Frozen Rope (episode #1478)

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 I have a little collection of slang terms here from a certain

Field, and I’m wondering if you can guess what they are.

Okay, put me on the spot, top of the show, sure.

Okay, yep. There are four of them, okay? Here’s the list. Ducks on the pond, frozen rope,

High cheese, and tumblebug.

Oh, some of these are clicking for me. Frozen rope is baseball.

It is.

It’s a strong hit that seems to be going straight out.

Yes, like a line drive.

Very good.

And ducks on the pond is batters on base.

Base runners, yeah.

Base runners, yeah.

They’re kind of bobbing on the bases like ducks.

What’s the third one?

The third one is high cheese.

So what’s high cheese?

High cheese is a fastball in the strike zone.

Cheese is a very positive thing in this case.

So it’s like a perfect strike.

Yes.

Nobody’s arguing against that strike.

Right.

Kind of a frozen rope in the strike zone, I guess.

And what’s the other one?

Tumblebug.

I don’t know.

Is that when a fielder does a little tumble when they try to make a catch?

Yes, they’re kind of showing off.

They’re doing little circus moves.

Tumblebug.

They make it look harder than it is.

Yes.

Yes.

I just thought we could use a little baseball, go Padres and all that.

Frozen rope.

I’ve heard that one.

That one’s in current use for sure.

Some of these terms may go back a ways, though, right?

Oh, definitely.

Decades or even a century behind them.

Yeah, at least to the early 20th century.

But I love the idea. It makes so much sense, frozen rope, right?

Oh, yeah. You can just see it going right past you.

A perfect one, like a straight shot.

You’re going to write into the scoreboard.

Exactly.

Almost no arc on it.

We talk about all aspects of language on the show, not just slang, but word origins, arguments you had,

Old expressions from your family, great books, and good writing.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eleanor, and I’m calling from San Antonio, Texas.

Welcome, Eleanor.

How can we help you?

So I was wondering if there is a difference between OK spelled OKAY and O.K.

Oh, good question.

What a good question. What got you to wondering about that?

Well, some of my friends, whenever they text me, they say O.K.

But whenever I text them back, I will say O-K-A-Y instead.

Does one feel more right to you personally?

It sounds like O-K-A-Y, the longer form, feels better.

The longer one feels much better to me.

Why is that? Does it feel more like a real word?

I guess O period K period feels like an abbreviation for something,

While O-K-A-Y feels like a real word.

It’s weird, but I think all of these things are true, even though they sound a little contradictory.

Let’s break this down.

First, if you’re a journalist or a writer, you’re probably going to use a style guide,

And your style guide may have advice on which one they prefer.

For example, the Associated Press prefers OK, spelled out capital O, capital K, with no periods.

Oh, that’s interesting.

I think the New York Times style guide may also prefer that,

And that’s because in their reasoning, it’s closer to the original form of, okay, that’s how it entered the language as an abbreviation for an intentional misspelling of all correct spelled O-L-L-K-O-R-R-E-C-T.

Wow.

Right?

Yeah.

Wow.

Yeah, there was this whole trend in the 1830s in Boston where the newspapers were just like intentional.

You misspell words and come up with these like ridiculous abbreviations.

And that’s the only one that made it all the way to present day is okay.

That is really, really interesting.

Yeah, yeah, right?

Yeah, isn’t that wild?

It started out as a joke.

Yeah, but you’ll find again and again, every single dictionary that I checked, and I checked like 12 of these,

And all editors that I know will permit OKAY as long as the style guide that they use doesn’t say that capital O, capital K is better.

Because O-K-A-Y has since joined the language fully as its own full word and doesn’t need to be the letters O and K anymore.

Eleanor, I have the same feeling about it, that it just feels more like a word if you spell it out with the K-A-Y.

Yes.

There is a really great and very readable book.

How old are you, Eleanor?

I’m 11.

I think you could totally read this and have fun with it by Alan Metcalf.

That’s M-E-T-C-A-L-F.

I just look, it’s the story of OK, I believe it’s called.

Just look for Alan Metcalf OK.

You can find it on Amazon or any online bookstore.

And it’s a really wonderful exploration of how this word entered not only our language,

But dozens of languages around the world also use our OK to mean yes or an affirmation.

OK, I will look for that.

How are you spelling that?

OK, of course, it’s Eleanor.

Well, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you for taking my call.

Okay, take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

So that book by Alan Metcalf is OK.

The subtitle is The Story of America’s Greatest Word.

I highly recommend this.

It’s a great book.

And he goes into this whole newspaper trend and talks about what was happening in Boston.

And he also talks about kind of a supplementary thing that made OK stick.

And that was Martin Van Buren being called Old Kinderhook.

Old Kinderhook from Kinderhook, New York.

There we go.

877-929-9673.

Another bit of baseball slang.

Grant, do you know what a yakker is?

The guy in the booth on the radio going, two RBIs, bases loaded.

I don’t know.

That’s a very good guess.

No.

But it’s a curveball.

And here’s the cool thing about the term yakker.

So Y-A-K-K-E-R means curveball.

Yes.

And this is so great because there’s a term, yawker, Y-A-W-K-E-R, which is the name of a kind of bird that does that same kind of swooping flight.

Isn’t that great?

Oh, interesting.

So the yawker comes from the yawker the bird.

Yeah, the yawker is a nickname for the yellow hammer bird.

Can I ask you, do you remember the first time you actually saw a curveball curve?

And were you as amazed as I was?

Yes.

I remember going to Bush Stadium.

I grew up as a Cardinals fan.

And seeing the ball in real life going like, the physics of that didn’t look possible.

How does that ball curve like that?

And then later as an adult, you start to look up things about the stitching and the delivery and the roll and all that.

And you start to figure it out.

But when you’re a kid, the curveball is amazing.

Oh, see.

An astonishing feat.

Yeah.

See, you were in the stadium.

I was playing baseball with Keith Sutton and my other buddies in elementary school.

The stadium is as close as I usually get to sports.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, is this Martha?

This is Martha. Who’s this?

This is Tyler from New York.

Hey, Tyler.

How’s it going?

Hi, Tyler. What’s up?

So I started listening to your show a few weeks back.

I just want to say I’m a big fan.

Yay!

So I noticed in between segments you guys play some awesome music

In your sort of musical interludes between segments.

I noticed you guys play some reggae, particularly Toots and the Maytails.

And I was wondering about the term reggae.

I’ve heard somewhere that Toots Hibbert helped popularize the term reggae through his song Do the Reggae.

I wasn’t sure if they actually coined the term or whether they just popularized it.

I was wondering if you could provide some background there.

Oh, that’s a really good question.

First, let’s talk about the music that we play in between the segments.

That is all picked by our engineer and editor, Tim Felten.

Tim is a core member of the band, the Surefire Soul Ensemble.

He has an incredible music collection.

He plays organs.

Yeah, he’s a wonderful keyboardist.

He’s like 50 organs in his house.

I don’t even know.

It’s a lot of keys in his house.

Yeah, and it’s good music, and he’s got good taste, and that’s what you’re hearing.

All the music on the show is picked by Tim Felten of Surefire Soul Ensemble.

Yeah, you can find his work online.

Yeah, by the way, if people don’t know, we do list the music that we play on the show on our website.

So just look for the most recent episode and we’ll have a list at the end of the episode description.

So the term reggae, so it’s really interesting.

So Toots Hibbert of Toots and the Maytals gave an interview in 2004 where he talked about the term reggae.

And they specifically asked him about the credit that sometimes people give him for corning the term reggae.

Now, the song was called Do the Reggae and it was spelled R-E-G-G-A-Y.

Instead of an E for the Y.

Reggae is usually spelled today.

And he says,

There’s a word we used to use in Jamaica

Called stregge,

S-T-R-E-G-G-A-E.

If a girl is walking

And the guys look at her and say,

Man, she’s stregge,

It means she don’t dress well.

She look raggedy.

The girls would say that about the men too.

This one morning,

Me and my two friends were playing

And I said,

Okay, man, let’s do the reggae.

It was just something that came out of my mouth.

So we just start singing,

Do the reggae, do the reggae.

And created a beat.

People tell me later that we had given the sound its name.

Before that, people had called it Blue Beat and all kinds of other things.

Blue Beat?

Blue Beat.

Yeah, like the color.

B-L-U-E-B-E-A-T.

Blue Beat.

And so it is the first use that we know of the term reggae is his song from 1968.

That is awesome.

What a great story.

Yeah, but there is another term in Jamaican English called reggae reggae.

R-E-G hyphen R-E-G.

And it has to do with raggedy clothing.

And it’s probably etymologically related to stregge and then therefore to reggae.

But it kind of just kind of reconfirms how you could easily missay or mispronounce stregge

Because of these other existing words in Jamaican English that have to do with the similar idea of somebody looking slovenly.

Oh, nice.

I’ll have to add stregge to my vocabulary, I guess.

That’s pretty cool.

You are interested in Jamaican English, and I encourage you to get into it because it’s super interesting.

It’s just like American English.

It’s got this rich history of immigration and politics and all this stuff.

There’s a dictionary of Jamaican English from 1967.

While it is a little out of date and hasn’t been updated since then,

It still really lays down a lot of the fundamentals about how Jamaican English is different from all the other Englishes in the world.

Well, if it’s from 1967, then it doesn’t have reggae in it?

That’s right.

It doesn’t.

Well, no, I’m sorry.

What it does have is it has older words that may have influenced reggae.

Right.

Well, thanks so much, guys.

You’re welcome.

Our pleasure.

Thank you for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Take care now.

All right.

Have a good one.

Take care.

Bye, Tyler.

Toots Hibbert may have coined the term.

It sounds pretty like there’s nobody arguing that he coined the term as we know it today

To refer to the music.

That’s so interesting to me because I would have assumed that it was much older than that.

Right.

Like the music itself was much older, but the name for the music was new.

Yeah.

Bluebeat and other things.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hang a snowman.

Do you know what it means to hang a snowman?

What did it ever do to you?

Right?

I don’t know what that means.

All right.

So we’re on baseball sling again.

How did you know?

Well, so far the show.

To hang a snowman in baseball is when one team scores eight runs in an inning.

Okay.

Because the snowman, you know, if you draw it real simply, it looks like an eight.

Okay.

Hang a snowman.

Yeah.

Eight runs in an inning.

That’s quite a feat.

Yeah.

It’s sort of like in tennis, you know, you can say that somebody was sent home on a bicycle

And that’s the two tires of the bicycle.

Two zeros.

Yeah.

So they lost six, zero, six, zero.

Oh, painful.

Ouch. Hang a snowman. 877-929-9673. Or should I say snowman 77-929-9673.

This show is about language examined through family history and culture. Stay with us.

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 joining us now on the line from New York City

Is our quiz guy, Mr. John Chaneski.

Hi. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Welcome.

You know, we sometimes go into some sort of puzzle types.

We’ve done this thing before.

It’s called takeoffs.

That’s where we take off the first letter of a word to get another word.

But this time we have a little bit of a theme going.

We’re going to make two-word rhyming phrases by taking the letter C from the start of a word.

So we’re only taking off the letter C from the first word and then getting the second word.

We’re getting a rhyming phrase.

Okay.

For example, if I said that I needed to know how old an animal enclosure was,

You’d say that I needed to find the cage.

Age.

Okay, gotcha.

KJ.

Remember, the words will always rhyme.

We’re not doing any canon, anon, or anything like that.

Okay.

It’s always chair hair like that.

Gotcha.

Okay, good.

Here we go.

What do you call a device used to keep a timepiece secure?

Timepiece secure.

Chain pain.

When I say timepiece.

A clock lock.

That’s exactly right.

It’s a clock lock.

I was thinking a little too hard on that one.

That’s right.

What would you call a gorilla who lives on a promontory that extends into a body of water?

Cape ape?

Cape ape, yeah.

Yes, a cape ape. Nice, Martha.

Now, if I insisted that my caddy paint a beautiful design on the side of our transport at the country club, what would that be?

Cart art?

Cart art, yes.

Martha, you’re doing it.

She’s on a roll.

Since I’m rich enough to join a country club, I might just take some money and toss it in the fireplace.

What would I be left with then?

Cash-ash.

Cash-ash.

Of course, I’m not rich at all.

Have you seen my car?

I call it the inexpensive pile.

What would you call it?

A cheap heap.

It is a cheap heap, yes.

Perfect.

Very good.

Did you know that on the set of the TV series Friends, they hired a special person to keep

Matthew Perry out of trouble?

The Chandler Handler.

Yeah, he’s the Chandler Handler.

That was his title.

Yeah.

Also, he was such a pain that David Schwimmer was quite put out.

What did they call him behind his back?

Cross Ross.

Cross Ross, yes.

A little something for you 90s folks out there.

If you were MacGyver and you needed to lift something heavy,

You might fashion a simple machine in a cunning fashion.

What would you call that?

Clever lever.

Clever lever, right.

Artist who was famous for mobiles and stabiles

Had a tree of the Birch family in his yard.

What did people call it?

Calder’s alder.

The Calder Alder, yeah.

The Calder Alder.

What would you call a piece of timber that’s destined to be made into traditional Dutch footwear?

A clog log.

A clog log, yes.

Finally, you know, not all witches use a cauldron.

I know a very modern group that puts their eye of newt in a microwave.

Do you know what they call it?

Eye of newt in a microwave?

Yeah.

Oh, coven oven.

Yes, the coven oven.

There we go.

Very good.

Those are our sea takeoffs for today.

You guys did fantastic.

Congratulations.

All right. Bye, John.

Bye.

The show is about words and language and everything having to do with that.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, and send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. My name is Maria Howard, and I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Well, hello, Maria. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Maria?

Well, my father always used to use this word starting when we were kids,

And he always used to say, out in the giggle weeds.

And none of us in our family, my siblings or my mother,

Could ever figure out what giggle weeds meant,

Other than just kind of out in the middle of nowhere.

So I was interested in finding out about the meaning of giggle weeds

And where it came from and who uses that word other than my dad.

In terms of who uses giggle weeds, I don’t hear it that much,

But we do find instances of it from time to time.

And it means sort of what you were describing.

You’re just out sort of in the boonies.

You’re lost in the underbrush or something like that.

Out of the Tuleys in some parts of the country.

I know that it was in a movie about motocross racing called On Any Sunday back in 1971.

There’s a reference to guys on motocross bikes taking a shortcut through the giggle weeds if they get panicked and accidentally go off the road.

So you do see it from time to time, but it’s pretty rare.

The other question is, what is a giggle weed?

Yeah.

Do you have any thoughts about that?

I have no clue. None.

None. Okay. So you sound pretty innocent.

That’s a good thing, Maria.

Yeah, I mean, giggle weeds in the past has referred to either marijuana or jimson weed.

And I don’t know if you’re familiar with jimson weed or have seen it around.

It’s all over Southern California.

I run into it all the time when I’m hiking.

Well, it’s in large parts of the country, right?

Yeah.

It is literally a weed.

It’s an unwanted pest.

Yeah, it’s a weed with these really jagged big leaves, and it’s got beautiful flowers on it, beautiful blossoms.

It looks sort of like giant morning glories, but it’s the datura group of plants, and it’s really hallucinogenic, and it’s really actually dangerous.

It’s really, really dangerous.

People have died from making tea out of the leaves or chewing them.

Or eating the seeds or smoking the leaves.

Yeah.

And it’s a poison, but it’s a hallucinogenic, so people sometimes take that chance.

Right.

Too much to their detriment.

Right.

That’s interesting.

I tried to guess what giggle weeds meant, and the only thing I could come up with in my imagination was somehow, you know, some young couple having a rendezvous out in the middle of nowhere, and, you know, I don’t know, the kids giggling or the people meeting giggling, kind of like in a lover’s lane situation.

So that’s the only thing I could think of.

And there may be some overlap there, too.

Yeah, it’s charming.

Yeah, exactly.

It’s charming.

But both meanings of the word giggle weed, the marijuana and the jimson weed, come up in early police documents where they talk about all the names for this.

So the earliest uses we know are of jimson weed or marijuana being used as a party drug, basically.

Yeah, the earliest use that I know, by the way, is from Indianapolis, which is where you are, right?

Oh, yeah.

It may be earlier than that. It probably is.

But so far, the earliest that I know of in print is from 1931 in the Indianapolis Star.

They’re describing two drunk guys who are rousted by the police.

And the line goes, they were gazing at the moon from the giggle weeds under the bridge.

I tend to use that word a lot.

And people kind of give me an odd look and say, giggle weeds? What’s that?

I have no idea. But now I do.

If you listen to the show, Maria, you know that our advice usually is to keep on using the expressions,

Even if people around you don’t know them.

This is how we hang on to our heritage.

Exactly.

And I love to kind of keep those words alive.

Please do, Maria.

You sound like our people.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, we really appreciate it.

Take care now.

Yeah.

Okay.

Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Or join our Facebook group. Just look for A Way with Words.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you? I am David Shelton.

Today I’m calling from Detroit, Michigan.

All right.

Welcome to the show. How can we help?

We have a situation in my household.

I actually live in Montreal, and I’m from Detroit, born and raised.

My wife, her mother is from Barbados, and we live in Canada,

So the Commonwealth British background linguistically,

And she’s a stickler for language,

And so she’s often correcting me for my tendency to use ebonic expressions

Or regional things from Detroit, Michigan.

But she uses an expression that irks me, if you will.

She will occasionally correct me and say,

Can you not do such and such a thing?

And I find that word usage, I don’t know, it just rubs me the wrong way.

So I wanted to bring it to you and ask you about that usage of that negation or negative expression.

Can you not?

So you sound like this is serious business for you.

He said it was a situation.

Yeah, situation.

Yeah, situation there.

I heard the capital letters on that, situation in all caps.

Yeah.

So, David, she’s saying things to you like, can you not leave the cap off the toothpaste tube, that kind of thing?

That’s the kind of thing, exactly.

And I feel like saying, can you not?

Say, can you not?

But she’s saying, can you not, is a full sentence, right?

Just can you not.

Like, you’re doing something that annoys her, and she says, can you not?

Exactly.

What I want to zero in on here, what I want to home in on, get right to the core of this is,

Is it because she’s disagreeing with your behavior as much as it is because she said something linguistically that didn’t quite sound right to you?

That’s interesting.

I think it’s the linguistic part that bothers me because I also find it to be difficult even when, I mean, not difficult,

But it also strikes me when she uses it toward our children or something like that.

So it’s not just when she’s checking me.

Linguistically, what’s happening, we do this a lot in English.

We have this thing called ellipsis, which is kind of like the actual punctuation ellipsis.

Something is left out.

We do this, let’s say, if I asked you, where’s the ice cream?

And you reply, over here.

You don’t say the full response.

The ice cream is up here.

You just say, over here, even though there’s no verb, there’s no subject, right?

Okay.

Another example might be, this happens a lot.

Somebody would say, take care.

And you say, you too.

Okay.

Yeah, there’s a subject there, but there’s no verb.

So the ellipsis a lot of times leaves stuff out that both parties or all parties in the conversation understand to be there.

It need not be said.

So you know what she means when she says, can you not?

You know what she’s referring to.

David, here’s what strikes me about it.

It sounds like you could translate that as, are you utterly incapable of refraining from doing that?

I mean, there’s an implication.

There’s a certain level of emotion there.

I think that you don’t hear if somebody says, you know, please put the cat back on the toothpaste.

If you’re saying, can you not?

It’s this utter exasperation, right?

You win this round, Barnette.

That’s a good, that’s good.

Yeah, well, you know, you’re absolutely right.

She’s a fairly severe individual, especially when she puts on her mother face or whatever and gives you a look.

You know, so, yeah, when you put the two together, it does have quite a zing to it.

Mm, a zing, yeah.

So I think Martha really has nailed what’s kind of annoying, because I’ve heard that before.

I don’t think I’m bothered by it as much as you are.

Yeah, but the whole question, the sub-question, the subtext is, are you incapable?

Right.

Yes.

What is wrong with you, David?

I’ve told you again and again.

That’s right.

Exactly.

Would you please refrain?

You know?

It’s not even would you please.

It’s like, can you not?

What’s broken in you?

Well, I want to thank you all so much for your time.

I really enjoy your show.

Oh, we’re glad to have you.

Call us some other time.

It sounds like you’ve got a great linguistic situation there.

Stuff is going to keep coming up.

Oh, I have a plethora.

A plethora.

Myriads.

Have a great day.

Take care, David.

Excellent.

Take care, David.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Well, call us about the linguistic situation in your house, 877-929-9673, or send us the whole story in email to words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about jimsonweed, but we didn’t talk about the origin of the term jimsonweed.

Oh, yeah, that’s a good one.

It goes back to the word Jamestown, the name of the place in Virginia.

And there’s an account of these British soldiers there in 1676 who ate some of this and lived to regret it.

They gathered it and ate it as a salad.

And there’s an account of what happened next after they ate this hallucinogenic plant.

Is this a radio safe?

Yeah.

Okay.

Mostly.

It says, some of them ate plentifully of it, the effect of which was a very pleasant comedy,

For they turned natural fools upon it for several days.

One would blow up a feather in the air.

Another would dart straws at it with much fury.

And another, stark naked, was sitting up in a corner like a monkey, grinning and making mouths, that’s grimaces, at them.

A fourth would fondly kiss and paw his companions and sneer in their faces with a countenance more antic than any in a Dutch droll.

A troll being a kind of small, funny play.

I think so, yeah.

Wow, yeah.

So, jimson weed is a hallucinogenic.

Yes, do not try this at home or anywhere.

It can kill you.

It can kill you.

And if it doesn’t kill you, it could leave you permanently damaged.

Or embarrassed.

You know, this is the age of social media.

You don’t want to be doing that.

But anyway, jimson weed derives from the term Jamestown.

Very interesting.

Language is weird.

It’s filled with strange pathways and odd histories.

This is something we love to talk about on the show.

But if you’ve got anything to do with language, a question or a comment or a word that you coined or someplace in the language that we need a word, let us know.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi there.

This is Jamie calling from Calais, Vermont.

Hello, Jamie.

Hi, Jamie.

Welcome to the show.

What is up?

Thank you.

I am a caregiver for elderly folks, and a gentleman who I care for is very particular about his language.

And the one thing that’s really stuck out to me is he insists that his fanny pack, the little pouch that he keeps his wallet and notebook and stuff in, is called a banana.

And he’s not allowed to call it anything other than a banana.

And I was just wondering if that’s got something in his mind or if there’s any other people who have ever called fanny packs bananas.

Jamie, tell us what that looks like.

Is it yellow by any chance?

It’s not yellow.

It’s blue.

Okay.

And it’s just a standard, you know, something you’d get at Walmart for $5, and it holds his wallet and a few other incidents.

Okay. Is he from Vermont?

He’s not. He’s lived in Vermont off and on since the 50s, but he grew up in Washington, D.C., in a home that sort of hosted—

And he often had international dignitaries living with him or stayed with him when they visited D.C.

And then he also, his heritage is Lakota Sioux.

And so he spent summers, starting when he was about six, visiting relatives outside of a reservation in Oklahoma.

All right. We may be getting near an answer to this.

Is he a horsey person? Does he or has he worked with horses or does he know horses?

Perhaps on his summers with the Lakota?

Yes, he talks a lot about how when he was there for the summers, it was really important.

Everyone sort of had a horse and a dog.

Okay.

And yeah, that was an important part of his childhood.

The pieces are now fitting and the puzzle is complete.

There is a type of bag used among people who ride horses called a banana bag.

It goes behind the saddle.

It’s a long bag, roughly the shape of a banana, curved over the back of a horse.

Cool.

Yeah.

So I suspect that is a natural use of the term for him.

I suspect he borrowed the term banana bag from the horse world and applied it to the fanny pack.

That sounds very, very likely.

Really interesting.

I’ll have to ask him more about his time working with horses.

Yeah.

I would love to know.

If he draws that connection, too.

I would love to know, Jamie.

I would love to hear confirmation if he could say, oh, yeah, of course.

He might even be wondering why it’s a curiosity to you,

Because it might seem like a natural use of that expression.

Right. He was confused that I had another name for it.

Oh, there we go.

Yeah, like he wasn’t, when I called it a fanny pack, he was like, what’s a fanny pack?

That’s a banana.

Well, it sounds like you have your work cut out for you, Jamie,

To get some more information about his experience with horses.

Absolutely. That’ll be a good tack to get him rolling and some fun old stories.

Yeah, sure.

Excellent.

And if anything new comes up, by all means, give us another call, okay?

I would absolutely let you know.

Take care now. Appreciate it.

All right. Bye, Jamie.

Thank you so much.

Sure.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Is a word puzzling you? You can always call us about it, 877-929-9673,

Or we’d love to read your stories in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

English, like any successful thing, has a lot of parents.

Join us for more on A Way with Words.

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.

Maori is the native language of New Zealand’s original Polynesian inhabitants.

And it was in the headlines recently because a government official there who speaks Maori

Has devised a manual for the government that adds dozens of new words and phrases to the Maori vocabulary

For talking about issues involving mental health, disability, and addiction.

There’s a Maori proverb, in fact, that he quotes that translates as words have great power.

And what he did was to talk with people in the disabled community there,

And he was trying to develop variants from the words that they use,

Because sometimes they use English words too.

And he found some of those English terms condescending.

For example, the word that’s getting the most attention in this glossary is the term for autism,

Which is takiwatanga, which literally translates as his or her own time and space.

Isn’t that interesting?

Is that his new word or the old existing word?

It’s the new word that he’s proposing that people use for people with autism,

Someone with his or her own time or space.

And a good description, right?

It is.

I mean, the word autism itself goes back to a Greek word that means self.

But I thought that that was a really interesting way to approach talking about mental health, was to create words from the Maori language that more specifically describe what they’re dealing with.

And it sounds like he’s in a position to make them stick, right?

As a government official, he can put them in official documents and they can begin to be used in all the materials.

Yes, yes.

And the idea behind it was to translate words and phrases that might carry stigma and make them more positive and make them more, how do they put it, recognizing humanity, hope, and personal dignity.

That’s a great effort.

Yeah.

That sounds like the kind of thing we can all do, right?

Right.

Seek the positive synonym over the negative one, right?

Yeah.

Well, and recognize that what we’re talking about is people.

Not abstract concepts, not dollar signs.

Exactly.

Exactly.

It goes back to framing.

How you frame a situation affects all subsequent conversations about that situation.

Yeah.

And the fact that there’s just such a great diversity among us, you know?

Well, it sounds like I need to check my Maori dictionary and maybe put some Post-it notes in there with the new word.

877-929-9673.

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Or join our Facebook group.

Just search for A Way with Words.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Patricia.

I’m calling from San Diego.

How are you today?

We’re doing great.

What can we do for you?

My question is about something that I’ve seen in the news, more often online but sometimes in print,

That I don’t recall seeing until quite recently.

And that’s abbreviations like POTUS and SCOTUS and CODUS and FLOTUS.

So the idea of abbreviating, for example, President of the United States to the acronym POTUS.

So I looked it up and I found out that it originated as a telegraphic code.

But I can’t seem to recall when it became widespread.

It seems fairly recent to me.

Yeah, the telegraphic code origins are pretty well known.

We can actually find copies of the 1879 manual where these abbreviations were used.

Actually, SCOTUS is in there for Supreme Court of the United States.

But POTUS isn’t exactly in there.

What’s in there is P-O-T for President of the.

And then, of course, naturally, you would add U.S. For the United States if you were a telegraph operator.

And this code known as the Phillips Code really had this great conciseness about it.

It’s kind of a natural shorthand.

And there are supposedly people could do 50 to 75 words a minute typing or telegraphing, keying in this telegraphic code.

In any case, you find as early as 1894, POTUS in print referring to the president of the United States.

Now, the problem with this is we’re not 100% sure whether or not that’s because somebody failed to telescope the abbreviation back out to the full president of the United States or if people are actually saying POTUS on the floor of Congress.

I mean, we have speeches transcribed in the newspapers from congressional debates where POTUS is in this transcript in the newspaper.

But again, we’re not 100% sure if the guy on the floor actually said POTUS.

However, it does show up pretty soon thereafter in a bunch of different newspapers.

There was an article, I believe, in the Buffalo Times that got spread around where they talked about the Phillips Code.

And they talked about how sometimes newspapers make mistakes and do forget to convert POTUS back into the full president of the United States.

That said, it has been insider journalist jargon ever since.

So journalists have used this again and again and again, even well until the computer age, even now.

And then at some point, it left journalism and politics because naturally the politicians picked it up as well.

And now it’s more widely known and has a lot to do with the increase in media after World War II.

At least that’s one of the prevailing theories that as media exploded and there were more kinds of media, not just newspapers, but radio and television and then later the Internet.

We all had a much closer look inside the journalism field, a much closer look inside the field of politics.

Yeah, I’m thinking about the first time I heard FLOTUS, which first lady I was associating that with.

Who was it?

Maybe Michelle Obama. What do you think?

What do you think, Patricia?

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking, is that maybe before that, but I always, I mean, I seem to recall more often just the president.

And in some ways, or the first lady, and in some ways it seems unnecessary to me, I mean, this acronym, because it, I mean, president has three syllables, POTUS has two syllables.

It doesn’t seem to be a great savings.

And somehow I recall that, you know, when a caption would say, President signs Bill, I wouldn’t think, oh, what president could that be?

It must be.

And that, you know, it seems like an unnecessary extension.

The other thing is, in the telegraphic code, it’s about the number of letters.

So five letters versus how many are in the full presidency of the United States is quite a savings.

And then the other thing is there’s a register difference here.

POTUS is far more informal.

This is the, not quite jokey, but it’s the little more lighthearted insider lingo of a profession.

Shorthand.

And so it’s not the kind of thing that’s going to be on official proclamations.

It probably will never be used in any kind of, even declamations from opponents of presidents won’t, they won’t use POTUS.

It’s much more informal.

Anyway, this is a great call.

I really appreciate your thoughtfulness on this.

Thank you so much for sharing your thoughts.

Really appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

Take care now.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Patricia.

This is a show that celebrates curiosity, and we’d love for you to share yours with us.

The number is 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

I found myself lately talking to younger folks and saying,

When I was your age, we didn’t have an exclamation mark on the keyboard.

Do you remember the days when to make an exclamation mark,

You had to do an apostrophe and then backspace and put a period there?

Oh, yeah.

Well, I also remember there being, what was it, no one?

You had to use a lowercase l?

Yes, yes.

Yeah, there’s a few of those.

Life was tough back then.

It was hard.

Young people today don’t appreciate that, right?

And it was so hard to get to the emoji row.

You had to hold down all these special keys.

I know.

Turn the plate in a certain way.

That emoji row only had 15 faces on it.

Yeah, it wasn’t even a gleam in our eye, was it?

No, it wasn’t.

It was very far away.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Bill from Phoenix City, Alabama.

Hey, Bill.

Welcome to the show.

My friend is a retired Army Ranger and a surgeon for over 40 years, and he’s always had a wealth of great stories to tell and anecdotes from his career, both in the Army and in medicine.

And I would describe him kind of as a master of colloquialisms and with a minor in the creative use of expletives.

Just a minor, huh?

That’s right. Well, I’m going to be nice at this point.

One of the stories he peppers in with, like I said, a lot of interesting words and phrases,

And one which has crept in my speech lately is a real goat rope.

He usually uses it in a situation where he’s trying to describe a difficult or chaotic situation

Or someone who has made something unnecessarily complicated.

But the phrase, a real goat rope, I was just wondering what it meant.

I never really asked him how right.

I was maybe a little bit afraid to ask him, but I wanted to see what your thoughts were that.

Bill, you’re saying goat rope, like the animal, right?

Right. G-O-A-T, the first word, and the last word is rope, R-O-P-E.

Goat rope. Now, I know there are variants, goat rodeo sometimes and goat roping.

Okay.

I have done some digging on this, Bill, for my book, The Official Dictionary of Unofficial English, which I published in 2006.

When I was researching it the first time, I found a use in 1951 of a particular kind of comedic writing that people do when they want to talk about being really surprised by a situation.

And this is a classic example.

It’s a military official.

And he writes, I’ve been to two world fairs, goat roping in Idaho and caught off at Unsan, but I’ve never seen anything like this.

So he’s talking about the chaos of a world fair, the chaos of a goat rodeo and the chaos of a military operation.

But this new thing has really got him surprised.

There was a fellow by the name of Dick West.

I don’t know if you remember him, but in the 1960s, he was a popular newspaper columnist.

He loved this construction.

He had a bunch of different variations of it.

I’ve been to county fairs, a Tom Thumb wedding, and a goat roping,

So you might say that I have led a rather sophisticated life.

Okay, great.

Well, that may explain why it came over into the Army usage, too,

If your first example, and I think maybe that’s where he picked it up,

A phrase that’s more common as far as military usage, too.

But you know what’s interesting about it, Bill,

Is that it kind of fell out of use for a while,

And then sometime in the 1980s, it just kind of pops back up.

I found a bunch of uses in Southern newspapers related to politics.

Different newspapers, not wire stories, so locally reported stories.

All of them are quoting an anonymous political operative using goat rope or goat roping to refer to some chaotic situation.

Sure, sure.

So when you’re talking about a goat rodeo or a goat rope, you’re talking about a loud, noisy, sort of chaotic situation.

And people running all over the place, goats running all over the place.

It’s just…

Well, usually at a rodeo, you have the big events where the experts and the professionals

Kind of do what, you know, ride Broncos or whatever.

And then there are kid events or amateur events where anybody can try their hand

At throwing a lasso over a goat.

And it’s usually hilarious because the goats…

Not for the goat.

Well, not for the goat, but for the people watching and the participants.

It’s not a well-being.

Kind of like a grease pig rally or something like that?

Something like that, yeah.

Yeah, pretty much you’re lucky if anybody wins.

That’s how chaotic they are.

Oh, okay.

Well, that makes a lot of sense.

Well, Bill, something tells me that you have a whole treasure trove of other expressions like that,

So I’m hoping that you’ll call us again sometime.

Oh, gosh, yeah.

Okay, thank you so much, Bill.

Thanks, Bill.

Thank you.

All right, Bill.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

We got a call from Case, who grew up in Los Angeles and moved to New Hampshire,

Where nobody understood an expression that she was using, and that expression was child cheater.

Do you know this?

Child cheater? Is this a booster seat?

No, no, it’s not a booster seat, but it is something you would find.

Oh, I know what this is.

This is a fake kid that you put in your car so you can ride in the HOV lane, right?

How did you know?

Is that it?

No, no, no, no.

No, a child cheater is a spatula.

And she was wondering why it’s called a child cheater.

And it’s because if you’re baking a cake and you’re using this spatula to get all the batter off of the sides of the bowl.

There’s no bowl left to lick.

There’s nothing left.

Yes, yes.

They’re sometimes called kid cheaters.

Kid cheaters, yeah.

But you’re not the only one who uses it.

So I don’t know what people in New Hampshire say, but it’s not child cheater.

This is why we loved it when my mother baked with the blender because it’s hard to get it all off the beaters, right?

Very easy to get it off if you’re just hand stirring or hand mixing.

Yeah, my tongue is moving just thinking about it.

Plus, standing in the kitchen eating food and not at a table with no napkin and plates was against all the rules.

Yes.

And it felt like you were getting away with something.

Even more delicious.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sylvia Bachner.

Hi, Sylvia, where are you calling from?

Indianapolis, Indiana.

Welcome to the program.

What can we do for you, Sylvia?

I have a question about some of the vocabulary my grandfather used.

When I was a child, he was from Kentucky in the Sadieville, Synthiana area.

One of the things he used to say about people who did not like to work was that they weren’t very work-brickle.

And, you know, I got the idea pretty quickly about what he meant.

But I discovered later on when I asked him that you could not say the reverse.

You couldn’t say that somebody was work-brickle.

So I’m just interested in the word, where it comes from, why it’s only used in the negatives, that kind of thing.

That’s so interesting because there is a certain amount of confusion about this word.

Well, the most common version is work brittle, B-R-I-T-T-L-E.

Oh.

Yeah, and it has been used positively for a very long time.

It probably comes from a dialectal word in England.

But since at least the late 19th century, you could say that somebody was work brittle,

Meaning that they were what I described, somebody who’s really industrious and eager to get to work and all of that.

What’s really interesting, though, is that after World War II, you see a lot more use of work brittle, meaning not so industrious, like actually lazy.

And so it’s this weird situation where work brittle can mean the opposite of itself.

Some people use it to say somebody who’s really industrious, and some people use it to describe somebody who’s super lazy.

It’s one of these odd situations where two different meanings coexist, sort of like the word peruse, you know, which can mean to look at something really, really carefully or to look at something just in a sort of cursory fashion.

So it’s kind of odd in that way.

And so that second leader misinterpretation came about because people didn’t quite understand what the expression meant.

Brittle.

They thought brittle meant, oh, like, they’re too fragile to work, some kind of, they’re too much of a, I don’t know, delicate flower.

Yeah.

And I’m interested that you’re calling from Indianapolis, right?

Yes.

Right, because in the Dictionary of American Regional English, there’s a map of where people say work brittle in that first sense of being industrious, and the big concentration is in Indiana.

Mm—

Oh, for heaven’s sake.

How about that?

Well, that is interesting.

Well, thank you so much for calling about this and sharing it with us.

Well, thank you so much for the information.

It’s fascinating.

Sure thing.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So that’s a really interesting expression.

I think I’ve only ever seen that in fiction at this point.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard it in the wild.

You sound like you’ve heard people say it.

I’ve heard it a couple of times, but then I’m from that part of the country.

Yeah, Kentucky, just south of there.

We know your family has words that seem to belong to you and you’re not sure if anyone else says them.

We can tell you if that’s true or not.

877-929-9673.

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

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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.

You