Elvis in a Cheese Sandwich (full episode)

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

Here’s a curious email from Nancy in San Diego.

Nancy writes about a game that her mother used to play with her.

She writes, when she finished eating an apple and was down to the core, she would call out, apple core!

And then Nancy would say, Baltimore!

And then her mother would say, Who’s your friend?

And Nancy would say, Jim!

And then her mother would throw the apple core at Jim, her brother.

And this apparently is a game that people play, throwing apple cores and shouting Baltimore.

Hours of fun for everybody.

Hours of fun.

And the interesting thing about this is, Martha, as you well know, these kinds of games exist for years and years, decades and decades, maybe centuries, and maybe you’ve never heard of them.

I’d never heard of this one before.

No, not that one.

But, you know, it does show up online in interesting places.

For one thing, there’s a story from the 1930s written by William Soroyan, who uses it, and there’s a Facebook group of people who played this game as children.

No.

Yeah, I’ve never heard of it.

No, it’s really interesting.

AppleCore Baltimore.

I mean, the rules change, and there’s a variety to them, but people all across the country seem to have heard of this game, and I’d never heard of it.

Sometimes they throw in nevermore there, which I think is interesting given that there’s the poem by Edgar Allan Poe, who is a son of Baltimore.

And then you might have to—anyway.

Maybe it’s just the natural rhyme.

There aren’t that many words that are going to rhyme with Baltimore, are there?

No.

In any case, I wanted to throw this out to our listeners and say, what do you know about this game?

What do you know about the rules?

There’s some stuff online, and I’ve seen it and read it, but I’m looking for the personal story.

Maybe you’ve got some detail and tell me some things about when you played it and the rules that you had or maybe the variations that you’ve used.

Give us a call, 1-877-929-9673, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who is this?

This is Karen Jensen from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Well, hello, Karen. What’s going on?

What’s going on? I have a question for you.

Okay, please.

I was quoted in the local newspaper, the Indianapolis Star, because I used a phrase, a fish stinks from the head down.

And after that quote aired, our local paper has the ability to make comments on articles.

And some of the comments were very critical that I had said something so unkind.

Because I was talking about an organizational leader who I felt like was not the right leader for the organization.

And I used that phrase to describe the problems in the organization.

And I was accused of calling the leader a stinky fish, which I didn’t think is what I was doing.

I thought what I was saying was there’s a problem in the organization.

You need to look to the leadership.

Right. That’s how that phrase is understood, right?

Yes, that’s what I thought.

But I got a lot of criticism, and he’s a very nice man, and I like him a lot, and I don’t want to call him a stinky fish, and I want to make sure I don’t use the phrase inappropriately.

So your version of it was a fish stinks from the head down?

Yes.

A slightly more common version is a fish rots from the head down.

Huh.

I think you should go back to that comment section and just type, can you say figure of speech?

I mean, it is a figure of speech.

And, Karen, you’re in great company.

I mean, this expression has been around for hundreds and hundreds of years.

You’ll find variations of it in German, Hungarian, Albanian, Turkish.

I’ve seen it in ancient Greek, in Latin.

And it’s exactly what you’re talking about, that when there’s corruption or decay, it starts from the top.

That’s lovely.

So you hear lots of different versions of it.

I think the question is, does a fish literally rot from the head?

I don’t know.

I don’t know the answer to that.

Do we have someone else we can ask that question of?

I bet we have some people in Alaska that know fish very well.

Maybe they can tell us.

There’s an idea.

Yeah, we have listeners in Alaska, and they’ll let us know, hopefully.

Well, I tell you, this question has troubled language buffs enough that some of them have asked experts in the field.

I remember William Sapphire asked somebody at the Smithsonian Institution about fish and how they rot.

And the answer was they probably don’t rot from the head down.

There’s not that much to rot in the head.

It would probably start in the intestines.

It really makes me want to get a fish and lay it outside and see what happens.

A little scientific experiment of my own.

Yeah, Karen, it really makes you want to get a fish and lay it outside and see what happens.

But the original dilemma here is that somebody misunderstood what you had to say.

As Martha has rightly pointed out, they’re wrong to misconstrue that.

It’s not a pedix.

You don’t call people a fish as an insult usually.

There’s one slang fish that I could think of that might be mildly insulting, and that’s a newbie or a new person at a company or a job or on a sports team might be called a fish or in prison might be called a fish.

But that’s clearly not the context here, and anybody who misunderstood that is going out of their way to misunderstand.

I think you were right to use that expression.

Well, that makes me feel a lot better.

Excellent.

I’m glad to hear that.

It’s sort of like the lipstick on a pig expression, isn’t it?

I mean, nobody’s talking about literal pigs.

Exactly.

Exactly.

I didn’t think it was literal either.

Right.

I wouldn’t have used it.

Well, Karen, we got your back.

And that’s good to know because you guys having my back is what matters.

Oh, rock and roll.

All right.

All right.

Well, we appreciate your calling.

Thank you, Karen.

Thank you very much.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

One thing I should have said to Karen was I know the kind of people that just write comments on the Internet without really thinking about what they’re saying.

Sure.

And they’re not to be taken seriously.

I mean, that’s an overgeneralization, but it’s so easy to leave comments without really contemplating what you’re putting in print, right?

Right. Absolutely.

And people tend to willfully misunderstand.

You know, they tend to go out of their way to find anything that you might have said that might possibly be offensive and then make a big deal out of it rather than being generous in giving you the benefit of the doubt.

If you’ve got a question about language, drop us a line, a hook, and a sinker, and we’ll try to help you out.

The number is 1-877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I think that was a P-U-N.

And a S-P-I-N-K-Y.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

Hi, this is Kevin. I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Kevin. How are things in Circle City?

It’s rocking.

It’s rocking?

Oh, yeah.

Well, what did you call us about?

Well, I guess maybe it stems from some of the rock culture that I surround myself with, but I’m always interested in the term dude.

Dude and hey dude, it’s like a term of endearment.

It’s a greeting, a salutation.

It’s a single sentence word, and I just don’t know where it came from.

I hear of a dude ranch, and so I don’t know where that term ever came into being in popular culture or before then.

Yeah, you’re right.

It’s like that beer commercial where all they say is dude.

You know what I’m talking about?

There was a scene in Finding Nemo like that, too.

The turtles did that, didn’t they?

Oh, I don’t remember.

Did they?

Dude.

Dude.

Dude.

Dude.

Maybe they were doing whoa, the whoa.

I was like, whoa, whoa.

It was a mixture of both.

A mixture of both, was it?

Dude is unfortunately an origin, which stands for origin unknown.

We do know that dude broke onto the scene of American English in the early 1880s.

In 1883, it just exploded.

It shows up in newspaper after newspaper, magazine after magazine.

It’s just one of those terms that sprang from the earth fully formed and ready to go.

In January of 1883, there was a poem about the word.

So we know that it was common, at least in the end of 1882.

There was a poem about the word, and they were kind of making fun of dudes.

Dudes were dandies.

These were men who dressed in the fashions of the day just to the hilt.

These days you might call them a metrosexual, but they wore the finest clothes, the finest shoes, went to the finest restaurants, smoked the finest tobacco.

They were seen as effete and prissy.

And that term, that use of dude, migrated out to the western part of the United States and quickly became used to mean people from the east or newbies from the east,

People who didn’t really know the ways of the West or the ways of the country or the ways of the cowboy,

People who came from the big city and really just didn’t get it.

You know what I’m talking about?

That’s the dude ranch.

That’s the dude ranch.

Exactly right.

Dude ranch shows up, though, first in the 1920s or so.

So dude ranch came much later.

There are some interesting side notes to dude.

The one thing that really interests me is that we’ve kind of had that split

Where there’s still a little bit of the use of dude to mean,

How should we put this, as in dude ranch,

Somebody who really isn’t very country-fied.

But for the most part, dude is just a normal everyday term of address.

It’s like fellow or guy or buddy or mac or pal.

You just say, hey, dude, what’s up, right?

Yeah.

So it’s really changed over the last 100-plus years.

So that’s a very condensed history of the word dude,

But it’s a great multipurpose word.

I’ve talked about this on the show before.

I think you remember, Martha.

It’s one of those words that’s contagious.

If the people around you use dude, you are quickly using the word dude yourself.

Is that true for you, Kevin?

Oh, yeah, dude.

And, you know, with the movie The Big Lebowski, that term exploded even more.

You know, the dude abides, and that’s a cult movie now.

There are, I guess there are conferences and annual meetups

And gatherings around that movie and people doing, like, I don’t know, what do you call those?

Like movie karaoke where they’ll recite the lines of the movie that’s playing on the screen.

It’s just crazy.

And that movie is just filled with the word dude.

I don’t know what the incidence is, but it must be in the thousands.

Dude, yeah, somebody should count them.

So that’s the short version, Kevin.

How’s that sound?

That’s great.

It’s fascinating how much it can change.

Yeah, it’s come such a long way.

Quite a long way.

Well, thank you so much for your call, Kevin.

Thanks, dude.

No problem, buddy.

Bye-bye.

Bye, dude.

Bye.

Martha, one stanza from that poem.

It was in the New York World in January of 1883, and it goes,

When Darwin’s theory first saw light, the dude he tried to think of,

But monkeys being far more bright, he made the missing link of.

Oh, wow.

The whole poem was very derogatory towards the dude, the original fancy dude.

Yeah.

So these are sort of wannabes, cowboy wannabes.

Well, think of people like this today, very, very fashionable.

They read the Thursday Style section of the New York Times to know how to dress tomorrow.

You know what I’m saying?

Sure.

The people who have closets full of clothes that they’ll never wear again because they’re simply not fashionable anymore.

Those kinds of people.

Dude.

Men, mostly.

Dude were men, you know.

Dudes were not women.

Although you will find today, just like guy and guys, you’ll find women being addressed as dude these days.

Yeah.

I rarely use that word.

Dude?

Dude.

I rarely do.

I have a bad case of it.

I’m sorry to say.

Yeah, you have the dudes.

I have the dudes.

If you’ve got a question about the history of a word, slang, or otherwise,

Give us a ring, 1-877-929-9673,

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Wait, let me explain something to you.

I am not Mr. Lebowski.

You’re Mr. Lebowski.

I’m the dude.

So that’s what you call me, you know?

That or his dudeness or duder or, you know, El Duderino,

If you’re not into the whole brevity thing.

Are you employed, sir?

Employed?

Next up on A Way with Words, something puzzling this way comes.

Stick around for a quiz.

You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And we’re joined now by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

How are you doing?

What’s up, buddy?

Oh, I’m just, you know, lugging these puzzles around.

I’m looking for a place to put them down.

I hope this is good right here.

Have a seat.

Satisfied.

Put your feet up.

Some quizzes, a few enigmas.

You say lugging.

Are you putting them on stone tablets still?

I still, you know, I’m a Luddite.

I just don’t trust these pencil things you talk of.

I don’t know.

Now, look, I don’t have a lot of time for horsing around, so I’m always looking for ways to save time.

Right.

Okay?

Okay, thanks for coming today.

We’ll see you later.

Good, see you.

Adios.

All right.

In that vein, I’ve decided that if I come across two words where the first word ends

With the same sounds that the second word begins, I’ll just condense them.

For example, I was at a garage sale yesterday, and I purchased a pair of those metal supports

You use in a hearth to keep the firewood off the floor.

And my wife asked me what I bought that day, so I said…

Any guesses?

I bought something and irons.

Right.

Irons and irons?

What else did you buy?

Well, they were at a garage sale, so they were used.

Used hand irons.

What’s that?

Second-hand irons.

Second-hand irons.

Very good.

Yes.

That’s exactly how this works.

I call this overlap-plied linguistics.

So we’re making blends.

Yes, we’re making blends.

They’re similar to portmanteau words, but each word is there.

Okay.

All right.

Like I said, I’m in a hurry.

Let’s do this.

All right.

The first one is a classic.

In fact, if you do a web search for the combo, you’ll find over 2,000 hits.

I’m a big fan of the baseball team from Maryland, the team Cal Ripken played for.

I call them the…

Balmorials.

Very good.

You’re in more of a hurry than I am.

Oh, my gosh.

Yes, the Baltimoreals.

Baltimoreals.

That was actually the inspiration for this puzzle, the Baltimoreals.

Okay.

Here’s the next.

My new favorite show is a reality show where fashion designers attempt to create clothes for astronauts to wear on spacewalks.

It’s called America’s Top Diaper.

I don’t know.

No.

Astronauts.

I’m trying to think of words.

NASA.

Well, spacewalks are.

Space suits.

Astronauts on spacewalks can be described as.

Extravehicular activities, EVAs.

I guess you guys don’t watch this fashion designer show where they…

Oh, Project Runway Out in Space?

Project…

Try to find a word that begins with way.

I’m looking for it.

Describes people in space.

Weightless.

Weight loss.

Weight loss?

Project Runway-less.

Project Runweightless or Runweightlessness.

Very good.

No, that’s horrible.

I think Project Runweightloss would be a big hit.

Well, that would probably be the biggest loser in space.

A lot of barfing, yeah.

Since Mozart’s The Marriage of Figaro is about a guy who cuts hair, I like to call it a…

Or it takes place in a…

Barbershoppera.

Barbershoppera.

Very good.

Okay.

I think you’ll like this one.

I like this one.

Hey, have you heard about this really talented guy I know?

He’s the first African-American presidential candidate, and he also wrote Eine kleine Nachtmusik.

Barack Obama—

Obama—

Obama—

Obama-deus?

Obama-deus, right.

Remember that song by Falco, Barack me Obama-deus?

Obama-deus, Obama-deus, Obama-deus, Obama-deus.

I used to think that was eat me, I’m a Danish.

Eat me, I’m a Danish.

Yeah.

Here’s the next one.

My kid’s doctor doesn’t only know medicine.

She knows absolutely everything from A to Z.

So we call her the…

Pediatrician…

Know-it-all?

No, but that’s the second word.

What is?

Pediatrician.

Oh, second word.

Encyclopediatrician.

Encyclopediatrician, yes.

Wikipedia pediatrician.

Wikipedia pediatrician.

Well, that’s somebody who thinks they know it all, but doesn’t.

That one goes out to Dr. Gillespie, the kid’s encyclopediatrician.

Yeah.

You know, they say that the number of smiley faces you use in your lifetime is finite, and once you run out, that’s it.

That’s why I practice…

Emotic conservation?

That’s it. Emotic conservation.

Oh, wow.

Right. That’s pretty good, actually.

Thank you.

Okay, here’s the last one.

I was watching this old movie from 1939, and I saw a whole bunch of people worshiping this giant ape.

And I thought to myself, how nice for that priest to have such a large…

It’s congregation.

King congregation.

King congregation.

Oh, king congregation.

Okay.

And that’s it.

Like I said, fast one in, out, boom, I’m done.

Conserved space.

Thank you, John.

That was fantastic.

Thanks, guys.

I hope you had a good time.

Yeah, colossal.

What a taxing one that was.

Yes. Wow. My brain hurts.

Thank you very much.

See you later.

Bye-bye, Dan.

Bye-bye.

And if you’d like to talk with us about any aspect of language, grammar, slang, punctuation, or words and how we use them, the number to call is 1-877-929-9673.

The number is 1-877-WAYWORD or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sandra. Now, I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Sandra. How are you?

Hello, Sandra.

I’m doing well. Thank you.

All right. What’s up?

I had a question about an origin of a phrase.

I was wondering about hair of the dog, or sometimes you’ll hear hair of the dog that bit you.

-huh. -huh. And in what context do you hear this?

Well, mostly it’s if someone has had a little too much to drink and they’re, you know, hungover.

Or you’ll hear someone say, well, how about a little hair of the dog and offer them more alcohol.

Somehow that’s supposed to make them feel better.

I don’t understand that exactly.

We had been on a trip and had been bike riding, and we did the Virginia Creeper Trail in Abingdon, Virginia, and I’m not much of a bike rider, and I was hurting for several days afterwards.

When we got home, we have an exercise bike in the living room, and my husband was like, why don’t you get on there? That’ll make you feel better.

And I said, oh, yeah, hair of the dog.

And that’s kind of how it came up, and we just were discussing what that possibly meant.

If a dog did bite you and somebody gave you some hair from that dog, I’m not sure what you’d do with it.

Make a stab, you know, the wound, or make a little voodoo dog and stick pins in it to get your revenge.

I mean, we were just kind of kicking around ideas about what that possibly meant.

So the way you used it was kind of like to get back on the horse after the horse has thrown you, right?

Right. Well, he was saying, yeah, if I rode some more, that I would feel better.

And I did not think that was the case.

Well, the way you would use the dog hair is you would take a little bit of dog hair, some soot, and some ham fat, and then you would rub it right into the dog wound.

Oh.

And that would make it better, huh?

Well, that’s what the folk remedy is.

Okay.

It’s known in Latin.

It’s a no, no, seriously.

That’s one of the formulas for if a dog bites you, especially in a case of rabies or hydrophobia, that was one of the folk remedies to supposedly solve that.

Oh, okay, for a dog bite.

For a dog bite.

This expression in various forms, the hair of the dog or the hair of the dog that bit me, goes back about 450 years.

In Latin, you will sometimes see it in the old medical manuals as crinus, canis, rabidii.

There you go. Okay.

Right, which is the hair of the dog, the rabid dog.

So, Sandra, the whole idea here is supposedly the thing that injures you is also the thing that cures you.

And there might be a little bit of wisdom to this folk remedy because if you can catch a rabid dog and pluck some of its hair, then you’ve got a good chance of killing it so it won’t bite somebody else.

So in one way it’s kind of a preventive measure more than it is a remedy.

So it did literally mean to get some of the hair and put it on the bite and, okay.

I just couldn’t imagine how that would possibly help, but okay.

In the earlier centuries before modern medicine came along, there were all sorts of these things that you would do.

Well, it’s interesting that these days you think of it usually in terms of what she was talking about in terms of a hangover, right?

A Bloody Mary for breakfast.

Yeah, it’s interesting how it kind of migrated just to that one specific use, right?

Right.

We don’t use it in another context.

Right.

People have been getting hungover for hundreds of years.

Well, that’s great.

Well, thank you for calling.

We appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate it.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Grant, I remember reading a few years ago in the Annals of Internal Medicine, they were proposing a medical term for hangover.

What was it?

It was visalgia.

Oh, right.

Sure.

I remember that.

Do you?

Yeah, yeah.

Oh, come on.

Really?

I think I might have an entry for it on my website, actually.

Is that right?

Yeah.

V-E-I-S-A-L-G-I-A.

I don’t know if it ever took, though, but it’s still in use here and there.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It comes from a Norwegian word meaning uneasiness after debauchery.

That’s the normal case, isn’t it?

Yes, exactly.

Visalgia.

So a little hair of the dog for your visalgia.

If you’ve got a question about a colloquial expression that you want explained, by all means give us a call, 1-877-929-9673.

Pop us an email to words@waywordradio.org or visit us at our discussion forum at waywordradio.org/discussion.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Daniel calling from Pittsburgh.

Hi, Daniel.

Hi, Daniel. What’s going on?

So I moved to Pittsburgh about a year ago from Chicago.

And Pittsburgh has all these great words that I’ve never heard anywhere else and way of speaking.

So I guess the most common one is yin.

So I’m from New York originally, and we say, like, use a lot.

Use? Use guys?

And it usually means two people.

But here, so it’s yin.

So I understand that it means more than one person, but it’s still, it’s not as fluid as use.

So where does this come from?

In older forms of English, you could make plurals by attaching the suffix en, and you still see this in children and brethren, right?

But we don’t do that anymore.

But there is some speculation that the Ewans, which comes to us from Scots, actually is the inheritor of that tradition of pluralizing.

It just doesn’t exist in modern English, but perhaps this is a throwback.

Oh, okay.

Do you have any other examples of things you’ve heard there in Pittsburgh?

Well, there’s also Nebby, which is meant to be nosy.

My neighbor that I met, she asked a couple of questions, and she said, oh, don’t mind me. I’m just being Nebby.

And I, again, I understood what she meant.

But then, because I just thought it was like a shortening of Nebbish.

Right.

It’s a Yiddish word.

But then a friend of mine pointed out that actually that’s not what Nebbish means.

And I thought to myself, yeah, that isn’t what Nebbish means.

Nebbish means, you know, like meek or timid.

Yeah, I think Nebb comes from an old word that means nose or beak.

Yeah.

Yeah, and it’s also one that probably comes to us from either Scots English or the northern dialects of England because these are the types of people that settled in Pittsburgh.

Pittsburgh, it’s got, what, two rivers, the Allegheny and the…

The Mon…

I can’t even say it.

Yes.

You’re still working on that one, huh?

So because of it, even though it is in the center of a landlocked state, it still has a little bit of this kind of island.

How should we put this?

Dialects tend to cluster in places where people tend to look inward rather than outward and tend to have a feeling of an island mentality.

Think about the island of Manhattan or the peninsula in San Francisco or a variety of places around the world where certain kinds of features happen to the local culture because they’re literally an island.

But it can also happen in places where they’re not literally an island.

They’re only psychologically or geographically kind of separated from the surrounding area or the surrounding country or state, what have you.

I just think that’s kind of what’s happened in Pittsburgh.

Okay.

There’s a great deal of good work that’s been done about the Pittsburgh language.

And one of the things is at Carnegie Mellon University.

It’s called the Pittsburgh Speech and Society.

They have a dictionary.

They have some recordings, some podcasts.

It’s great stuff.

We’ll link to it on the website.

There’s more work that you can read out there.

We’ll try to find some of this and collect it in one place so you can go to some reliable sources that can tell you a little bit more about what you’re hearing.

All right?

Great, great.

Thank you so much for your call, Daniel.

Thank you.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye.

Yeah, let’s definitely link to that site, Grant.

They have recordings of people of various ages from Pittsburgh talking, and they have little podcasts about the dialect there.

It’s fabulous.

And if you go to that website, you can find out what a grinny is.

Oh, what is a grinny?

G-R-I-N-N-Y.

You’re not going to tell me?

You’re going to make me look it up?

Oh, I’ll tell just you, just you, Grant.

Okay.

It’s a chipmunk.

A grinny?

Yes.

Why?

Isn’t that fabulous?

I don’t know if it’s because they look like they’re grinning when they have little nuts in their cheeks.

I don’t know.

I don’t know what the origin of it is, but there are all kinds of wonderful things on that site, and we will have it on our website, which is waywordradio.org.

You can always call us.

The number is 1-877-929-9673, or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Franklin.

I’m calling from Monon, Indiana.

All right.

What’s going on, Franklin?

Well, when I went to school up at IU Northwest in Gary, I heard a lot of people saying the word finna and substituting it with going to do.

And I was just wondering if there was an actual derivative of that slang term.

No, give me an example.

Like, I’m finna go to the store.

Okay.

So that’s like F-I-N-N-A.

Right.

Okay.

Sure.

That makes sense.

And you say it means I’m going to do something, right?

I’m about to do something?

Yeah.

Okay.

This is a great example of a corruption of a dialect phrase that turned into a slang phrase.

The original form of this is fixing to.

You’ve probably heard that, right?

Yeah, to my wife.

I’m fixing to go to the store.

That’s probably what it meant.

Yeah, it is.

It’s exactly where it comes from.

And I’ve seen it in print as early as 1993.

I have no doubt that finna is one word spelled F-I-N-N-A is older than that.

Another variant is fitna, F-I-T-N-A.

And you’ll frequently see it used in the very informal writings of black Americans in black speech because it’s something particular to certain regions of the South where they used fixing to, and then over time the pronunciation kind of got mushed together.

It’s very similar to rendering going to as gonna.

Right.

Or in it for isn’t it?

Yeah, it’s something like that. How does that sound?

Oh, it’s very interesting.

My wife said it was probably fixing to.

I was like, I don’t know.

It sounds really kind of warped from that.

So you heard this as a university student.

Was it white kids, black kids, everyone?

It was mostly black people who used it, but anyone who was from a predominantly black area would kind of catch on and use it that way.

Yeah, it’s definitely characteristic of African-American vernacular English.

And you will hear it among the speech of white Americans, but it’s less common there.

Yeah.

Well, Franklin, we’re finna go.

Did I say that right?

Yeah, it’s something like that.

All right, yeah.

All right, thank you so much for your call.

All right, well, thanks a lot for having me on the show.

Sure.

Super duper. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks.

I probably sounded a little like an idiot saying that, didn’t I, Grant?

You’re all right.

Thank you. You’re very generous.

No, it’s an interesting one.

It is.

It’s usually a very colloquial or very informal language.

It’s not something you’ll ever find in a formal letter or business writing or school writing.

That’s so interesting.

I mean, I’m quite familiar with Fixin’ Too, having grown up in the South.

Well, see, that’s what I was saying.

That’s why it usually appears in the language of black Americans is because it comes from the post-war migration of the blacks to the North, and they brought a lot of that southern language with them.

Fascinating stuff.

Well, if you’d like to talk with us about language, give us a call.

The number is 1-877-929-9673, or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

I did not know until recently that there’s a word for the phenomenon of seeing images of recognizable objects like faces in places you don’t expect.

You know, like when you see the Virgin Mary in a piece of toast or a cloud that looks like Mr. Magoo.

There’s a word for that, Grant.

And it’s pareidolia.

That’s P-A-R-E-I-D-O-L-I-A.

It comes from a Greek word for image, and it’s the same root that gives us idol and kaleidoscope, both of which have to do with images.

And that word, again, for seeing the face of Elvis in your grilled cheese is pareidolia.

I learned it from Dave Wilton’s newsletter about language, which is called The Harmless Drudge, as you know, Grant.

And I think we should put a link to that on our website.

It’s a really interesting article.

You can find that article at waywordradio.org.

And if you’d like to give us a call, the number is 1-877-929-9673.

Coming up on A Way with Words, it’s our quiz about some of the oddest charms you may never have heard.

Stay tuned.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s time for our weekly slang challenge where we try to stump a member of the National Puzzlers League.

Today’s contestant is Joe Cabrera from Boston, Massachusetts.

Hi.

Hi, Joe.

What do you do there in Boston?

I do graphic design, print production mainly, a little programming on the side.

And a little puzzling too, I guess, huh?

Oh, a lot of puzzling, unfortunately.

What do you mean, unfortunately?

People give you inquisitive looks all the time.

Oh, yeah.

I’m always on the subway with my little pad of puzzles, just leaving away, wasting, killing time.

Nice.

Well, Joe, we like to start by asking our contestants if they have a favorite slang term for us, speaking of being inquisitive.

Oh, yeah, actually, I do.

It’s the term Clark Kent’s job.

Ooh, what’s that?

Is that like your day job that subsidizes the night job that you really want to be doing for a living?

Exactly.

That’s exactly what it is.

I’ve never heard that term.

Where did you pick it up?

I heard someone using it on the Internet once.

And I said, oh, that’s kind of interesting.

And I looked it up, and other people have used it.

Oh, no kidding.

So into a nearby phone booth.

Are there still any phone booths around?

Oh, good point.

What do superheroes do now?

I think he just changes so super fast that it doesn’t matter where he is.

Oh, that makes sense.

Yeah.

All right.

Well, Joe, let’s see how you do with our quiz.

Okay.

I’ll give you a sentence with a blank in it with two possible answers.

Only one is correct.

In case you need a lifeline, Martha will be standing by to try to help you.

Okay?

Okay.

All right.

Let’s see how we do.

Here’s the first one.

Mm—

Whoa.

She kicked him right in the blank so hard that he almost vomited.

Is it A, prosciutto, or B, labanza?

That’s L-A-B-O-N-Z-A.

And prosciutto is P-R-O-S-C-I-U-T-T-O.

Those are my two choices?

That’s it.

That’s it.

I’m going to go, I’ve heard this one before.

I’m going to go with labanza.

Oh, yeah?

Why is that?

The bread basket.

The belly?

The punch?

Yeah.

I mean, that’s what I’m guessing.

That’s what I’m guessing.

You’re absolutely right.

Do you have any idea where that comes from?

La panza.

It sounds Italian.

Yeah, there we go.

Is it?

I’m not familiar with it.

Yeah, it probably comes from the Italian term la pancia, L-A-P-A-N-C-I-A, which is the punch.

Sure, la panza in Spanish.

So occasionally it’s been used to mean the buttocks, but that’s rarer.

Yeah, usually it means the belly.

It’s kind of a tougher target to hit, too. yeah

So, whoa, she kicked him right in the la panza so hard that he almost vomited.

That means she kicked him right in the gut.

Ouch, ouch.

Yes.

All right, so let’s try another one.

This is the other one.

Okay.

Kind of not feeling well.

Bad case of the blank.

Maker’s Mark takes its toll.

So what do I have a bad case of?

Is it the woe fits, W-O-E-F-I-T-S, or the moose tanned, M-O-O-S-E hyphen T-A-N-N-E-D?

Can you read that out?

Sure.

Yeah, read that off one more time.

Kind of not feeling well.

Bad case of the blank.

Maker’s Mark really takes its toll.

And the two choices again are?

Woe fits and moose tanned.

Woe fits and moose tanned.

So, Joe, are you familiar with Maker’s Mark?

No.

Oh, so I could substitute Southern Comfort or Jameson’s or Jägermeister in there.

Thank you.

We’re talking about a pretty serious alcohol.

We’re talking about good old Kentucky bourbon is what we’re talking about.

All right.

Let’s see.

I don’t know about moose in Kentucky.

No, I don’t either.

Well, it’s just an alcohol.

Don’t read too much into that.

Okay.

That might make you feel not well.

I kind of like woe fits.

That’s a nice little combination of misery and just like a physical reaction.

Oh, so you’re having woe and you’re having some fits?

Yeah.

That sounds like a good description of a hangover to me.

Right.

And it’s exactly right.

Joe, that’s exactly it.

It is woo fits.

All right, Joe.

Sometimes it’s spelled and said as woo fits, W-O-O-F-I-T-S, and it just means a hangover.

Oh, it’s almost like a Captain Jammer.

Exactly.

There we go.

Exactly.

Beautiful.

Joey, that’s two for two.

You’re a superhero.

Awesome.

Good.

I like comic books, so that’s good for me.

Nice work, Joe.

Congratulations.

Oh, thank you very much.

Well, thank you so much, Joe.

Good luck with the puzzling.

Oh, thanks. It was fun.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Okay, see you.

Bye-bye.

And if you have a question for us about words, language, grammar, slang, why not give us a call?

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

That’s 1-877-WAYWORD, or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jenny from New York.

Hiya, Jenny. How are you?

Hello, Jenny.

I’m excellent. How are you?

Doing wonderfully well. What’s up?

Well, my question is actually about my Manhattan job.

I am a cheesemonger at Murray’s Cheese, and we’re opening up a new charcuterie store in the Grand Central Terminal, and it’s called Murray’s Real Salami, or will be.

It’s opening in a couple weeks.

And behind the counter at the cheese shop, we’re called Cheesemongers.

So the idea was just to follow that form and call the people who will be working at Salami the meatmongers.

But after some Google searches, we found that it has some rather unsavory connotations.

Sorry, I didn’t mean to get all there.

Yeah.

What should we be called?

So do these people have uniforms and little buttons that say cheesemonger?

No, not so much.

But we do have signs that will reference it.

Or we can say, you know, if I’m, for instance, in the front organizing some packages and someone’s asking me about a particular type of cheese, I can say, oh, just, you know, ask one of our cheesemongers up at the counter.

So it’s not really something that’s going to be plastered everywhere, but we do like to have some sort of title for it.

I see.

And meatmonger isn’t going to work.

There is something vaguely pornographic about that.

Yes, yes.

I did a Google search and found a man given to wenching.

To wenching.

Okay.

To wenching.

So salamimonger isn’t going to work either.

Yeah, I don’t think so.

Okay, so you need something completely different.

People react okay to the cheesemonger?

Yeah, they do.

Like, sometimes they snicker, and they think it’s a little funny.

Sometimes I say I’m a cheesemongress.

Mongress.

But, yeah, cheesemonger is okay.

Like, I think cheesemonger and fishmonger, I’m not really sure, aside from, like, warmonger, what other mongers still exist out there.

But I think it’s a common enough word that people don’t get too freaked out by it.

Right.

Okay.

But you need a better word for the people who work with the meat.

Exactly.

How about flesh chater?

No.

Oh, no, that doesn’t work.

If anything, that’s worse.

Okay.

Well, you said you work for a charcuterie, right?

Right, right.

And this is the French term for a place that handles meats, deli meats, not like a butcher.

Exactly, right.

They’re all cooked and cured.

Yeah, the cooked and cured, exactly.

The seasoned stuff, the stuff that you would make sandwiches or crudités out of or little hors d’oeuvres, right?

An etymological relative of carnage and carcass, I would just throw in.

Then what about the French term charcutier?

Is that too pretentious?

Well, we talked about, I don’t know, because another thing is we really like to try to avoid being pretentious.

So we’re calling it Murray’s real salami.

And we did, we have talked around the idea of salami, like the Italian one, but it’s just such a mouthful.

And also, I’m not really sure how we would do plural because it’s probably, I think, salumiere is singular and then it would be salumieri plural or salumieri sounds weird.

What is the word?

Salumieri.

Okay.

And so meter maid spelled with an A wouldn’t work.

Yes.

I’m leaning toward Grant’s original suggestion, charcuterie, right?

Charcuterie.

Yeah, that’s kind of nice.

It does flow rather nicely.

And it would kind of balance the, I guess, the country mix since we do have things from all over the world.

It’s called salami, which is more of an Italian kind of thing.

Charcuterie.

Jenny, how about meat concierge?

Meat concierge.

Oh, that sounds nice.

Do you think?

I was just joking.

This is harder than I thought.

I do like kind of trying to work with butcher and kind of make it, you know, give it a bit more finesse.

But cured meat butcher sounds a little clunky.

But it does kind of carry that same, like, I don’t know, rustic charm as monger.

You know, we’ve given you some avenues of exploration, and I would be interested to find out how this turns out.

And further, I bet we’ll get some emails from listeners, and if we get something super-duper, we’ll forward it on to you, all right?

Great. Wonderful. Thank you so much.

Okay. Good luck.

Okay. Thank you. Bye.

If you can think of something to call someone who handles the sale and preparation of cooked and cured meats in a fancy shop, let us know.

We’d love to hear about it.

The number to call is 1-877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we got an email from Wendy.

She’s an English teacher in Louisiana, and she had her students write an autographical poem recently.

And when asked to come up with four words to describe themselves, she writes, many used random as an adjective.

She says she asked her students about the meaning of random, and she looked all over online.

And what she’s trying to figure out is, is random a hot teen word right now?

And what do they mean exactly when they use it?

Do you use that, Martha?

Do you use it that way?

Okay.

Not at all.

This is something that I’ve known about for quite a while.

As far as I know, it goes back to the early 1990s, probably the mid-80s.

It’s one of those things that’s very difficult to track because random is a fairly common word in normal usage.

But among young people, and it’s not a teen phenomenon so much as, I’d say, people in their teens, 20s, and 30s probably know it best and probably use it most.

And it typically means unusual or weird or odd.

And there are some different contexts for it where its meaning can vary.

You know, slang tends to be very flexible in that regard.

So if I just said, last night I met this random dude at this bar, well, if I talk about a random dude, I mean that he was odd and he probably talked to me in a way that you wouldn’t talk to strangers or he behaved in a way that really wasn’t normal.

So I’m actually, it’s kind of derogatory.

But if I describe myself as being random, or if you say something to me and say, well, that’s random, what I just mean is, that’s weird.

Maybe it’s a non sequitur.

Maybe it’s abnormal for you to say.

It’s out of the ordinary for someone to say.

So weird or odd generally will cover most of the bases.

Well, that’s interesting that all these students are describing themselves as random.

You can see how a teenager might not want to be perceived as knowable, right?

Teenagers want to think of themselves as a bit of a mystery, maybe think of themselves as being complex.

And so if you describe yourself as random, that means that you’re not a simpleton.

Huh. So this word ended up evolving without my noticing.

Yeah.

Where did it come from?

I think it’s a perfectly normal outgrowth of the regular meaning of random.

If you think of random behavior, it can kind of go both ways.

Random behavior is odd or unexpected behavior.

And then if you use it more and more, the idea that it’s odd and exclusively odd or exclusively weird tends to take hold.

I’ve heard teenagers say, that’s so random, but I had no idea that you could use it in that way.

Yeah, well, it tends not to be the straight up meaning of random when they use it that way.

Although in your mind you might be able to make it work.

So, yeah, random. I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it, Martha.

It’s definitely a word for, no offense attended, the younger set.

It’s pretty common. Most young people in high school are going to know it.

The only reason I probably know it at my age is because I study slang for a living.

It belongs to a specific group, and we’re not a part of it.

You’re such a random guy, Grant.

Thank you, doll. So are you.

We’ll take any random caller.

The number’s 1-877-929-9673.

Or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Terry from Kenosha, Wisconsin.

Hiya, Terry.

What’s going on?

Well, a little, I guess, conundrum we had.

Solving a statistics problem in our decision sciences class.

My professor had asked, we were dealing with a problem on the probability that the Cubs would win the playoffs.

And the question came up where the word rooting came from, because apparently in Australia, where he’s from,

That means that if you are rooting for a team, that would mean that you were having sex with a member of that team.

So your question then is, what is the deal with these different roots, right?

Right.

What’s the root of root?

Right. And, you know, it’s funny because I looked on the Internet.

And, of course, you can find everything about etymology when you’re looking for the word root,

But it’s very difficult to find the etymology on the word root.

You’re exactly right. You’re exactly right.

Yeah, as far as I can tell, the root in terms of rooting for a team

Somehow is related to the idea of swine rooting for something in the soil.

And I’m not really sure of the connection except that it’s a noisy affair and you hear little moans of pleasure when they find the things.

So you’re saying that the kind of rooting that animals do when, say, pigs are looking for acorns or that sort of thing, their nose is to the ground and they’re looking for food.

Yeah, very, very enthusiastically and noisily.

Right. So that’s more or less how we get the rooting for the home team?

That’s my suspicion, but as Terry said, it’s hard to sort out all those roots of root.

Do you have a different theory?

Well, so there’s, I think there are two roots that we’re talking about here with different roots, so to speak, different word origins, right?

So one of the roots has, the root, say, on a plant has to come from, it comes from the Latin, radix, R-A-D-I-X, right?

But the Australian root, which means to have sex more or less, it’s almost always used by men in reference to having sex with somebody else or wanting to have sex with someone else.

And it comes from a much older noun form of root, which means penis.

And as you probably know, as an adult woman, and we’re not going to giggle about this, but the language is just filled with synonyms for the sexual organs.

And that’s just one of many of them.

Well, and it still doesn’t quite say, well, where does that word rooting for the home team, you know, when it’s used as a fan.

Most etymologies are kind of mysterious, but as Martha was saying, it probably comes from a fanatic,

Which is the original form of the word fan, for a team is very aggressive and very crazy and very crazed.

And have you ever seen a pig root for acorns?

It’s not a passive affair.

It’s almost violent.

A pig will knock you down and eat your arm on the way to getting acorns out from under the must, the layer of leaves and bracken and whatever else is on the ground.

Grant, that was very beautifully said.

I was going to say, do you have a close and personal experience with this?

I have very much so.

I remember we had a gigantic oak tree in the yard of one of the houses we lived in.

We had some pigs in the back.

And it was massive.

It took two or three of us children to put our arms around it.

And the acorns that it dropped were just a little smaller than limes.

They were pretty big around.

And so our father would have us collect those and take them out back to the hogs and dump them in the trough.

And you, I don’t know, you’d have thought you were putting their favorite drug in there.

They were crazy for acorns.

And they would knock the trough over looking for that one last bit of acorn that might have fallen out.

Oh, my gosh.

Well, that sounds like Cubs fans.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

That sounds a lot like Cubs fans.

Well, yeah, think about the crazy guys with the colored hair and the painted chest and who are shouting into their horse, right?

I mean, that is the kind of enthusiasm that we’re talking about here.

So I could see how that might.

I mean, this is guesswork still because like most words, we’re not 100% sure that’s what it means.

But we can see in our minds how the connection might exist, right?

Right.

Yeah, it works for me.

Maybe I’ll get some extra credit for finding out the answer to that one.

I hope so.

Let us know.

Okay.

Take care.

Thank you.

If you’ve got a question about something that’s confusing,

If you’d like us to help you separate the different Englishes in your mind,

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From Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And from the Argo Network in New York City, I’m Grant Barrett.

Chaloego.

Buh-bye.

Bye-bye.

Say oyster I’m not gonna stop eating oysters just because you say oysters let’s call the whole thing.