Dog and Pony Show

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. As long as we’ve had schoolyards, we’ve had schoolyard rhymes.

Those rhythmic sing-song verses are one way that children poke fun and test limits.

And a lot of those rhymes, of course, are crude, and some of them, unfortunately, are quite cruel.

The other ones, the ones that I’m drawn to, are just plain silly.

When you think back to your own days on the playground, what verses come to mind?

For me, it’s things like Johnny and Mary sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G. First comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby in the baby carriage.

And I guess a lot of these verses were about trying to figure out at that age what love and babies had to do with each other.

Very good.

And I also remember the taunting back and forth between the sexes.

Grant, do you remember this one?

Boys are rotten, made out of cotton. Girls are handy, made out of candy. Boys go to Jupiter to get more stupider. Girls go to Mars to get more candy bars.

I learned that from my niece, Madison, actually.

Really?

Yeah, I never knew that one in my own years.

Really?

Well, I know you love these things.

I do.

Yeah, the songs are the ones that I love.

We did all the verses to Glory, Glory, Hallelujah that we made up and the ones that traveled around.

Yeah, you’re going to sing.

Glory, glory, hallelujah. Teacher hit me with the ruler. Shot her in the butt with the rotten coconut and she don’t teach no more.

Oh, awful stuff.

And we made up like 15 or 20 verses.

Yeah.

Some of them we thought we made up, but they just were traveling in the ether from year to year.

Student to students, school to school, right?

Yeah, yeah.

We sang a different version of that.

All the stuff.

But it is. It’s about you are the least powerful person in your life. Your parents have power. Your teachers have power. The older students have power. The bus driver has power, right?

Yep, yep.

And it is a way of kind of undermining the authority structures around you by mocking them gently, sometimes not so gently.

Yeah, yeah.

And just trying to figure it all out, too.

We’d love to hear your playground rhymes. What are the things that you said when you were in school? Or what are the things that your children and grandchildren say now?

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Hope from Dallas.

How are you?

Doing fine.

Hi, Hope.

Hey there, what’s up?

I’m so excited to speak with you. I’ve been looking forward to this for such a long time.

Well, welcome. Glad to have you. What’s up?

Thank you.

Well, I am a transplant from Maryland, and I recently moved to Dallas. And when I meet people, of course, one of the questions they ask is, do I have children? And I came up with an answer, and I don’t know if it’s original or if I have sort of, you know, taken it from someone else. And that is, because my children are not babies, I tell them that I have adults because my children are all over 25, and they seem to immediately understand that that means that while I’ve birthed some folks, they’re not still in diapers.

You’ve birthed some folks.

So you spell that K-I-D-U-L-T-S?

Yes, I do, with a dash, of course, so that it sort of gives pause.

After the I.

Oh, yeah, where’s the dash?

After the D.

After the D, okay.

I don’t know.

Kid-ult.

Kid-ult.

Yes.

What do your kids think of that?

They love it, especially since two of them served in the military. And it was more of a reminder to myself that they weren’t babies anymore.

Well, it solves the problem of trying to explain to people, because the next question when you say, they say, do you have kids? And you say, yes, I have kids. They always say, how old? And you just kind of like short-circuit that and go straight to both answers.

And surprisingly, everyone gets it.

Very good.

You know, I know this term from marketing and demographic research and advertising. They’ve been using this since the 60s and 70s to refer to a couple different groups of people. The same word, K-I-D-U-L-T-S. And it’s either adults who enjoy entertainment that’s meant for kids or products that are meant for kids.

I wouldn’t know anybody like that.

Or vice versa, kids who enjoy products meant for adults. So let’s say adults who read Harry Potter novels might be adults, and it might be considered adult entertainment. And the reverse would be, I think, children who are under their teenage years, and when their parents are asleep, they slip in to watch the naughty shows on HBO.

But Hope’s talking about something different, and I love this application. I haven’t heard this before.

Really?

Not in this sense.

Have you granted of somebody talking about, I mean, it’s better, I think, than my adult children. I’ve never liked that term adult children. That sounds like such an oxymoron to me.

It does.

Is that what you’re thinking?

Exactly. The word children and kids, you know, it just no longer seems applicable on any level once they’re over 25. Have you heard of any other ways of describing it that seem to not, you know, offend the children, and yet the other individuals can understand what you’re trying to say?

Well, when you eliminate the ones that offend the children, you eliminate most of them.

Spongers!

That’s right.

People were hanging around waiting for me to die!

Yes.

Exactly.

I was just curious because my daughter said to me, it’s sort of like coming up with a Brangelina or J-Lo term where you combine the two words. And I know that there’s a word to describe doing that, but I don’t recall what it is.

Absolutely. They are often called blends because you blend two words together.

Okay.

Well, I’m going to take credit for it in this case.

Okay.

I think you should.

So here we go. Hope is a coiner of the word cadult to mean your grown offspring, right?

Oh, thank you.

It’s official.

Congratulations.

Well, as much as we can make it.

Now you’ve birthed folks and also a word. Congratulations.

Oh, I love that. I’m going to claim that and have them put it in my obituary.

All right, then.

Hopefully I’ll never have to read that, Hope.

Well, at least not for a very long time.

There we go.

Take care of yourself, all right?

Thanks, Hope.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

So we talked about blends, but there’s another word for that too, right?

Portmanteau.

Oh, sure.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Shoving words together like smoke and fog become smog.

Mm—

Yeah.

Exactly.

It strikes me as something that a lot of people have probably created their own family word for.

Yeah, or else they’ve been searching and hope has been their hope.

Right.

Hope has brought hope.

Hope has brought hope.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi.

This is Sarah calling from Los Angeles, California.

Hi, Sarah.

Welcome to the show. What can we help you with?

Well, I needed some advice on how to properly pronounce a word. This word has been bothering me for years now.

I had a discussion with my mom and my sister, my aunt. We’re all pretty much readers all the time, so we all have good vocabularies, but I think because we read words a lot, we don’t always know the right way to pronounce them.

So I had said to my mom something about ogle, O-G-L-E, and that’s how I pronounced it, ogle. My mom said, I think you mean ogle. And I was like, ogle? I always pronounce it in my head as ogle.

So I will say my mom typically has a better vocabulary than I do, so I usually trust how she pronounces things. Then my aunt said, I always thought it was pronounced Oogle.

Oh, dear.

So the three of you are talking about this, and one says Ogle, Ogle, and Oogle?

Yeah, and Oogle to me sounds the most outlandish, being that there’s only one O, right?

So I think my mom and I both dismissed my aunt’s pronunciation. But the thing is, I’ve been hearing Oogle. I have asked a few of my friends how they pronounce it, and I’ve gotten Oogle more than once. And to top it off, I heard it on TV the other day, Oogle.

Really?

So, yes.

So is this a pronunciation now?

Are people saying Oogle?

That’s really my question.

No!

Is this a new thing?

They may be saying it, but it’s not right.

Well, they’re…

Oh, Grant and I are going to disagree about this.

We’re going to agree on one thing.

Oogle is the best pronunciation ever.

Far and away.

Far and away the most common, the most accepted.

99.99% of people say ogle.

That’s it.

Ogle.

So my mom is right.

You ogle it.

It’s ogling.

I was ogled.

Don’t ogle me.

That kind of thing.

But you’re right too, Sarah.

Ogle is fine.

But ogle is probably like 1% or 2% of the population.

It’s a very tiny number of people.

See, you’re special.

But it does exist.

Oh, no.

Only one dictionary that I checked has that as a variant pronunciation, though, in the American Heritage Dictionary.

Oh, I think Merriam-Webster does.

Oh, do they?

Yeah, I’m sure they do.

I might have looked in the wrong one.

But it’s the kind of question that comes up fairly regularly.

The oogle thing I’ve heard before, and here’s where I start to waffle a little bit.

He’s waffling about oogling.

If you look in the old slang dictionaries, you will find a wide variety of similar words that aren’t this word,

That are pronounced exactly the same way and mean to give someone the eye or to look a sconce at them

Or to flash your peepers at them or to give them the old sexy up and down, you know, that kind of thing.

And they all are pronounced, they’re all spelled with double O, oogle.

Oh.

Yeah.

So I’m just saying, like, it’s out there and it could exist in this weird slangosphere

That never quite makes it to the standard language and doesn’t actually show up in the dictionaries.

But.

Maybe my aunt’s mind, she’s picturing it with two O’s.

Yeah, that’s what I was going to say.

Yeah.

If you see it with one O, how can you possibly pronounce it oogle?

Right?

Okay.

I agree with you on that.

I have to tell my mom that she’s right.

No.

Yeah, don’t tell her.

Yeah, don’t tell her.

Does she listen to the show?

I don’t think she does, but I mean.

If she hears it, she’s going to know.

She’s going to know.

I’ll probably have to say it for her.

You were right, Mom.

Okay, well, thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling, Sarah.

Much appreciated.

All right, you have a great day.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We want to hear your family’s disputes about language, 877-929-9673.

We talked recently about the childhood game of taking the lyrics to familiar songs

And making them much more complicated so that three blind mice becomes a trio of visually impaired rodents.

Remember that, Grant?

Yes.

Well, Harlan Messinger, who lives in Arlington, Virginia, sent us a doozy.

Now, this is a familiar song with lyrics changed to Shakespearean English.

So see if you can guess what this is.

Oh, goodness.

Okay.

Oh, proud left foot that ventures quick within.

Then soon upon a backward journey live.

Anon once more the gesture then begin.

Command a sinistral pedestal to writhe.

You’re laughing.

I get it.

I know what it is.

And also your performance is outstanding.

Thank you.

There’s more.

Commence thou then the fervid hokey poke,

A mad gyration, hips in wanton swirl,

To spin a wild release from heaven’s yoke.

Blessed dervish, surely canst go, girl.

The hoke, the poke, banish now thy doubt.

Verily I say, tis what it’s all about.

Thank you. Thank you. I am bowing.

I should point out that credit for that poem goes to Jeff Brecklin of Potomac Falls,

Who won some contest in the Washington Post a few years ago.

That rendering of the hokey pokey in Shakespeare.

Brilliant. I love it. The hokey pokey.

I knew what it was, but they didn’t take away any of the fun.

877-929-9673.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined from New York by John Chaneski.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

What you doing?

I’ve got Mo Puzzles.

I’ve got Movie Night.

We’re going to talk about movies.

Okay.

The answers to all of the following wordplay questions are one-word movie titles,

And all of the movies won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Oh, gracious.

Okay.

I’ll give you a lot of clues.

Here we go.

If you change the first letter of this movie title,

You can make a word meaning insolent or one meaning garbage.

Crash.

Yes, crash.

Very good.

And the other words would be trash and?

Brash.

Brash.

Brash.

Excellent.

If you take this 10-letter movie title and break it into two five-letter words,

You’ll find that you got to have the second word if you want to be the first word.

Two, a 10-letter title into two five-letter words.

Right.

You got to have the second word to be the first word.

Oh, man.

Let’s try it this way.

I need a clue.

You got to have…

Heart.

Yeah, and you got to have that if you want to be alive.

I’ll give you a hint.

It’s a 1995 historical drama directed by Mel Gibson.

Braveheart.

Braveheart.

Very good.

Oh, very nice.

Oh, that was tricky.

Now, the title of this movie is a man’s middle name that means for the love of God.

It’s also not a middle name you find very often anymore.

Isn’t this a Hebrew middle name?

Biblical?

No, but think about Latin when you think about For the Love of God.

Oh, Amadeus.

Yes, Amadeus.

Very good.

Starring Fmurray Abraham.

Fmurray.

Nice.

You could interpret an English translation of this title to mean Barak’s Barracks,

Which contains only four A’s, just like the movie title.

Four A’s.

So is this etymological origin of Barak as in Barack Obama?

That’s a clue to if you translate the title into English.

White House?

Huh.

Yeah.

Think of a movie title that could be translated.

Casablanca.

Casablanca is correct.

Nice.

Very good.

Very good.

This one-word best picture title becomes a girl’s name if you remove its penultimate letter,

Then another girl’s name if you remove the next penultimate letter, and it’s only five letters long.

To start with or to end with?

To start with.

This is tough. I’ll give you a hint.

It’s a 1955 drama.

By now, anybody who probably knows this movie has probably guessed it.

1955 drama directed by Delbert Mann, and it stars Ernest Borgnine.

I was going to say Marty.

Yes.

Marty?

Yes, very good. Marty it is.

Remove the penultimate letter, and you get…

Oh, Mary.

And remove the penultimate letter again, and you get…

Oh, May.

May. Very good.

Oh, penultimate meaning next to last.

Never seen it.

The title of this best picture can be interpreted to answer the following question.

What’s between F and J?

F and J.

G-H-I.

G-H-I?

G-H-I.

Well.

Here, I’ll let you know what the, if you write it out,

It looks like G and H-I.

Gandhi.

Gandhi’s right.

Way to go.

Can I just say, by the way, my clues for this, by the way, this movie stars Ben Kingsley, of course,

But also Martin Sheen and John Ratzenberger.

Oh, that would have helped.

Not at all.

I’m sure that would have really helped, yeah.

All right.

Finally, this title of a sports movie rhymes with the name of a sport, but not the sport featured in the movie.

So it’s one word.

Mm—

And it rhymes with the name of…

A sport.

A sport.

Hoosiers?

No.

I don’t know. I need another clue here.

It also rhymes with a rice wine.

Saki?

Hockey?

Rocky.

Rocky is correct.

Well, that was kind of rocky, but you guys did pretty well.

That was a workout.

I feel like I run to the top of the steps and I’m jumping up and down.

Cut me, Mick.

After my raw egg.

Well, I’m going to fly now, so I’ll see you guys next time.

You are fly, John.

Thank you very much.

Thank you.

Thanks, John.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’re the show about words and language and how you use them.

877-929-9673

Or email us

Words at

Waywordradio.org

Hi, you have a way

With words.

Hello, this is Eric

From Dallas.

Hi, Eric, welcome.

Hey there, what’s up, buddy?

Oh, I’m just having

A great time here.

I was going to school

With my little girl

Who’s eight years old

And she was reading.

Some kind of product package.

And she was saying to herself, fact, fact, fact, fact.

And I wondered what she was doing.

She said that she was trying to practice identifying facts.

And so I asked her, what was that all about?

And she said that her teacher had shown her how to identify facts and that they were simply things that could either be proven true or false.

And so I probed a little further, and I found out that for her, a fact was simply something that could be true or false because they were doing a section on learning about facts versus opinion.

So the teacher, when you say she, it’s the teacher who believed that facts could be true or false.

Exactly.

You talked to the teacher?

I did, and it didn’t go so well.

Oh, really?

Yeah, because I then went to the dictionaries that I had.

I went to Webster’s, and American Heritage 5th edition just came out.

And so I looked at that, and I noticed that, you know, down the list, that apparently, you know, in American Heritage, around 2C, it said something that is asserted that could either be true or false.

But that was down at 2C, as opposed to 1 or 2A.

So I discussed that with her, and she was adamant that this word had changed and that fact now meant just something that could be true or false.

Oh, this is a bit of a puzzle here, because on one hand, you’ve got a teacher who needs to simplify things for students.

I was going to say, your daughter is, what, third grade?

That’s right.

She’s an eight-year-old in third grade classroom.

She needs to simplify this because nuance doesn’t really work at that age, right?

We all know that.

Right.

Just tell them that maybe you’ll take them to the water park and see what happens.

That turns into a yes really fast.

Yeah.

So nuance doesn’t really work, so you’ve got to simplify.

But on the other hand, it sounds to me as if she’s simplified by hanging on to a much rarer substance of fact, right?

Your argument, let me see if I can recap this.

Your argument is that, look, a fact is always true.

If it’s found out to be false, it is no longer a fact.

It’s just a statement or a false assertion.

Exactly, or an assertion. Exactly.

And that’s what I said, and she was adamant.

She said, you know, words change their meanings over time.

And, you know, you have to say, yes, that’s true.

Yeah, and the other thing is that I think if she’s talking about words changing over time, then she’s talking about the term fact going through this evolution that’s ending up someplace other than where it started out.

And I don’t think that’s happening.

It doesn’t sound like she’s even teaching that anyway.

It sounds like she’s justifying her teaching.

Now, this is all secondhand through you, and I think you’re probably faithfully reporting this.

I just would backtrack and say, from my position as a non-educator, I’ve never taught in a classroom, I would think that you would just start with, here’s what a fact is, it’s always true.

And if it’s not true, then it’s a false assertion or a false statement.

So she needs to just talk about statements that you then grade as either being fact or not fact, rather than talking about facts that you grade as true or not true.

Sounds like she started out with the wrong word to start with.

Why does she not use statement or assertion?

Statement or assertion.

Neither one of those words is that difficult for an eight-year-old.

Yeah.

Well, in this particular section, my understanding in the curriculum, they were teaching the difference between opinion and fact.

Well, yeah.

Yeah, I think that would make perfect sense to teach to third graders.

Right, and if it’s not a fact, then it becomes something else, but it’s not a fact.

Once you know that it’s not a fact, it’s not a fact anymore, and you should stop calling it a fact.

We’re with you, Eric.

I feel better.

Okay, take care.

You’re the first and last teacher, Eric.

Keep educating, Eric.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

But I appreciate the position that the teacher’s in.

Oh, yes.

I really do.

Yes.

Because I know teachers across the country, and a lot of times they’ve got this suspect material in front of them that was picked by a state board or a school board, or they had no control over it.

And what are they going to do, renounce it in front of their classroom?

No, they have to buy into it and teach it the best that they can.

Call us with your language disputes, 877-929-9673.

Here’s another childhood rhyme, Grant.

A horse and a flea and three blind mice sat on a curbstone shooting dice.

The horse, he slipped and fell on the flea.

The flea said, whoops, there’s a horse on me.

Did you use that one in school?

I did not.

I just found it online recently, but I’m wondering if it involved pushing and shoving, you know.

Whoops, a horse on me.

If that was an excuse, you know, to do that.

I don’t know.

877-929-9673 is the number to call.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rona Sullivan.

I’m calling from the Middle Peninsula of Virginia.

Oh, well, welcome to the show.

Glad to have you here.

Hi, Rona.

I was wondering if you knew where the phrase may have come from, like a dog chewing waspers.

It’s a phrase I used to hear my father say in the Blue Ridge area of Virginia.

And in what context would he say it?

You know, I worked outside with him a lot, and I think it was likely when you’re chewing gum with your mouth open, and he says, you look like a dog chewing waspers.

Because waspers, we know what waspers are, right?

Yeah, waspers.

Do you know what waspers are?

Oh, yes, wasps.

Yeah, that is an expression that’s used in places like Kentucky and Tennessee and Virginia for wasps.

Sometimes it’s pronounced warshpers.

And I think it has to do with the exposing of the teeth.

Like you said, somebody’s chewing gum.

Or I’ve seen a lot of times expressions like, he’s grinning like a mule eating briars.

Yes.

Have you heard that one?

Yes, I heard that one growing up.

Yeah, yeah.

And that refers to somebody with a really big smile, right?

Because if you’re chewing briars, then…

Your lips are pulled back, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Trying to not get stuck.

Yeah, because it’s pointy and prickly.

And I’ve also seen like a possum eating persimmons.

Mm—

Right.

And it all has to do with exposing those teeth and just having a big old grin.

And I guess if you’re chewing gum, you’re chewing gum like a dog eating waspers.

I love that.

It’s not a compliment, though, right?

Yes, it wasn’t very polite to do that.

Do you know what nationality might have used that term primarily?

Because where I’m from in that Blue Ridge area is such a melting pot.

It would be really hard to know the origin.

You’re right.

You nailed it.

It is pretty hard to know the origin.

That whole part of the country is mainly settled by the Scots-Irish folk.

Right, Scots-Irish.

Which probably has something there.

Which reminds me, there’s a version of this saying that is in Irish slang dictionaries online for what it’s worth.

Which is, you can describe somebody as having a face like a bulldog chewing wasps.

And it’s not a couple.

It means they’re ugly.

Yeah.

Well, thank you.

Yeah, I think the main thing is that it derives from that image.

All those images are so vivid.

Yeah, very vivid.

You’ve got to be hungry to eat Breyers.

Unless it’s Breyers ice cream, that’s something different.

We had a German shepherd who would chew bees, and if you’ve ever seen it, there’s really nothing like a dog chewing something like that.

Are you serious?

Why?

A German shepherd chewing bees?

Yes, they were very protective of us, so they would kill snakes or chew bees to protect us.

That’s the only explanation.

Oh, my gosh.

Brave animals.

And you saw lots of teeth, right?

Yes.

Well, thank you so much.

I really enjoy the show, and thank you for answering the question.

Okay, Rona.

Well, it was our pleasure, Rona.

Thanks for listening.

Thanks for calling.

Glad to have you.

You’re welcome.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You know, Grant, my Labrador retriever back in the day, Alice once swallowed a live chipmunk.

I’m not kidding.

And it was like running around inside?

Well, she barfed it back up.

And then it sort of blinked wetly and ran off.

But, you know, dogs do this kind of thing.

That’s why you love them, right?

Yeah, they’re big goofballs.

Always ready for a romp, though.

That’s right.

Give you a little bit of love, right?

Big goofballs ready for a romp.

Just like us, call us, 877-929-9673.

We talked about the game of converting lyrics from familiar songs to much more lofty language.

And Lauren Holland Sturdy sent this to us from Dallas.

She wrote,

For the caller who rewrote Three Blind Mice, name that tune.

Propel, propel, propel your craft progressively down the liquid solution.

Ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, ecstatically, existence is but an illusion.

Let’s do rounds of that.

I was going to say, no, I did not sing that, and yes, you’re welcome.

877-929-9673 is the number to call about language.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Martha. Hey, Grant. This is Matt from Oak Park, Illinois.

Hi, Matt. Welcome.

Welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question about the dual nature of the prefix in-I-N.

And by that I mean in most cases when you put that before a word, it changes the word to the opposite meaning.

So, for example, inactive is the opposite of active.

Insensitive is the opposite of insensitive, et cetera, et cetera.

And I’ve actually made a whole list of them.

And that’s in most cases that I can think of, but there were three cases that came up where it does kind of the opposite thing, where it makes it a synonym.

And the one that occurred to me was inflammable.

And then somebody on your Facebook page also put in invaluable, and my wife brought up ingenious.

So I’m wondering, and it becomes, I don’t know if it’s an exact synonym, but it basically is the same meaning.

So I’m wondering why that is.

That’s a really good question.

Invaluable is the best case here, I think, that can explain that sometimes the negation is happening in there,

But we just don’t know how to get to the root of it.

Invaluable, if you want to break it down, basically it means you cannot, there’s the negative,

Calculate the value.

It’s so valuable that you cannot put the price.

I never thought about it that way.

So in is still doing the negative work there.

And in the case of inflammable… Like priceless.

Priceless, very good. In the case of inflammable,

That classic word where flammable and inflammable mean the same thing,

It’s inflame.

Took the BLE suffix.

So it doesn’t actually have quite the negation

Because it’s a completely different I-N prefix. It’s inflammable.

It’s the same as the en prefix, but it’s spelled in, so it means to break into flame.

Okay.

So that’s the problem with inflammable, is the in is not a negation.

Okay.

And then with ingenious, I have no idea, but it’s probably something similar like that.

The thing is, there are all these different prefixes in English that are spelled in.

There’s at least three that I know of that come from different etymological roots.

And as a matter of fact, the IN prefix has become corrupted, so it’s actually spelled a bunch of different ways.

So the IL, for example, in front of illegible, is basically the IN prefix.

Oh, okay.

Yeah, or in front of illegitimate.

I want to recommend a website to you, which is beautiful and wonderful, and it’s all about affixes.

That’s what these are called.

Words that go on the front or the end or in the middle of words are called affixes, and it is affixes.org.

A-F-F-I-X-E-S dot O-R-G.

And it’s by a British lexicographer and language expert, Michael Quinian.

And he just explains this stuff so wonderfully.

It’s very comprehensible.

So, Matt, spend an afternoon with that and get back to us.

I will do exactly that.

I appreciate the information.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling, Matt.

Bye-bye.

I really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Have a good one.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

By the way, Grant, I saw a bumper sticker the other day that said,

What if the Hokey Pokey is what it’s all about?

I don’t know if I find that comforting or scary.

877-929-9673.

Coming up, more questions and stories about language 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.

We got an email from a guy in Texas named Truman Blocker.

He writes,

I recently celebrated my granddaughter’s 13th birthday, and on the occasion of becoming a teenager and a beautiful young girl and a very bright junior high school student, I composed a detailed, loving message on a birthday card to her.

Okay, it was a little mushy, but hey, I’m her proud grandfather.

When I thought the time was right, I handed it to her and requested she read it aloud to her parents and friends while I teared up.

Immediately, she handed it back to me and said, Granddad, I don’t read cursive.

Oh.

Oh.

Oh.

That was sort of his response.

Actually, he wrote, he said, ex-squeeze me?

Absolutely.

I made you this very nice dinner.

Oh, I don’t like that.

Can you make me something else?

And, of course, his email was prompted by a conversation we had recently about who, if anyone, reads and writes cursive writing these days.

And we got so many responses.

I’m telling you.

Yeah, and some of the most interesting ones came from listeners in their 20s

Who told us that they’re not at all surprised to hear that their peers are having a hard time reading this.

Gordon Sluder is 23.

He lives in San Diego, and he called to say that he wasn’t taught cursive in school.

Gordon told us, I had to privately, on my own, learn how to read cursive.

I still don’t know how to write cursive, but I can read it with great difficulty, and he emphasized the great.

Yeah.

Well, good for him, though. He learned his skill.

Yeah, exactly.

We talked about this in the original show.

It’s kind of fallen to the same place as calligraphy.

You only learn it if you want to know the art.

Right.

Well, in fact, John Foster of Vancouver took a different tack.

He writes,

I’m 24 and probably part of the last generation where cursive was a required part of the curriculum in grade school,

And I’m glad for it.

As someone who has great admiration for some of the skills that have been lost to mainstream society,

Tying bow ties and shaving with straight razors to name some others,

I’ve taken to corresponding with some of my friends by mail.

For these letters, I use a fountain pen, which requires you to write in cursive.

Unlike ballpoint pens, which require a certain amount of pressure to leave a mark,

Fountain pens will ink the page with just a glancing strike.

As you write, the page rises and falls with the pressure of your pen.

When you write in block letters, you lift your pen only ever so slightly between letters

Rather than making the large leap over the space between words.

Because you’ve released the pressure, the page rebounds back into the nib of your pen.

So what he’s saying is that if you’re printing the letters with a fountain pen,

You’re more likely to have a messy, ink-stained page.

And as a result, John continues,

When I first started writing with a fountain pen, I had my mind blown, as we kids say,

To realize that cursive served a practical purpose as well as an artistic one.

So if we wish to keep cursive writing alive rather than taking up arms against the computer,

We should arm our children with fountain pens and have them realize for themselves the beauty of the handwritten word.

This is one fight in which the pen is truly mightier than the sword.

Well, very good.

I love that aesthetic take on cursive writing.

And I agree.

And this is why I don’t think that cursive will ever completely leave us.

It might.

It’s on its way out.

We heard from a lot of young listeners who said, eh.

It’s too beautiful.

Well, we heard from Alan Peterson in Oklahoma, who’s 22, and he said,

We were forced to learn cursive and write it in fourth and fifth grade.

After that, I never used it again and never looked back.

Wow.

I think you’re going to be hearing it from more and more people like that.

Well, certainly, we’ve received a lot of email, tons of phone calls,

Lots of social media messages about cursive writing.

Hey, we’ll take some more.

What’s your take on cursive writing?

Do you need it?

Do you know it?

Do you want to know it?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is James Bordeaux calling from Vermont.

Welcome, James. What can we do for you?

Well, I had a quick question about a saying that I hear often around my workplace, and I was just kind of wondering where we got it from.

Okay.

Often we have a term of phrase here where everybody says, dog and pony show.

And I was just curious to find out kind of how we got that.

And, James, what do they mean by that, dog and pony show?

Usually the reference is, you know, when we have, I work on a National Guard base, and oftentimes, like a lot of the lower officers, you know, they’re getting prepared for some sort of meeting or brief, and, you know, they’re getting ready to go put on, like, a show, I guess, so the upper commanders can kind of get an overall look of what’s going on.

But it’s used very often, and I was just curious how we got it.

And do they say it in a proud way or a disparaging way?

Usually it’s kind of a disparaging way.

It’s not always like in such a great, you know.

Got to go do the dog and pony show.

Right, yeah.

Yeah, dog and pony show, and it’s definitely disparaging.

This has got a really interesting history.

It goes back for sure to the 1920s.

By the 1940s, it was pretty fixed in government and military speak to refer to these kind of like perfunctory performances, these presentations where you had to just display your data and display your knowledge.

And just everybody just kind of politely golf clapped at the end of it and moved on, you know, because they were obligated to come and you were obligated to speak and nobody really wanted to be there.

But it comes from there was a time in American history where there was a kind of a, I won’t call it a warfare, but this enmity between the big traveling circuses and these tiny, literally dog and pony shows where this guy and maybe his wife and his kids had trained a few dogs to do a few tricks, and maybe they had one or two ponies, and the dog occasionally would leap upon the pony and go around in circles, and then they would get money for this.

And they were highly regulated.

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, you can see cities all across the United States start creating these regulations against dog and pony shows because apparently there was a particular kind of vice that also traveled with these shows.

There was illegal alcohol being sold in another tent or there was a hoochie-coochie show happening.

And the dog and pony show was kind of the front for all these other illegal activities.

And so to disparage the dog and pony show would just kind of put down all these vices as well.

And to kind of talk about the rinky-dink aspect compared to the grand affair of a circus with the marching band.

Right, or the menagerie.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

With the beautiful horses and maybe the elephant and the odd rhino or what have you, you know.

So it all kind of descends from this kind of petty warfare between these traveling shows, shows up in legislation and in law, becomes the kind of thing that other people pick up on, shows up in the military and government by the 1940s.

And here we have it in modern business speak as a way to talk about these perfunctory presentations.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, so it’s sort of like a poor substitute for a circus or a menagerie then.

Yeah, yeah.

Knock off, rinky dinks, mom and pop.

Yeah, it’s not even a good circus.

Not even a good circus.

So I guess that sort of fits with the kind of presentations you’re talking about.

Yeah.

I mean, everything we do here is, of course, it’s all based on data, and it’s always the same data or there’s no change.

And if there is change, it’s very little, and it takes hours of preparation and hundreds of people to put it together.

And I could definitely understand why it would be a drudgery.

Yeah.

Well, James, now you have the history.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

877-929-9673, or find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Fawn. I’m from Danville, Kentucky.

Fawn, welcome.

Hi, Fawn. How are you doing?

Well, I was raised in Michigan and came to Kentucky when I was 18 and have lived here ever since for 30-some years.

And I had noticed there were several colloquialisms, I guess, and I just kind of wondered if you knew if that was just a local thing or if it was something that other people do.

But one thing that is very consistently done by even top-level management people or from the pulpit, I’ve heard it from the pulpit, they use, instead of saying, I have no idea, they’ll say, I have no ideal.

No ideal instead of no idea.

Yes, they use that consistently.

There’s another one they use, instead of saying frustrated, they use flusterated.

And, you know, kind of a contractual type of thing.

And if they’re going to carry something, they pack it.

They don’t carry it from place to place.

They pack it from here to there.

Or if they are going to help you out in some way, they’ll say, yeah, I’ll pack you.

I’ll pack you.

These all sound familiar to me, Martha, most of them anyway.

Sure, yeah.

Flustrated has got a couple hundred years of history.

And it’s not exactly the same as frustrated.

What it tends to mean is kind of frustrated with a little bit of aggression, maybe with a little bit of anger or with a little bit of or even a lot of confusion.

So it’s not just about like you don’t know what to do.

It’s like you don’t know what to do and you’re feeling unsteady.

Isn’t there an element of fluttering in there too?

I imagine.

I’m doing that as I’m talking about this.

I’m like spinning my hands like a whirligig.

T-Rex.

Yeah.

My arms are too short.

But ideal is the one that I want to talk about the most.

Yeah, does that one bother you?

It consistently bothers me.

Do you, Fawn, do you ask them if they know what they just said?

Do they know that they’re saying ideal, or do they think that they’re saying idea?

The two people that I have confronted with it, one was a high school student and a friend of my daughter’s.

And he was absolutely convinced that that was the correct use of that word.

And the other person I talked to about it seemed a little offended and really didn’t want to talk about it.

So I actually haven’t, you know, gone up to the wall with anybody.

Here’s what we know about ideal in Kentucky.

And it’s not a lot of information.

It turns out that it’s not very well researched.

But there’s anecdotal evidence that shows that Kentucky is a place where when you say, I have no ideal, that’s pretty much the ordinary way of saying it instead of I have no idea.

And it does, as you noted, because you did great field work here, Fawn, it does extend across all spectrums.

So it has very little to do with education or socioeconomic status or religion or race or where you are.

But it’s like pretty, you know, there’s this pocket of people that do this and they’re all got that feature of the language.

Which means it’s not so much a mistake as it’s a dialect.

However, it doesn’t mean that people on the outside aren’t going to judge folks from Kentucky for saying I have no ideal.

With an L at the end instead of saying I know I have no idea.

Or ideal.

Ideal.

Yeah, it’s often ideal.

I have no ideal.

The Court of Appeals in Kentucky.

Yeah, yeah.

Let’s go down to the mill and mill some flour.

No, I’m sorry.

Let’s have a mill.

So I shouldn’t necessarily say to somebody, you realize you’re using that word wrong, right?

Well, because they are surrounded by people who say that, which means it’s a feature of dialect, and in that particular part of the dialect, that’s what they do.

And there’s a good explanation for it.

L and R are what we call liquid sounds.

They’re pretty much the only two liquid sounds we have in English, and they’re easy to confuse.

They happen in approximately the same places in the mouth.

And you’ve ever heard somebody say, I have no idea, where it sounds like they’re adding an R at the end?

The I have no idea is a little bit related to what’s happening when someone says, I have no idea.

I see. Okay. All right.

Well, I got to tell you, Fawn, it was a great call.

If you find any more Kentucky-isms, pass them along. We’ll try to explain them. All right?

Okay, thank you so much.

Take care there.

Thanks, Fawn.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a different verse to Mary Had a Little Lamb.

Okay.

Mary had a little lamb.

Its fleece was black as ink.

It chewed the paper off the walls and spit it in the sink.

We used to do that, too. You make up rhymes, right?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Because you get kind of tired.

Every year, some teacher’s like, oh, today we’re going to read this story.

You’re like, you know what?

Every year of my childhood, somebody’s read me that story.

Let’s do something new.

So you’d play around with it, make new verses.

Send us your childhood rhymes, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sadie here in San Diego.

Hello, Sadie. Welcome. What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about the word agreeance.

Agreeance.

Use that in a sentence for us, will you?

Well, we were all in agreeance that we should go to the party.

And how was the party?

Well, it was actually a party that my boyfriend didn’t attend.

So we were outside chatting before we went inside.

And my friend’s husband asked why he wasn’t coming.

And we talked about it, and I said, well, we were all in agreeance that he shouldn’t come.

And then my friend’s husband said, is that a word?

And I said, I think so.

And I tried to look it up, and I got some mixed messages.

So I decided to see if you guys would have the answer.

Oh, that’s my kind of party.

You came to us for more mixed messages.

Very good.

Agreeance.

Agreeance.

And did he suggest the word that he would have used?

Well, he said that we should have said we were all in agreement.

And after you kicked him in the shins for interrupting your speech?

Yes, and that’s how he is.

That’s kind of the nature of our relationship.

So, you know, I really wanted to know who was right.

So I’m excited.

So either I’ll be, you know, groveling or he’ll have to eat his words.

All right.

Well, here’s the thing about this, Sadie.

Agreance is technically a word, but a huge but.

I mean, it’s like a rose with thorns.

Don’t grab the stem.

Just look.

The problem with agreeance is that nobody recommends that you use it.

It’s very rare, and it’s mostly used by people who are quasi-educated or uneducated,

or else lived in 1820.

I was going to say.

Well, I like to read older books.

Okay, how old are we talking here?

Books that were written in like the 1800s.

They could explain it.

The 1840s was a big time for this word.

You could have legitimately picked that word up from your reading.

It was far more common than…

Here’s the thing.

Agreement is the better word in every case.

But the problem is that agreeance has a little nuance.

Agreance talks about the state of agreement only.

It never talks about the act of agreement.

Right. And so a grant has got this little place that it can occupy, a very tiny place that is also occupied in full by agreement, which has more than one cent.

Yeah. And it used to be a legal term in Scotland.

Yeah, exactly. It’s like it used to be. It used to be a thing.

These days, if you use a grant, most people are just going to cock an eye at you.

And then and then what happens in this non sequitur fashion without your permission, correct your grammar.

And then you are forced to be the bad guy and kick them in the shins.

Right, which is a position I get put in a lot.

You know, this is what happens. I always say this is what happens to people who try to read things that are good for them. Because you always are reading just a little bit above your level. And everything’s not 100%, you know, when you absorb it and it takes a while to sort it out and get it right. Don’t worry about it. It happens to everybody.

Oh, thanks. I’m serious. All avid readers have this problem. Something just kind of comes out a little misshapen. They don’t say it exactly right or use it exactly right. And the old vocabulary thing, I had this happen to me. There was a period in high school where I was reading Dickens, and I was like throwing out these old London spellings of words into my school papers, and my teachers were like, they were florid with the red ink. They were just like, it looked like a bouquet of flowers when I get my papers back because there’d be all these red squiggles. Like, what do you mean you left the E off of diverse? Because that used to be a thing. So I’m with you on that. But avoid agreeance if you can.

And you know what you need to do to this guy? Just tell him he doesn’t have permission to correct your grammar. I mean, he’s not your parent. He’s not your teacher. He’s not your copy editor. Right? Right?

Oh, I love you guys. I love you guys. That’s exactly what I need to see here. It’s not his job. Nobody hired him. If he’s got a problem with the way that you speak, then he can go do his own thing. Well, you guys have a really great time at the party. Yeah, at the party. Great. Make him sit in the car next time.

Wow, you just made my day. Thank you. But do avoid agreeance, though. I will. That’s the other side of that, Sadie. Do avoid it, all right? We’re on agreement about that. Yeah. We are in agreement. All right. Take care of yourself, Sadie. Thank you so much. Bye, Sadie. Bye-bye.

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

Things have come to a pretty path. That’s all for today’s radio show, but join us online on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up for our weekly newsletter for the latest in language news. You can also leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673. Let us be your linguistic detectives and share your family’s stories or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or school. You can email us too. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

If you happen to miss our broadcast, you can hear us by podcast anytime at all. Find us on iTunes. Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine. Tim Felten edits and directs the show. Our production assistants are James Ramsey and Josette Hurdell. A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning, better human communication, and the value of a thing well said or well written. The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California. Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. Do svidaniya. So long.

I like tomato, potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let’s call the whole thing off.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere. More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

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