Gangbusters (episode #1448)

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.

Grant, how would you react if I took both of your hands in mine and looked into your eyes and said,

May a mouse eat you?

I’d be confused.

Yes.

It’s nice to hold someone’s hands, though. That’s nice.

And I know you don’t mean me any harm, as far as I know.

Right, no.

Because you’ve been in the hardware store lately to the Axile.

I don’t know. This is from another language, right?

Yes, exactly.

If you and I were Persian speakers, you would have an entirely different reaction because I would say,

Which means may a mouse eat you.

And it’s a term of endearment.

Isn’t that sweet?

May a mouse eat you.

Yeah, you’re just so cute and little, tiny and sweet.

It’s the kind of thing that adults might say when they’re squeezing a little child’s cheek or something.

But people who are affectionate with each other say it too.

Isn’t that sweet?

That is cute.

May a mouse eat you?

I thought maybe it was a death warning that you were going to be buried into the soil and the mice would be able to eat your corpse.

I don’t know.

I don’t know.

I think we need to brush up on our Farsi.

Seriously.

But it is weird how many strange terms end up becoming terms of endearment.

I always loved my little cabbage in French and actually used that with my son.

And it wasn’t until much later, it was like seven or so, that he actually said, why do you call me that?

And I had to explain it to you.

Cute little camera G.

I know, right?

What is it about terms like that

That are so appealing?

And I also like we use,

A lot of people use bean

For their little baby

And there’s something small

And cute about a bean.

The bean, the little bean.

And it’s funny,

My Facebook is filled

With the cutest babies ever

From all across the world

Because all my friends

Are having babies.

Yeah, and a lot of people say,

You know.

Or cute as a bug.

There’s something about being tiny, right?

That’s right, right?

It’s cute as in the original cute,

Like the small, well-crafted thing.

And not so necessarily the adorable or attractive part of cute.

Yeah, exactly.

Well, we’ll talk about some more terms of endearment later in the show.

And in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you, 877-929-9673,

Or send your terms of endearment to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Megan Briswold calling from Plano, Texas.

Hi, Megan. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Megan.

Thanks.

What is up?

Hi, I’m a teacher.

I teach 11th grade English.

And recently, I signed a project to my students, and later on, my colleagues and I were talking about how industriously the kids had gotten started working on this project, and they seemed excited about it.

And I said, yeah, they were just going gangbusters on it.

And my friends looked at me and said, what?

And another one said, yeah, Megan, I’ve heard you use that before, but what does gangbusters mean?

And I was floored.

I thought everybody used that term.

And I said, you know, they were working really diligently on their project.

They were going gangbusters.

So I was curious to see what you guys knew about it.

I’m surprised they hadn’t heard the term.

Yeah, I mean, I think it’s still pretty common.

I thought so, too.

Maybe it’s just certain circles.

Yeah, we can tell you a little bit about it.

The term gangbuster itself has been around since at least the early 20th century.

And it referred to the kind of person you might imagine, like a police officer who is known for breaking up gangs or, you know, aggressively fighting organized crime, that kind of thing.

So they’re actually busting up gangs.

They’re actually literally busting up gangs.

Gangs of criminals.

Yeah.

Yeah.

But the term got popularized by a radio drama in the 1930s that went on for, I think, 21 years or so.

That’s right.

And it was called?

Gang Busters.

And Grant says it exactly the way the show opens.

I listened to that show when I was a boy.

I would lie in my bed at night when I was supposed to be sleeping listening to old-time radios on repeat from stations around the country.

Oh, that’s funny.

Yeah.

And it’s sort of like, I mean, the thing that I compare it to is Dragnet, you know, where they talked about police cases and how they got solved and all that.

But Grant’s right.

They started the show with a whole lot of noise, like wailing sirens.

Machine guns.

Yeah, machine guns.

And there was often a really exciting moment in the show, like the chase and the capture, like the collision of the cars or like the bank vault busting open or something like that.

Yeah. And the funny thing, too, a little tidbit here is that the guy who said gangbusters was the former head of the New Jersey State Police, whose name was Norman Schwarzkopf, whose son became the famous general.

Whoa.

How about that?

Whoa.

Yeah, you can kind of picture Norman Schwarzkopf Jr.

As gangbusters.

That’s pretty cool.

Well, thank you so much.

I had no idea that it had that background and that history.

How about that?

Well, share that with your friends.

So, yeah, the radio show did the work of people who are working diligently

And actively and very aggressively.

Cool.

Well, then I’m glad to know that I used it appropriately.

You absolutely did.

Thanks, Megan.

All right.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I just want to tell everybody, if you want to hear that old radio show,

You can go to archive.org, the Internet Archive.

In the upper right-hand corner, use the search field, just type in gangbusters,

And you will find a ton of gangbusters old-time radio shows.

And they hold up surprisingly well for stuff that’s older than your grandparents.

And they really do come on like gangbusters.

I mean, the beginning is cacophonous.

It’s not radio you can sleep to.

Yeah, exactly.

But what a thrill that must have been.

Oh, yeah.

In the radio days before TV.

Yeah, all those sound effects.

Sure.

The Foldy Man was busy on that show.

Yes.

877-929-9673.

Grant, I know you know some Swedish.

How about this term of endearment?

Certainness.

It means sweet nose.

Sweet nose.

Isn’t that like a little cat’s nose?

Aren’t they the little pink noses?

That reminds me that one of the terms of endearment that I’ve been trying to remember for years,

I learned from my Swedish friends, and they said it translated as cozy yarn girl

To describe the kind of person who was like a warm sweater,

That you loved them so much that they just made you feel comfortable.

So if you speak Swedish and you know that, let me know.

I’m going to ask my friends. I’ll get back to you.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Eva Jo Gregory, and I’m from Billings, Montana.

Hey, Eva Jo, welcome.

How are you doing?

I’m doing pretty good.

What can we do for you?

My boyfriend is from Grand Rapids, Michigan, and he uses these two phrases, which I really don’t understand.

One of them includes the word dank, and then the other one is clutch.

So I don’t know.

If I make a really great meal or something, he’ll be like, oh, this is just so dank.

This is so dank.

Or if he sees a really cool car or he loves motorcycles, a great motorcycle, he’ll be like, that’s so clutch.

That’s so clutch?

Is it just automobiles he says that about?

No.

It’s almost as if he uses dank for, I don’t know, a particular object,

And clutch is like a situation.

So if there’s something really cool going on, it’s clutch.

Got it.

There’s a cool car driving.

I can definitely help you with both of those.

Clutch is the easiest one, so I’ll just dispel with it quickly.

It probably comes from baseball, where there’s a clutch situation,

Means that things are really tense and there’s a moment to score

And the team really needs to do a good job in order to get ahead and beat their opponents.

And so that’s a clutch situation.

It probably comes from older expressions having to do with being in a clutch,

Which means being nervous or being tense.

And you do find clutch as an adjective throughout the sporting world, not just in baseball,

To refer to these really serious situations where somebody’s got to, they’ve got to prevail.

They’ve got to pull it all out and give 110% and win.

So if they do, it’s really cool.

It’s a really good, positive thing.

The situation is, yeah, it’s a good, positive thing.

So the clutch situation isn’t necessarily positive, but the positive outcome from the clutch can be positive.

So I could see why there’s a transference there and a kind of a slangy usage.

I would say that slangy usage isn’t that common, but dank that he uses to mean good or great or cool, that is incredibly common.

And most of our listeners are going, oh, yeah, that comes from the marijuana world.

But do you know how it comes from the marijuana world?

So dank has been used for at least 25 years to describe good marijuana.

And what’s funny about that is good marijuana isn’t necessarily actually dank, meaning moist or wet.

That’s probably a sign that it’s not ready to go.

Instead, I think it has more to do with the smell of good marijuana, which is kind of like, imagine a potato cellar, which is going to be dank.

So in any case, how dank became widely used in the marijuana world, I have a theory.

And I got this from Dr. John Leiter, who was the chief editor of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, which I used to help edit.

And in his notes, he has written that he believes it comes from a guy named Manny the Hippie, who appeared on the David Letterman show in 1996.

Manny the Hippie was this character in the Haight-Ashbury part of San Francisco in the mid-90s.

Clearly a drug user, an admitted drug user, a convicted drug user.

And David Letterman did a show on the road in San Francisco.

And he ended up spending an entire day in a van with Manny.

Manny taking…

And Manny is like…

You can find some videos on YouTube of Manny the Hippie.

He’s a character.

But his vocabulary is loaded with things, including the word dank.

And as a matter of fact, it is the earliest use of dank that I know of.

I haven’t looked thoroughly.

But the fact is, in the mid-90s, the David Letterman show was huge.

We’re talking 20 years ago.

A lot of people watched that show.

And Manny was on the show multiple times.

And he was such a memorable character that Dr. Leiter’s theory, one which I endorse,

Is that Manny was responsible for popularizing the word dank in marijuana circles across the country.

Very interesting.

Yeah, well, I’m going to have to share with him what this really means because I don’t think he knows.

You don’t.

You think he just picked it up from friends then with no knowledge whatsoever.

He’s not a dope smoker?

Yeah.

No, he’s not.

Okay.

Not a dope smoker, not a Letterman fan?

Well, that’s interesting.

So think about the generations.

He is a Letterman fan, but definitely wasn’t watching 20 years ago.

Oh, okay.

Think about the generations, though, that now this word has come.

So it’s now used just to mean cool by a guy who’s not in the marijuana world.

That’s a natural progression for slang.

That’s pretty cool.

Yeah, it makes sense.

Very interesting. All right, well let us know what he says, will you?

I will, yeah. All right, take care now. Thank you. Bye-bye.

Thanks, Eva Jo. Bye-bye. Bye. Manny the hippie also used the word

Swag to mean bad. To mean bad, though.

Not to mean like excess stuff that you’re given for free.

Or even to mean swagger or anything like that. So that was one of his

Words which it didn’t catch on. Yeah, I’ve never heard it used that way. Yeah, swag to mean

Bad. I think there’s a few uses of it out there, but it’s not very common at all.

Manny the Hippie, I wonder why he wasn’t monetized.

I mean, he just sounds like a character, right?

Well, Manny apparently was in a really terrible movie, and that was that.

Oh, okay. He was in a movie.

You’ve got to watch this segment.

Go to YouTube, look up Manny the Hippie, just like you think it’s spelled.

Manny the Hippie and Letterman.

There’s like a five-minute interview.

After Manny has left prison, and the reason he was in prison,

Because he violated his parole by going to New York to be on the Letterman show,

And then was on the air talking about drugs.

And then he was imprisoned for 10 months.

Manny the Hippie is quite a character, let me tell you.

Three-time Darwin Award winner.

He’s still around, actually.

Just a few years ago, San Francisco Station looked him up.

And he’s still in Haight-Ashbury.

A lot of people remember him from The Letterman Show.

All right.

So go to YouTube and watch Manny the Hippie.

And as long as you’re there on your computer,

Send us an email with your questions and stories about language.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Also stop by our Facebook page and find us on Twitter at Wayword.

Does your family have secret language?

Share your stories as A Way with Words continues.

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

And we’re joined once again by our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, guys.

I’m back once again with a quiz for you.

Welcome.

You know, people are always asking me, where do you get the ideas for your quizzes all the time?

This one was something I saw on the side of a bus.

There was an ad for an explosive expose.

And I’m like, hey, wait a second.

The word expose is inside the word explosive.

-oh.

That’s the kind of thing that’s always interesting to me.

I’ve gathered a few of these words that are inside other words for you.

And to make it easy to figure it out, I’ve limited my search to four-letter words that are inside other words.

Okay.

I’ll give you the long word.

You give me the word inside, and the clue will clue the whole thing.

Got it.

For the most part, these will be nouns inside of adjectives.

Oh, okay.

That can describe that noun.

For example, in the clue, a union member might find him despicable.

The word despicable contains the word…

Scab.

Yes, very good.

Now, to be even more helpful, the outside word, as I call it, the outside word, is always the last word in the clue.

Okay?

Okay.

Gotcha.

Here we go.

This one’s a little cryptic, but I think you can get it.

It can be quite soothing.

It can be quite soothing.

Right.

Sing?

Song.

Song, yes.

Very good.

This one’s actually different from the others.

This has a verb inside it.

What I do with my psychiatrist.

Chat?

Yes, chat.

Grant, already getting out of the gate with two.

For once.

Yes.

Here’s the next one.

This office staple is often transparent.

Tape.

Tape, yes.

It’s actually also inside staple, which is weird.

It is writing that is libelous.

Libelous.

Lies.

Lies.

You sit on a throne of lies.

These would be useful in studying demographics.

Demographics.

Maps.

Yes, maps is right.

Nice.

I think we’ve hit a puzzle that Grant is in tune with.

Bring it on, my brother!

Finally, hopefully, it is buoyant.

Buoyant.

Buoyant.

Buoyant.

A buoy.

Well, yeah.

Now, the letters are separated by other letters in this one.

Boat.

Boat is correct.

Yes, way to go.

It’s time for me to get on my boat and sail on out of here.

You guys did terrific.

Wow.

Well, that was tough.

Tough for me, not for Grant.

Some days you’re in the pocket.

Some days you’re out of the pocket.

Some days you’re inside the word.

I feel like Martha usually cleans my clock, so I feel pretty happy today.

My clock’s pretty dirty right now.

Thanks, John.

Really appreciate this one.

Thank you, Grant.

Thank you, Martha.

I’m going to feast off this for weeks.

And if you want to talk with us about language, call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike McDonald from San Diego.

Hey, Mike, welcome.

What can we do for you?

Well, I’d like to perhaps put out a challenge to you and Grant and your listeners on something that has bothered me for some time.

And that is a lack of a modern salutation for the heading of letters.

And you’re talking about letters that are printed out on paper?

Yes. Well, to the extent anybody writes letters anymore these days,

You know, typically you put, you know, dear sir or dear madam or gentleman,

And those terms seem to be old-fashioned and they’re also gender-specific,

Which is sort of inappropriate in today’s sort of modern world.

And so I’m looking for a more appropriate salutation that we can use that sort of reflects our times.

So dude isn’t working for you?

Dude?

I think here in Southern California probably would be very appropriate.

It might be.

It’s like, dude, I’ve got a business proposition for you.

Or dog.

And so, obviously, we’re interested here in levels of formality.

I mean, are you making business proposals?

Are you writing your nephew?

Who are you writing to?

Yeah, who’s your audience?

Well, typically, people use, if they try to use something else, they may use something to whom it may concern, and that seems very impersonal and sort of awkward.

What I use, and I’ve got to say I don’t really like it, but it’s the best I’ve come up with, is I sort of focus on what the person does.

And this is typically in more of a business environment.

So if somebody is a banker or a person with the DMV, the Department of Motor Vehicles, I typically use Dear Banker Person or Dear DMV Person.

But again, I don’t think it’s a very good solution.

So I’m looking for an additional solution.

Mike, to clarify, you’re saying that you actually use the words DMV Person or you use their name?

This is when you don’t know who the individual is.

Okay.

Okay.

And do you know how that goes over?

Has anybody reacted to that?

No, I’ve never had a reaction back.

But it gets the job done is what you’re saying.

It’s just inelegant.

It gets the job done, yeah.

How do you feel about leaving the greeting or salutation off altogether?

I sort of feel like we’ve been so ingrained to have some type of a salutation

To sort of start the text of a letter.

You’re right.

And it’s frustrating that these terms that used to be so proper and just an easy thing to fall back on just seem stuffy.

I mean, older than madmen.

I do use to whom it may concern, but we’re talking like IRS level of letters, right?

We’re talking like the people who could do you serious damage or do you serious good if, you know, the people who have a lot of control over what’s about to happen to you.

Yeah, I do that when I feel huffy.

You know, it’s so context sensitive.

Well, Mike, what we’re going to do, and we know people out there have already encountered this and are going to have answers for you and for us.

And we welcome those answers.

How should Mike be addressing letters to handwritten letters or printed letters when he doesn’t know who he’s writing to?

To whom he is writing?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Mike, we’ll see what we come up with.

All right.

And we will be looking at the top of those emails to see how they salute us, if they do at all.

Okay, well, thank you very much.

All right. Cheers. Thanks for calling.

Thanks, Mike.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye now.

We talked on an earlier show about childhood misunderstandings of words like bacon seed for vacancy.

And that prompted Diane Walsh to write.

She’s from Boardman, Ohio.

And Diane writes, in the early 60s when I was learning to read, I would read the newspaper and guerrilla warfare was in the news often.

Well, I thought they were talking about actual guerrillas and I was terrified.

It was after a long while that I asked someone and they reassured me that guerrillas were not going to come after me and my family.

Bless her heart.

That’s kind of sweet.

It is sweet.

I had the same experience, Diane.

I was so worried about those guerrillas.

I unfortunately learned it in print first.

And I had already, yeah, and I had started some Spanish already, so I didn’t make that.

But I could see that.

Oh, that’s hilarious.

You never had that misunderstanding of G-U-E and G-O-R.

Some other ones, I’m sure, if I think about it, but not that one.

Oh, my gosh.

I was thinking, what are those gorillas so angry about?

And are they fighting each other?

And this is going to spill over into my community?

Planet of the Apes will become real.

That’s that thing about language when you’re a little kid and you’re just starting to get the hang of it.

And you almost know too much for your own good.

You don’t know enough, but you know too much for your own good.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Gwen.

Hi, Gwen. Welcome to the program.

Where are you calling us from?

Thank you. Terre Haute, Indiana.

Oh, very good. What’s up?

Well, I called in with a story I thought you guys might enjoy with a kind of little play on words.

And I thought I’d share that with you today.

Great. We love word stories.

Well, this is a few years ago, and I grew up southeast of here in a little town called Duggar, Indiana,

And it’s in west-central Indiana, and it’s mining country.

Years ago, it was deep mines, and now it’s surface mining.

And those of us who lived there, grew up there,

Refer to the large drag lines that clear away the soil as a stripper.

And it’s just when you talk about the stripper,

Everyone locally knows you’re talking about the large drag line.

And a few years ago, it was my great-grandfather’s birthday, and we all gathered on Christmas Day for his birthday.

And my cousin had come in with his new bride from Texas.

And we celebrated the birthday and had the cake and everything.

And they were building at the time a brand-new drag line.

And, of course, men being what they are, the bigger the toy is, the more they’re interested.

So all the guys pile in the car and go down to see how they’re building this large drag line.

And when I mean large, the bucket alone can carry 450 cubic tons of dirt in one scoop.

Kind of think of it as two city buses could fit easily in the bucket of this.

And the guys are all interested.

So they go down, Jerry, and all the guys pile in the cars to go down.

Well, his new bride comes walking through and wanted to know where Jerry was.

And we looked up and said, oh, all the guys went down to see the stripper.

Well, she got this unusual look on her face and didn’t say anything.

And we continued on the conversation.

Finally, she jumped up very, very agitated and said, what kind of family is this?

Why would they do that on Christmas Day and your grandfather’s birthday?

The men would go see a stripper.

And we said, well, yeah.

You know, I mean, it’s new, you know, and still not getting the gist of her concern.

And we just continued, and she just was very agitated.

And then finally the light went on and someone said,

And they said, well, they went to see the drag line.

And we could not convince her.

We tried to explain to her what it was,

But all she thought of was a Gypsy Rose Lee performance as opposed to,

You know, the actual thing.

So we literally had to get her in the car and drive her down to see.

And luckily the guys were all still there, you know,

Looking at the drag mine slash stripper,

And it took some violent convincing of all,

Because she thought maybe they congregated there

And then were going on to see the stripper.

She had never heard that.

So, you know, the use of words locally

Can sometimes send people into panic.

That’s really, really good, Gwen.

So it’s stripping the soil is why it’s called a stripper, right?

Right, that’s why it’s referred to locally

Or by most people as a stripper,

Because it strips away the soil to expose the coal vein.

Well, Gwen, thank you so much for sharing this story about the importance of precision in language.

I appreciate it, Gwen. Thank you so much. Bye-bye.

Well, thank you, guys. Love to show.

Thanks, Gwen. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Wow.

Good thing she caught them before they went down to the Gentleman’s Club after seeing the drag line, right?

That’s right. She intervened.

We love these stories about language and words misheard and misunderstood.

Call us about yours, 877-929-9673, or send those stories an email to words@waywordradio.org.

A little over a century ago, a little editorial in the Springfield Republican newspaper in Springfield, Massachusetts,

It’s suggested a new colloquial expression for the next edition of Webster’s Dictionary.

Their origin story was that there was a father who went to see the headmaster at the local school

Because his son was struggling in school.

He had been doing great, but all of a sudden his grades started dropping.

And the other thing that emerged in this discussion between the father and the headmaster

Was that the son had in the meantime become, quote, conspicuous as a ladies’ man.

And the father said, yes, yes, I know.

He’s got all girled up.

And the editors at The Republican love that term, all girled up.

And they described it this way.

It’s a remarkably happy and pregnant phrase.

If there’s anything that plays the mischief with the girls and boys during that budding, downy, and velvety period of their teens,

When they ought to be laying solid and permanent educational foundations,

It is this premature efflorescence of the sexual period

Which moves boys and girls who ought to be kept down to study

To perk and prim and sidle and play with each other’s eyes

And write silly and badly spelled notes to each other

And eat slate pencils in private.

But then it rarely lasts long, it is less harmful than tobacco or whiskey,

And there is no law against youth of that age making fools of themselves.

All that for a verbed noun.

Girled up.

He’s all girled up.

When you first said it, I’m thinking like, wow, he’s wearing dresses.

What’s he doing?

Right?

I’m thinking drag went back that far.

Is he going to do a lip sync?

Oh, yeah.

I thought that was so funny.

And, you know, that particular newspaper is also supposedly the first citation of somebody suggesting the title Ms.

Oh, interesting.

For women.

Interesting.

Springfield Republican 100 years ago.

100 years ago.

Boy, they really wrote purple prose back then, didn’t they?

They did.

They had no end of printer’s ink, apparently.

I know.

I know.

And I just love that they were so excited about this neologism.

And eating slate pencils, too.

I assume that means using up a lot of pencils.

By that, I think they mean eating chalk.

If you Google eating slate pencils, there are all these videos and all these articles about people who eat chalk.

Why?

A lot of them have a calcium deficiency.

Oh, I see.

What is that called?

Pica-rism?

Pica.

Pica, right?

Yeah.

Here we go again.

We veered off course.

877-929-9673 or Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Camille from Dallas.

How’s everybody doing?

We’re great, Camille.

How are you doing?

I’m good, thank you.

What would you like to talk with us about?

So I teach at Seagullville Middle School in Dallas.

All right.

Oh, one of our people.

And we are looking at the word student Friday.

Okay.

Do they want to say hi to everyone?

Say hello.

Hi back.

That sounds like eighth graders to me.

Well, what do they want to know?

What task have they given you to talk to us about?

Well, I heard the word at an AP institute.

And the word means taking pleasure in others’ misfortune.

Oh, that word.

Okay, okay.

So we’re reading Divergence, and, you know, they like it, and so we’re just looking at that word.

Okay.

Yeah, the word that you want there is schadenfreude.

The word is pronounced schadenfreude.

Say it again?

Schadenfreude.

Tell them to write this down.

It’s S-C-H-A-D-E-N-F-R-E-U-D-E.

Schadenfreude.

Okay, so we wrote the word, but it’s schaden.

Yeah, schaden.

It retains something of the German pronunciation.

And that E on the end is pronounced as a U.

So it’s a German word, and the E on the end is pronounced like U.

U.

Yeah, schadenfreude.

Schadenfreude.

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

I think that’s funny.

I agree with everything you want to say.

It’s actually kind of fun to say.

It’s got a nice da-da-da about it.

It’s got a nice rhythm.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And as you probably know, it means taking joy in the pain of others or something like that.

Literally, in German, it means something like damage joy or harm joy.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

It’s related to English words like the schaden part is related to the English word scathe, like a scathing review is really harsh.

And the freude is like the English word frolic.

They come from the same root.

So schadenfreude is like scathing frolic almost.

You’re laughing at somebody or you’re taking joy in their pain.

Wow.

That’s a lot to teach in that word.

That’s the whole point of this show.

Yeah, and the point of your work, I guess.

Camille, best of luck with your teaching.

Say hello to the students for us, and thank you so much for calling.

Awesome. Thank you guys so very much.

Awesome program.

All right, take care. Bye-bye.

Keep up the good work, Camille.

Bye, class.

Bye-bye. That’s nice.

877-929-9673.

I was talking to a Texan about how dry the weather has been out here.

She said, it’s so dry that trees are bribing the dogs.

That’s how dry it is.

Took me a second, but I got it.

The trees are bribing the dogs.

Here, doggy, doggy, doggy.

877-929-9673.

More conversation about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned to 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.

Think of a word that you consider beautiful.

Now, why is it beautiful?

Well, the English essayist Max Beerbohm had some thoughts about this.

In 1909, he wrote this,

What you take to be beauty or ugliness of sound is indeed nothing but beauty or ugliness of meaning.

You are pleased by the sound of such words as gondola, vestments, chancel, ermine, manor house.

They seem to be fraught with a subtle onomatopoeia,

Severally suggesting by their sounds the grace or sanctity or solid comfort

Of the things they connote. You murmur them luxuriously, dreamily. Well, prepare for a slight

Shock. Scrofula, investments, cancer, vermin, warehouse. Horrible words, are they not? But say

Gondola, scrofula, vestments, investments, and so on, and then lay your hand on your heart and

Declare that the words in the first list are in mere sound nicer than the words in the second.

Of course they’re not.

If a gondola were a disease, and if a scrofula were a beautiful boat peculiar to a beautiful city,

The effect of each word would be exactly the reverse of what it is.

The appropriately beautiful or ugly sound of any word is an illusion wrought on us by what the word connotes.

That’s well put.

You think?

I do. I find that again and again, when you look up lists of people’s favorite words over the last century, because it comes up repeatedly, often in magazine competitions or magazine surveys, people put things like mother and love and beauty or country, things like that, things that they have a lot of love for or pride in or strong associations with.

So absolutely, we invest our words with emotion. And somehow we think it’s the word that’s doing the caring, but we’re doing the caring for the word.

I guess I wanted to believe that words just in and of themselves, devoid of meaning, had a particular kind of beauty.

But this guy is arguing otherwise.

I agree with Beerbohm.

I think of words as kind of like bookshelves.

I love my bookshelves for the books, not for the shelves.

They’re carrying the books, which are the things that I love.

The shelves are merely doing some work for me.

Most words are like that.

But poetry doesn’t work unless you invest words with meanings, right?

And not just meanings, but connotations and suggestions and hints and memories.

We’ve talked before on this program about words become more powerful as we age because we have more associations attached to them,

More memories of a particular speech or book or romantic conversation or something nice that someone said that used this particular language.

Are you saying that once again we’re talking about how context is important?

It never goes away, does it?

It doesn’t.

Maybe if we said the word context 50 times.

Right.

Pretty lovely.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hello.

Who’s this?

Hi, this is Mary Lou.

Hi, Mary Lou.

Where are you calling from?

From Petoskey, Michigan.

Petoskey, Michigan.

I don’t think we’ve ever had a Petoskey, Michigan call.

We have not.

You’re the first.

Welcome to the show.

Northwest Lower Peninsula.

Got it.

Okay.

What can we do for you?

I have a question about the origin of the phrase, the whole shebang.

I was raised on a farm that was homesteaded in 1835, and one of the phrases my grandmother, who we lived with, she lived with us, she used a lot was the whole shebang.

And that’s when she wanted to say everything included the whole shebang, and it was used in a lot of different contexts.

And it just happened that I had a great, great uncle who served in the Civil War and was imprisoned in Andersonville.

And when my husband and I had an opportunity to visit Andersonville, we did find his name and the roster of people that were there.

And we also were taken on a tour of the grounds at the Andersonville Center there.

And we noticed that there were little tents where the prisoners were kept, and they were called shebangs.

So I wondered if, in fact, is this the origin of the term, and how did it come to mean everything or the whole thing?

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

In the early days in the 1860s, actually about the time of the Civil War, we’d see the first printed uses of shebang.

And it usually means one’s quarters, a small enclosure, a hut.

It’s never used for something like a mansion or a fine building or anything like that.

In a couple places, it’s used just for the place to sleep behind bushes.

So it’s your shebang.

And eventually, it started to be used to refer to you and all your belongings, everything that you own.

That’s all your shebang.

And so then you’ll start to see later when people talk about, like, I’m selling the whole shebang,

Meaning I’m selling the household with the furniture in it and everything in the drawers, that sort of thing.

And then it kind of just generalized later to mean any all-inclusive set of anything.

Anything. Any use.

And there’s a theory, and not a strong one, but there’s a fairly decent theory that it comes from an Irish word, shabin, meaning a drinking house of ill repute, kind of a place where you’d go to get rot gut.

And given the Irish influence on American English and the Scots-Irish influence, I wouldn’t be surprised if that were truly the origin of it.

Yeah, I could see having a really humble little shebang there and referring to a place like that.

-huh.

Well, that’s very interesting.

I’m glad to hear all the background of the term.

Oh, Mary Lou, I’m really glad to hear all the background of your family.

That must have been quite an experience to go there and see.

Yes, it was.

It was.

It was a kind of a spine-chilling experience to see the name listed there.

Fortunately, he was one of the, not very many, I think, released early from Andersonville to another nearby town.

So he survived the whole experience.

Well, he did.

Very good.

Wow.

Yeah, we love these kinds of family connections.

Thanks for sharing yours.

Take care.

Shirley.

Thank you.

Bye.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Tell us your family stories about language, just like Mary Lou did.

877-929-9673 is the number to call, or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yeah, hello. This is Steve Pond from Burlington, Vermont.

Hi, Steve. Welcome to the program.

Hello, Steve. What can we do for you?

Well, we were having a dinner party a few weeks ago, and after a couple glasses of wine,

We decided to discuss things like where the words of spitting image and dead ringer came from.

So I thought, well, I’ll call you guys and see if you have any ideas.

So what was the substance of the conversation?

Different theories floating around?

Yeah, well, we have one particular friend that’s kind of a cerebral type,

And he just sort of all of a sudden pops up with these things,

And we’re like going, well, yeah, I guess so.

I’m not sure where they do come from.

So we, you know, between maybe horseshoes and whatever else, you know,

You could come up with, we really couldn’t, you know, find any particular solution to the problem.

So dead ringer is one of those you mentioned?

Yeah. Yeah. Dead ringer and like spitting image.

Sometimes you talk about somebody’s a spitting image of somebody or they’re sort of similar in what they’re going for, I guess.

Yeah. Dead ringer is just exactly the same, the same image, right?

Somebody who’s a dead ringer looks exactly like somebody else that you know, right?

Right, right.

And you mentioned horseshoes.

Interestingly enough, dead ringer may come from horse racing and the fact that in horse racing,

The term ringer has been used for a horse that’s entered in a race that’s actually a higher class of horse

Than all the other horses in the race.

And so it’s not really a fair race because you have this ringer in the race

And people in the know are going to bet on that ringer and win in an unfair way.

And the dead in dead ringer is just this sense of dead is the sense of absolutely.

Like if you’re in a dead heat, for example, it’s just an exact deadline finish.

A dead shot directly on the target.

Yeah, you’re dead right about something.

Absolutely right.

It’s absolutely.

So a dead ringer is somebody who absolutely is just like a DNA carbon copy of somebody else.

And just for the record, Dead Ringer does not come from that email you were forwarded that suggests it had to do with people buried alive ringing bells on the surface so they could be rescued.

It has nothing to do with that.

Yeah, who wasn’t forwarded that email?

Yes, that is not a true story, at least as far as this origin goes.

That’s right.

If you get that email that says—

I did read that, and I said, well, that’s an interesting sightlight.

It doesn’t seem to make any sense, but—

No, no.

If you get that email that says, life in the 1500s, just send it to your—

Delete it.

Yeah.

Delete it to your—

Send it to your trash can.

And now spitting image has some interesting complications as well, and a number of folk etymologies there.

These stories that may or may not be true, it’s much harder to pin spitting image down.

But the gist of it is there’s a linguist by the name of Larry Horn at Yale,

Who for years has been working on the idea that the spit and image or spitting image came from an older form of the verb to spit.

The past tense would be spitten, as in beaten, you know, S-P-I-T-T-E-N.

We don’t really conjugate verbs in this way anymore in English, except the ones that we’ve kept on from the older forms of English.

What’s interesting about this, there’s been a lot of theory that it comes from spit in image, spitting image, spit and image.

And a lot of times, though, it’s about he’s the spitting image of his father.

It’s so often male.

It’s the son said to look like the father.

And what Larry’s done is put together this 27-page paper.

It’s in the Journal of American Speech, published 10 or so years ago.

And in this paper, he finds other versions of this expression in a bunch of other languages.

And it turns out all of these other expressions give real credence to the idea that what we’re talking about here is the idea that it’s as if the son were spit from the father’s mouth or from his body in a way that makes him exactly like the father.

And so we are talking about the verb to spit.

And the verb is the most important part, not the image part.

And it’s the spitting image.

It’s spitting as past tense.

Right.

So the image of his dad, you know?

Yeah.

Really interesting.

He finds versions of it in Italian, French, some far less common language like Asturian, Flemish, Croatian.

It’s in Greek and Irish.

Does a wide variety of these all have this idea that a son looks like his father?

Yeah, because I read something, I researched it a little bit,

And there was some dimension of, like, if a carpenter wants to make a paneling

Of identical pieces of wood, you know, that sort of bookmatch each other,

You split it, and when you split it, you have opposing sides

That are identical to each other.

And so somebody thought maybe the word got more from splitting image

To spitting somehow.

Yeah, that’s another one of those false trails.

We do find a number of uses where people misinterpret the word as split, S-P-L-I-T, instead of spit, S-P-I-T.

But those are unusual.

They’re not very old.

They’re not nearly as old as this expression is itself.

And they always look like reinterpretations or misinterpretations.

And so people have kind of come up with these fake etymological ideas in order to explain their misinterpretation, and they just don’t hold water.

Right, right.

All right, very good.

Okay, Steve, thanks for calling.

Thanks, Steve. Bye-bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s another Persian expression that I just adore.

It’s havato daram, and it literally means, I have your air.

I have your air.

Can you guess what that means?

No, that we just kissed and I don’t know.

I have no idea.

What does that mean?

No, no, it’s not a term of endearment.

Okay.

Havato.

But that would make sense, wouldn’t it?

I’m stealing your thunder?

No, it’s actually a very supportive thing.

If you say, I have your air, it’s like, I’ve got your back.

I’m supporting you.

Oh, I’ve got you.

Okay, very good.

Yeah, I was part of a group that went with a friend to go paragliding here off the coast,

You know, in San Diego.

And we all had her air, you know.

She ran off the cliff, and we had her heir.

No bones broken, I see.

Well done.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Elliot from Charlottesville, Virginia.

Welcome, Elliot.

What can we do for you?

Hey, well, I have a little bit of a question that comes from my time spent down in Denmark, South Carolina.

At just about every family gathering, there would be butter beans served.

And butter beans as we know them are the smaller, light-colored beans.

But then I’d come back up to Virginia, and I’d go to the store looking for them,

And I saw that they must have been mislabeled because what I knew as butter beans were now labeled as lima beans,

And the lima beans were labeled as butter beans, and I just didn’t know what was going on.

-oh. Now, wait a minute.

Now, what color were the lima beans?

So the lima beans as we know them in South Carolina are the larger sort of cream-colored beans.

Mm-Really?

Like large as in the size of a quarter? What are we talking about here?

A little bit larger than a quarter, maybe a little bit smaller than a half dollar.

Okay, big ones then.

Yeah.

And then the butter beans for you are the smaller ones, size of a dime maybe?

Yes.

Okay.

But it’s flipped when you go to Virginia.

But it’s flipped when I go to Virginia, indeed.

And even in South Carolina sometimes, you’ll go to the Piggly Wiggly, you’ll go to the frozen section,

And they will have two separate bags of what appear to be the same beans labeled as butter beans

And then lima beans on the other bag.

Well, common names are really interesting,

Particularly when it comes to food items,

Because we’re not all one country when it comes to labeling our food.

We are not consistent.

We’ve had many, many calls about this,

And fortunately for us, some of the work has been done

To figure out where exactly this is happening.

And it turns out that in the American South,

Butter bean is used to refer to lima beans,

Almost exclusively in the American South.

Lima beans meaning what color?

Well, that’s the thing is what we’re talking about.

Butter beans are typically the small beans.

Does that sound right?

Yeah.

Yeah, so the color, it’s greenish, grayish, whatever color.

So they’re all lima beans.

Just get this, but they’re just a different size of lima bean,

A different subspecies of lima bean, as I understand it.

So in the American South, a butter bean is a small lima bean.

Now, lima bean is kind of like the canonical term for it,

And butter bean is the regionalism.

So lima bean is far more common in the United States, North America,

Rest of the world for this particular kind of food item, all right?

But in New England, a butter bean is a wax bean.

And what is a wax bean?

They look like green beans.

Oh, they’re the color of like a white semi-clear candle wax.

I hated those two.

Right.

Yeah.

Okay.

So I can understand where if you’re on a dialect, like where two isoglosses meet, where two

Different regions, their speech patterns mix, I can understand why.

You could go to the store, and these producers have figured out, oh, in order to sell these, I need to label them both ways.

It particularly depends on where in Virginia you are, where you may have the more cosmopolitan,

Where you’re getting people from all over the country coming in with different expectations for what a butter bean is or what a lima bean is.

Yeah, it better be clear packaging.

Well, there you go.

So I guess I can rest assured that everything is safe down in South Carolina, calling butter beans, butter beans.

Yeah, butter beans.

I guess so.

As long as everyone understands, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, we all understand.

Take care now.

We’ll do.

Bye.

Thanks. Bye-bye.

We know at your last family gathering, something came up, and it had to do with language.

We want you to tell us about it, 877-929-9673.

Or tell us about the strange food labeling you saw in the grocery store, words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s an adorable term of endearment from German, Mausbea.

So mouse, how do you spell that last part?

B, A with an umlaut, R, mouse bear.

Is it a tiny bar for vermin?

With little mugs?

Yeah, it’s a pub for the small creatures.

It probably is.

I don’t know.

There’s probably a bar with that sign over the top in Berlin.

It’s just mouse bear.

A term of endearment.

Yeah.

Mouse bear, my little mouse bear.

I know, right?

Oh, that’s good, right?

Yeah, it’s got the hugginess of a bear, but the cuteness and the little bit…

Finely formed features.

Yeah, mouse bear.

Mouse bear.

877-929-9673.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org or find the show in 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.