Find Your Pants

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

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it’s time for Slang This, the puzzle where you guess the meaning of strange slang terms.

Today’s contestant is Catherine Bryant of Boston, Massachusetts. Catherine, come on down.

Hi there.

Hi, Catherine. Say hi to Grant.

Hi, Grant.

Hello, Catherine. What’s going on there in Boston?

Well, it’s a nice spring day here. We’ve had some nice weather, which is a nice change after the winter.

That’s great. And what do you do there in Boston?

I am an editor. I edit elementary and, these days, middle school science textbooks.

You’re corrupting young, I mean, you’re improving young minds.

Exactly, exactly.

Oh, okay. With evolution and everything.

Whoa, the E word.

That’s right.

Wow, okay. Well, besides evolution, do you have a favorite slang term?

Well, there’s a term that some friends of mine who hang out at MIT use, and I’ve never heard it from anyone else.

Okay.

But it’s a very creative use of the word pants, specifically having pants or finding your pants.

Pants.

And it sort of means having your act together or trying to get your act together.

Oh.

So you might say, you know, oh, I wish she’d find her pants already. We’re already late.

Or, you know, I’ve been making progress on my project. I think I finally have my pants.

I like that.

That’s great. But that’s just from a small group of people, or do you think it’s more widespread?

I think it’s only this group of people at MIT. I think it’s one of those college slang things that particularly picked up there. I’m not sure, but I don’t think I’ve heard it anywhere else.

Boy, I really like it. Have you heard it, Grant?

I think it’s a clever use. Maybe some people will hear the show and it’ll spread.

Yeah, maybe so.

Well, Catherine, let’s try to find our pants and move on to the game.

All right.

Okay. Grant will give you a slang term, and then he’ll give you three sentences that suggest what that term could mean.

Okay.

Only one example will be real, and the other two are fake.

So your task is going to be to guess which of those sentences illustrates how this slang term is really used. And chances are you won’t have heard the term before, so the trick will be to puzzle out its meaning, and I’ll be standing by to help.

Okay.

If you get stuck, all right?

Sounds good.

Okay.

Here we go. We’ve got two terms for you today, and the first term to guess the meaning of is boilover. I’m treating this as one word, B-O-I-L-O-V-E-R.

And here’s the first one. His body was covered in boilovers, fingernail-like lesions that shed like snowflakes.

Oh, that’s what I wanted. That’s the response I was looking for.

Here’s the next one. More than 30 years later, Grandpa could still recount the play-by-play of the boilover in 1970 when Great Britain unexpectedly won the ashes in Australia.

And then the third sentence. He was a pretty sorry bank robber. One boilover after the other, time after time. He waived his demand note. Then the place suddenly exploded with police, and off to jail he went.

So we have three separate choices here. Is a boilover an icky hard growth on the skin? Is it an unexpected win in sports, or is it a bank robbery gone wrong?

And I should say that in the second clue there where I talked about the ashes, that is the trophy for rugby.

Well, I sure hope it’s not the first one because, ew.

I’m with you on that, Catherine. Would it help if I told you that this term is from the Antipodes? It’s from Australia, that general neck of the woods.

That doesn’t help me.

They certainly have some creative terms down there. I could see it being a sports term, actually, that like a big upset would be a boil over.

-huh.

I could see that.

Yeah, I’m going to go with that. I think I like that better.

So it is. It’s an unexpected win in sports. It originally was used in horse racing and then later was spread to pretty much any sport and even elections, which are kind of a sport-like event themselves, right?

Yeah.

All right. So nice work there, Catherine. We’ve got another one for you. Are you ready?

Okay.

This one takes a little bit of spelling. It’s Nick Thameron. N-Y-C-H-T-H-E-M-E-R-O-N. That’s nycthimeron.

And there are three sample sentences. The first one, once a week in Greece, recycling trucks rumble through the streets, pulling a nycthimeron for collecting grass cuttings and compost.

And the second one, sometimes ants from competing colonies don’t fight at all upon encountering each other. Instead, they enter a state of nycthimeron, in which each acts as if the other is not there.

And the third one. One of the great tricks of good playwriting is to treat an entire year as a nycthimeron, 365 days condensed as if they were just 24 hours.

So, Catherine, is a nycthimeron a recycling container for green waste? Is it a kind of avoidance posture that insects sometimes take instead of protecting their territory? Or is it a 24-hour period including a night and a day?

Well, it sounds like a Greek term to me. So if you’re playing the same trick you did with Australia, that would be the first one. But you might be playing a different trick, for all I know.

Yes. Let’s see. So we’ve got grass clippings, insect avoidance, and a day and a night. It’s a good word. Martha, you can jump in here and help her out. You’ve got the classics training here.

Well, you’re right about the Greek. And if you’ve been to Greece, you know that in the morning people say kalemera.

Oh.

Good morning.

Does that mean good morning?

Yeah.

Well, then that sounds like…

Sounds like the last half of that word, doesn’t it?

Yeah, it does, actually. What about the first part? What does that sound like?

And next could be night. So we could be looking at a night and a day. So let’s go with the third one, how about?

Bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing, bing. That is exactly right.

Hey, all right. You know, I always rather that the callers get these correct than get them wrong. It’s exactly right.

Well, I’m glad you were there with that morning piece there. I don’t think I’d have picked that one up. Let me spell that again. N-Y-C-H-T-H-E-M-E-R-O-N. A nycthemeron is a 24-hour period, including a night and a day.

Very nice. It’s just a fancy way of saying a day.

Right. And it’s a relative of ephemeral.

Oh, okay. You’re today, gone, tomorrow.

Sure, sure. Very nice. Well, this was fun, Catherine. How’d you like it?

Catherine, you rocked.

Oh, this is great fun. I’ve learned all kinds of new things.

Catherine, you did wonderfully well. And for playing our game today, we’re going to send you a brand new book.

Excellent. It’s Sapphire’s Political Dictionary Autograph by the author himself, New York Times columnist William Sapphire.

Oh, excellent. Good to hear for that, too.

Yes, indeed. Thank you so much for playing with us today, Catherine. It was good fun.

Well, thank you. This is great.

All right. And if a question about language is puzzling you, give us a call, 1-877-W-A-Y-W-O-R-D. That’s 1-877-929-9673.

Or you can always email us. The address is words@waywordradio.org.