if you look at Merriam-Webster, it’s cayenne or cayenne or cayenne.

And this pepper is named for a town in French, Guyana.

Guyana.

Yeah.

Okay.

And so I don’t know how they pronounce it down there, but it’s all over the map, literally.

And think about, but I mean, think about other peppers too.

What about the one that starts with a J, the light green one that’s in so much Mexican food?

Well, that one’s a problem.

Has it jalapeno, jalapeno?

Exactly.

Right?

Exactly.

And then there’s the people who want to add the tilde or the enye to habanero, right?

That’s exactly where I was going with that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Jalapenos.

But in Spanish for habanero, you wouldn’t actually say the H, would you?

You wouldn’t say the H.

Yeah, it comes from Havana or Havana.

Havana.

Yeah, and jalapenos come from the Mexican town of Jalapa.

So there’s a couple of difficulties here.

One is these are foreign words that we’re trying to anglicize.

And so they’re being independently anglicized by a lot of different people.

Yes.

Right?

The other one is they’re maybe not primarily transmitted orally.

We’re learning them from books or even from the labels that we see in the store, right?

We’re learning them from the recipes.

The recipe says, get this pepper.

You go find it in the store.

And at no point do you talk to another human being necessarily about it.

Right.

Exactly.

And because they’re from place names that are pronounced particular ways in those places, I mean, the dictionaries are really all over the place.

And so I think the challenge really is to ask that person to hand you the spice and just not sound pretentious.

You know?

Yeah.

I mean, you don’t want to sound boorish about it.

But you also want to just say, look, I’m going to approximate this the best I can and just go make some great food.

Yeah, that’s the point, right?

The casserole on the table is the result I want, not being 100% exactly precise and say it like somebody from French Guiana.

That’s exactly it.

So it’s the spice of language, right?

The spice of language, yeah, get it right.

Well, we know the kitchen is filled with these kinds of things that are just not quite the same from kitchen to kitchen.

Like, is it turmeric or turmeric, right?

Turmeric is what I would say.

There’s an R, right? Does everyone pronounce it? No.

No.

Well, we want to hear your stories about this dispute you had in the kitchen about the way to say a thing.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha and Grant. How are you all doing today?

This is Julio Ferrari from Frisco, Texas.

Hi, Julio. Welcome to the show.

What’s up?

I’m Brazilian. I studied English my entire life, and we moved to Texas 12 years ago.

And all the studying in the world didn’t prepare me for a couple of things.

First, it didn’t prepare me for the differences in the language, first that you study abroad, and then the real language when you get here.

And it didn’t prepare me for all the Mexican food I’d be eating living in Texas.

So as soon as I got here, the first week I was here, I ate.

I mean, I really, in Brazil, you can’t find good Mexican food.

I had been to the United States a few other times, but I was finally living here, and I wanted to have as much Mexican food as I could.

But one day it really hit me, and things weren’t really doing very well in the restroom.

When I come out, and I mean I was sick.

I could not stand up anymore.

This guy looks at me as the look in his face of despair made me think he was at the same Mexican restaurant that I was.

So I leave the restroom.

He looks at me and says, dude, can you do me a solid?

And I’m like, wait a minute.

I can’t even do a solid for myself right now.

What are you talking about doing me a solid?

What?

You know, and it took me a while to learn what that meant.

But studying, look, I studied English my entire life.

I’ve always been an Anglophile.

But I cannot find anywhere why and where that comes from.

Oh, gracious.

Thanks for kind of, you know, telegraphing that in such a way that the details weren’t obvious.

Much appreciated.

That obvious.

That obvious.

All right.

So you’re Brazilian.

You sound very American to me.

Yes.

But you’re still really interested in why we speak this messed up language called English.

Yeah.

I mean, Portuguese is probably one of the hardest languages to learn.

But when I came over here, I actually learned Spanish as well.

And that wasn’t hard at all.

But English, what you study overseas and what the language really is when you get here are two completely different things.

Yeah, I found that to be true in French as well.

Many languages are like that.

The book language is nothing like the street language.

Yep.

So if somebody wants to do you a solid, that means they want to do you a favor, right?

Yep.

So they’re going to do something good for you.

We’ve got a really brief recent history of this word.

It dates back to the 1960s or so.

But it comes from the idea of a solid service.

It’s elliptical in a way.

So you don’t say, I’m going to do you a solid service.

You just say, I’m going to do you a solid.

We made a noun out of the adjective.

And it’s roughly associated with black English, although it hasn’t been only there.

That’s pretty much it.

We still find some variants maybe in some prison lingo as far back as the 1920s.

Where a solid was a prison inmate who was trustworthy.

It’s the same sort of idea.

A solid, again, just a plain old solid as a noun, not as an adjective, was somebody that you could give your supplies to and they wouldn’t be stolen or lost.

There’s another note that I want to make here, Julie.

I don’t know how old you are.

You sound young to me.

20s, maybe?

I’m 34.

34, okay.

My colleague, Connie Ebley, at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, collects slang from her English students every year.

And it’s funny.

You’ll get these late teens, early 20s students, year in and year out, putting down Do Me a Solid as slang that they use and slang that they think of as belonging to them in their era, even though it dates back to their parents’ generation in the 1960s.

Julio, your accent is amazing.

I keep listening for Brazilian Portuguese, which is just one of my favorite languages.

And I’m just not hearing it.

How long have you been here?

How long have you been working on English?

Well, I’ve been here for 12 years now.

And I’ve really worked on trying to get the accent right and a lot of exercises.

And I’ve got a good year for those things.

But I’ve learned English my entire life.

Literally, I went to an American school in Brazil.

And, yeah, so I did study a lot.

But now I’m training on my Spanish to get it to where people already don’t recognize.

They don’t think I’m Mexican, but they don’t recognize where my accent’s from.

All right.

Cool.

Thank you so much for your call.

Thank you very much.

We say in Portuguese, muito obrigado.

Obrigado.

Ciao, ciao.

Bye-bye.

Ciao.

Tudo bem.

Ciao.

877-929-9673 is the number to call or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

This is Tracy in Madison, Wisconsin.

I have an issue with the word issue.

Okay.

Do tell.

We used to use issue to describe a matter that was open to debate, but now it seems to be used as a synonym for a problem.

Whether I’m talking to a computer tech, a pharmacist, or an auto mechanic, they want to know about my issues instead of my problems.

And I wonder if this is a recent phenomenon, if we’re using issue euphemistically to make our problems seem less problematic.

Aha.

So, Tracy, you have an issue with it?

You don’t like it?

Well, I realize I’m not going to change it, but it just seems that in the past, oh, five or ten years, everyone seems to be calling their problems issues.

And I can’t imagine, I wonder if Apollo 13 had launched in 2010 instead of 1970, would the commander have said, Houston, we’ve had an issue?

That’s a good point.

You know, if you look up the phrase issue with or have an issue with, it looks like it really took off in the 1980s.

You’re not the only person who’s bothered by this at all.

The American Heritage Dictionary’s usage panel addressed this issue a couple of times.

And more recently, they have come around to feeling like it’s more okay to use that.

But in the past, it was regarded as a little bit weaselly, I guess, you know, rather than saying problem or screw up or whatever.

Right.

And do Britons have the same issue?

The same issue?

Yes.

I don’t know about that.

Yeah, it’s throughout the English-speaking world and partly due to the American broadcast hegemony.

But, yeah, it’s catching on everywhere.

I don’t really have a problem with it, though.

It doesn’t bother me.

I agree that some people use it weasely, but I think you should be allowed to take the sting out of the presentation of a problem by carefully choosing your words.

If you’re talking about?

Whatever happens.

I mean, if it’s a technical issue, yeah, sure.

And actually, what’s really interesting to me that in the tech universe, many of the trouble ticket software programs actually use issue instead of problem.

So you actually create a new issue or you create a new ticket about an issue.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Because there are many things where the user sees it as a problem, but the tech support person doesn’t see it as a problem.

Maybe it’s a known bug or it’s actually how it’s supposed to work or it’s something that’s actually currently being worked on and it just hasn’t been released yet.

There’s a lot of different ways.

And so issue actually takes some of the judgment out of it because both parties might not actually agree.

Oh, that’s a good point.

And that kind of takes us back to the old kind of legal stuff where we’ve got issue being used in legal terms as issue of fact versus the issue of law where you have.

So who decides.

Right.

So you actually takes us back to the issue being a point of dispute.

And there’s another thing to consider here too, Tracy, which is, and I know most of the people who use issue to mean problem don’t actually mean it this way,

But it really is interesting to me that a lot of times we’re talking about a circumstance which came out of another situation.

And if we go back to issue, thinking about it as a noun referring to something that comes out,

It literally issues from, say, a pipe or a breach or a part of the body, for example.

You’re talking about people being born as their children as your issue, for example.

Right.

So something that’s a result.

So it’s a result of a circumstance.

And so it’s really interesting.

It fits nicely in there.

I know that most people don’t mean it that way, but it’s really interesting.

It does fit very nicely there.

Yeah.

And it fits the etymology of the word.

Well, I’ll be able to think of it in those terms now rather than just being bothered by it.

Thank you so much.

Okay, thanks for calling.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Tracy.

Is there a point of dispute in your workplace?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or email The Whole Dilemma to words@waywordradio.org.

We’ve talked before on the show about names that are tautologies,

That is, they’re repetitive, like Sahara Desert is really repetitive because the name specifically translates as deserts, desert.

Gobi Desert also, desert, desert.

Right, right, exactly.

Go down the El Camino Real.

It’s like going down the, the, the Royal Road.

And La Brea Tar Pits, which literally means the Tar Tar Pits, right?

But one that I wasn’t aware of is East Timor.

East Timor?

Yeah, Dimor in Indonesian and Malay means east.

Oh, so east-east.

East-east.

That’s a good one.

Yeah, 877-929-9673.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Keri.

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Keri.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help?

I am writing a short book for my boyfriend’s daughter,

Who is getting ready to start her freshman year at Indiana University.

So my book is basically things that I would tell my college self, and I was trying to think of creative things I could do to include other than just my bullet points.

So I wanted to use phrases and quotes, and one of those that came to mind is one that I heard several years ago, and it’s youth is wasted on the young.

So in order to use it in my book, I wanted to correctly attribute the author, and I have researched online, and I can’t find definitive answers.

What did you find that wasn’t definitive?

Well, I’ve seen several different people.

George Bernard Shaw, Albert Einstein, Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain.

Hey, I’m Lincoln.

Lincoln, yeah.

You’ve got to throw all the usual suspects in there.

Biggie, Biggie said it.

And I don’t even know what the exact quote is because it’s often written differently, too.

All right.

You’ve actually got two questions here.

One is, who said this first?

And the other one is, in the future, where can I go to get definitive answers?

Besides the show.

Oh, perfect.

Yes, I have two questions.

Let’s answer both those questions.

It was George Bernard Shaw who had the sentiment first.

Notice I said the sentiment.

Because what tends to happen is somebody in a well-placed,

Kind of very visible public arena will say something,

And then it kind of gets modified as it’s quoted and re-quoted.

It becomes better.

People polish off the edges and shine it up and give it a better wording.

And frankly, youth is wasted on the young is perfect.

You can’t really even take a word out of that.

So what happened was in 1935, apparently he said this to an interviewer or in a conversation that was quoted.

And it appears like almost instantly in the kind of jokey section of a lot of newspapers around North America.

And many of them quote the Montreal Daily Star, where supposedly the conversation went like this.

A young woman remarked, what a wonderful thing is youth.

And George Bernard Shaw apparently replied, yes, and what a crime to waste it on children.

Which in itself is a pretty nice repartee, right?

Yeah.

And so then it was immediately ensconced into famous quote books and showed up in joke books.

And it’s the kind of thing you would see in Reader’s Digest at the end of the column where they just needed to throw in a little line or two.

And it got modified over time and misattributed it as tends to happen with all the best quotes.

So in the future, if you’re looking for a definitive source, we recommend the Yale Book of Quotations by Fred Shapiro.

Fred took all the Bartlett’s books and all the quotation books that he could find, and he went through and he said, wow, that’s wrong.

Let me fix that.

And he one by one got all these famous quotes, and he researched them individually and went to all these vast archives and said, okay, I’m going to change history because it turns out it wasn’t said by that person.

It wasn’t said by this person.

It was said by this other person.

And so it’s a very reliable book.

I think he may be working on a new edition.

So that’s the Yale Book of Quotations by Fred Shapiro.

Yeah, it’s a beautiful book, too.

I would put it on your wish list.

Okay, wonderful.

And his name is Fred Shapiro?

Fred Shapiro, yeah.

Okay, yeah.

Thank you, Carrie.

I hope it turns out well.

I hope she appreciates all the hard work you’ve put into it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much for your help.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, we’d love to help you with your book.

We’ve got all kinds of things to say.

Opinions galore.

877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org.

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Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye.

So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

For we know we need each other, so we better call the calling of art.

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