Fickle Finger of Fate

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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.

I came across the most lovely term the other day, door dwell.

Door dwell.

Can you guess what that is, door dwell?

It’s when you don’t want to leave and you’re just hanging around saying goodbye without going back to your car.

That’s kind of nice, right?

Sort of like doorknob hanging, right?

But that’s not what door dwell is.

It’s a D-O-O-R?

Yes, D-O-O-R.

Second word is D-W-E-L-L.

And it’s a trade jargon term.

Oh, I don’t know it.

What is it?

It is the time it takes the elevator doors to close once you’ve boarded.

Once the last person gets on there.

That makes a lot of sense because in retail they talk about dwell times in aisles and at registers and in different spaces.

Dwell time is something you take into account as an architect.

Okay.

Yeah, dwell.

Isn’t that interesting?

I’ve always loved the word dwell.

And then to find door dwell, which is usually two to four seconds.

And so, of course, I’ve been reading about elevator jargon, which has fascinated me.

And the fact that a lot of building managers disabled the closed door button.

Why?

You know, the risk of lawsuits.

Oh, I see.

Because you can make it close on someone’s arm?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So they don’t actually work, supposedly.

And hoistway is another one.

You can probably guess what hoistway is.

That’s the tall column of space that the elevator occupies?

Yeah, the elevator shaft is called the hoistway.

And my other favorite term from elevator language is terminal landing.

Oh, is that when the cable is cut and it falls unexpectedly?

Fortunately, no, no, no.

It’s the top and bottom elevator landing area.

Oh, the terminus, right.

Yeah, so all you poets out there, I want to read poems about door dwell and terminal landing.

This is a show about words and language and everything related to it.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Nina from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Nina.

What’s up?

Hi, how you doing?

Oh, we’re good, thanks.

I have a question.

And as you know, Pittsburgh is its own language, has its own language here.

When I was a kid, my mother would give me a little bit of money and send me up the street to the little corner store and say, you know, get a half pound of jumbo.

And I was usually there with a bunch of other kids who were also getting half pounds of jumbo.

You know, I just assumed that this stuff that I was buying, that was the name of it.

And then when I got a little bit older and I talked to some other people that weren’t from around here, they said, well, you know, that’s baloney.

And then I was in denial. I kept thinking, well, no, it can’t be. It can’t be the same thing. Maybe it’s a certain kind of baloney, whatever. But I was really curious if you had any information on how did it get from baloney to jumbo? And is this just something that happens in Pittsburgh? Is this just one of our slangs or do other people call it that for some reason?

I can tell you it sure didn’t happen in Kentucky when you said half a pan of jumbo. I’m thinking elephant meat. That sounds awful.

I know. I thought of that too.

Ew.

It’s a well-known Pittsburghese lexical item, a well-known Pittsburghese word.

They’re used in southwest Pennsylvania, and it comes from a brand name.

There was a brand name of bologna made by a company called Isaly’s, I-S-A-L-Y.

Okay.

Yeah.

And so it’s just kind of like a way that Kleenex became generic or Xerox became generic.

At least for that part of the country, Jumbo became generic for bologna.

Oh, so it was actually what that brand called that.

Yeah, that’s right.

It was the brand name and then became generic.

Oh, my goodness.

I mean, talk about market domination.

They must have just owned the whole bologna distribution center there.

Just pushed out all the other competitors.

Bologna owner.

So no other place, I mean, it’s just here that calls it that.

That’s right.

That’s exactly right.

Oh, wow.

And it didn’t make it to the West Coast.

That’s cool to know.

Yeah.

We have at least in print uses of it going back to the 1970s, but I have no doubt that jumbo meaning bologna in Pennsylvania is much older than that, probably decades older.

Well, I was growing up in the 60s and we used it.

Yeah.

So at least back that far.

But, yeah, it’s, you know.

Print always lags behind spoken language.

You know.

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

Thank you.

That was very, now I have a mystery solved in my life here.

Oh, bring us more.

Thank you.

Bring us whatever you have, all right?

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Good.

The Pittsburghese, not only do they have the unusual language, they’re so proud of it.

And there’s some really great books have been written about it.

Barbara Johnstone has written several.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Gum Band is one of those.

Gum Band.

For rubber band.

Lots of those.

Give us a call.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Bob Felton from Reno.

Hey, Bob.

Welcome to the show.

How can we help you?

Well, I was looking at a phrase, actually a quote from a famous advertising guy.

It says, if your advertising goes unnoticed, everything else is academic.

And that phrase is academic or it’s all academic or it’s just academic.

Is often heard in a dismissive way.

People dismiss the relevance or the importance of whatever an effort might be by simply saying, well, that’s all academic.

And I was wondering where that phrase came from, how it became used.

Does it sound dismissive to you to call it academic or as a way of belittling it?

Absolutely. Yes, I think that’s a common way that you hear it.

Yeah, just kind of theoretical.

Exactly.

And what are some ways that you’ve encountered academic like this?

Well, I think that you’ll hear it in the business world sometimes to have people say, well, that’s fine, but it’s just academic.

That kind of usage.

Yeah, I’ve encountered it similar to that, where it’s definitely a way of, I think, short-circuiting the conversation, reducing the discussion so that somebody with a strong will can get their way without having that will be challenged.

That’s an interesting perception. I would agree with that.

I’ve also seen it used in situations where it didn’t matter anymore whether or not you discussed it.

It was done. What was done was done, and there was no fixing it, no going back, no redoing it.

And in that case, the conversation about what you could do to fix it is academic.

It’s just, it’s done, right?

Yes, yes. I’ve heard it used that way as well.

And the answer to why we say this is actually really simple, because academia is a place where things are discussed.

Academics really are about conversation. They’re about professor-led discourse, more or less.

And it has traditionally been so, at least in the European-slash-Western Greco-Roman tradition, it has almost always been about discussion.

And so basically you’re saying, if you’re saying it’s academic at this point, you’re saying all that’s left is the talk, right?

It’s all over but the shouting.

I guess so. I guess so. Do you know anything about its origin?

I’m looking at the Oxford English Dictionary, which takes it back to the early 19th century of the sense of not leading to a decision or just theoretical. Theoretical. You know, formal. And therefore now in a weakened sense of no consequence or irrelevant. Right. Inside that ivory tower. It’s interesting that it goes that far back.

Well, Bob, thank you so much for your call. Thank you. All right. Take care. Thanks, Bob. Bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Lately, just for fun, I’ve been looking at copies of old magazines, including Boy’s Life, which has a little section in it called Think and Grin.

Yeah, little jokes and riddles and one-liners and kind of like lowest common denominator humor, right? Exactly. Exactly. These magazines from the 1950s are pretty much that.

Here’s just one example. Woman: I’ll have a large lamb chop with buttered carrots and peas and have the chop lean. Waiter: Yes, madam, which way? 877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello, nice of you to take my call. My name is Joe and I’m calling from Burlington, Vermont. Hi, Joe.

So what’s on your mind today? Despite my age, which is in the early 80s, I do recall that my ninth grade English teacher at Burlington High School in Burlington, Vermont, who sported a Phi Beta Kappa key and was an excellent teacher, was also a stern disciplinarian, of which I was a victim. When she first detected me whispering to the classmate who sat in front of me, she announced that I was to write the poem 50 times.

And the poem, which I can still recite, so many years later, went this way. For those who talk and talk and talk, this proverb may appeal. The steam that blows the whistle will never turn the wheel. Well, it took me an hour or more to write that out 50 times and turn it in the next day. But then she caught me a second time and meted out the same punishment. So I did it a second time.

And then, unfortunately, there came a third time. She again administered the same punishment. And it was burned into your memory, clearly. What does it mean to you? Why is it referring to steam and whistles?

The phrase, the steam that blows the whistle will never turn the wheel, it was an analogy to side conversation in a class that was never going to amount to anything. So if you’re talking, you’re not working. It would not be productive work. Useless chatter.

I can find some uses of this in books about Proverbs as far back as 1910. There are a couple variations I see on this in books of Proverbs and aphorisms and old sayings. One of my favorites is, the fellow who blows his horn the loudest is likely in the biggest fog.

Oh, boy, that is good. But I think that one has more to do with just dominating the conversation than it does with having any kind of chit-chat when you should be doing other work. If you look in old teaching manuals over the last several hundred years, there are often these sorts of sayings that are little humorous, like column fillers or things that are listed to kind of lighten the content a little bit.

And I’m quite sure that teachers would borrow those to use on their students. So not a highfalutin literary reference or anything like that? No, not really. As far as I know, that’s not Shakespeare or anything like that.

All right. You were doing this in cursive, I take it? I wrote it out. And it takes over an hour to write that poem out 50 times. Joe, thank you so much for your call, buddy. Really appreciate it.

My pleasure. Good to talk with you folks, and I enjoy the show. Thank you very much. Take care. Bye-bye. Take care. Bye now.

Joe’s punter brought back a lot of memories for me of the things that my parents would say and the things my parents would have me do having to do with language. And if you’ve got some of those, we’d love to hear about them.

877-929-9673. Or tell us about the terrible writing assignment you had to do, an email to words@waywordradio.org. Support for A Way with Words comes from the Tony Award-winning Old Globe, part of the San Diego community for over 80 years.

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You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hello, John. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Hey, John. What’s up? Well, I have a cool little puzzle for you today, a little quiz. In this day and age, you know, you have to be as speedy and efficient as possible.

For example, someone sent me a text saying he was pre-aching. And I thought, well, sure, if you know you’re going to be running a marathon tomorrow, it would be very smart to get that out of the way today. Then I realized he meant preaching.

Oh, okay. Pre-aching. Nevertheless, I’m still pre-aching the gospel of efficiency and reading things the wrong way. I’ll describe a text. You tell me what forward-thinking word I’ve made an error about. Now, there should be a clue to the original word in there somewhere, too.

All right? Mm— Here we go. My dad was texting me about my birthday, and as I understand it, he mailed me a gift yesterday. That’s preposterous. Present. Present.

Oh. Right. He pre-sent it. Oh, pre-sent. Okay. Very good. Now I get how this works. These will all begin with P-R-E. Oh. Okay. Right.

My kid texted me about his field trip today to the National Archives to see the Constitution. Now, as I understood it, they took a leisurely walk over there yesterday. To see the president? I don’t know. No. What’s the Constitution famous for?

Preambled. They preambled over there. Right. They pre-strolled. They preambled. Yeah. Very good. My brother was texting me something about the early ancestors of computer interfaces. I think that’s what it was. Something about the pointer on his computer screen from days gone by.

Precursors? Yes, the precursor. Very good. Now, this is right up your alley. My linguist friend was texting a list of word parts, and I thought, good. You should make sure any mistakes have been rectified yesterday.

Prefixed. Yes, prefixed. Prefix. My mom was texting me something about getting ready for Thanksgiving, and I thought, well, at least you peeled the potatoes ahead of time. Prepared. Yes, prepared.

My doctor was texting me something about medications I was supposed to take, and I thought, well, why did he hire someone to handwrite a manuscript of these things yesterday? Prescribe. Prescribe, yeah, that’s weird.

Mom, again, texted me about canning fruits and veggies for winter, and I’m like, well, what does this have to do with you playing tennis yesterday? Preserve. Preserve, right.

My brother texted me about my niece playing dress-up, and I thought, well, at least she took care of her garden yesterday. Pretend. Yes, pretend. What does it have to do with the garden?

Pretend you got it. Trio, what? Pretend you got it. My friend was texting me about his work with the CDC keeping people healthy, and I responded, well, good thing you expelled all that toxic gas ahead of time.

You prevent. Prevent. Oh, yes. Very good. And on that note, thank you, too. Really appreciate it. My pleasure. I’ll see you soon. Take care. Bye.

Bye. It’s a show about words and language and how we use them and some goofing around. 877-929-9673. Email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi, Grant and Martha. This is Jenny from Portland, Oregon. Hi, Jenny. What’s up? Well, I have a problem. It seems like there’s kind of a hole in the English language.

I’ve been in a situation where I needed a noun to describe something that was fake or made up. And there are a lot of words for that, but none of them seem natural to me. What were you talking about? What was the thing that was fake or made up?

In this situation, it was in dental school in our cafeteria. There were a new series of drinks, and they’re supposed to give you different powers.

Like one was supposed to make you happy, and one was supposed to make you sleepy, and one was supposed to make you sexy.

And someone asked you what my opinion of it was. And I was like, it sounds like something to me. And I couldn’t think of something what that word should be.

To me, there’s one obvious word that would go in there that’s not radio friendly. But I also prefer not to swear. It just seems a little aggressive.

And then I looked it up in the thesaurus later. I was trying to find something else that would work in that situation. But all the words just sounded like they belonged, like they were coming out of the mouth of a grandpa. Like poppycock and malarkey and flim flam. And none of that sounds right to me either.

So I’m wondering if I’m missing a word that exists or if I just need to embrace my inner grandpa and go with one of those words. I like all those words. What does it say about me? Embrace your inner grant.

So they didn’t give you the powers that they said they were going to give you. Well, I didn’t try them, but someone asked what I thought of them, and that was what I thought. You missed your opportunity.

So the modern slang word janky, does that work? To me, something that’s janky means that it’s like falling apart or poorly made versus just, you know, there’s claims being made about it that aren’t true.

So what about, okay, so fraud or fake or hoax and none of those really worked for you? Kind of. Kind of. For fraud, maybe the closest thing. I feel like those all have little sort of tweaks to their meaning that don’t exactly capture what I’m going for.

The way that like poppycock really does capture what I mean, but I just don’t feel comfortable using poppycock as a 20-year-old. You should do it. Well, but you should.

Yeah, would it help if you knew it came from Dutch words that mean soft poop? Maybe that would help. I will tell you, Jenny, the one word that I think works best here, however, it’s a little kind of a feat, maybe literary even, is the word chicanery.

But you’re going to sound pretentious if you use it. It doesn’t sound quite so grandpa-ish. You hear me? You’re going to sound pretentious if you use it, though. Yeah.

I think I ended up saying BS. Just saying not the whole word, but saying BS. And I don’t love it, but that was what I ended up using that day. So I feel like situation to situation, you could choose between those two. That might work.

What about sham or bunk or… Or bogus. Bogus. What about bogus? Or rubbish. I can take another look at thesaurus. Some of those are not so bad. Rubbish sounds a little grandpa-y. Focus sounds a little, I don’t know, 80s.

How dare you say that about me? I don’t know. Oh, yes. You have to say it like that, right? Oh, yes. That’s a really interesting question, actually. So we want something that’s more age-appropriate for you. Apparently we’re not giving you age-appropriate ideas.

I think there might have been some good ones in there. I just feel like these words that mean this seem to be kind of loaded with more meaning than, you know, just that they belong to a certain time period or something like that than a lot of words.

What about something more general like crap? Is that too close to obscenity for you? It’s not too bad. That might work in some situations, too. That’s my list of possible words.

Well, I think, Jenny, this is clearly one of those calls where we have to put the call out to our listeners and see what they have to suggest for you. All right.

So here’s the call out. If you know the word that Jenny should use to describe something, a noun preferably, where they’re making claims about a product that cannot be substantiated, then we want to know. And so does Jenny. Give us a call, 877-929-9673. Or email us, words@waywordradio.org. How’s that, Jenny? That’ll be good. We’ll find out. Thanks for calling.

Okay, we’re going to crowdsource it. Take care. All right, thank you. Thanks, Jenny. Bye-bye. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Shreya Gardner. I’m calling from San Diego. A fellow San Diegan. Welcome. What’s up?

I work for a corporation, and in the last year I’ve been getting responses to scheduling emails that say, I’ll revert, or we’ll revert, meaning we’ll get back to you. And that seems really wrong to me.

Revert? Yeah, it doesn’t have an object or anything? It’s just revert, period? No, it’s just revert. I’ll say, for example, so-and-so has availability on the following dates and times. Please get back to me. Let me know what works for you. And they go, okay, we’ll check with so-and-so and revert.

Interesting. And I’m like, revert back to what? That’s R-E-V-E-R-T, right? Yeah. Are your correspondents from the subcontinent, are they Indian, perhaps? Or Bangladeshi or Pakistani? They’re from New York, and they’re almost all in banking.

Sorry. No, that’s fine. It’s just interesting because most of the books that I know about world Englishes have revert, and they have an entry, and they mark it as being Indian. It’s one of these, at least in the subcontinent, it’s a holdover from several hundred years of British bureaucracy where this word lived on after the British themselves stopped using it in that way for the most part.

Yeah, well, it seems to me that you can only revert back to something that you already were. Like, the Hulk can revert back to Dr. Bruce Banner. Or I can revert back to my childish ways, but I can’t revert back to you. And it just means to get back to somebody. Like, if I revert to you, it means I’ll get back to you with an answer or a follow-up.

Right. I mean, it basically means I’ll get back to you, but it just seems wrong. Wayne, that holds to the etymological history of this word. We got it from the French. I think it came to English a couple different times. It’s got hundreds of years of history. And over the years, its meaning has changed here and there, but almost always there’s this really solid underlying meaning of go back, return, reciprocate, or reestablish, or just return to a previous state. And I think this use, as odd as it sounds, actually conforms really well to other meanings of the word over history.

Well, it’s really succinct. It reminds me of dun-dun-dun-dun-dun. Exactly. I’m like waiting for, I’m like, okay, what are you going to revert to? This could be interesting. That’s awesome.

Yeah, they just basically mean, I mean, it sounds like it’s email shorthand for I’ll get back to you. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, and in that sense, I think it’s really efficient. It’s odd to my ear, but I bet if I were in your office, I would get used to it.

I guess I’m old school. I’m not used to it. I’m old school, too. Well, now I want to talk to your correspondents in New York City and figure out where they learned it. Take this back down the tree of language and figure out how this is spreading, because I love it. It’s an innovation that I haven’t seen in the United States before.

Yeah, so Grant will do that, and then he will revert. And then we’ll revert. Shreya, thank you for calling. Thank you. Thanks, Shreya. Bye-bye.

Well, we love these field reports about language, so give us a call. 877-929-9673, or you can send them an email to words@waywordradio.org. A little wisdom from Bob Marley. Truth is, everybody’s going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for. Oh, nice. Is that not the truth?

877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Gabe Kenneth-Cullen from Norwalk, Michigan. Hi, Gabe. How are you doing? Hey, Gabe.

Well, here’s the thing. My brother and I have a huge rivalry, and every time we get in a competition, we always tell each other to put up each other’s dukes. And we’ve never known where the term comes from. Is it like British royalty fighting each other with their dukes and duchesses, or what’s the origin of the term?

You have the same question that a lot of people do, and we’ve never had a really clear, firm etymology on this, but there are a couple of theories that are both interesting and colorful.

One of which is that Duke comes from a Romany word, the language associated with people who are called gypsies, but we don’t use that word anymore.

But there’s a word in the Romany language, Duke, D-O-O-K, that means the hand.

And it could be, you know, put up your hands that way.

The other story is colorful, but there are some problems with it, that it’s a contraction of the phrase Duke of York’s or Dukes of York.

Which, are you familiar with Cockney rhyming slang, the slang of East London?

Yes.

So like in Cockney rhyming slang, instead of saying feet, you might say plates of meat.

So if I’m standing all day, I might say, oh, my plates of meat are tired.

And in Cockney rhyming slang, supposedly Duke of York’s or Dukes of York is a reference to the term fork, which is a slang term for hand.

If you think about it, forks look like hands and you use them to grab things.

The problem with that is that there aren’t really good citations about that, although a lot of authorities will mention that particular one.

Yeah, criminal slang and can’t tends not to be chronicled very accurately or very soon.

And so written citations for that are slim.

The Romany word is really the best guess.

I would agree with Martha.

Another spelling of that is D-U-K.

There is some palm reading called Dukering or Dukering, which is D-U-K-K-E-R-I-N-G, which is associated with that group as well.

And that word is well chronicled.

There’s a direct connection there to the underworld.

It’s got a really strong history.

It’s probably the most likely source for it.

Okay.

Well, thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

You all don’t actually put up your dukes, do you?

No, I don’t.

No.

We usually are playing a game of chess when we bring it up.

Oh, I see.

I’m imagining you standing there like Gentleman Jim Corbett in that weird pose with the fist up in front of your face.

As much as I’d like to sometimes, we never result to actual violence.

Excellent.

Well, glad to hear it.

You just have the Gamma Keys word battles.

Thank you so much.

Good talking with you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, my name is Emily Kirkland. I’m calling from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Emily. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Emily.

My question is about the word goober.

I looked it up in the dictionary, and it says that it’s the word that black people back in George Washington Carver’s time used for peanuts.

But my sister also uses it as a word for peanut butter and jelly mixed together.

Oh, like the kind that you buy in the store where they’re both in the same jar?

Or when she puts it together herself in like a swirl in a bowl?

She puts it together herself.

Peanut butter and jelly mixed together called goober.

I wonder if that’s a brand name.

Interesting. Maybe.

Because you’re right.

The word goober itself for peanut is really interesting.

It goes back to actually a language from Central and South Africa.

And people who were enslaved and brought over here in the 1600s and 1700s used that to apply it to peanuts here in this country.

So you’re right about the history of it.

And there is a product called Goober.

Aha.

Yes, made by Smuckers.

It’s type of candy.

Well, not just that, but there’s a jar that you can buy that has peanut butter and jelly together in the jar.

It’s made by Smuckers, and it is called Goober.

That’s the name of it.

Goober Stripes is one of the variants of it.

So maybe she’s just generalizing from the product in the store and making her own at home.

Oh.

And then she also uses it as a nickname for me.

Well, that’s not nice.

Because that’s a longstanding insult.

Because what happened was, so the slaves brought it from a variety of African languages to the United States.

And then it became the term for peanut, widespread in the American South.

And then it became the term that you would refer to the farmers that raised those peanuts.

It was meant as a derogatory term.

That means kind of insulting, kind of treating them like they were unsophisticated or didn’t have any kind of class and education.

And then from there, it became a little more generalized insult to just somebody that you wanted to put down.

They’re a goober.

And not completely offensive, not like the worst ever, but not nice.

Is that the way she uses it, Emily?

She calls me a little goober.

Maybe that’s more of a pet term because you’re small like a peanut.

Actually, I’m 5’2″.

Okay, not small at all.

Okay.

Well, what you need to do is ask her next time she makes some goober to make you one, too, because they’re yummy.

Right? Goober sandwiches, yeah?

Sounds good.

Actually, I make it, too.

Okay.

Aha, you do.

And so what do you say to her when she calls you a goober?

I call her gooble.

Gooble.

Gooble and goober.

Right.

What a gooble is like this superlative form of goober, like even more goobery.

Emily, thank you so much for giving us a call.

We really appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Emily.

There’s a nice history there, right?

It’s connected to an unfortunate part of American history,

One of the worst black marks on our record, right?

The slave trade.

But there are a number of words like the juke and jukebox

That we are pretty sure came into English from Africans.

Yes, yes.

Which is really interesting stuff.

Yeah, a few food words like goober, like yam, and okra.

Okra, that’s right.

All of those come from African languages.

Fried okra with cornmeal batter.

Is it lunchtime?

Yes, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s an interesting word, ephelis, E-P-H-E-L-I-S, ephelis.

No idea.

It means freckle.

Oh, nice.

You know, if you use the word freckle too many times in a paragraph and need a substitute, you can use ephelis.

And nobody will understand you, but okay.

Right.

And I looked it up.

It comes from a Greek word that means nail stud.

Nails stud. Oh, I see like the head of a nail sticking in the woods.

Exactly.

Oh, cool.

Ephelis. 877-929-9673.

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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.

Remember that call we got from Sarah in Texas?

She was the bank teller who had had a brain injury.

Oh, yeah.

And she was talking about how she sometimes has difficulty finding words,

And it’s especially difficult because it’s an invisible injury that she can’t really.

Right.

She’s looking for words to explain it to people.

Without having to do a long conversation about it every single time.

Right, right. And she was looking for language to help her along in a really efficient way.

And a lot of people wanted to help her out.

We got lots and lots of emails and phone calls about this.

Maria in Dallas also has brain injuries and suggests just saying,

Oh, I’m sorry, I’m having word trouble from a brain injury.

Just really straightforward.

Crystal Kelly from Florida says,

Why don’t you use a technological metaphor like,

Sometimes my brain and mouth don’t sync up.

Oh, very good.

We also got a really interesting letter from Joanne in Simsbury, Connecticut,

Who has neurological problems as the result of Lyme disease that also have the same effect,

That sometimes she can’t find the right word.

And she used to work as an artist and photographer,

And she says that now she does volunteer work where she has to use the phone a lot,

And she uses her visual memory.

She actually keeps written lists of common words and phrases next to her

So that she can look at those lists and kind of have them fresh in her mind,

Or I guess look at them during a phone conversation.

But she also said that since her illness, she’s developed a couple of interesting unusual conditions,

One of which is hyperlexia, which usually occurs in children,

And that’s a near obsession with the written word and trouble with the spoken word,

Which I thought was really interesting.

She said, I’ve decided to use this to my advantage and have begun to write short stories and personal essays.

Right now I’m 500 pages into my first novel and enjoying the process immensely, so wish me luck.

And she said the second condition that she has is called palynopsia,

Which is a visual hallucination involving an image of a written page that stays superimposed on her vision even when she looks away.

It’s actually kind of fascinating.

She said it’s like seeing through a clear sheet of acetate covered with the most recent page I’ve read.

It’s most visible when I’m staring at a white wall.

This image can remain for weeks or until I read another page.

And since I read so often, the images change quickly.

Like the late Oliver Sacks, I’ve decided to regard both of my new conditions as interesting rather than disturbing.

And I’m choosing to use them in an advantageous manner.

I feel that a positive, unapologetic attitude about these conditions helps.

How outstanding.

Yeah.

If we could all treat our illnesses in that way.

Yeah.

Every time you come across a difficulty, find a way to genuinely make it an advantage.

That’s amazing.

Yeah, it’s a challenge, of course, but I thought that was just such a graceful way of dealing with that kind of thing.

That’s so wonderful.

Thank you for sharing that.

If you’ve got something to say about language or anything that we air on this show, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Blaine Chambers calling from Billings, Montana.

Hi, Blaine. How are you doing?

I’m good. I’m good.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question about a word.

My brother and I grew up on a rural farm there in Arkansas.

The farms are transitioning from being labor, mainly, to being mechanized farms.

And my brother and I would play in all of these old abandoned houses.

And we would come back to our farm store and tell of our adventures.

And some of the old African-American ladies there would say, Fatty Red, I wouldn’t play in your house if I was you.

There’s haints in there.

And we were like, haints?

Now what’s a haint?

And so my brother and I discussed it.

And we, you know, over the years we just thought it was a variation of haunt.

But the context it was used in seemed more malevolent than, you know, ghost.

So we just, over the years, just wondered what that was.

Well, you’re exactly right. Haint is a variant of haunt, and it does refer to ghosts or spirits.

My Aunt Maisel was from North Carolina, and I can remember her talking about,

Don’t go by that house, it’s got a haint in it.

Yes, ma’am, exactly, exactly.

But it did really seem to me that, and we had heard them use the word ghost.

But when they used haint, it seemed to be more of a, as I said, more of a malevolent than a ghost.

According to these people, there were haints everywhere.

Yeah.

That comes from my understanding as well, that a haint is definitely somebody, maybe more like a poltergeist out for mischief.

Oh, exactly, exactly.

Something that we modern-day people would refer to as a poltergeist.

But like I said, my brother and I have puzzled over this for years.

So the haint here, that’s a noun form of a dialect pronunciation of haunt, then.

Exactly. Exactly. And it is a Southernism. I’ve read Dolly Parton talking about haints.

Yeah. And a haint tale is a ghost story.

So it’s interesting that you have that extra deeper layer of meaning of it being more malevolent than I’ve known it to be. That’s interesting.

Yes, well, and the way it was, my brother and I, it was like when parents would tell their children, don’t go out in the woods, there’s a boogeyman there.

Yeah, yeah.

As a warning mechanism to get your child to do whatever you’d want them to be doing.

-huh.

So have we solved this thing, guys?

I think we did, yeah.

Yes, we did. You had it.

When I get off, I’m going to call my brother and tell him the mystery has been solved.

It has indeed. Thank you so much for your call, sir.

Thank you so much. You guys have a great day.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Blaine. Bye-bye.

Yes, ma’am.

Well, the interesting thing about haunt, while we’re on the subject,

Is that it originally meant to hang around a place, right?

Right.

To frequent a place.

Right.

And so when we talk about, this is one of my favorite haunts.

I love coming here for ice cream.

That’s actually the original meaning,

And then the ghost is called a haunt or it does haunting

Because it hangs around a place.

Right, right.

So that usually blows people’s minds.

Wait a second, did it originally refer to ghosts?

They’re like, nope.

It’s about their behavior.

Very good point.

Yes, where you hang out is your haunt.

Well, this is one of our favorite haunts here,

Library, bookstore, looking in a dictionary.

If it’s yours, too, give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, it’s Bill Waters here.

Hey, Bill, where are you calling us from?

From Marquette, Michigan.

Well, welcome.

What can we do for you?

I’m puzzled by a particular use of the word pretty.

I don’t know if that’s a universal idiom or if it’s peculiar to the United States,

But I know we’d be hard-pressed to express ourselves about certain things that impact us mightily

If we couldn’t say pretty, as in pretty good, pretty bad.

Bob’s pretty good bank.

Right.

Bertha’s Pretty Good Kitty Boutique.

Bill, that’s really interesting.

What brought this to your mind?

Why were you thinking about pretty?

Well, I’m kind of a backward scholar of languages generally, and I can speak several.

And in none of those that I’m familiar with, does that combination show up as universally as it does in English?

Is that an oxymoron? Pretty good? Or pretty bad? Pretty awful?

That kind of thing, and yet it’s so commonly accepted and hardly ever questioned.

In some ways, it just doesn’t make sense to me, so I come to the experts for help.

Yeah, well, never look to English for logic, because you’re going to go away disappointed almost every time.

When we go back to the origin of pretty in Old English, it actually didn’t mean anything like it does today.

It was more about being cunning or crafty or being adept at something.

It moves on to being clever or skillful.

Eventually it becomes elegant or artful.

And then we reached this really interesting point where pretty kind of means what it does today.

That’s the 15th century or so.

But there’s a kind of patronizing tone to it, definitely in opposition to beautiful.

If I called something pretty or someone pretty, it didn’t mean that I thought that they were worthy of adoration.

It meant that there was something superficially attractive about them and that it wasn’t any kind of deep-seated quality in their nature or their being.

That was in the original sense of the word.

Yeah, yeah.

And so what we start to see pretty quickly is that almost derogatory use of pretty, a dismissive way of, well, she’s just pretty, instead of she’s beautiful.

We start to see that over 100 years or so transform.

And so by the 1600s, well into the 1600s, pretty starts to have these two meanings where you can say something is pretty good or pretty nice.

And what we have is I would almost call it a reverse intensifier.

It’s a weakener where the word that pretty is attached to, the adjective that’s attached to, takes a little bit less power.

If I say pretty good, that’s not as good as good, right?

If I say pretty nice, that’s not as nice as nice.

And we find that again and again, unlike other intensifiers, such as if I say it’s a whopping good pizza you’ve made there.

Well, that means the good is even more good than good, right?

Yeah.

And so then that gets us to where we are today, where if someone is called, that’s a pretty nice shirt.

I’m actually probably not complimenting the shirt very much, am I?

Unless you add something like another modifier like, that’s a daggone pretty shirt you’re wearing today.

Well, and then it’s the other meaning of pretty.

Then it becomes the one that has something to do with the attractiveness.

Yeah, I’m thinking of the movie Pretty Woman.

I mean, what if they called it Beautiful Woman?

Beautiful Woman, right?

Maybe it wouldn’t have worked as well.

Yeah, I grew up with pretty being a pretty positive word.

You know, oh, you want to be pretty when you grow up.

There’s another pretty which we use.

For example, if I say that you were in a pretty pickle, it doesn’t mean that there was an attractive pickle. It means it was quite some pickle, and that is an intensifying use of pretty. That means a problem of some great proportion.

Okay, well, I think I got it now. I think I got it.

Yeah, so but hundreds of years of this split use of pretty.

Okay, well, you got that cleared up for me. I appreciate that.

Thank you very much, Bill, for calling.

Glad to help.

Okay, my pleasure.

Bye, Bill.

We have another word in English that behaves like pretty, and that’s fair.

And fairly, right?

Yeah, I never thought of that.

That’s a fairly good test score.

Yeah, fairly good.

That’s a fair deal.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

It cuts into it a little bit, right?

It dilutes it a little bit.

And it’s kind of like the British quite.

Quite or rather.

Rather, yeah, yeah.

But it doesn’t mean very.

It doesn’t mean very.

It means kind of a negative version of very.

A little less than quite.

A little less than rather.

Yeah.

Amazing what happens when you just bore into one single word.

Call us about the one you’re thinking about, 877-929-9673, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s a question for you.

When someone asks you a penny for your thoughts and you put your two cents in, what happens to the other penny?

I think it’s like Richard Pryor in the Superman movie, where he takes the remainder of every fraction of a cent, and he tells the computer to give it to him in a check, and then he buys a really fancy car.

Interesting that you mentioned Richard Pryor, because that quotation was actually from George Carlin.

Oh, interesting.

Yeah, they’re part of the same peer group, right?

Great comedians.

Yeah.

877-99-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Bruce Alvarez.

Hi, Bruce. Where are you calling us from?

Fairfax, Vermont.

Excellent. What’s up?

Well, I’ve been watching a bunch of old TV shows from back when I was a kid, and I’ve been watching McHale’s Navy. And in one episode from season one, Captain Binghamton used the term fickle finger of fate. And the only references I have to that, in my mind, are from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In.

Right.

And the only things I can find beyond that, there’s a book titled Fickle Finger of Fate by Raymond Ives, but it was published in 2008. And the term was also used in a book called Crossing the Line by Wendell Saylor, published in 2013. So I’m trying to figure out when was it first used and why.

Well, remind us about the Fickle Finger of Fate on Laugh-In. I remember that well.

It was basically something that was offered up, I think, as a joke. And they called it the Flying Fickle Finger of Fate.

And wasn’t it a little trophy or something that had a hand?

Yes, it was a trophy that had like a little propeller or something on it.

Yeah. Really goofy like the rest of that show, right?

Yes.

The Flying Fickle Finger of Fate being awarded to somebody.

But it’s actually much older than that.

Yeah, most people would know it from Rowan and Martin’s Laugh-In, but I can take some form of it back to at least the 1930s, decades before Laugh-In, and different parts of the phrase, we can break them down, take them back to the 1860s and 1870s.

If you go back to the 1870s, you will find the finger of fate, and you’ll find fickle fate separately used in different texts in different ways. But they’re always talking to this experience we have as humans where we kind of don’t know what’s next, right? We don’t know what our day of doom is going to be. We don’t know how badly our well-played plans will end up in disarray. It’s all about fate.

And that fickle fate or the finger of fate is something that we always have to kind of pay attention to. By the 1930s, these two phrases were combined into the fickle finger of fate. And they start to pop up in the language of military men, especially during World War II, where they’re using it to talk about what happens when you die. Like you’re killed on the battlefield in a way that is unexpected. It’s not just this glorious moment. It’s just you died in a Jeep accident maybe instead of being shot by the enemy and the fickle finger of fate. And they put the F word on the front of it as well. So it’s the F word, fickle finger of fate. And in that way, they just kind of turn it into this really dark humor, this gallows humor. You just don’t know when your time is up.

You’re thinking maybe it’s the middle finger of fate.

Yeah, the middle finger of fate. I’ve always thought about it as being this kind of bony finger of death, you know, pointing at me out of the shroud to say, now is your time or something like that.

That’s a little scary.

Yeah.

I still, I think, think of it as just like you said, we don’t know what’s going to happen and things happen and it’s the fickle finger of fate.

Yeah, that’s part of being alive, right?

And are there specific references to it in texts prior to the McHale’s Navy episode I saw?

Yeah, absolutely. Like I say, it comes up in print in the 1930s for sure as the full phrase of the fickle finger of fate. And in the 1940s, it comes up with the F word attached to the beginning of it in the American Speech, which is a journal published by the American Dialect Society. And there’s a glossary of military terms used by soldiers during World War II. And it’s in there. But interestingly, it’s in there as the F wording flickle flinger of flight, where they’ve, as a joke, have inserted L’s in all of the words. So presumably the writers of that episode knew it from World War II context because McHale’s Navy is a World War II.

Yeah.

Yeah.

They may very well have had some copies of these military glossaries, which floated around and were published and appeared in various forms in newspapers during the war.

Yeah.

And, of course, people consumed war stories real and imagined. They consumed newspaper stories about it. They heard back from their soldiers who were abroad in letters. So, yeah, the whole country was immersed in World War II. It’s not surprising that this language got around.

It’s very interesting. Thank you.

Bruce, thank you for this walk down memory lane. I’m remembering all these laugh-in jokes now. And remember how the people got doused with water and all that?

Sock it to me.

And Artie Johnson falling over on his tricycle.

Yes, yes. Those were the days, Bruce.

Thank you so much for calling.

All right. Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Here’s another word that was new to me, Grant.

Tunket.

T-U-N-K-E-T.

Do you know that word?

Mm-mm.

Don’t know that one.

It’s a euphemism for hell.

Tunket.

Yeah.

What’s the derivation of that?

Nobody knows, but it’s a U.S. Dialectal term. Like, what in Tunket?

What in Tunket, huh?

Yeah.

Who to thunket?

Who to thunket?

What in Tunket?

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In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski and that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

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From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

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