Flee Fly Flo

We need your help.

On one hand, the show is overflowing with emails and phone calls from listeners who have language questions.

Lots of language questions.

On the other hand, donations are softer than we expected.

In other words, the ratios are all out of whack.

If you give to support A Way with Words now, you help answer all those interesting, funny, weird, thoughtful messages and calls.

You help put the show out to hundreds of thousands of listeners each week.

And you help bring everything back into balance.

Go to waywordradio.org/donate and make a gift today.

Thank you.

And now, here’s the show.

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 it’s the time of year when I’m thinking about WOTY, W-O-T-Y, Words of the Year.

2016 has been a heck of a year.

Yes, it has.

And a lot of language has come to the fore, of course, a lot of having to do with the presidential election.

Yes.

But a few other things as well that caught my eye, and I wanted to share a few of those right now with you.

Please do.

One of them I think we have to talk about is the supposed word bigly, B-I-G-L-Y.

And what this is is the way that Donald Trump says the word big league.

And he uses big league as an adjective, as an adverb, kind of as an intensifier to make something seem really important or really severe or really extreme.

Bigly, though, is the way that people are hearing it.

So a lot of people have taken the word bigly, B-I-G-L-Y, and they’re running with it in a different direction.

Another word for word of the year is hygge, H-Y-G-G-E.

I talked about it on a previous show and mentioned that it’s so popular now that people are fighting back against it because it’s being overused.

It’s in every Christmas email.

It’s all over the place.

Magazines have it on their cover.

And it’s this idea of well-being or general good feeling or promoting kind of a convivial atmosphere or just cocooning kind of experience where you just, the whole house is set up to make you feel comfortable.

Yeah, and it’s a Danish word, right?

Yeah, Danish, H-Y-G-G-E.

Cool to look at, hard to say because it doesn’t match the pronunciation in English, but a nice concept.

You think that one’s going to be the winner?

I think that probably Brexit really has this huge international implication.

Had a lot of legs, as we like to say in the old Hollywood parlance.

It still keeps going Brexit and Brexiteers and all the different forms of that.

Just keep being used in unironic and easily understood ways, which is a sign that a word has really succeeded.

Well, we talk about words all year long, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories about language to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Beth Redmond-Jones from San Diego.

Hi, Beth. How are you doing?

Hello, Beth.

Good. How are you?

All right. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

What’s on your mind?

So as a child, my mother and my grandmother used to say this little ditty to me, and it’s a little different, I think, than what you guys usually cover, but it went something like this.

Bobo ski watten dotten watten chh.

Bobo ski watten dotten watten chh.

Itten bitten watten totten itsy bitsy skuotten dotten.

Bobo ski watten dotten watten chh.

And they used to say this to us all the time when they’d be cooking or whatever, and it’s something my brothers and I learned, and I’ve been teaching it to my girls.

But I have no idea where it came from, and my mother passed away a decade ago.

My grandmother’s been gone a couple decades.

So I was wondering if you guys had any insight.

Oh, my goodness.

Well, first of all, congratulations.

That was a beautiful rendition.

Beth, I have a feeling that Girl Scouts and former Girl Scouts everywhere are pounding their dashboard and tugging at their earbuds because it’s a camp song, like a call-and-response kind of song that little girls like to sing and, you know, patting their thighs and clapping their hands, one of those kinds of songs.

And there are lots of different versions of it, but the one I learned was Flea.

Flea, fly.

Flea, fly, flow.

Flea, fly, flow.

La vista.

Kumulama, kumulama, kumulama vista.

Achi, kachi, kumarachi, ooh.

That’s great.

Outstanding.

Thank you.

And I have that.

I found that, a version of that.

It’s called Flea Fly Flow.

Right.

And it’s in the folklore books.

Yes, yes.

Really?

And the thing about folklore that we often say on the show or children’s games is that it’s something that’s passed on from person to person.

It’s mouth to ear rather than page to eye.

And so there are lots and lots and lots of different versions, and I’m sure all those former Girl Scouts out there are saying, no, no, no, Martha, the song didn’t go that way.

It goes this way.

There’s one that is a sort of jokey variation of that, which has to do with flea and fly and then mosquito and calamine, and the end of it is squishing the mosquito, that little shh.

I would say that it’s not just Girl Scouts who are responding.

It’s anyone who went to summer camp.

Yeah, I went to summer camp.

30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s.

I mean, this variants of this, Beth, have lasted so long.

And it’s crazy.

It pops up again and again and again on the Internet.

People will be like, does anyone else know this?

And people go, yeah, but my version’s like this.

Or we didn’t use that line.

We used this line.

But there’s one book that I would recommend to you if you want a little more about this.

It’s called Camp Songs, Folk Songs.

It was published in 2014.

And it’s by a woman named Patricia Averill.

And she’s got a section in there on the song that Martha just sang called Flea.

She talks a little bit about her informants and has some variants on it.

But she directly connects these kinds of nonsense songs to scat music, which really came into vogue in jazz and popular music in the 1920s.

And then you start to see it pop up in camp manuals of the songs that they’re teaching the kids.

Or you see it come up in letters that people are writing home or memoirs and that sort of thing.

I really think she’s making a really solid case that this kind of nonsense, pitter-patter, came out of two traditions.

One, camp song traditions, which have been, they go back as far as camps go back, but also the scat kind of joining in and people needing the music in order to carry off this nonsense.

And part of being the insider and proving that you belonged was mastering the song.

So Beth, I guess our question for you is, did your mom or your grandmother go to camp, summer camp?

Not that I’m aware of.

My grandmother was born right around 1900, and my mom was born around 1924, and they didn’t necessarily have the means to send my mom to camp to Girl Scouts.

So it was never something that was part of my understanding of them growing up.

They just said it was something they knew, and I had to learn.

So I did.

It’s possible that also they learned it on the playground.

It is something that you could do with rope skipping, or you might just do it with hand clapping.

Like Martha was saying, there have been waves of traditions over the decades of young women teaching each other these really complicated clapping songs.

And this also works as a clapping song, even outside of the camp environment.

Yeah.

Well, I know my mom was a big jump roper, so maybe she learned it from there.

I wish she was still alive so I could ask her today.

Yeah.

Right.

Those linguistic heirlooms.

Yes, exactly.

Well, thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for sharing the song.

You want to sing it one more time for us?

Sure.

Bobo ski watten dotten wattench.

Bobo ski watten dotten wattench.

Itten bitten watten totten.

Itsy bitsy ski watten dotten.

Bobo ski watten dotten wattench.

Nice.

Thank you so much for indulging me.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye, Beth.

Thanks, Beth.

Yeah, here’s the one I was talking about.

Flea, flea, fly.

Flea, fly, mosquito.

Calamine, calamine, calamine lotion.

Oh, no, no, no, not the notion.

Notion, notion.

Itchy, itchy, scratchy, scratchy.

Got one on my backy-backy.

Quick, get the bug spray.

Think he went that away.

Yeah, I’m counting here.

I have eight different versions of it that I found. It’s just a little bit of searching.

If you want to hear a little bit more about this, we also talked about this kind of rhyme in 2012. Just look for the word Bobo, B-O-B-O, on the website, and you’ll probably find it.

Call us with your linguistic heirlooms, 877-929-9673, or share them in email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

Another possible word of the year candidate is it looks like Latin X. It’s usually written and not said. It’s the word Latin with an X, and it stands for Latino or Latina. And it’s a way of avoiding the gendered adjective that might usually default to the male.

So you can say all the Latinx. Actually, I would never say it. You would write all the Latinx in my community came out to vote. Yeah, people say it, Latinx.

Do they do say Latinx? I’ve never heard it. I’ve only seen it written. Anyway, that’s cool because the X kind of serves as a wild card to stand in for these other letters, right? And we’re seeing this X starting to be used more and more in a few other places, and I may share some of that in a future episode.

Cool. 877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Danielle, and I’m from Escanito, California.

Hello, Danielle.

Hi, Danielle. Welcome to the show.

So I have a question about the phrase, to be honest with you, or I’ll be honest with you. I’m just curious where it comes from, and I guess why we say it. My boyfriend says it a lot, and then I’ve noticed I’ve started saying it a lot. And I think, whoa, wait a minute. I just, like, why am I saying that? Like, is it more like I’m going to cut you a deal? I don’t know. I was just curious about that.

To be honest.

To be honest.

Yeah, to be honest with you, I’m just a little curious about it. And so you’re thinking that being honest should be the default.

That’s what I’m thinking. Why am I saying it if already what I’m going to say is honest? And I guess, you know, it’s usually when someone’s asking a question. And so like through our businesses or work or whatever, when someone’s asking me a question and the answer, I’m already going to say the same answer regardless if I put the to be honest with you. But I’m just curious about it.

Is it ordinarily that you’re a huge liar in this one time when they tell the truth? I just got to clarify this time I’m going to be honest with you. But everything else, everything else is rubbish. Finally, Danielle is going to tell the truth.

There’s some linguistic stuff happening here. There’s a lot of different ways to go about this. Obviously, everyone who says to be honest or variations on that theme, they’re not all saying it for the same reason. Sometimes it is because they’re a huge liar and there’s one time they’re going to be honest. Sometimes, and it sounds like this may be the case in your house, it just kind of becomes a catch word where you can’t stop yourself from saying it. And it’s a little bit of a crutch and kind of empty. And it’s just a thing you throw at the top of a sentence to introduce a sentence. And it doesn’t really have a lot of weight or meaning and it can be safely ignored.

But there’s another whole usage of to be honest, which I really like. In linguistics, we call it an adverbial disjunct. And this is where you are providing commentary on your own language. You’re labeling your words or you’re talking about your intentions. So frankly and hopefully kind of work the same way. Frankly, you know, I’m saying basically I’m going to be franker. Or hopefully, blah, blah, blah, blah. I’m talking about my wishes for the future. A lot of language that we have is metanarrative or commentary on our own speech. And this is just one of those many things here.

The other thing that’s happening here sometimes is it’s not that you’re always a big fat liar. It’s that the circumstances in which you’re in put you in an adversarial relationship with the other person. And you need to reassure them and do this really human thing of reaching out to them and just kind of saying, I’m being honest with you. You generally want them to know that you are being honest and you’re being forthright because, let’s say, they’re a customer with a complaint and you run the complaints department and you’re naturally adversaries, right? And so that’s another kind of, to be honest, which I think is really, really interesting because you just want the other person to understand. I’m being faithful. I’m being loyal to you as another human being and being genuine. Please believe me. And that’s probably the best use of, to be honest.

Oh, okay. Great. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Yeah. And I have another hour on that topic if you want.

Danielle, thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Yeah. No, thank you guys. You guys are great.

Yeah. Thank you. Keep being honest.

I will.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673 or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Another word of the year candidate is Zika. We have to throw that one in there. Z-I-K-A, standing for the Zika virus, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and causes birth defects. And it is slowly creeping into the United States, and the mosquitoes that carry it are found throughout the warmer parts of the country.

Alerts are being sent out by the Centers for Disease Control. It’s showing up in newspaper articles. There’s a lot of people freaking out. And, of course, obviously all the advice that usually applies to how to keep mosquitoes out of your environment is being spread even more because this looks like it’s even worse than the other things that are spread by mosquitoes.

Indeed.

The Zika virus. Good candidate for Word of the Year.

877-929-9673.

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 in the shadows is this mystery man, our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John. How are you doing?

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. It’s nice here in the shadows. It’s warm.

Come into the lights.

Oh, it’s too bright. You know, guys, it’s that time of year again. It’s always some time of year, but this is the time that I trot out my limericks about things that have happened in the news in the past year. Here they come. They’re trotting out. News limericks. News limericks for 2016.

As usual, finish the limerick with a word or two or three. I think I have one here, at least one that requires four words. But let’s just. Okay. I’m making you guys do all the work. So you start the limerick and we finish it.

Yes. Let’s see how you do. Gravitational waves had been hiding. We could prove they existed, providing. We had evidence, and this year got our chance when they recorded two black holes colliding.

Colliding.

Yes, very good. Nicely done right out the gate. A little science for us there. It’s good. Here’s the next one.

To provide my poor heart with protection, I just read the comics page section. In my local papers, I love Garfield’s capers. Oh, I’m sorry. Was there some kind of election?

Yeah, it was. I don’t know. Something. Someone said something. Yeah. Here’s the next. Some people found themselves thrown. Bob Dylan, it became known, won a Nobel Prize. But don’t be surprised. He gathers awards like a…

Rolling Stone.

Like a Rolling Stone. Oh, that’s good. Good. That’s good. Speaking of Dylan, two Brits were so sad and they moaned, a boxer named Dylan they owned. And Dylan had died, and at first how they cried, but eventually they had Dylan…

Cloned?

Yes.

What?

Two Brits had their dog cloned.

Yes.

Oh, their dog.

Their dog. Yeah, I said boxer.

Oh.

They owned a boxer, but okay, I gotcha. If you like, I can reread it with doggy in place of boxer. He’s undefeated with 29 knockouts.

That’s right. Now they cloned him. Who knows how far he can go? Here’s the next one.

All life on this earth’s transitory. We lost Prince. Not the end of the story. We lost Wilder and Cohen. We lost Rickman. Keep going. Lost Ali. But at least we found…

Dory.

Yes. In 2016, we found Dory.

A team in Chicago of note rarely had reason to gloat, but all that is over because as of October, they have lifted the…

Curse of the goat.

The curse of the goat, yes.

Right.

Here’s the last one.

This one’s kind of personal.

At our house, we make sure the kids know to get exercise now and then, though since July of this year, we have nothing to fear.

They take long walks thanks to…

Pokemon Go.

Yes, Pokemon Go.

I was going to say the snow.

No.

I remember snow.

No, Pokemon Go.

And that’s my cue.

Actually, I have to Pokemon Go myself and go.

There’s a Zubat out in the control room I have to take care of.

All right.

Good luck finding the Gyarados.

That’s where the action is at.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate it.

Thank you, guys.

Take care.

This is the number one Pokestop on public radio, A Way with Words, 877-929-9673.

Drop your lures here at words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alice calling from Tampa.

Hi, Alice, how are you doing?

I’m doing well, sir. How are you?

Excellent.

What can we help you with?

I had a question about the term gaslighting.

I had heard it a couple of times in the past few weeks.

It came across in a book that I was reading, and I actually said it in conversation to someone when we were talking about something, and she was like, gaslighting, what is that?

So I explained to her what I thought it was, and it got me thinking about where the term came from.

And if there was a term for gaslighting before we had gaslights, I feel like the term kind of dates itself.

Good question.

So I was wondering what we would say before and kind of where it came from.

So, Alice, how were you using it when you were talking with your friends?

So we were kind of discussing some of the election things that were happening.

And I said, and this is before we had actually gone through the election, and I said, I just kind of feel like I’m being gaslighted, like the things that I thought were true people are telling me aren’t true.

So it kind of felt like I was crazy, even though I was absolutely certain that something had happened.

Everyone else was kind of denying that it happened.

Right.

So that was kind of how I was using it.

I understood one thing to be true based on something that had happened, and everyone looked at me like, that’s not a thing.

That didn’t happen.

Gaslighting.

So G-A-S-L-I-G-H-T, right?

Gaslight?

Gaslighting?

Correct.

Yeah, and you’re right that gaslighting is a form of psychological abuse in which abusers manipulate their victims into doubting their own perceptions, right?

Just like you were describing.

And it comes from a play that was eventually made into a movie starring Charles Boyer and Ingrid Bergman in 1944.

In that movie, this creepy husband manipulates his wife into doubting her own perceptions.

And among the things he does is he secretly dims and brightens the gaslights that are on the wall.

Have you seen that movie?

I have seen that movie a long time ago, but yes, I have seen it.

Okay, so you know, I mean, she’s seeing the gas lights flickering and going down and then going back up.

And he tells her that that’s not happening.

And it’s just one of the many things that he does to really mess with her mind.

And, yeah, so that’s where we get the term gaslighting from that play and movie.

But before that, I guess what?

Manipulation?

Yeah, probably just psychological manipulation.

Yeah.

But some people are really adept at it.

And once you get that name for the practice, you’re like, wait a second, that explains that boss that I had.

Or, wow, that’s why I really dislike that politician.

Or, oh, that’s why I fell away with that friend because they just were always denying things that I knew to be true.

Perfect. So I wasn’t sure if it actually started with the play.

I wasn’t actually familiar that it came from a play.

I had seen the movie, but I wasn’t sure that’s where it came from.

So, yeah. And even though we don’t have gas lights anymore, I kind of feel like that’s just going to stick around.

That’s just, there is no new kind of slangy term for what it is.

And not only is it sticking around, but it seems to have new life.

I’d say over the last five to ten years, I’ve seen gaslight again and again and again pop up when I’m reading for new words.

And I think it’s here to stay.

And it’s so distanced from its movie that I think it’s showing that it is a really successful term.

And probably, it reminds me of gold bricking in a way.

And that it’s just, it’s going to stick around as a really solid compound that’s easy to say and easy to understand.

Well, this is great. Thank you so much, you guys.

Thanks for calling us.

Appreciate it.

Take care.

Thanks. Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Becky, and I’m calling from Idaho.

Hello, Becky.

Hi, Becky.

From where in Idaho?

Idaho Falls, so it’s southeast Idaho.

Okay. Very good.

Welcome to the show. What’s up?

Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Yeah.

So I grew up in rural Pennsylvania, in central Pennsylvania, and I was regularly asked if I was being haves.

So this was kind of an endearing question.

So my older uncles of the especially rural variety would ask me this question, and I thought it was normal growing up.

And then I moved away and started asking other people if they were being haves, and they thought it was the hokiest thing.

So I’m wondering how behaving became being haves.

Oh, good, good, good, good one.

What’s your guess?

I have no idea. I’ve done some research on the internet about it and haven’t found anything.

Well, the word you want to look for if you’re looking this one up is re-analysis.

Re-analysis. Because what’s happening here, let me just set up this scenario.

You’re a parent, you’ve got a child, and you’re constantly giving them the commands.

Be still. Be quiet. Behave. Right?

And the first two are verb plus adjective. Right? Verb plus adjective.

But the last one is a verb all on its own.

But to the kid, it sounds like verb plus adjective.

And so that’s how they analyze it when they’re very young, say two, three, maybe a little older than that.

And they’ll say, I am being have.

I behave all the time.

Because it sounds like have is an adjective.

And these kind of reanalyses are pretty common with kids.

They’re looking for regular patterns.

They’re trying to synthesize the rules of language, just kind of understand them through experience.

It’s so well-known, in fact, this kind of reanalysis of the word behave that it pops up in virtually every textbook that I’ve ever read on children’s language or the psychology or the mental development of children.

It’s really common.

Wow.

Is there a reason why I would have only heard it in that specific geographic location?

Coincidence?

Just pure chance because you don’t have your own kids or you don’t have a lot of exposure as an adult to other kids.

But it’s something that will probably get a lot of emails going, oh, yeah, my child did that, or I remember doing that when I was a kid, because it’s really common.

So the parent then, because the child was interpreting it that way, would kind of repeat it back in the same way?

Yeah. Well, as a parent, you—I don’t know if you have kids of your own, but as a parent, you often latch on to the little cute things that your kids say, and you adore them.

They’re very charming, and they make perfect sense.

And they’re funny because you get the kid’s logic, but it goes against what you know to be true about the word, about how language is supposed to work.

Yeah.

So maybe you said it when you were little.

Yeah, it could be.

You just picked up on that.

Yeah, and I wonder if your uncles or your family, it’s like it started with some young member of their family at that level years ago, and they just kept on saying it because it was funny and cute.

Wow.

That’s so interesting.

There’s another one that happens, and I’ve heard this from numerous families, and it happened in my family with my son.

We would say things like, you know, when he was two or three,

Do you want me to hold you?

And after a while, he would throw up his little arms, little chubby arms, and he’d say, hold you? Because to him, do you want me to hold you? Hold you sounded like one word that was a verb. Wow. And so he thought hold you was all he needed, you know. Hold you. Hold you. Oh, that’s so cute.

So yeah, the word you want is reanalysis. And just do reanalysis, behave, and you’ll come up with a bunch of hits on it. That is so interesting. Thank you so much. Yeah, sure. You’re welcome. Thanks for calling, Becky. Really appreciate it. Yeah, thank you. Bye.

Well, we’re being Have over here. Give us a call, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Another word of the year candidate, and this one’s got some legs because it’s been going on for a few years, is the word woke. And this refers to someone who is aware of the racial or political injustices of the world and is doing their part to resolve them. So if you are woke, you are aware and acting. And it’s a word that you probably don’t use for yourself. You probably describe somebody else that way because to call yourself woke is not right. You have to be judged from the outside to know whether or not you truly are woke. Right, right. If you have to tell somebody you’re woke, you’re not woke. Yeah, exactly right. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Rosie, and I live in Edmore, Michigan. Hi, Rosie. What’s up? I lost my only son earlier this summer. Oh, gosh, I’m sorry to hear that. Thank you. And I was discussing the situation with a friend of mine. I’m a high school English teacher, and I was talking with another English teacher because we like words and etymology and things like that. And she had also lost a child, and she said, there is no word in our culture for someone like us. If you’re a child and you lose your parents, then you’re an orphan. If you’re married and your spouse dies, then you’re a widow or a widower. But there is no word in our culture for someone who has lost their child. And I was wondering if you know if there is a word in our culture or perhaps in another culture. My friend commented that it is such an unspeakable thing, and that’s why we don’t have a word. I was wondering if you could find something. I kind of feel like I’ve lost a little piece of my identity because I’m not a mother anymore. Right, of course.

Well, you’re a mother, but the person who made you the mother is gone. Yeah. Yeah. And I think in English we do not have a word that acknowledges and respects what you’ve been through. Not one word. Not exactly. Not one word. There’s a way to say it in two or three words. Right. But those may be clunky. Right. Right. Like you could say bereaved mother. And I think most people would understand, oh, she lost a child. Right. Yes. Right. But I think the issue of acknowledgement and respect is really important here. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. And it kind of helped coming to grips with my grief. Of course. I mean, if I had a title for it or, you know, like I know, you know, like when someone comes up with a new disease, it sometimes makes it more tangent or, you know, if you can put your hands on it better when it has a name. Right. I mean, if you’re, you know, experiencing symptoms and you don’t know what it is, it’s all the more confusing. But then, oh, it’s this. It has a name. Right. But it’s saying a name to your pain kind of clarifies everything. Yes. Right, right. It’s unspeakable, but it happened to you. So how do you speak that acknowledgement into existence, I guess? Without having to explain it at length every single time you talk about your circumstances. Because you don’t want to hide this event from others, right? You want them to know what has happened to you.

Yeah. There is a word in Hebrew, I believe it’s something like shakol, which is found in Hebrew scripture to describe women who have lost children. And I believe there’s a similar term in Arabic, but I’m not aware of anything in English. There’s also been a movement, a small movement, to adopt a version of a Sanskrit word, which is something like vilama. Vilama. V-I-L-O-M-A-H. It’s a movement started by Carla Holloway at Duke University, a professor there. But it hasn’t really caught on. It’s kind of hard to say. But it does have a nice correspondence to widow, which has some Sanskrit roots way far back. Although it came to us from Old English. Having to do with emptiness. Yeah, right. And bereavement itself. But most languages do something where they use an adjective that means bereaved and then the role or title of the person, like bereaved mother, bereaved parent, something like that.

Rosie, is there anything that you’ve thought of? No. Having been an English teacher for many years, I kept thinking, maybe I could go to a Greek root or a Latin root and come up with something and invent a word. Yeah, that’s really tough. I mean, I’ve seen people suggest daddo, like D-A-D-D-O-W, like dad and taking the ending of widow. But that seems so trivializing to me. Yeah, it seems a little too goofy. Mamo and daddo. Mamo and daddo. But those are such arbitrary-sounding words and sort of, I don’t think they’re good. And then you’d have to explain what the word means. Right, every time, which makes it kind of worse in a way, right? What’s interesting about widow and widower, they themselves are words that when they are applied to people, they often dislike them anyway, even though they have a word to describe their situation. So you’ll find many widows who really dislike being called a widow. And widowers are often scratching their heads like, why this word for this circumstance? It doesn’t seem right either. I think you may never find a term that matches the depth of what you’ve gone through, unfortunately. Not in this language. But this is the kind of question that I would really love to throw out to the folks who are listening to see what they have to say. Other people have had this same experience. Solid and transparent and not a jokey blend, right? Yes. Something with some respect to it. Not a trendy word. Exactly. When you first hear it, you’re like, oh, yeah, of course. I get it. That one makes sense. Yeah. We may not have it, though. Yeah.

So if you have what you think is a solution to the question Rosie is asking, a single word in English that would work in English for bereaved parents, give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org. Rosie, you might Google that word vilomah, V-I-L-O-M-A-H, because you’ll find a community of people who are talking about the same thing. I don’t know that they’ll come up with an appropriate word or not. Yeah, yeah. Well, this has been very helpful. Thank you so much for your call. Yes. I appreciate that. Thank you very much. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye.

More conversation about what we say, how we say it, and why. 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. A few weeks ago on the show, we had a call from Chad in Nebraska, and he was the guy who had family members who said, M-bye, at the end of a phone call. M-bye. And he wondered if anybody else did that, and that prompted a really funny discussion on our Facebook group. Carol said, I never realized I said m-bye until I had a parrot. If I’m on the phone and he thinks it’s been long enough, he starts telling me m-bye. And Pamela writes, I also did not realize that I used the mmm-bye until my kids pointed it out. Now they do it. And Kirsten said, I worked at a bakery in Michigan where all the sales clerks regularly took orders over the phone. One girl had just moved to the U.S. from Japan, and most of us had no idea we said mmm-bye until she asked us why we all did it and if it meant something specific. That’s cool. And Jane wrote, I think we have too much of love you at the end of phone calls.

We had an employee pop that out at the end of a conversation with a sales rep.

As she hung up the phone, she realized what she had done.

I still chuckle over the horrified look that came over her face.

Yeah, I’ve seen that happen where the CFO of a company said it to the outside accountant who was giving her a hard time.

Okay, love you.

Love you.

Love you, mean it.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And you can join that Facebook group, no problem.

Just go to Facebook and look for A Way with Words and join thousands of other people talking about the show and language.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, good morning. This is Leslie Kane.

Hi, Leslie. How are you doing?

I am doing well. Where are you calling us from?

Fort Laramie, Wyoming.

What can we do for you?

I grew up. I was born and raised in western Nebraska.

Since that time, I’ve probably lived in Colorado and South Dakota and Wyoming, Iowa.

And in Nebraska, we always called the ditch on the side of the road the borrow pit, referring to you borrow from the pit to make the road.

My family was in construction, but since I lived in Nebraska, I’ve not heard that term.

I’ll say it to people and they go, the borrow pit? What are you talking about?

And what do they call it?

So I don’t know whether anyone’s ever, I don’t know whether it’s very, very localized or because my family was in construction, they just said that.

But in Scottsville, Fingering, Nebraska, which is where I was raised, that’s what we called it.

So this is the ditch that runs alongside the road.

Yes.

Like a raised road.

Yes.

Yeah.

And what did they call it if they didn’t call it a borrow pit?

I think just a ditch, the road ditch.

Okay.

Yeah, those things go by lots of different names, including gutter and greater ditch.

You’re not the only person who uses borrow pit by any stretch of the imagination.

Yes, yes.

I’ve just lived places that didn’t use it.

Well, it’s not common in most of the United States, but there is one part of the country where it’s far more common.

And that is the West.

Yeah, it’s where you live.

It’s the Rocky Mountains, Nebraska, Wyoming, all around in there.

Yeah, I think the more common version of this is barrow pit.

Barrow meaning a mound because, you know, if you’re digging, then the dirt has to go someplace and it forms a mound.

And so we think that it may be that barrow pit is a version of that, you know, sort of by what we call folk etymology.

That’s exactly what you said.

My grandmother was an English teacher, and I remember asking her, how do I spell that?

Because I had to write something.

And I actually thought it was B-A at the time, and she told me B-O, but, you know.

Oh, how interesting.

My sister and I have been talking about this, and it’s just taken me a while to get to you and ask.

Yeah, so that origin story of being about borrowing dirt from one place to put in another is a folk etymology.

It’s not really the origin of it.

It does come from barrow, B-A-R-R-O-W, meaning a mound of earth.

But it’s a really obvious, like, natural thing to assume that it’s the more familiar word to borrow, B-O-R-R-O-W.

That’s interesting, really interesting.

I appreciate knowing that.

Now I can say when people say, where did you get that?

I can, you know, with confidence say there are other people that say that in the world.

Absolutely.

I appreciate your help.

Leslie, we’re glad to help.

Thanks for calling us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Call us with the words from your part of the country or your part of the world, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Jonathan Wilcher.

I’m from North San Diego County.

Excellent.

Hi, Jonathan.

So my question is, my father used an expression I remember since childhood.

When somebody said to him, how’s it going, he’d always respond, same old six and eight.

And when I became an adult and interested in English, that was sort of curious, but it never occurred to me to ask him, or I never had the opportunity.

He has since passed.

But it always stuck with me, and I know there’s expressions like same old eight to five, meaning the hours you work.

But six to eight, I just never got that.

Interesting.

He’s from California, but his parents and grandparents were from Texas, and I believe the heritage goes back to England, the last name like Wiltshire.

So either my great-grandfather or great-great-grandfather came over and ended up in Texas.

So it may have some English meaning behind it.

It does have an English connection, although you can’t ever be certain where somebody picked it up.

They’re more likely to have picked it up from a film or a book than they are from the long history from grandparent to parent to child.

The thing is the expression same old six and eight isn’t that common.

It’s actually incredibly super rare.

But it probably is just a variant of the far more common same old seven and six, which is British, which refers to shillings and sixpence.

So it’s seven shillings and sixpence.

And you’ll find this again and again in English literature and slang books and dictionaries and so forth.

And same old seven and six just basically means, like you said, it’s the same thing day after day.

Same old, same old, day late and a dollar short.

Here I am again doing the same old thing I did the day before and I’m probably going to do tomorrow.

And that particular number supposedly refers to the cost of certain kinds of licenses that you used to have to buy in England.

For example, a wedding license was said to have cost seven shillings and six pence.

Now, I don’t know why it should be that particular number, but there you go.

It’s interesting because when I was digging around, I could only find two references.

And one was from a book called The Inspector French’s Greatest Case.

And within that book, the expression is, the yard’s going strong, same old six and eight pence.

Yeah.

I thought, well, six and eight pence, where is that from?

And then I found a reference, an annotation of Ulysses by James Joyce.

And in that annotation, they give you the meaning of different expressions.

And lo and behold, I found the same old six and eight pens.

And the definition is a usual and unchanging thing, like you’re saying.

And then it says, after the usual fee for carrying back the body of an executed malfactor and giving it a Christian burial.

How my father ever came up with the same old six and eight with a father from Texas, I don’t know.

But that’s the only reference I can find.

Yeah, well, it’s possible your father learned it, like I said, from a book or a movie.

It doesn’t take many exposures to a new term before it kind of catches your fancy and you find it popping out of your mouth.

And it’s interesting to find that there’s one more thing that costs seven and six, I know, the cost of carrying a body.

There are a couple other uses of seven and six.

One of the slang dictionaries suggests that it’s rhyming slang and it means to be in a fix or to have a problem or that a seven and six something is to fix it.

I don’t find a lot of uses of that, though.

The citation record is really weak on that.

Probably the most common use of seven and six is in bingo calling, which is very different than what we’re talking about here, but I think it’s worth mentioning.

There are all these standard phrases, particularly in the United Kingdom, that you say when you bingo call, like they’re drawing the ball out of the basket, and they’re going to say the number, but sometimes they don’t actually say the number.

They say a phrase, and then the number.

They’ll say, seven and six, was she worth it?

Or you can just abbreviate it and say, was she worth it?

That refers to, again, the cost of the marriage license.

Was it worth the marriage license to get married to the woman you’re with?

Okay.

Well, interestingly, he never said seven and six.

He always said six and eight.

So I’m just wondering if you’d ever heard of a reference to burial.

No, I haven’t.

But the six and eight, again, it sounds so much like the seven and six that I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s just a variant on it, like his own version of it or a version that he picked up from somewhere else.

One for a wedding and one for a burial.

Yeah.

Jonathan, if anybody else has heard about that, we’re going to hear about it.

Yeah, it’s the same old six and eight.

Yeah, so thanks for calling.

Oh, absolutely. Thank you very much.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Kelly Christensen from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Kelly. How are you doing?

I’m fine. How are you?

All right.

What’s up?

Well, I had a question about a phrase that my dad used.

He actually still uses it.

And what he says is if you’re painting a wall and you’ve missed a spot, he’ll say, you’ve got a holiday up there.

He was in the Navy for 28 years.

And I think it has something to do with the Navy because I talked to another friend of mine who was in the Navy when I said that same phrase.

He said, I haven’t heard that since I was in the Navy.

So do you know whether or not that’s a naval term or whether that’s something that everybody knows that I just am not aware of?

If I had a bell, I would ring it.

I would do the ding, ding, ding.

We need to get a bell.

Yeah, because, Kelly, it does have nautical origins.

It goes back farther than the U.S. Navy, though.

It goes all the way back to at least the 18th century.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In the classical dictionary of the vulgar tongue, which was published in 1785, the definition of a holiday is any part of a ship’s bottom left uncovered in paying it.

And the key part here is it is a part of a scam where you would pay somebody to retar the bottom of your boat and they would skimp out on the materials and not retar the part that you couldn’t see.

But what does holiday have to do with that?

Well, they took off and didn’t show up for work that day.

Yeah, the theory is that it has something to do with, like, taking a holiday from the work, just, like, skipping out on it.

Oh, I just hear that.

I hear that now.

Okay.

But you said something about it being in the classical dictionary of a vulgar tongue.

Was that a vulgar thing to be talking about in the 1800s, I guess?

Well, it’s back when slang was considered far more pejorative than it is today.

It was the language of the underclass, like the cant and slang of the worst sort of rabble and filth that the English-speaking world had to offer.

Yeah, and not necessarily vulgar in the sense that we think of it, but common.

More like the – meaning more like vernacular than vulgar.

Yeah.

Common.

Got it.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, our pleasure.

All right.

Take care now.

All right, you too.

Bye-bye.

Okay, bye-bye.

Yeah, I’ve also seen holiday used in terms of dusting.

Right.

You know, like don’t leave any holidays on the table or whatever.

Yeah, because dusting is weird.

If the light’s not right, it’s really quite easy to leave this little triangle of dust that you only see later when you’re sitting down to enjoy a snack.

Like, oh, I did that.

Right, when the light hits it that one way.

Yeah, or dust bunnies under the bed.

But, yeah, a holiday.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And hit us up on Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

We were talking earlier about the discussion on our Facebook group about saying bye at the end of conversations on the phone.

And that also prompted some people to talk about people who say, yellow.

Yellow.

Yellow.

Esther said, my mother said yellow when she answered the phone when I was growing up.

We pranked her once from a slumber party just to hear it and laugh.

Sorry, Mom.

Yellow.

Yellow.

Yellow.

I’m sure there’s a movie.

There’s got to be, there’s a thing, right?

There’s a movie.

Is a guy known for that?

Somebody, yeah.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Kelly Davis, and I’m calling from Tallahassee.

Hi, Kelly, how are you doing?

Hello, Kelly.

What can we help you with?

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching CBS Good Morning, and the actor William Macy was on there, and he used the phrase, us old the cockers.

And he used it in the same sense of us old guys, us old codgers or whatever, something like that.

When I looked it up online, I didn’t find that sense.

The sense that I found it in was the phrase me old cocker, as in buddy, pal, friend, my old friend, my old buddy, whatever.

Sounded interesting, so I thought I’d call you up and see what you guys have to say about it.

So when William Macy was talking about his buddies, it sounds like the emphasis was on them being old, right?

Yes. It was like us old farts.

And you’re right that in English the word cocker has meant friend or buddy in the past, but I’m betting that he was actually referring to a Yiddish term.

And that term is altercocker, which means old pooper, you might say.

Oh, okay.

It’s related to caca, for example.

And it’s spelled lots of different ways, like altercocker, K-O-C-K-E-R.

But it basically means a crotchety, fussy, old man.

So I’m betting that’s what he was talking about, those old cockers.

That’s interesting.

And I saw the spelling K-O-K-E-R, and I also saw the word alter in some of those articles, but it never explained it.

It never said that those were Yiddish, and it just went on and went with the English.

And so I had no idea, but that’s really interesting.

Yeah, the alter is cognate with the English word old.

And cocker, as I said, basically means pooper, so the old poopers.

Okay.

So now you have a new term from Yiddish, alter cocker.

And it’s a term of affection and endearment, really.

-huh.

It’s kind of joking, and it sounds to me like that was the same spirit in which William Macy was talking.

Yes, that could very well be.

In fact, it probably was.

So there.

Well, Kelly, glad to help.

Thanks, Kelly.

Okay, thanks.

Bye.

All right, bye-bye.

So alter cocker, a lot of people might know it as AK, which is frequently abbreviated.

It’s a little old-fashioned now, particularly as the Yiddish speakers haven’t passed the language on to their kids and grandkids, but AK.

I love it.

Yeah.

Sometimes you hear it reduplicated where they say the old AK, so it’s the old, old, old Cocker.

And just to kind of wrap this up, there is a Cocker that means a fighter, which has various connections to cockfighting and just somebody being like a real kind of bantam of a man, which goes back in English dialect and slang well into the 1800s.

Oh, cool.

Yeah.

877-929-9673.

Grant, do you know the word boodler?

It’s a kind of scammer.

Yes, it is indeed a scammer.

What do they scam?

Well, it’s somebody involved in bribery or corruption.

It comes from the Dutch word boodle, which means property.

And I learned about that from Anu Garg’s Word of Day email, which everybody should be subscribing to.

You can find it at wordsmith.org.

Boodle.

Yeah, boodle is property and boodler is somebody who’s corrupt.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Want more Way With Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show on any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open, so leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language, and you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten, director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

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

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.

Hi, it’s Martha.

One of the things we try to do here at A Way with Words is to create a little oasis of civility and raise the level of today’s discourse.

By that, I mean we try to help people do a better job of listening to each other.

What’s someone really saying? What do their words really mean? How can we all better connect with each other?

We figure that if we can all understand each other better, the world’s going to be a better place.

And you can help.

I’m asking you to help us keep serving all of our listeners and help us bring you new episodes in 2017.

Make a difference today.

Pitch in at waywordradio.org/donate.

Thanks.