Flash in the Pan (episode #1682)

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 Grant, when you and I do speaking engagements around the country, there’s one question that always seems to come up during the QA.

Well besides how can I do what you do?

Right.

Right.

What are you thinking of?

I’m thinking of how often we get asked what’s your favorite word?

Oh that’s a hard one.

It’s so hard.

And you and I both have kind of the same stock response, which is it’s like choosing your favorite child or your favorite star in the sky.

Yes.

But people do have favorite children and they do have favorite stars in the sky.

Well, yeah, and sometimes things change.

And that’s what I was going to say is that I have a new favorite word.

All right.

All right.

This is a moment.

Let’s have it.

Okay.

All right.

Maybe you already know this.

The word is gongoozler.

Wow.

Okay.

Lovely.

I’m lots of potential here.

Talk to us about it.

Yeah, okay.

Gongoozler.

That’s G-O-N-G-O-O-Z-L-E-R.

A gongoozler is somebody who stands around watching things.

And the cool thing about the history of this word is that it comes from the slang of canal workers in Britain in the late 18th and early 19th century there’s a nineteen oh four glossary of canal terms that defines Ganguzler as an idle and inquisitive person who stands staring for prolonged periods at anything out of the common.

Oh, that’s amazing.

I love that.

It’s such a specific term.

But it reminds me so much, what’s the Italian term for the old men staring at construction sites?

Yeah, I thought you might mention that umorelli.

Umorelli, yeah, absolutely.

Just kind of foaming at the mouth over this cool thing that’s happening and it’s just speaking directly to their souls.

Right, right.

These older guys who just go around and watch construction workers and comment and it’s it’s very endearing I think instead of staring aimlessly at your phone or gaping in wonder at the language you can call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada 877-929 nine nine six seven three email words@waywordradio.org or go to our website and find a lot more ways to reach out at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

My name is Caitlin Colbertson and I’m calling from Dallas, Texas.

Welcome to the show, Caitlin.

Dallas is one of our favorite towns.

We’ve had so many good shows there when we’ve we’ve hit the road.

But what but what’s on your mind today?

Well, as I’m entering my seventh decade, my body is betraying me.

And one of the ways it’s doing it is I’m getting that old lady arm flap underneath your arms.

Oh no.

And when I refer to it to my friends I call them flying bettdies.

And everybody looks at me like I’m nuts.

But my whole life, the old women in my life born in the eighteen nineties, they all called their underarm extra skin flying Betti’s.

But I went and looked it up on the internet and no, I couldn’t find it anywhere.

So what are flying beddies?

Where did that come from?

Well well hold on a second, Caitlin.

Let’s get to the bottom of this.

So you’re talking how many women are we talking about who use this term in your in your world?

A dozen, two dozen?

Yeah.

Pretty much all over Texas.

But all only your family, not your friends or your co workers.

Oh, friends and co workers are too young to use things like that.

Yeah.

And and I do, but they all look at me like I’m crazy and then they give me that what is she saying?

Let’s not listen to this.

I gotta tell you, Caitlin, as somebody who whose body is betraying him because of age as well.

I’ve got I’ve got flying billies, we might call them on the way.

So Oh, excellent.

I love that.

Yeah, so Caitlin, you’re talking about you’re standing there in a sleeveless dress and it’s the part that keeps waving even after you stop, right?

Correct.

Now I have heard them called flying bats.

Yeah, yeah, b batatwings never.

Yeah, bat wings they’re sometimes called in Batwings.

That’s it.

Yeah, I’m actually more familiar with the term hello Betty’s.

You know that the same idea that you’re like waving to Betty over there and you and it just keeps waving.

Well Martha, I think the term is as hi Betty’s, not hello Betty’s, right?

Oh I’ve heard both.

Oh and and and hello Helens.

But I’m wondering if hi Betty and Flying Betty’s those sounds so much alike.

I wonder if there’s some kind of bleed in from one into the other.

Well I imagine there is a connection there.

And the whole idea of them being sort of like wings, you know, I’ve heard some people call them flying squirrels.

Oh my bing or bingo wings, you know, you’re sitting there playing bingo and you get bingo and you raise your hand and you’re waving it and again I think there’s more common in the UK but Caitlin you’ll be interested to know that there are lots of expressions like this all around the world.

I I love the German one Winker Arme which which is waving arms.

Yeah.

And and then arma.

Vinker Arma.

Okay, I’m gonna have to try and memorize that one.

Yeah, yeah.

W-I-N-K-E-A-R-M-E.

And then in Brazil you talk about Chaosin use, which are little goodbyes.

Oh and there’s also a Chinese term that translates as bye bye meat.

That’s not so cute.

Oh, that’s the bat.

Well, the Swedish one is Yerhang, which means pike hang, P-I-K-E, because they look kind of like the soft underbelly of the northern pike fish.

So the pike Golly gee, Willy Whiffers.

That’s a lot of crazy.

Caitlin, do you know who has the most of these?

The Australians.

The Australians seem to believe the English is meant to be embellished with a lot of vigor and they go for it.

And so there’s a book of Australian slang by the journalist and author Kel Richards, and he has I think 15 terms for this from Australia, including Auntie Arms, the Nanas, the Tuck Shop Lady Arms.

The Tuck Shop is a a shop that sells sweets and things to school kids, goodbye muscles, piano arms, reverse biceps, which I really love, and so does he.

Oh, that’s nice.

The wobblies, the by nows, the ta-ta flaps, and then this one, the widow’s curtains.

Oh.

The widow’s what?

Curtains.

The widow’s curtains.

Ooh.

Yeah.

That’s cool.

That one’s got some some spirit to it, I think.

So Caitlin, you’re not alone in this.

And I’m surprised this is only just now a problem for you.

I remember taking a salsa class in my thirties and you know, in a in a sleeveless dress and I looked up at my arms in the mirror and it was like, oh no.

But I Caitlyn I gotta say, you’re good natured laughing about this is just the right way to handle it, I think.

Yeah, and I’m a crazy old woman.

And I raced bicycles for fi fifteen years and then when I turned forty I got bored and took up skydiving.

So I’ve always been athletic and slimmer, but now as I’m aging, finally at seventy, I’m starting to flap.

Yeah.

It’ll happen to us all.

Even those of us who don’t have that amazing lifestyle.

What a lifestyle that is, road racing and skydaving.

Oh, it’s the most fun you can have with your clothes on.

You can do it naked too, by the way.

Caitlin, thank you so much for your wonderful call.

Call us again sometime.

All right.

Okay.

Thank you so much for enlightening me.

Yes, sir.

Bye bye.

Bye-bye.

Are you waving?

I’m waving.

I’m waving.

I’m waving.

My buddies are flying.

Well, you know what?

I bet there are even more terms out there floating around.

We’d love to hear about them.

If you have a different term for those flabby upper arms, give us a call or call about any aspect of language 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Robin.

I’m calling from San Luis Obispo, California.

Hey, Robin.

Glad to have you.

What’s up?

My family were watching a sporting event, me and my mom and my dad, and we heard the term a flash in the pan for a d an athlete who, you know, d performed very well for a short period of time and then sort of fizzled out.

And we were talking about that between the three of us, and we’re just wondering about the origins of that.

My parents thought maybe it had something to do with gold mining, a a flash of gold in a pan.

I hadn’t really ever given it too much thought, but when I’d heard that before I’d thought of like like f flambe or you know using wine and cooking and something flaring up and instead of Googling the origin, we thought that it would be more fun to give you guys a call.

Well, we are glad that you called.

So the pan we’re talking about here is a different pan, and it’s not as common as those other ones.

At least it isn’t now, but it used to be.

And it’s the pan on a flint lock musket where you put the powder.

And so a flash in a pan is a misfire because the powder burns but the gun doesn’t really fire.

So you you put the powder in the pan, you pull the trigger, the hammer strikes a flint, makes a spark, the powder goes poof, and it’s supposed to travel, the fire that’s made is supposed to travel through a touch hole to ignite the main charge that’s in the barrel.

But when you have a flash in a pan, that last part doesn’t happen.

You only get the initial burst of poof of the of the powder and nothing else.

And so it’s an explosion that doesn’t really lead to much, just exactly the same way we use it figuratively now.

And we have it in a literal sense from the very early 1700s, and from a figurative sense from the very early eighteen hundreds to and it was described I think the very first non literal use I know of they were talking about a journey that was slow to start.

So not quite the same sense.

But but sometimes it’s about hesitating more than it is about having an initial success and then petering out to nothing.

So there’s a couple of different nuances there that have changed over the years.

Well that’s very interesting that you know, I thought that b that both of our thoughts could be were were perfectly valid and but they were they were not the right one.

Not the right ones.

And another one that often comes up that is also not right is old style photography where you have this pan full of powder to make the flash so that you can get a lot of extra light on your subject.

Okay.

Martha, we have a bunch of these from that era of weaponry right from the the flint lock era.

Yeah, I’m trying to think muskets and well I’m talking about half-cocked where they the literal became figurative.

Or lock stock and barrel or keep your powder dry.

Mm-

Or if we talk about somebody being ramrod straight, the ramrod is this long straight tool you use to to drive that charge home in the barrel.

Right.

And it’s a you know at one time people would think of a ramrod as a very good example of a straight thing, but we just don’t have that intimacy with that kind of weapon anymore.

Yeah, those are that’s I I d would never have guessed that that was something that came from from from weaponry.

Yeah, that’s very interesting.

Unlike baseball, which is still a a regular part of everyday life and has given us so much figurative language, we just this has passed on into history.

So we don’t have that that daily intimacy with that kind of weaponry that we used to Right.

Yeah.

Well Robin, thanks for the question and say hello to your parents for us.

Oh, absolutely will.

Thank you guys so much.

Sure, yeah.

Take care of yourself.

Bye bye.

All right.

You too.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Words on Parade as a wave of words continues.

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 joining us wearing a tinfoil hat and carrying a ball of red yarn, it’s our quiz guide, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

I’m telling you guys I, have it all figured out and they can’t they can’t stop me.

There’s this the language conspiracies.

I know every single one of them and have just we’ll talk about that later.

But first I I have a quiz for you.

Now, if you’re like me, you like to travel the world, but you don’t have time or resources.

Luckily, language can help you where you get you where you want to be.

So you just listen to conversations around you, you’ll get to many, many wonderful countries.

For example, I ever heard someone say, I try to be organized, but I’m just not.

I mean two lists.

Here’s the pro list, but where did the and then you finish with a country in Africa?

He said, Congo.

The Congo.

Yeah, we’re at the congo.

So I’m like, oh it’s it’s it’s just like traveling to another land.

It really is.

It really is not, but we’ll play anyway.

Well, there we go.

I’ll give you an overheard sentence.

You finish it with the name of a country.

Here we congo.

Here on the farm, we don’t drink coffee.

We just take the dry grass from the barn, steep it, and make ourselves some delicious Haiti.

Hay tea!

Some hay tea.

Oh god.

Took me a second.

Okay.

I think Martha might come out ahead on this one.

I guarantee you that doesn’t leapt forward immediately with the correct answer.

Grant was picturing a real farm, I’m sure.

I was thinking about sunny mez meadows filled with daisies.

I’m sure that hay tea tastes about as good as the pun.

Anyway, let’s move on.

Listen, Mon, I could tell your daughter didn’t want to clean her room, but did to Jamaica.

Jamaica?

To Jamaica?

Yeah.

You made a cleaner room.

Also a terrible pun.

I’m keeping a list of your offenses.

Okay.

I I’ll I’ll atone for them eventually, I’m sure.

I am unable to reach the bowl on the top shelf.

What about you tall.

You tall?

I am tall, but I can still I still can’t reach the bowl on the top shelf.

What about me?

You not at all, no.

Are you taught?

No.

Is it something about no reach?

Think about the Great Rift Valley in Africa.

But Kenya?

Yeah, Kenya.

But Kenya.

This is really terrible.

Even I think these funds are terrible.

I know.

I know.

This snow is coming down really hard.

I’d better head to the town garage and fetch the Okay.

The snow’s coming down.

Going to the garage.

It’s a thing in the garage.

It sounds like a country, but it’s a terrible pun.

Yeah.

Something plow?

Plow.

Whoa.

I think you had it.

Think about countries, island countries, oceanic archipelago.

Oh Palau, yeah.

P A L A.

Okay, that was funny.

That’s that’s correct.

Similarly, these campfire treats are delicious.

You see they’re just crackers and chocolate and marshmallow?

Wow.

Can I have Samoa?

Samoa, yes!

The independent state in Polynesia of Samoa.

Oh, John, you could make a whole Korea out of these terrible, terrible, terrible puns.

And if any listener wants to join us, they can call or text toll-free eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Amy in Atlanta.

Hey Amy, we’re glad to have you.

What made you take time out of your busy day to give us a call?

So I’m an historian.

I do walking tours and I really like walking around the city and pointing out details in the city to folks to see how to weigh their clues in the landscape that remind us of history.

Mm-

So one of the tours I do, we go on a little tiny street called Airline Street.

But Airline Street’s nowhere near the airport.

Atlanta’s famous for its airport today, but the street name goes back before that.

It goes back to where it’s adjacent to the rail line that is a block away.

Yes.

And there used to be a train called the Airline Bell that ran down that railroad.

So my guests never make that connection when I point out Airline Street to the idea that it’s about railroads.

So I’ve always been curious how did the term airline became used for that new industry of railroad And then how did that term transition to the aviation industry as it got started?

Oh Amy, it’s such an interesting question because it leads us to such interesting things.

One of them is that when you look in digitized newspapers and journals, you can find the word airline many, many years before airplanes were ever invented, before anyone could fly.

You know, almost before Icarus, but not quite, but really far back.

And your connection of that airline railway to the name of that street is exactly on the money when you did that, and there was a dinging ding d that went off in my head and it wasn’t just because you said the airline bell, and I assume that’s B-E-L-L-E, the meaning the, you know, the the beautiful one, right?

Beautiful lady.

And this is because there’s this thing, a particular usage of airline that they use in construction, but particularly for railways.

And all it means is as the crow flies, a straight shot airline.

But if you took this path in the air and not on the ground, there’d be and with nothing in your way straight through.

And so when we’re talking about railways in particular, they used airline or airline routes for the shortest distance between two points, but they used it kind of as a marketing tool as well because people wanted to know that their train wasn’t gonna meander all over the landscape.

It was gonna go to A to B, straight as could be, with nothing in between.

Okay, that makes great.

So it’s a line through the air, literally.

Yeah, it’s like a beeline.

A bee line, yeah.

Yeah.

A bee line.

So then when the aviation industry got started, they were really focused on that same idea that it’s an airline, not that it is you are in the air?

No, they weren’t.

That actually has a different source.

Think of think of ocean liners and airliners.

So airline is kind of a reduction of the idea of the term of of airliner.

So yeah.

So it’s more connected to the idea of a liner.

It’s something that has a a line, a point it it’s still a line, it’s still a connection from point A to point B, but it’s less about the directness of it.

And it was often two words, right?

And then airline.im Someset it’s a open compound or closed pump compound, hyphen or space in there.

But yeah.

So I’ve seen it both ways.

Yeah.

Mm-

Well that’s great.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, take care.

Thanks, Amy.

We really appreciate it.

And then fun have fun on those tours.

That’s if I get to Atlanta, I’m gonna look you up.

I me too.

That sounds great.

What a town with deep history.

I’d love to find out more.

Take care of yourself.

All right.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Amy.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know that happens to you all the time.

You find you’ve been using a word every day.

And you’re like, wait a second, do I even know what I’m saying?

Well, this is the place to figure it out.

Call or text toll free in the United States in Canada 877-9 nine2 two9 nine nine six seven three or email words at waywordradio dot org Grant, you remember that call we had from Jane in Cape Cod, Massachusetts?

She’s the one who directs a women’s choir called Common Voices and she was looking for a word for what their group does when they gather to sing just for the joy of singing and community rather than working toward a rehearsal.

Right.

So so it was nothing official.

They just came together.

Wasn’t a performance.

Wasn’t practice.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s funny, I I always say this, but we get so much response.

We get so much response to questions like this.

We had a lot We had a ton of them.

People really stepped up to help.

And it’s a long list of suggestions that they offered.

Among them were Songfest, Enchanted Evening, session, choral fellowship, song circle, like a knitting circle, or a sing along.

And actually Jane wrote us after that with a list of words that she’s thought about since she talked with us and that list includes the words cinema jig and synchronize.

Oh nice.

Those actually sound like the names of a cappella groups though.

They kind of do.

They’re always very punny, aren’t they?

Sing ’em a jig.

But you know, there’s one other one that we got from Sandy Jones.

She lives in Toronto, Canada, and she noted that in the same way we say I had a good think about something.be May the choir could just call their time together a sing, as in I’m looking forward to next week’s sing.

And I really like that.

Oh, I particularly like it if you put the adjective good in front of it.

Let’s have a good sing.

We had a good sing.

Nice.

We’ve got a good sing scheduled for next week.

I like that.

Well, if you want to have a good chat with us, you can call or text any time.

It’s toll free in the US and Canada.

The number is 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Josh from calling from Jacksonville.

Hi Josh from Jacksonville.

What’s on your mind?

Well I was watching the Artemis launch recently and it was as epic as it was, I was thrown off a little bit because as they’re talking about the details and everything, they said you know, something about the positioning had to change just a tad.

And it got me thinking about how you know specific they were being, but then going to just a tad threw me off and I’m like, where did we even get that from?

Like just a tad., just a little bit So you said that they were being specific, but do you feel like tad is kind of a a a measurement for scientists?

Like the rocket scientists would be using a tad?

Why don’t they say like a centimeter?

Right.

Yeah.

Or something way more actually specific.

No, this was it that’s why it threw me off so much.

Gotcha.

Being that, you know, everything has to be perfect with a launch like that, especially going around the the moon.

And yeah it just made me think like where did we get that measurement a a tad and like like it could mean so many different things but obviously it’s just a little bit yeah I agree.

It’s a little bit weird to see it in in a scientific context.

The word tad meaning a small amount, it’s a little bit of a mystery how that meaning came about, but it probably began as American slang for a small child in the in the mid-19th century.

And actually, Abraham Lincoln’s son, who was named Thomas, acquired the nickname Tad very early.

Some people will say that Tad is just a shortened form of tadpole.

And and that Abraham Lincoln’s son w wiggled had a big head and a little body and wiggled around a lot and that’s why they called him Tad.

I suspect it had to do that the sense of tad meaning small amount, just kind of arose because it’s a small you know, it th it’s in that class of words that are they’re just tiny words.

Yeah, and and the other part, there’s two other things I want to toss in here, Martha.

One is it looks like most of the sources and references that say it comes from Tadpole all got that information from the Oxford English Dictionary.

But the Oxford English Dictionary entry hasn’t been updated in a really long time, and I suspect when they update it, that purported etymology will will either disappear or be reduced in importance.

Because we have expressions like tit for tat, which is kind of a quid pro quo when you do you you you push back or return an action to somebody, usually a a a mean one.

And and there’s no reason that the tit and tat in that expression couldn’t also have come to the fora as you’re broken down its component parts.

And it may have come from tip for tap, T A P and all these small words are confusing and their likelihood of appearing from many sources at any time makes it really impossible to know if they’re for sure related or they were devised independently or or what exactly happened.

And you know, we have this other whole thing too.

There’s this cluster of words from the American South that mean small, including tad and tat, but also taddock and tadtic and tadl.

And those could be kind of pet forms or hypochristic forms of longer words made short in order to represent s small things or small people.

So it just it’s just too confusing here, but but Martha’s gist, I can back completely, which is it’s an American term, came around in the mid eighteen hundreds, those things are for certain.

Anything else is guesswork.

Sounds appropriate being such an American term then for the Artemis launch.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, come to think of it.

I I love the idea that there’s a bunch of rocket scientists going like, just nudge it a little bit.

You don’t have to measure.

Eyeball it.

See the pants in your pants, guys.

It’ll get there.

And check it twelve times.

Yeah, exactly.

So that’s pretty much what we know about Ted.

Thank you so much.

Yeah.

I’ve been using it without questioning it for so long and then hearing it in that context just made it just stuck out like a sore thr thumb.

So yeah.

Thank you.

Well we appreciate the time, Josh.

Take care of yourself.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye bye.

Thanks, Josh.

Bye-bye.

Well, maybe you came across a word that you’ve said all your life and then you saw it in a different context and you thought, what?

Where did that word come from?

What does it really mean?

You can call to talk about it, eight seven seven two nine Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Jill calling from Greenville, South Carolina.

Hey Jill, we’re glad to have you.

Today I’m calling to talk to you about pickles.

Oh yes, please.

I love pickles.

Me too.

Pickles.

Okay.

What are you thinking about in terms of pickles?

Well well, I am curious as why why is it that when we say pickles, everyone just automatically assumes pickled cucumbers.

So if you ask someone if they want pickles on a sandwich like you just did, it’s implied that you’re talking about pickled cucumbers.

But for other pickled foods, you always have to specify like pickled onions, pickled carrots, and so on.

I’m just curious if there’s like a linguistic reason as to why cucumbers became the default pickle and if there are other examples like this where one specific food becomes like the unspoken standard.

I was thinking like the closest I could think of is fries, which we’re implying is fried potatoes, when anything else has to be spelled out like fried fish or for example fried pickles.

So I’d love to hear your thoughts.

Yeah, Jill, amazing.

This is great, because there’s a ton of cool stuff we can talk about here.

And a lot of it has to do with food.

There’s a word that we keep bringing up on the show these days, and it’s prototypicality.

It’s the idea that something is prototypical and that when you mention it, there’s one particular prototype of this kind of thing that pops into your mind.

There’s a a kind of a generic idea that you may have.

Now it can differ from person to person, but generally these are culturally shared.

They’re because we’re all come from the same basic culture.

So for example, something has floated for years in the historian community is the idea that in a thousand years, if they’re looking at our cookbooks and somebody reads, oh, it the recipe needs two eggs, in a thousand years, they might not know that we meant chicken eggs.

And they’d be like, well, what do they want?

Hummingbirds?

Emus?

I don’t I don’t know what kind of egg they want in this recipe.

That’s because for us, the prototypical egg is a chicken egg.

And we find this again and again, corn is a really great example because corn is a historical example.

It used to refer to any grain seed, but now, at least in the United States and North America, we generally mean maize, M-A-I-Z-E.

Whereas you have this other idea, which is so for us, corn is prototypically maize, but for other people it isn’t.

Meat went to the same route.

It used to mean just general food, anything that you would put on the table and eat.

And then it became prototypic the flesh of an animal.

If I say, Do you want to go for a drink?

What do you assume?

Alcohol, yeah.

Alcohol, yeah, you know we’re not gonna get warm milk probably.

You know, unless one of us is under under drinking age.

So again and again we find with food that this happens it happened with the word plum.

Plum historically meant dried grapes.

And we marmalade wasn’t always made from oranges.

It was made from quince.

And so the prototypicality of that changed.

So many good examples.

This is awesome.

So yeah, there’s a ton of these.

So anyway, yeah, so just generally what happens is we develop a cultural understanding that we agree upon generally, and there are obviously exceptions to this, where but generally we culturally agree that this one generic version of this category is what we all agree we mean when we say something like pickled.

Yeah, it does seem weird if you think about it, like why did cucumbers win?

You know?

Yeah.

I think it’s just I think it’s the same reason that there’s that time of year where you can’t go home without finding the neighbors who’ll have cucumbers and zucchini on the porch.

There’s just so many cucumbers in the world.

So Jill, does that help?

Yes, that completely answered my question.

More than answered.

Thank you so much.

Always in full.

Always too much.

Thank you for saying that.

No, I love I love all that information.

That was awesome.

Thank you so much.

I’m gonna go tell all my friends about this.

Yes please.

And and look up the word prototypicality for more.

I will.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate you too.

Sure.

We appreciate you.

Thank you.

Take care of yourself.

Take care.

Yep.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call or text 877-929-9673.

There’s more A Way with Words on the way.

Stay tuned.

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.

Daniel Mendelssohn is a widely acclaimed author, critic, and essayist, and he has a PhD in classics and teaches literature at Bard College in upstate New York.

In 2001, he taught an undergraduate seminar on the great Greek epic The Odyssey, but this one had an unusual twist because sitting in on the class along with the young students was the professor’s eighty one year old father, Jay Mendelssohn.

Daniel Mendelssohn tells the story of that semester and more in a moving book called An Odyssey, A Father, A Son, and an Epic.

His dad had been a kid from the Bronx who stubbornly worked his way up to become a research scientist and mathematician.

He was this gruff absolutist who reveled in the precision of numbers.

And he was somebody who always said, if something’s not hard, it’s not worth doing.

So the book is this delightful chronicle of contrast because there’s the dapper urbane younger Mendelssohn who lives in the world of texts and interpretation where meanings shift and multiply, and then there’s his schlubby, opinionated dad who keeps interrupting with his own commentary, like demanding to know why everyone thinks Odysseus is such a hero.

He says, he cheats on his wife, he sleeps with Calypso, he loses all of his men, so he’s a lousy general.

The younger Mendelson finds these interruptions embarrassing and frustrating, but the students love the old guy and his insights.

So on one level, the book feels like taking this invigorating college class on the Odyssey, all for free.

After the class, the father and son take a tour of the Aegean, retracing the voyage of Odysseus.

So it becomes a book about travel writing too.

And one of the other things I really enjoyed about this book is the passion that the younger Mendelssohn, the professor brings to teaching.

He writes Beauty and pleasure are at the center of teaching, for the best teacher is one who wants you to find meaning in the things that have given him pleasure to So that the appreciation of their beauty will outlive him.

In this way, because it arises from an acceptance of the inevitability of death, good teaching is like good parenting.

You know, there there’s so many lines in this book, Grant, where you just sort of like have to stop and put the book down to think about it.

I love the merging of those concepts.

The relationship between father and son, the relationship Right, right.

And of course it’s it echoes the whole story in the Odyssey, you know, Odysseus and his son Telemachus and his dad and and yeah, it’s about fathers and sons and education and and travel and and so much more.

It’s it’s a richly moving book.

So the book by Daniel Mendelssohn is called It’s called An Odyssey: A Father, A Son, and an Epic.

We’ll link to Daniel Mendelssohn’s book on our website at waywordradio.org.

And Martha and I are always delighted to hear what you’re reading.

You can call or text toll-free in the United States and Canada 877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisa.

I live in Paris, Kentucky.

Hey Lisa, we’re glad to have you.

Well, I was interested in finding out if you knew anything about a kind of cookie we used to have at Christmas.

It’s called Hobel Speina and it’s got one of those little double dot things above one of the letters, I’m not sure which one.

But I was just interested in finding out more about it.

It’s a cookie we used to have at our friend’s house in Miami at Christmas every year.

I just wanted to find out if you knew anything about it.

I can’t find out anything about it.

Hobel Spain now.

Well that sounds like it’s got some German roots.

Mm-

So is it their family that’s got the German heritage or yours?

Theirs.

Okay.

Yeah.

We used to go over there every Christmas and they introduced us to it and then we learned how to make it.

It’s a little complicated, but it’s really cool.

In in in brief, how do you make them?

Well it’s like mostly dough with butter and a little bit of lemon and a little bit of rum and you cut it into a rectangle like about inch and a half by three or something like that and then you put a slice down the middle vertically and then you fold one end through it so it looks like a little bow tie and then you deep fry it and then you cover it with powdered sugar.

Yeah.

So the word that we’re talking about here, Hovoshreina, is H O B E L S-P-A with the two dots on top of it and then N-E.

That’s the plural form.

The singular is Hobelshpan.

And you know what it translates directly as?

Wood shavings.

Or planing chips.

Because they look a little bit, particularly in some other varieties of this of this dessert, they look a little bit like the shavings that you get when you smooth the surface of wood with a plane.

And sometimes they’ll be called hobel sharten with about the same meaning, basically meaning planing shavings, that sort of thing.

And so that shavings refers to that twisted shape that they get and some of the other varieties instead of putting kind of the leg of the rectangle through the slit that you’ve made in the dough, you actually just put a couple slits and the the frying or the baking of them, because they’re you can do it both ways depending on your recipe, will naturally make them curl up like a shaving of wood.

Interesting.

I have never heard of anything like that.

And so I think I’ve got something that will blow your mind.

I found a recipe for this from 1795.

No way.

In a book from Laura Saxony, a cookbook by a woman named Frederica Luis Luffler.

And she has a recipe, and it sounds so much like yours and I’ve translated it here, but basically you take the dough from two eggs and a nut of butter as she phrases it, flour and a little salt, and roll it out, and then when it’s hardened a little you cut two finger widths of them with a baking wheel and then you bake them in a little bit until they’re light and yellow and then sprinkle them with sugar.

And that sounds a lot like your recipe.

Huh.

That is really interesting, although I never considered baking it in the oven.

Yeah, I but I bet it’s a little healthier, but that which is not very German of them, because the Germans say, How can I add more fat to this recipe?

I come from German heritage on two sides and let me tell you the tendency towards fat baked goods is very, very ingrained.

That’s pretty funny.

It does have six tablespoons of butter in it.

Absolutely.

I saw one recipe that was literally a pound of butter.

That is a lot of butter.

Wow.

That is I’m gonna give you a word, Lisa, that you can Google.

And it’s it’s for the category of this German baked good and the deep fried stuff.

And it’s Schmolzgebeck.

S-C-H-M M A L Z G-E-B-A with two dots on it.

Although you can leave it off for Google doesn’t care.

C K Schmaltzkebeck.

And you’re gonna find tons of recipes and variations from all over the German-speaking world, but not only that, but from from nearby countries like Hungary and Poland.

Another word that I really loved was Smolskebeck Streifen, and it basically means a lard pastry strips.

They’re not shy about saying that there’s lard in there instead of butter.

You know, I live in eastern Kentucky and they said if they knew what was lard was they’d put it in a pan and fry it.

His food history where people do just literally eat fried fat.

That’s just yeah that’s what they had.

That’s what they ate.

Absolutely.

Sounds delicious.

Well Lisa, happy baking.

Yeah, good luck with that.

Well thank you so much.

We love your show.

We listen to it every week.

Thank you.

Thanks, Lisa.

Bye bye.

Thank you.

Bye.

Although it’s in ancient German and the old style script.

We will link to that the cookbook from seventeen ninety five, so you can take a stab at it yourself and we’ll of course include the recipe in English on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tom Harris from Bluebell, Pennsylvania.

Hi, Tom.

Welcome to the program.

What’s up?

Well, I’ve always had a question about a baseball term.

The announcers frequently, when they’re calling a game, will say that the batter takes for a ball two or a ball three or a ball four.

And I never knew where the term take comes from.

I didn’t know if it came from takes a pass, takes a gander, takes a I don’t know what, but I’d love to know where that expression was derived.

Yeah.

Batters have been advised by managers to take a ball since the mid eighteen fifties or so.

And and I think by take grant, wouldn’t you say it’s like like taking one for the team, you’re sort of forcing yourself to the restrain yourself.

Yeah, that’s perfect.

You’re allowing yourself to be in a disadvantaged situation because ideally you should be swinging at all pitches good pitches that come across the plate.

But because there may be something better happening in the next pitch, you’re gonna wait on it.

And and and so you’re putting yourself in just a little bit of a disadvantage.

Yeah, and there was a a thesis written by Edward J.

Nichols at Penn State.

He wrote a thesis called An Historical Dictionary of Baseball Terminology that’s super detailed, and he dates this expression all the way back to 1854, talking about letting a fair pitched ball go past without offering to strike it.

And the need for a specific term like this arose after there were big rule changes in the 1800s.

Batters originally had the right to request either a high pitch or a low pitch.

And then once they established the modern strike zone and called strikes that that made batters have to decide, you know, in a split second, they adopted this term to describe that deliberate choice of just you know holding back restraining yourself and letting the ball go across the plateau but you don’t think it’s an abbreviation for something like take a pass take a look.

No, take is so to speak one of those utility players in the English language and take has a lot of accompanying and modifying and and assisting roles with other language in other words.

So take itself is more of a helping verb in this situation, although I don’t think it fits the strict definition of a helping verb.

Okay.

Well that’s very helpful.

Well thank you and I’ll I’ll take a look next time I hear him say it.

And think of what you’ve told me.

Tom, there’s one last thing I want to leave you with since you seem so interested in the old rules about you know calling your pitch.

There’s a cool website called protoball.org, P-R-O-T-O-B-A-L-L dot org.

And they have all the old rules of baseball.

They have all the old stats that guys who are obsessive about this stuff have gone through old records and newspapers and recorded every game they could find.

Way far back to like the beginning of baseball.

And and my favorite thing about it is they have this glossary of games that seem like baseball but aren’t really baseball.

Just fascinating stuff.

So we’ll we’ll take a look for that too.

Yeah.

Take a look.

Well that’s great.

Well thank you guys so much.

Great show.

Love it every week.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Okay now.

Call or text toll free in the United States or Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or go to our website at waywordradio.org and find all of our past episodes and a lot more ways to reach us.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Martha from Tallahassee, Florida.

Oh Martha.

Can never have too many Marthas in my life.

What’s going on, Martha?

That was the right thing to say, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Hi Martha.

Oh, gee, there’s an echo.

What’s on your mind?

When I was a lot younger, like when I was a child, and even now when I see a really old movie on TV or something, like the people after dinner or after lunch they say, Oh, I’m going for my constitutional and I was like, What?

Constitutional?

Why do they call it?

Are they going down to Liberty Hall to sign a parchment?

What are they doing?

Yeah, really, really.

And it with an A L on the end it sounds like an adjective.

Yeah.

So it’s like this is a walk, you know, a leisurely walk after dinner.

In Germany they take a Spazierengeen, you know, they go Spazierngein, which is a leisurely walk after dinner to help digest.

Mm-

And I thought, but why do they call it a constitutional?

That just doesn’t make any sense to me.

It’s pretty straightforward.

There are two senses of the word constitutional, one referring to the legal document and the other going the other one as you said going for a walk for your health and they both go back to the Latin root constitutore which means to set up or to establish or make something what it is, you know, its essence.

So the Latin word constitutio meant character or disposition or nature, and it could also mean an imperial order, you know, an order from the emperor.

And when that word found its way into English, it began to develop two different kinds of meanings around in the 1500s.

And one was political, a constitution, establishes a government, right?

It’s the fundamental laws.

And the other was bodily, it was your constitution as the fundamental makeup of your body and and your inherent strength and your health.

So your constitution was something that was foundational to you in the way that a constitution is foundational to a government.

And then the word constitutional as an adjective also came to mean beneficial to one’s bodily constitution, you know, good for your health.

And then by the early 1800s, you see constitutional being used as a noun probably first in British colleges, talking about a constitutional being exercise that you take for health.

In eighteen fifty-nine there was an article in the United States in the New England Farmer that was urging Americans to, as they put it, adopt what John Bull calls his constitutional walk.

John Bull being Britain, and so that’s where we get the idea that it was probably a British term that came over here.

And do you remember Harry Truman taking constitutionals every morning?

He was really Yeah, yeah, he was famous for taking these seven A.M.

Walks that reporters had to sort of jog to keep up with because he did that for his health.

He was very proud of that.

So Do ye do people say that much anymore?

I d I don’t say it.

I think they say it with a wink though, don’t they?

Yeah.

I mean I talked to my dog about going for his daily constitutional.

But I think I got that from a a relative early on who was who was really proud of taking a constitutional.

There’s there’s two things that I wanna pop in here.

One is that there’s another archaic meaning of a constitutional and that is not walking but sexual activity, which was also seen in as good for the health.

Oh.

Yeah.

And then Martha had mentioned that for some reason constitutionals were were very connected to Oxford and Cambridge in the United Kingdom.

And as a matter of fact, if you look at the historical record at Cambridge, people would take vigorous eight mile walks in under two hours and do things like jump hedges and ditches.

And their constitutions were very vigorous.

They weren’t just a lollygagging around a circle.

Those edges are pretty high.

That’s impressive.

There’s a lot of history to this.

Something to ponder on your next constitutional.

Thank you, Martha.

You take care of yourself.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call or checks toll-free in the United States and Canada, 877-929-9673.

A Way with Words Senior Producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor, and John Chaneski is our quizmaster.

Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language thought or question, the toll-free line is always open in the US and Canada.

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A Way with Words is an independent non-profit production of Wayword Inc.

It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

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And special thanks to our nonprofits volunteer board.

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Thanks for listening.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Until next time, goodbye.

So long.