Our discussion about grammagrams prompts listeners to send in several more stories from their workplaces. A high-school drama teacher in Arlington, Texas, reports that in the theater world, the letter Q is scribbled in scripts to mean cue. A plumber points out that pipes that are Y-shaped are called wyes. A Virginia man who works in a shipyard that refuels nuclear submarines says that because the abbreviation for bill of materials is BOM, he and his colleagues joke about exploding nuclear BOMs. It’s not really a grammagram but we like it! This is part of a complete episode.
Transcript of “Even More Grammagrams”
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 had a conversation not long ago about gramograms, which are a kind of rebus that uses only letters.
So, for example, if you want to indicate the word empty on a vat, if it’s empty, you can just write the letters M-T.
We heard from a listener who actually does that in his work.
And we heard from a lot of other listeners who use those kinds of things in different ways.
For example, Robert Creclo of Arlington, Texas, called us to say that he’s a high school theater teacher and that stage managers have to record a lot of data like sound cues and light cues and where actors enter and exit.
And when you’re writing in the script, you just use the letter Q instead of the word C-U-E.
Of course, sure.
Just quickly use the letter Q, which is super cool because our word Q, meaning a prompt, C-U-E, comes from the Latin cuando, Q-U-A-N-D-O, which means when.
And then we heard from Tim Healy, who is in the plumbing business, and he pointed out that pipes that are shaped like the letter Y are actually called Y pipes spelled W-Y-E, which is super cool.
You Google Y-W-Y-E and you’ll see all these pipes that are shaped like the letter Y.
And one more example, you know the term bill of materials?
It’s a list of materials that are required by a contractor to complete a contract or a list of all the raw parts and intermediates and subassemblies.
It’s called a bill of materials.
The acronym for it is B-O-M, pronounced BOM.
Well, we heard from Vince in Virginia who works in a shipyard that refuels nuclear carriers and submarines.
And he says he works in the materials section.
And so on a daily basis, he’s making nuclear bombs.
And they also, when you’re talking about a bill of materials, you can explode that bill of materials, which means you list everything.
Yeah, you break it out.
Yeah, and distribute it to the people who are going to be using the different parts.
So he’s not only making nuclear bombs, but he’s exploding them on a regular basis.
Vince, be careful out there.
Well, we know you’ve got weird language in your work.
Just humdrum stuff that seems exciting to you.
Share it all with us, 877-929-9673.
Or tell us all about it on Twitter @wayword.
