Fake English

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

And I’m Martha Barnette, and here’s a word that has me very excited, Grant, pungle. Do you know this word?

Baby platypus?

No, no, no, that’s a puggle.

Oh.

But pungle, P-U-N-G-L-E. It means to shell out, that is to put down money.

Or like if you force somebody to pay up, you might say, I made him pungle up.

It’s mainly used in the western part of the United States.

And what’s really exciting is that this weird-sounding word makes perfect sense if you know that it comes from the Spanish imperative pongale.

That is, to put it there or put it down.

So it’s been thoroughly anglicized.

Yeah, to pungle.

So, for example, you might pungle down money on the poker table.

Interesting. I love it.

We’d love for you to pungle your questions and comments about words and how we use them.

Put them down in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Or call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this must be Grant.

This is Michelle Stein.

I’m calling from the Davis Academy in Atlanta, Georgia.

Hi, Michelle.

Wait, is that a school?

You’re a teacher?

That is correct.

Wow, one of the noble ones.

Indeed, middle school, no less.

Oh, terrible time.

What can we do for you, Michelle?

I have a particular group of students in one of my classes who have coined a new phrase.

Word actually is more accurate, we believe. And we’re looking for the community to give us some feedback on whether there is any other word that has the same meaning or whether we can encourage the use of the one we’ve created. Okay, very good. Let’s hear it.

The word that we have come up with is fistumba, F-I-S-T-U-M-B-A. It has two uses as a noun and a.

And it is the occurrence whereby two people fist pump one another and an injury occurs by accident.

They fist bump each other?

Yes.

Fist pump, fist bump, whatever the current term is.

Rather than hand slapping nowadays, it’s a closed fist pump.

Okay, because I’ve never heard it called fist pump.

Oh, well, that’s interesting.

It’s common language from these parts.

It’s not fist bump with a B, it’s with a P?

Either works.

Oh, wow.

I mainly know it as a fist bump or a DAP, a D-A-P.

Oh, I haven’t heard DAP.

So what are they doing where this becomes violent?

How do you hurt somebody or yourself when you’re doing this?

Well, what occurred was a student got a correct response on something they were working on.

And a student sitting next to them, instead of the high five, fist pumped or bumped or dapped them.

Very enthusiastically.

Correct.

So how did they come up with the word?

I mean, fistumba, it sort of sounds like something you might squeeze.

It sounds like a fistula to me.

Well, that actually occurred.

One of the two students involved looked in the dictionary and saw that fistula was a word.

He actually did that.

Andrew’s pointing to himself.

Yay, Andrew.

For Latin for flute, I believe.

Yeah, it means a hole between two parts of the body that shouldn’t have a hole.

Right.

Now, he had no prior knowledge of that word.

But I think what has occurred and what we’ve tossed around in our class is that Zumba is a current popular term being used for a form of dance exercise.

Oh, okay.

And I think that because that word is floating around very much in the current community, it popped into their heads and it seemed to flow well.

Fistumba for an injury received while fist bumping.

Correct.

Well, let me just say, your boldness in calling a national radio show to ask whether or not you can propagate it means your chances have improved.

Ooh.

Because it takes a lot of muscle to make a word stick.

You really have to be highly connected.

Yeah, we discussed that.

You almost need to be a marketing agent for your word.

Right, right.

What other strategies have they used to popularize the term?

At this point, it’s been mouth-to-mouth demonstrations, of course, within the school confines.

Lots of demonstrations.

No chaperones, I guess.

Yep, and it actually brought out a discussion of the book Friendle, which you may or may not deal with.

Yeah, yeah.

It’s the other word for a pencil, right?

Correct.

A pen, yeah.

A pen.

Oh, it’s a pen, okay.

But other than that, we aren’t quite sure how to propagate it.

Okay, so here’s your strategy.

First, call a national radio show and tell them what about the word.

Great.

Here’s the second part.

The second thing that you have to do is all of your students need to get all of their friends to use it.

But they need to use it in a non-demonstrative kind of real way.

You can’t force a word on people if it sounds awkward or weird.

You’ve got to use it naturally and a lot.

And the cool kids have to be using it.

Oh, that’s easy.

If the cool kids just bail on this word, it’s never going to work.

No, the cool kids created it.

And then the third thing is you as the teacher need to teach it to your other classes.

Absolutely. It’s on the wall.

Oh, there we go.

And put it in the school newsletter, in the school newspaper.

Make sure she goes home to the parents and talk about it at the PTA meeting.

Yeah, rename the football team.

The Fighting Festumbas.

You need to get a declaration from the mayor that says National Festumba Day here in Atlanta.

The Lady Festumbas.

Yes, we’re in the process of learning how to write formal letters.

We can do that, too.

There you go.

So here’s what we’re going to do.

You’re going to do all this work, and we’re just going to wait five years.

We’re going to wait five years, and you call us back, and you let us know how it went, okay?

You got it.

Thanks for calling, Michelle.

Well, can I have my students give you one giant hello because they’re anxiously waiting?

Oh, please.

Yes, absolutely.

Hello, bright minds.

Now, I want to hear them say their new word.

It’s you, sir.

That’ll work.

That’s fantastic.

Thank you, Michelle.

They do sound cool.

Yeah, thank you to your students as well.

Thank you so much.

Good luck.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Call us with your language questions and comments, or send them to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John calling from Burlington, Vermont.

Hello, John.

Hello, John.

How can we help you, John?

Well, there’s a word I think I knew at one point long ago, and I cannot remember it for the life of me.

And I’m hoping you guys can help.

Was it Shlemiel?

No, keep going.

Was it biscuit?

No.

Give us a clue.

The word describes a certain kind of verbal behavior in which someone says something to the effect that, well, I’m not going to say anything about X, but XXXXXX.

That’s called lying.

There are lots of variations of it.

That’s true.

And I hear it with some regularity and just…

You do?

Yeah.

Well, it’s kind of a trope.

It’s kind of the screenwriters and TV sitcom writers, it’s just kind of a standard little jokey thing they throw in there as well.

I mean, people genuinely do it in real life.

I’m imagining politicians.

Oh, certainly politicians, yeah.

And pundits.

Yeah.

So, John, you’re looking for the word for that.

We can help you.

The word is probably paralepsis.

Does that ring a bill?

No, but I’ll take it anyway.

That’s a rhetorical term, right, from the classic rhetorical devices that we use when we write and speak.

Yes, P-A-R-A-L-E-P-S-I-S, Paralepsis, or sometimes it’s Paralepsis with an I in there.

And it comes from Greek words that mean leaving aside.

So you might say, for example, it would be unseemly to mention my opponent’s drinking problem, so I won’t.

And then go on, you know.

And then say, except you can.

Describe how late they were at the bar last night.

Right.

Exactly.

Yeah, exactly.

Exactly.

It goes by lots of different names, but probably that’s the most common name for it, Paralypsis.

Great.

Well, I’m going to write that down so I don’t have to call you back in a week and ask you again.

All right.

Well, we’re happy to help, John.

Thanks.

Hi.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

I’ve been looking for that for a while.

Yeah, sure.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Bye.

Bye.

Call us 877-929-9673.

I was on another call-in show recently, and a truck driver called in and shared some great slang that I want to share with you.

You know what a bed bugger is? A bed bugger. I don’t know. It’s a moving van. It’s a truck that’s hauling furniture. Isn’t that gross? I see. Yeah, that is gross. Imagine bedbugs traveling. They’re like, free ride, going to California. See you later, Ma.

Bring us your workplace slang, 877-929-9673, or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, my name is Kathleen. I’m calling from Hebron, Connecticut. Hi, Kathleen. Welcome. How can we help you?

I have a question. I’m interested in the name of a sign or character or symbol that I usually call a pound sign or a number sign, and I hear people call it a hashtag. I’m very confused. Why? And in what context do you hear it?

Well, I just hear it more when people are telling what their, if you want to get in touch with me, call this number, hashtag, whatever. I understand that because I don’t text or use anything like that, that’s why I don’t understand what I’m talking about.

I think I get what you’re saying. So on a commercial, somebody will say, you can call our toll-free number or follow us on Twitter under the hashtag mattresses or whatever their product is.

Right. That’s interesting because what that is is a keyword. So for the radio show, we might use language as our hashtag or Wayword as our hashtag. And then we put the pound sign in front of it. But it’s the hash plus the word that makes the hashtag. The symbol itself is still called the hash or hash mark or pound sign or number sign.

Yeah, and this is largely on Twitter, right? I mean, that’s how you call attention to this or that topic.

Right, but outside of Twitter, this particular symbol, we’re talking about two vertical lines, two horizontal lines. They cross, they kind of create a tic-tac-toe board with nine squares, right, and no outside border. This has got a ton of names, and it really depends on the context. And where you are or where you’re from, that all comes into play when you decide what you’re going to call it.

Yeah, if I call customer service, they’re not going to say press the hashtag.

No, or the hash mark even.

They’ll say press the pound sign, right?

Right.

But if you are a programmer and you write software,

You’re probably going to call it a hash.

Some people call it a hatch mark.

Actually, that’s the older name for it because it looks like cross-hatching,

Which are lines that cross each other.

You might do a cross-hatch drawing with an ink pen.

Interesting. I just was wondering why, and now I understand, because I don’t use what they’re talking about.

Well, the Twitter hashtag is really interesting.

I might be misremembering this history here,

But Twitter basically was created by people with lots of programming experience.

And so when it came time to look for a symbol to do this particular job

Of connecting a lot of short messages together,

Kind of like tagging them or marking them as being of the same theme,

They decided to go with this single character, which was more or less underused.

The same way they went with the at side for the Twitter handles.

In programming, in a lot of languages, you put the hash sign before comments in code.

And comments are the language that are just for other programmers reading the code.

The computer is completely going to ignore those comments.

But it’s just so if somebody else comes in and wants to finish your work or correct your work or just discover what you did,

You left a comment saying, this particular function solves this problem and this is how I did it.

And so you just use that hash there.

So I could see how it would easily just kind of leap to the mind of the Twitter guys when they were making their software.

Well, that’s really interesting.

Well, we appreciate your calling. Thanks so much.

Thank you.

Thanks, Kathleen. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Call us.

A word game and more discussion about why we say the things we do. Stay with us.

Support comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, celebrating 35 years of making a leadership difference with Situational Leadership 2, the leadership model designed to boost effectiveness, impact, and employee engagement.

More about how Blanchard can develop your executives and leaders at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And joining us now is our quiz guide, John Chaneski. Hello, John.

Hi, Martha. Hi, Grant.

Hiya, John. What’s up, kid?

You know, I’m going to make a pitch right now for another term that I think belongs to the dictionary.

You know, occasionally I do that.

This isn’t igree or innovative or any other junk that I made up.

This is a real term that I hear people use all the time but has not yet made it into the book.

Oh, good.

And here it is.

Sailing, as in yard sailing or garage sailing.

Or if you live in Brooklyn, like me, you do some gate sailing or even stoop sailing.

Now, if you spend the summer yard sailing like me, you know what I mean when I say that rich neighborhoods are the best. Rich people need to get rid of things, and sometimes they sell good stuff at a good price.

For example, I was garage sailing and hid a few famous people’s homes. At the house of a famous novelist, I found a whole box of used slinkies for a dollar. What else would you call them? Used slinkies for a dollar. Give me the last name of a famous novelist, possessive S, and then another word for what you would call slinkies.

Oh. Something Springs. I was going to say Mortals Coil. Alice Springs. Now they’re going to rhyme. Kings. Oh, there we go. King Springs. King Springs. I was yard sailing and I got a box of King Springs. Let me tell you about a few more bargains I got.

A famous TV doctor who dispenses health advice was dispensing of some pottery, including many appropriate for displaying flowers. What were they? Ozz’s vazzes. Ozz’s vazzes is right. Sometimes, no matter how well off you are, you hate to throw things out when you can get a dollar for them.

I was at a real estate mogul’s place and picked up a few machines for clearing my cellar of water. What were they? Trump’s pumps. Trump’s pumps is right. Nice. Good. Back in Hollywood, I found some baseball equipment that belonged to a handsome movie star. What were they? Baseball equipment. Pitts mitts. Pitts mitts is right. I got Pitts mitts for a buck.

Everybody, and I mean everybody, sells their stuff. I was at this huge yard sale, literally on a huge yard, and I got some nightclothes belonging to a very powerful man for only a dollar. What were they? Is it something jammies? Not the slangish form of that word. Not the slangish form? No. So it’s just pajamas? Obama’s pajamas. Oh, my goodness. Obama’s pajamas, yes. It smells like cigarette smoke. It was a very big yard. Had to be washed.

Sometimes people will be selling just about anything, including stuff from their garden. I was at a famous music producer and performer’s house, and I got some pretty flowering plants for only a dollar. What were they? A famous music producer. A music producer. And performer. And performer. Oh, I was going to say Spectre’s something. I was going to say Jones. Jay-Z’s Daisies. Jay-Z’s Daisies. Oh, nice. Yes. I was thinking about Roses Roses. That could work.

Finally, now one caveat. If you go yard sailing, be sure to clean the stuff you buy thoroughly. I wasn’t careful, and that’s how I got these infectious particles from a famous Disney Channel teen singing sensation. What were they? Cyrus’s viruses. I got Cyrus’s viruses, yes. Just a word of the wise. Please sanitize. Sanitize the stuff you get from yard sales. That is my yard-sailing quiz. You guys are great. How about that?

But you remind me, John, I have to say, one of the things I miss about not living in Brooklyn anymore is finding just boxes of books on the sidewalk that you can go through every single weekend, as long as the weather’s nice. That’s true. Thanks, John. It was a great quiz. Thank you, guys. Bye-bye, John. Take care now. Thanks. Bye-bye.

And if you want to talk about language, words, and how we use them, call us 877-929-9673.

Or send us a question and email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Richard, and I’m calling you from San Diego, California.

Hi.

Hi, Richard.

Hi, how can we help you?

My question is about a word that I’ve heard often, and I thought it was a Yiddish word.

And the word is cockamamie.

And I can tell you that I did a little research myself.

I looked it up because I really thought it was a Yiddish word.

And when I looked online, it said it was French.

I didn’t believe it because I’ve heard it so often.

Among Yiddish speakers are people who have a lot of Yiddish in their lexicon?

Yes.

Yes.

A lot of, you know, people who are Jewish will often use this word.

And the way I’ve heard it used has always been like, that’s crazy.

That doesn’t make sense.

That’s a little word.

Yeah.

It’s Meshuggah.

Meshuggah, right.

So cockamamie means just nonsense or weird, unusual, baloney, that kind of thing, right?

Exactly, Grant.

And again, I really, I’d always thought it was really a Jewish word.

And it just doesn’t make any sense to me that, you know, all of this and the citations were, no, this is definitely not.

And I remember hearing this as a kid.

That’s why I was really surprised.

Where were you as a kid when you heard this?

Not France.

New York.

Where in New York?

Well, Long Island, actually.

Okay.

All right, let’s paint this picture first.

Cockamamie does come from a French word, décalcomanie,

Which was a mania for decals in the 1800s in France and the UK.

And then later in the New World,

Where you’d actually have this design on a piece of paper.

You’d wet it and you’d put it on your arm and hold it there for a little bit

And then pull it up and then the design would be on your skin.

And it was not just kids, although it was primarily kids,

But adults would sometimes do this as well as a kind of decoration.

I don’t know.

I’m imagining tears near the eye or something like that.

I don’t know.

Spider webs across the face.

Fun for the whole family, right?

They didn’t have video games.

In any case, the French word traveled to the United States is decalmania, but it was mispronounced.

And here’s where the confusion I think you have originates.

The earliest uses that we find of cockamamie in print are in the 1930s in New York City among immigrant communities in the Lower East Side.

And these were primarily Jewish.

And it would not surprise me at all if the word just simply traveled along with all the other Yiddish words

As people tended to forget Yiddish and just some of the few core words kind of stuck around.

And cockamamie because it’s such a distinctive, it’s a fun word.

It’s automatically fun.

But you’re absolutely right.

There’s no linguistic expert at all, including the ones who are Yiddish experts

And the ones who are widely respected in the language community.

There’s no expert who says that cockamamie is Yiddish or Hebrew or anything like that.

How does that sound, Richard?

It sounds great.

I mean, it’s information I didn’t have, so I really am surprised, but I appreciate it very much.

Yeah, sure. Thanks for calling.

You’ll better bet it now.

Okay. Thanks very much.

Thank you, Richard. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Here we have one strange story of how a word entered English from another language,

Was drastically corrupted, and then continued to be used because it was so odd.

And words survive for a variety of reasons, but oddness isn’t always one of them.

You’re right. 877-929-9673.

I spent one family holiday in a tiny town in the interior of Argentina.

And the town was so tiny that there really wasn’t anything to do at night

Except walk down into the valley to the little video store.

But, of course, that was thrilling for me because I got to look at all the titles in Spanish of all the movies

And see how they translated into English.

And it was really interesting, Grant, because so many of the titles, at least when I translated them, seemed oddly flat.

For example, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, the title just translated to An Expert in Fun.

And Up in the Air, you know, with George Clooney, was Amor Sin Escalas, Love Without Stopovers.

And here’s another one.

This one was, it just translated as Terror on Board.

Is that the Keanu Reeves bus movie?

That’s a good guess.

No, it’s Snake.

Snake on a Plane.

Yes, how did you know?

Yeah, I mean, there’s so many Terror on Board movies.

Yeah, it could be anything.

Why would you use something so generic?

I don’t know why that happened.

I don’t know.

Maybe Samuel Jackson doesn’t translate well into Spanish.

Maybe they just don’t get the badassery of this man, you know?

It’s kind of tied up in that title, right?

I guess.

Maybe snakes are confusing.

Call us 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Susie from Dallas.

Hiya, Susie.

How are you doing?

Hi, I’m okay.

How are you?

All right.

What can we help you with?

Okay, well, I wanted to ask about the word patron.

In the library, the librarians for a long time would call the people coming in the library patrons.

But there’s a trend lately for the librarians to call the people customers.

And this bothers me.

I like the word patron.

I feel like it has a lot of respect in that word.

And I wondered, what’s the difference between the word patron and customer?

Customer to me means somebody who’s going to give money,

And patron is somebody that comes for a long period of time.

And also, what’s going on with why would librarians want to change that?

Well, first of all, let’s say, hey, librarian, you’re our people.

Wait, are you a librarian or you just frequent the library?

I am a librarian.

Oh, you are.

Okay, you were talking about libraries like an insider.

Okay, so are you getting an edict from on high that you have to call your patrons customers?

No one had actually ever said to us we had to,

But it was kind of like a newspeak thing where all of a sudden

All the administrators started using the word customer

And all of the printed material would come out with the word customer.

Oh, really?

Interesting.

What I’m hearing here is echoes of a conversation that has been happening in industries all across the world where people are starting to realize that even if it’s a public service, even if it’s something funded by tax revenues or the government, or even if it’s funded by donations, you still have to treat your patrons, your customers, as if you were an ordinary business where they pay you a fee and you provide them a service.

And both of you are trying to do the best that you can to hold up your end of the bargain.

And so to me, it sounds like an echo of this kind of idea of running these institutions

A little more like a business in order to increase efficiency.

Now, you mentioned Newspeak, maybe a little bit of it’s just a, how shall we put this,

A reframing of old practices so that they sound fresh and new.

I don’t really know.

Certainly, the library is one of the few places in the world where I get consistently good service.

So I don’t know that they need to call it customers.

Yeah, I’m with Suzy on this.

I’m not sure I like the term customer because it feels so much like a transaction.

I mean, I’m not going there and paying to borrow books.

And I think that patron has a sort of antiquated, sort of aspirational sense of all of us in the community patronizing the library.

That is, being patrons, giving patronage to the library, all contributing to it.

That’s really interesting. You know, you’ll probably both be relieved to hear that Eric Partridge, the great British lexicographer, more or less agreed with you.

In 1955, in his book, Concise Usage and Abusage, he talked about this, and he said that you can have a patron of the arts, but not of a green grocer or a bookmaker.

Exactly.

Right? He says, tradesmen have customers, professional men have clients, though doctors have patients.

I remember reading about a librarian who has that on her job interview list of questions that when she was interviewing people for a position, the last question was patron or customer? Explain.

I love it.

You know, the essay question. Discuss.

So to kind of round this up, it sounds like, Susie, that you’re in the camp of you like library patron, right?

I do.

Martha, you like library patron?

Well, I mean, there is the sort of whiff of patriarchy in there. You know, the old etymology there, which might be bothering some people. But I sort of like clients.

Right.

As a better word.

Client.

Yeah.

More like a professional service.

Yes, yes, yes.

Not so much like, you know, selling onions or something. And me, I don’t care what they call me as long as the libraries stay open.

And that’s a problem.

So, Susie, we’re going to throw this out. We’ll see what kind of opinions we get back, and we’ll talk about them again on a future show, all right?

Okay, great.

Thank you so much for calling, and best of luck at the library.

Okay, thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What do you think about customer versus patron? Can you be a customer of the library, or are you just a patron? Let us know, 877-929-9673, or email us any question at all about language to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking about the word pungle early on and how you can pungle up money or pungle down money. And you can also just pungle, that is to set something down. And I found a citation in a newspaper from Nevada in 1867 that I just loved, Grant. It goes, all night the clouds pungled their fleecy treasure.

Can’t you just see clouds?

Sure, yeah.

Pungling their fleecy treasures.

I love it.

Pungling your fleecy treasure.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Greg Cantrell from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hello, Greg, welcome.

How you doing?

Well, I’ve got a word that I grew up hearing, and it never occurred to me that it was anything out of the ordinary until a friend of mine the other day, I used it in normal conversation, and the friend that I was with said, what does that mean? And it’s actually a phrase, and the phrase refers to something that’s really full. You can’t put anything else in it. And the phrase is lambing full, like L-A-M-M-I-N-G. Of course, here in Texas, we dropped that I-N-G, and it’s just lambing full.

Lambing full.

Yeah, and so I got curious, and I’ll just Google that up and find out what the origins, and I couldn’t find it anywhere on the Internet. I checked the Oxford English Dictionary. It’s a mystery.

Well, how about that?

Not for long.

Not for long.

There’s a whole class of words in English that ultimately turned out to be intensifiers, and a surprising number of these words have to do with hitting or banging or thumping somebody, and this is one of those. The lamin here, and it’s often paired with other words. You can say lamin full or lambing full, but you might say lamb and huge or lamb and big or lamb and long. So the lambing is used as an intensifier. And it connects back to an old British dialect word that is in a number of old dialect collections. That means to hit or to strike or to punch or that sort of thing. And even before it came to the United States, it had already started to take on this use of, how shall I put it, the intensifying use.

Striking.

Larapins.

Well, yeah, yeah. That’s a striking blouse you have on.

Thank you.

It’s literally related to a word that has to do with hitting.

Or doesn’t that beat all?

Well, beat. I mean, there’s different beats in competition. But anyway, you have this whole collection of words. That’s a whopping big sandwich you have there, right?

Also about hitting.

It’s really interesting.

So that’s where, in general, that it comes from. And you can find it. And I want to ask you this. Do you read Zane Gray novels, or have you ever?

I can’t say that I’ve ever actually read one.

Because he was lamb and fond of this.

He really was. He used it in numerous books. And if you read Westerns, you’ll often find that modern cowboy writers, people who just kind of write in the genre, will often use his language, and they’ve borrowed the term from Zane Gray novels that are 100 years old into their own modern works. The word kind of has this other life in cowboy fiction.

My friend who called it to my attention was born and raised in Kentucky, in central Kentucky and had never heard the word.

Okay.

Not surprised.

Not surprised.

Yeah, I grew up in Kentucky, never heard it.

It’s not overly common. It does tend to be mainly southern when it pops up in the United States, though.

All right.

Well, thank you so much.

Greg, it’s been lamb and good fun.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You can email us your questions about language, words@waywordradio.org, or find us on Facebook and Twitter. And you can always call us, 877-929-9673.

Grant, have you ever heard of alligator radio?

No, I haven’t.

That’s a trucker slang thing again.

It is indeed. It’s a CB radio that transmits a strong signal but is very, very bad at receiving signals. So they call it that because it’s all mouth and no ears.

Oh, like an alligator.

Alligator radio.

But we are not Alligator Radio here. We’re more like little bunnies with big ears tuned to your questions.

So call us, 877-929-9673.

More Lust for Lex. Stay tuned.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

More and more voice recognition technology is part of our daily lives. When you call customer service, you’re asked to press or say one. Or maybe you’ve consulted Siri, the iPhone assistant. And voice recognition means that now you can compose large amounts of text, even books, by just speaking. No need for a pen. No need to type. Just say what you want, and the words magically appear on the screen.

And in the past, many great writers have dictated their work, but that was to human transcriptionists. John Milton supposedly recited Paradise Lost to his daughters, and they wrote it down. Mark Twain dictated much of his autobiography. One modern convert to dictation is the author Richard Powers. In 2006, his novel, The Echo Maker, won the National Book Award, and he wrote most of that novel speaking it into a computer. He described that process in an essay. At first, he writes, it wasn’t easy. I needed weeks to get over the oddness of auditioning myself in an empty room, to trust to the flow of speech, to learn to hear myself think all over again. But eventually, Powers found that dictating allowed him, as he put it, to live above the level of the phrase, thinking in full paragraphs and capturing the rhythmic arcs before they fade. I spend less mental overhead on orthography and finger mechanics, and more on hearing my characters speak themselves into existence. Mostly, he says, I’m just a little closer to what my cadences might mean when replayed in the sub-vocal voices of some other auditioner. And I love that description of how his narrative voice might sound to a reader.

And so, Grant, now I’m beginning to wonder how my own writing might be affected if I use dictation technology. Have you ever tried that? Have you ever tried to write emails with dictation?

Oh, man, a long time ago when the technology and the CPUs weren’t very good.

Oh, yeah, I did it a long time ago. And I would be sitting there with a microphone saying, okay, and then it would type bouquet.

Yeah, and it only works when you’re alone. It can’t work in an office where there are cubicles or other people can hear you. Otherwise, somebody might leap over and shout something in your microphone and put something naughty down.

Well, I did try that the other day with a dictation program, and I was shocked at how good it was.

They’re vastly better. David Pogue, the technology columnist in the New York Times, uses this stuff fervently. And he will go on the record saying it’s the only reason he can get a lot of his work done because it just saves him so much time.

Right.

We’d love to hear what you have to say about dictation. Do you use it? Do you use it to write books or papers or anything like that? Do you think it’s changing the way that we think and write?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Marcus Smith and I’m from McKinney, Texas.

Hi, Marcus. Welcome.

Hi, Marcus. How are you doing?

Well, I have a question that surrounds beginning sentences, spoken or written, starting with the word but. And I should say that my wife and I actually have a question. And we have kind of a bit of a wager surrounding the answer.

A wager? What’s on the line?

Well, if my wife is more correct than I am, of course, because there could be kind of a continuum where neither one of us is perfectly right. But if she is more correct than I am, then it will be distilled almond oil with an organic vanilla extract foot rub.

Ooh. Yes. Wow. So, and if I am more correct, then it will be kind of a shoulder rub and pampering afternoon for me.

Wow. And what do we get if we answer the question?

Yeah, there we go. Yeah, I want some grass here.

Well, I guess I could send you a sample of that oil. Sound like you like that.

Yeah. This is wonderful. You can’t send back rubs in the mail, so yeah, she’s right.

Well, so let me say, basically, I made the assertion, my wife and I were chatting the other day, and she is in charge of upper elementary education, a kind of an elite school for third through fifth graders. And then I myself am becoming a writer. And so I made the assertion that spoken sentences could start with but, but only following some other immediate spoken statement, while written sentences could start with but regardless, because you could go after an implied kind of an accepted state, like, you know, but despite the sunny day, Martin felt a chill.

So it might be a bit redundant, but still maybe legitimate. But Laura said that spoken words are looser than written ones, that you could start a verbal clause with but, and she cited some rhetorical choices by some past speakers, but that when writing you had to have some other phrase antecedent in order to use the word but, even if it was a prior paragraph.

So, for example, the second paragraph could begin, you know, but if we accept the above, you know, et cetera. And what was interesting was that our 11-year-old daughter, Kirsten, we have three girls, and Kirsten chimed in, weighing in on her mother’s side, because she said that for verbal communication, you could have an implied verbal antecedent. You know, so, for example, if I hand her a pizza slice on a napkin, but otherwise said nothing, she could respond, but father, I would prefer my pizza on a plate.

This is how your children talk?

Well, that’s how she phrased the example. But no, they don’t normally walk around speaking that way. But, you know, when crafting kind of that formal example, that’s what she put together.

Okay. Wow. You guys are giant nerds.

And we like that. I’m moving in. Do you have a spare room? Just thought you’d like to know. Because these are the kind of conversations I like to have.

Absolutely. All right. Let’s break this down into a nutshell. My first response is all mature writers develop an instinct for this kind of thing that allows them to use but in a place where an elementary school teacher might have a problem with it.

This is just breaking it down. And all of these arguments for and against using but at the beginning of a sentence are all, in certain circumstances, correct. It is completely about the writer, the audience, and the content. That is what it is about.

And I know that in a fifth grade class, a teacher might say, don’t begin your sentence with and or but. Well, that’s because students have a problem with that. They have a continuous thought. They throw an and or but in there to link.

Yeah, they just string it all along. Yeah, just to string it all together. And then this happened, and then that happened, and then, yeah. But, yeah, and then sometimes to introduce like an artificial drama, they’ll throw them in a but because it’s oppositional to what came before. And it just feels dramatic to them. They’re like, I need a but in here.

Just to kind of like umbrella everything that you said, but is right in some circumstances, but there’s no universal law on that. There can’t be universal law on that. I think there’s going to be a lot of massaging because I think we’ve met in the middle.

Yeah, I think you probably have. Yeah, a lot of massaging. We agree that spoken and written language are basically different things. They have different rule sets and nobody should ever speak like they write or they’ll probably stone to death by people who say, don’t be pretentious.

I just, like, if you speak like you write, you sound alien. You sound like a weirdo. But as an adult, I would use but at the beginning of the sentence. I wouldn’t feel compelled to try to make it sound more lofty with something like however. You know, I think some people try to do that. They try to sound more sophisticated.

That makes sense. Well, great. Well, thank you very much. Marcus, thanks for calling.

Yeah, I think this was a stimulating call, and I’m really glad to hear that these kinds of conversations are happening in families instead of what SpongeBob said.

Well, you know, I once had a mentor tell me that whenever you encounter an interesting problem, you just don’t set it aside. You should really mull it over and try to come up with an answer.

I agree. Yeah, let it marinate. Thanks, Marcus. Bye, Marcus. Take care now. Take care. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. How are you? This is David from Cape Cod.

Hi, David. Welcome to the show.

Hi, David. Thank you. Nice to talk with both of you.

Nice talking with you. What’s up?

Well, I listen to your podcast every week, and a question occurred to me recently that I thought perhaps you could help me with. I’m a lawyer, and I subscribe to an online legal library service called Lexis, L-E-X-I-S. I’m familiar with the word or the prefix Lex or L-E-X frequently in my business. That refers to law or the law.

In fact, in my Black’s Legal Dictionary, there’s about five pages of terms that begin with Lex. But I hear the term that you use often of lexicon or similar words, which refers to words and not law. So I wondered if there was a connection or a common root to the lex, which means law, and the lex, which means words.

Yeah, there is a connection there, fortunately. It comes ultimately from a Greek root, which might be pronounced leg. Martha can correct me if I’m wrong.

Legane?

Yeah, and it means to speak. Yeah, and ultimately to gather. It goes all the way back to the root that means to gather, like collect. And you can sense in the different words that this root has appeared in in English, you can sense there’s always this idea of an exchange of information. I mean, that’s the very broadest umbrella sense of this.

But in the specific words like dialogue, you’re actually talking about speech between two people. It occurs even, and this surprises people, it’s the root also of the L-O-G-Y or the O-L-O-G-Y that’s the end of words like psychology or geology, where we were talking about studying something. Geology is the study of the earth. But maybe what we’re really talking about is discussing the earth, right?

But we have to be careful here when we’re talking about this root, which ultimately means speech or word, that we don’t fall victim to the etymological fallacy. This is where somehow we keep deferring to the oldest meaning of the word and suggesting that somehow that’s the best or the purest. And this might be counterintuitive to a lawyer who relies heavily upon case law and where sometimes the precedent, the earliest precedent, is the one that matters most.

Yeah. So it comes from the same word, it’s just split off into two separate branches of meaning?

Yeah, that’s right. They entered English at different times. They entered the different European languages at different times. In my field, in language and dictionaries and linguistics, the lexis is the total stock of words, all of the vocabulary that are in a language. And the lexicon is the vocabulary of a person or a language or a branch of knowledge. A little different.

We need to differentiate those in our fields just so we know what we’re referring to.

Yeah, this is one huge family of words. I mean, the Greek word logos, which is related to these. It’s a logo. And eulogy comes from that as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

It’s a trilogy.

Right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And in scripture, you know, in the beginning was the word. That word in Greek is logos. I mean, it’s all over the place.

What I love about this root, and I’m so glad that you brought it up, is that usually when we talk about words that last in the language, ones that are impervious to the ravages of time, we talk about parts of the body or the terms for our relationships, mother and father. We talk about the weather, these things that are universal to the human experience.

But it’s really interesting to find that at least with this one word, that speech has been so important to human beings in the modern era that the root continues to flourish, not only in English, but in every language that has any kind of connection to Greek. I love it, even in Russian.

I understand your point about the oldest isn’t necessarily the most important, but is it originally of Greek origin? Yes, as far as we know, as far back as the best etymologists have found. Although I’d love it if they found that there was some Indo-European route. But as far as I know, there isn’t a confirmed one. It always has the little asterisk next to it where they suggest that it might have existed, but there’s no proof of it.

Yeah, they’ve reconstructed it.

Well, thank you very much.

Yeah, our pleasure. Thanks for calling.

Okay.

Bye, David.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Say you’re driving down the highway and on the side of the road you see a piece of blown tire. Now you could say there’s a piece of blown tire. But if you’re a truck driver, you’re likely to call it a what? An alligator.

Exactly. I love that term, alligator. It’s got the back that looks like the back of an alligator. It’s long. It’s about the same shape. When a big tire blows out, it’s pretty long.

Yeah, especially if you’re driving in Florida. Makes perfect sense.

877-929-9673.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Oh, hello. My name is Richard Borowski. I’m calling from Madison, Wisconsin, and I do have a question. What does English sound like to a non-English speaking person? Now, I mean, how would a person who has heard English but doesn’t actually speak it imitate it, like, say, a child from Manchuria or someplace far away who’d heard the language a number of times but had no idea anything about it? How would they imitate it the same way?

I remember when I was young imitating French or Chinese. What makes this so difficult, I think, is it’s like asking a person to look at a face and see it as a collection of shapes and shadows on an oval rather than a face.

You sound like an artist.

Well, I’m a writer. I’m also an artist. But here’s my question. Can you talk some fake English to me?

There’s so many different ways to take this.

Yeah, you said you had A Way with Words, Richard. How about you? Let’s hear it.

That’s exactly it. I mean, I have no idea even what the most common sounds are. They’re lots of THs and Ss.

All right. We’ve got some answers here for you. The first thing is you need to get on a computer and go to YouTube, and you need to Google or you need to search for fake English. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of videos made by people who don’t speak English as a first language who are imitating English, the sounds of English. And some of them are hilarious, and some of them are set to music. People even sing songs like that.

The other thing is there’s a variety of a fake language in the game, the Sims, you know, these little fake digital people that you have little lives.

Right, you kind of there, yeah. And there’s a language called Simlish, which sounds kind of like English, but isn’t actually a language. That, too, is kind of like that.

The other thing I’d say, when I lived in France more than 10 years ago, I used to do this thing for my French friends where I, as an English speaker, would imitate English speakers. And that’s kind of what you’re talking about. I would go, hi, I’m Grant. I’m very nice to meet you. It’s a pleasure to be here in Paris.

Because their impression is that we’re like horses chewing oats. That we’re just like put our lips out in this huge way and our mouths move. They’re gaping maws that are the sounds issuing from them.

And my Spanish-speaking friends think we sound like we’re snakes. We have a lot of sibilant sounds. And they’re sibilant to me.

Well, yeah, especially in Spain. But you know what? I have an Austrian friend who says that to Austrian’s ears we sound really nasal and that when she was studying English in middle school, she got the most compliments on her accent when she had a really bad head cold. And she also says that they have a term for this. They call it cow gummy English, which means chewing gum English or bubble gum English, that we just sound kind of like, sort of like how Grant was talking a minute ago. Low lip-scoring everyone.

But it would be interesting to hear people from other countries’ take on how we sound. So we’d love for folks to call us and let us know. We’re speaking directly to you, international listeners. How do British speakers sound, American speakers? Call us, leave it on the voicemail, 877-929-9673, and we’ll share these on a future show.

Well, that would be wonderful if I could hear it, but you say I should go to YouTube and I can hear some?

Yeah, there’s tons of them. Yeah, there’s very funny videos. And it’s usually young folks kind of make it, because you have these young people meeting each other in these digital spaces online and kind of like reconciling their misunderstandings of each other, and this is part of that. Like, oh, I thought you guys all sounded like this, and they’ll imitate it, and it’s super funny.

Yeah, we’ll link to some of the best ones on our website, too. Thanks, Richard. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it. Great question.

Bye, Richard.

Take care now. Bye-bye.

Thanks for speaking to you. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty path. That’s the end of this week’s show. For more A Way with Words, including hundreds of episodes, a blog, a newsletter, a dictionary, mobile apps, and conversations with other listeners, go to waywordradio.org.

Our phone line is open 24 hours a day. 877-929-9673.

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Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Herdell. A Way with Words is produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by caring listeners and sponsors. Just as we do, they 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. I’m Grant Barrett. And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

Neither, neither. Let’s call the whole thing off. You like potato and I like potato. You like tomato and I like tomato. Potato, potato, tomato, tomato. Let’s call the whole thing off. But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part. And oh, if we ever part.

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