Gee and Haw

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, I have a new word for you.

Yes, please. Smooze. To smile when you watch the news. It’s not a verb.

Oh, it’s a noun.

It’s SM Eusee. Smooze news, and it’s a dialectal term from Sussex in southeast England. And it means the gap in the base of a hedge made by the regular passage of a small animal. And this is in current use, yes.

Oh, that’s adorable. Well, I thought you’d like it. And I wanted to share it because I learned it from a passionate lyrical book of essays and glossaries called Landmarks. It’s by the British author Robert McFarland. The book is an effort to reanimate our connection with nature by collecting more than 2,000 terms that are used in various dialects all over England.

He says they’re terrifically fine-grained vocabulary about the land and natural phenomena used by farmers, fishermen, sailors, scientists, miners, climbers, shepherds, and other people. And he calls it a book about the power of language to shape our sense of place. For example, he says now that I know the word smooth.

I will notice these signs of creaturely commute more often. And it took me a while to understand this, but I started to relate it to my own experience of camping here in the desert in Southern California. Because the first few times I did it, it was just not so much a landscape, but what Robert McFarland calls a bland escape. That is, you can’t distinguish things. It’s not so legible. And then you start to learn the names of different plants: agave, yucca, Prius, oat, Manzanita. And it starts to make more sense to you, and you start to connect more with nature around you. You learn to spot a tarantula hole, for example. And so this book is a kind of celebration of words and nature that connects us to the natural world. I love it, and this is Robert McFarland, and the book is Landmarks. And I’m gonna share some more examples later in the show.

Outstanding. Sounds like a wonderful book. We know that when you read a book, you come across words you didn’t know, but you want to share. This is the place to do it. Eight seven seven, nine two nine, nine six seven three. Email words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Morgan calling from Tempe, Arizona.

I’m Morgan. Welcome to the show.

Hello, Morgan. What’s up?

So, about a month ago, I was volunteering, and after we were pulling up barbed wire, we were hanging out and having a couple beers. And someone said, “Oh, do you have your church key with you? Otherwise, you’re not going to be able to have your beer.” And I just had no idea what they were talking about at all. And they said that it was a bottle opener, but I had never heard this term at all before. And it seems like it was a term for an older bottle opener for a can of beer or something. So I was just calling to ask about the origin of that term.

Mm-yeah. Back in the day, when before pop-top cans, before we had aluminum cans, we had steel cans. And you would use a bottle opener with a triangular point to open the beer. And I think you see that sometimes on cartoons and things like that. Two triangles, two holes on each side.

Yeah, they’re going in and water coming out.

Yeah, and back in the day, if you’d had enough beers, maybe it’s that bottle opener sort of looked like a church key. Big and heavy, right?

Yeah, same shape roughly.

Yeah.

Yeah, so it’s pretty straightforward. It’s just sort of the resemblance to a very large key, but it’s irreverent.

There’s something slang.

Oh, yeah, right.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it’s kind of a joke if you’re talking about church and beer in the same sentence. The best we could come up with at the time was that?

The next morning you were gonna sing.

Oh, God.

Oh, God. Well, that too, if you use that church key too often.

Yeah.

Yeah, there’s definitely the slangy mismatch of the idea of church and the idea of sitting around and drinking alcohol, right?

Yeah, slang often has that kind of incompatibility to give you a little bit of irony or humor.

Yeah, well, it’s interesting how often that question comes up. A lot of people are curious about that.

Yeah, but you know, it’s common enough that’s in every major American dictionary, and many of the British dictionaries have it too, although they usually mark it as an Americanism.

Mm-and it might hark back to the days where you know you had a really big key to open the front door of a church. Classic key, yeah. Do you have any idea about?

When it started to become a little bit less common among younger folk? Because most of the volunteers are a lot older than I am, and none of my friends around my age have used the term at all before.

Mm-that’s interesting. I don’t think it goes back much earlier than the early 1950s, 50s or so. But then when pull tabs and pop tops appear, the need for the church key diminishes. However, with the resurgence of beers that aren’t pop tops, a bottle beer like the craft beer movement, maybe the church key slang is coming back because I have certainly heard it from people in their 20s and 30s.

Okay?

Yeah, that’s cool. Thanks so much for telling me about this.

Sure thing, Morgan. Thanks for calling. Really appreciate it.

Bye.

Bye.

You guys have a great day. One place that you might still use a church key is opening a can of motor oil. Although many of them now come in bottles with screw tops, plastic bottles with screw tops, or they have the peel back tab that reveals a hole. Some of them you still use exactly the same kind of implement to make two holes on opposite cut sides of the can so you can pour the oil out.

Yeah, I hadn’t thought of that. Boy, that takes me back to being a kid and drinking Hawaiian punch.

Yeah. One of my favorite things was to use the opener to make triangles all the way around the lid completely off with these sharp salt.

Like exactly. Eight seven seven, nine two nine, nine six seven three. Do you know what a brows line is?

Brows, yes. The highest point on trees that deer and similar animals can reach when they’re grazing.

What do you read that has brows?

No books. The world. I read the world. I was gonna share with you this new term. Brows line is a good one, right? Crown base on trees and shrubs indicating the height to which.

Yes, it is. The best thing about brows line is that once you know to look for a brows line, yes, you see it everywhere. And you’re like, I don’t see any other evidence of deer.

Yeah, except for this brows line, and that gives you everything you need to know.

That’s all right, Grant. And then you can look for hoof prints and scat and what have you?

Yes.

Yes, and feetings.

Feetings? What are feetings?

Or footprints?

Oh, nice. In the snow.

Yeah, eight seven seven, nine two nine, nine six seven three.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Lauren. I’m from Omaha, Nebraska.

Hi, Lauren. Welcome. What can we do for you?

So, I work at a climbing gym, which I know is really weird for a Nebraska to the middle of the Midwest. But so because you know, we’re really new and a lot of people don’t know about climbing, we have a lot of lingo that goes through the gym that a lot of people don’t know or don’t understand. We’re just totally okay, but it then also makes us question like the roots of them. I was talking to someone one day, and I was talking about how did climber out that we have up, and I said, you know, if you have any problems, you know I can give you the beta. And I realized I didn’t know, like, because they asked me then what beta meant. And I, you know, saying, well, that’s how you climb around. Like, where does it come from? Because that’s such a weird word. I was like, I actually have no idea. So what are we talking about? These fake walls with the handholds or rope climbing?

Beta can apply to both bouldering, which is where you climb on the wall. But you have you don’t have any ropes with you. You fall into like a giant mat and as well top roping, which has the ropes. Okay, beta be eta the Greek letter, right?

Yes, and it’s the route that you climb. Does it the optimal route or is it just one of the possible ways?

It’s one of the possible ways because there’s like a term for like being intended paid us. So that means like how the route was sat like the intended way to climb it. And then there’s also like things like breaking beta, which means, you know, you’re climbing in a way.

That’s not the intended way. We do think we know the origin of this. It’s pretty well established in the climbing fields that the guy who made beta mean the route that you can take up a cliff face or mountainside or what have you was?

Probably Jack Molesky, who climbed in Texas. And it comes from the word beta max. You know, you may have read this before. Beta max is an old video format that kind of lost out to VHS even though it had some optimal things. But there was a time in the 80s where you could buy a beta max recorder and a beta max player and it worked like any other video camera player combination. And so if you say that you’re going to go to the beta, it means that you’re gonna go to the tape of somebody literally climbing that route. You know, somebody else was standing back either after them or below them or on the ground was filming them going up so that then later other people could study their technique or study their route and mimic it or improve upon it.

That’s actually really awesome.

I appreciate that.

It’s such an Lignish term for a piece of technology that doesn’t that we don’t use anymore. One thing that I really like about this is this filming of performance or filming of somebody doing an athletic thing is so widespread in common in the rest of, you know, in football and baseball and every other sport. They film and they watch the film in order to improve their own game or improve their own performance and it’s always been surprising to me that this beta term hasn’t left climbing and entered the rest of these fields.

Yeah, it’s interesting. When I used to go to rowing camp, we would watch the tape. We would talk about the tape and football too. You talk about the tape, but not the beta, not the beta.

Yeah, we’re kind of older than our statistics. We love watching ourselves climb.

I mean, I guess we never like see it as like, you know, how to improve. I mean, obviously some people do, but it’s just really interesting to me. I want to recommend a book to Lauren before we go.

Do you know about Matt Sammets climbing dictionary?

His last name is S a me T.

No, I haven’t heard that. It’s pretty good.

And if you have a little gift shop or something in your climbing gym, it might be something good to stock.

So your new climbers can bone up on the jargon of the field. That would actually be awesome.

Yeah, and send them to our website.

Yeah, we would radio die largey. Anyway, thanks Lauren, really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

Bye.

Bye Lauren.

Bye. Well, we know that you have language in your hobbies or your pastimes or sports you participate in. We’d love to hear about it. So call us eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three. The English writer Samuel Butler once wrote, “Definitions are a kind of scratching and generally leave a sore place more sore than it was before.” It made me think of you as a lexicographer scratching.

It’s true. One of the things you teach novice lexicographers is there is no such thing as perfect. The best you can hope for is good enough and then you move on to the next definition. We’d love to hear your thoughts about language.

So call us eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three or email them to us words at waywordradio dot o RG. A Way with Words is a show about family history and culture. Stick around for more [Music]. You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Martha Barnette and I’m Grant Barrett. And it’s time for the quiz with John Chonesky.

Hi John.

Hey, Gran.

Hey, Martha. Hi, John, as you can tell from my name, John Chonesky, my background is Polish. Now, you can probably tell from my physique too because I’m tall and kind of slender.

So I’m Pole ish ish. Okay, gotcha.

Okay. Now I’ll give you a clue to a word or name that ends in ish ish. It will sound like I’m describing something that’s similar to something else.

For example, this sounds somewhat like a mark used to identify livestock.

The answer would be brandish. Yes, brandish, right. Now brandish really means to wave or flourish a weapon. But brandish could be sounds like a brand.

Okay.

Okay. Here’s a few more. This one sounds somewhat like an official or legal prohibition.

Banish. Banish, it’s sort of, you know, banish. This sounds somewhat like a restroom in the UK, informally at least.

Lewis W C ish. Weird. Lavish. Sort of like a lab.

Yeah, if you put us on an airplane, we would have gotten it.

Yeah. Now this sounds somewhat like a fish’s fishy appendage.

Finish. Yes, finish. This sounds somewhat like a play on words.

Punish. Punish.

Yes, of course. This sounds something like an 80s term for cool or awesome.

Radish. Radish, you’re probably waiting for that one.

There it is. Way back in the 80s, I guess it was. This sounds somewhat like the way I would refer to me, that is me, vis-a-vis me.

Selfish. Selfish, yes. This sounds somewhat like a bridge or arch or rather the full extent of something from end to end.

Spanish. Spanish, yes. This sounds somewhat like a mountain lake or pool excavated by a glacier.

Tarnish. Yes, great crossword. That’s a very good word.

Yes. This sounds somewhat like a road vehicle that’s bigger than a car yet smaller than a truck.

Vanish. Yes, vanish. And on that note, it’s time for me to vanish. I am finished. Stop punishing radishes. John, thank you so much.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you, Grant.

See you next week.

Bye John.

Thank you.

Bye. Take care.

Well, if you’d like to talk with us about anything involving language, give us a call eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three or send us an email.

The address is words at waywordradio dot o RG or you can hit us up on Twitter at Wayword.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Katie calling from Fairbanks, Alaska.

Hello, Katie.

Welcome. What can we do for you, Katie?

What’s happening in Fairbanks?

Yeah, as you guys may or may not know, Fairbanks is one of the dog-mushing hubs of the world. I mean, I’m actually a dog-musher here in Fairbanks, right?

Yeah, I run a dog sledding tours with my husband and then my husband is also running the Iditarod, that thousand-mile race that starts in just a couple weeks.

Wow, that’s amazing. Yes, I have a dog-mushing question for you this morning.

Wait, you have one for us?

Yeah, well, it’s a dog-mushing terminology question.

Okay, so when we direct the dogs where and how to turn, we use our voices. So we tell them G to go right and ha to go left and it’s my understanding that those words go back to, I think, like horse driving and mule driving commands that I’m assuming were at least used around sort of the turn of the century and like Wild West Gold Rush time period in the lower 48 states. And I think that that’s when the terminology was brought here to Alaska and started to be used by dog-mushers here again around the turn of the century, early 1900s. But I’m curious why those words and where they came from kind of before the horse driving and the mule driving.

Wow, that’s amazing. So just to recap here, G is left and ha is right.

Opposite, okay.

Haw is right and G is left.

The reason I asked you is one of my colleagues has done a little bit of work. It’s been a couple decades on the modern understanding of these words, which were very well known when we were a more agrarian society when you had a mule team or an oxen team to help you work the fields or horses to go to town with or what have you. And it turns out in the modern day most people know that G and ha directions to animals, but they don’t remember which is which, which is left. Except in dog-mushing, which is really interesting.

So yeah, so ha is left and G is right. Yeah, and so they have these separate lives as words and they only kind of come together as a pair in the last 250 years or so. G is the much older one, goes back to at least the 1600s. You can find it in a ton of old dialect dictionaries throughout the United Kingdom. And what’s really interesting, it doesn’t always mean the same thing in every place. So in some cases it just means go or it means go forward or it means go fast. And then of course later in the United States, it gets really specific and just means go right or turn right or do right?

Yeah, pretty cool.

Right, and it’s yeah, and it’s probably it’s even more interesting to me is that there are all these other terms that sound like G, like G up or Giddy up or get up that all kind of mean to go or get the speed on, but they’re all later than G. They’re all much newer, which means they might be influenced by it, but they aren’t the source of the word G meaning go or go right?

Right?

Okay, and what we don’t have for that or for hall we don’t know the true origin because these are interjections and interjections are notoriously difficult to source when you’re doing word histories or etymologies. These are words that probably exist for centuries or even longer in the language before somebody decides to write them down because they’re in the beginning of kind of really making dictionaries or collections of word lists. Interjections get kind of short shrift because they seem so ordinary and they seem kind of non-lexical and so people don’t really bother to write them down until they become a little more obsessive and a little more completist later. Well, what strikes me about these two is that the vowel sounds are so different that I’m guessing that even if you’re in a snowstorm or the wind’s blowing really hard.

You might not hear the initial sound, but you’re gonna hear the e or the oh, yeah. Is that what you find, Katie?

Yeah, I think that’s exactly right. So when we give tours, I’m usually having this conversation with people about G and ha. I’ll be directing the dogs with my voice during the tour. People will often say to me, gosh, you know, you don’t say that very loud. People expect that we really need to like yell at the dogs in order for them to hear us because mostly when we give those commands, we’re talking to the dogs that are in the very front of the team, the leaders. But people think we really need to yell in order for them to be able to hear us. But you know, I think a dog has a great sense of hearing, but also like because they sound so different, I think they all really only need to get, you know, kind of a sense of what I’m saying, a little piece of it, and they can easily get like, okay.

Yeah, she’s saying, you know, this layer that way. Outstanding.

It’s super cool. While we’re talking, do you know the origin of the word mush?

I think so, but I could be wrong.

I believe it comes from Marché, which is French.

I think to walk or to march or to move. Exactly, exactly. I would be interested to know how that word migrated around the world because the French aren’t necessarily known for their dog-mushing prowess, you know, at least in France.

So I think that it comes maybe from French Canadians and natives in that part of Canada who were mushing at some point in the, I don’t, I don’t even know what century that would be, maybe 1800s, earlier than that.

Yeah, it goes back very to the French tradition in what is now Canada. Think about a time before there were really borders between the countries or the borders didn’t matter very much. Think about the fur trapper era or the casual exploring era where a guy just wanted to go see the country and he’d take off and he would learn this tradition of working with dogs in this way from the native people. And then the French jargon is kind of applied to this old historic way of getting around.

Yeah, cool.

We actually never say it to the dog, but the word that we use, like when we’re talking about mushing, when we’re describing what we’re doing, but it’s not a command, which a lot of people are surprised to hear.

I don’t ever tell the dog to mush. And I think it’s because the word kind of like what we’re talking about, the word sounds like mush. Like I think it’s hard for them to hear, you know, it’s different than G and haw, which are very easy for them to hear.

Mm—

So what do you say when you want them to get going?

It’s a two-part command.

The first thing that we do is basically tell them to get ready. So we say ready and then we say alright, and alright is their command for like moving forward. Different mushers will say hike. I’ve heard hike as well, but I think again alright with the T and hike with the K and they pay easy for them to hear. Would your dogs obey?

Anyone’s voice but yours.

Yeah, I know my mom and I were just having that conversation last night. She’s here visiting and she was driving her own little five-dog team and she was getting frustrated because they wouldn’t listen to her command. And she knows the words, but I think a lot of it has to do with how you say it, you know. So the tone and the authority and the inflection is really big, you know. So my husband and I will say our commands almost exactly the same.

I learned how to mush from him. And so I think definitely the dogs do know the words, but there also needs to be a similarity in tone and inflection. So Katie, one last question, although I could talk to you all day. How do you get them to stop?

Oh, we have brakes on the sled. We, you just surprised. We do say whoa, but we say whoa as we’re applying that brake. And I’ve gotten them to stop using just the word before, but you typically do need the brake and that’s why the number one rule in mushing is to never ever let go of your sled because if you fall off, you know, you tip over and let go, they’re just gonna keep going.

We don’t have a way to bring them back. Oh, they are enthusiastic.

They are in it and we would love to see pictures of the dogs. Yeah, you can check them all out on our website. The name of our kennel is black spruce dog sledding dot com and I have our little pictures of everybody up on their website along with a little biography.

Oh, that’s nice. Black spruce dog sledding dot com.

Okay. We’ll put a link on our website, Katie.

Thank you so much. This is so informational and so enlightening.

Yeah, we learned a lot.

We appreciate it.

Good luck. It was great to talk to you guys.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye.

Bye. What language are you preoccupied with these days?

Call us eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three or send it to us an email that address is words@waywordradio.org. You know Germans have a lot of idioms involving pigs and one that I really like is ik glaub mein Schweinfeift, which means I think my pig is whistling, which is what you say if you’re utterly surprised about something that you never expected to happen. And do some people call guinea pigs whistle pigs? That just reminds me, you know, we’ve had a call about whistle pigs. I want to say it’s marmots. Apologize to marmots for saying they were a size they weren’t. So whatever size they are, we approve of the size of the moment, that’s right. But you know the good thing about this is you can find all of our past episodes on our website waywordradio.org. So we could go check that out right now and you can send us an email if you’ve got questions words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Shannon Hurley.

I’m calling from Virginia Beach, Virginia.

Well, hello Shannon.

Hi Shannon.

How you doing?

Real good. What’s up?

I just have a word that I’ve always been worried where it came from. The word is nitnoy.

Nitnoy.

Nitnoy.

How are you spelling that?

I would guess n-i-t-n-o-y. Maybe n-i-t-n-o-i-d.

I’ve never seen it written.

Mm— And what does it mean?

Well, it’s something smaller insignificant like a nitnoy problem.

Okay.

Mm— Do you have a memory of about when you learned it?

Like how many years ago?

I’m guessing probably 30 years ago. It seems to me.

I remember you know it as far as I’ve been in the Navy.

Anyway, it would try going right up out of college. Mm—

That’s really really really really really interesting to me.

So interesting.

You know why this is interesting.

Why is that?

I only know of one slang dictionary. Maybe two. I’ll asterisk that, but one slang dictionary that I can respect that has this word and that’s Paul Dixon’s war slang dictionary. And I believe the word in a very unusual spelling was in there from 1994 onward and he spelled it n-i-t-t-e-n-o-i-d, n-i-n-o-i-d, which is really weird.

Nobody else spells it that way.

The only other place I’ve seen it is urban dictionary. But we kind of don’t really count urban dictionary unless it’s the only place that has it. But what’s crazy about this is it does mean small or tiny in the Thai language, but the American military hasn’t had a presence in Thailand since the Vietnam War. And so even though this term is heavily associated with the military, like when I looked up uses of this, they kind of start in 1987 and they go forward to present day and I find them again and again from people who are in the military or they live and work in military communities or they’re part of the government that associates with the military in some way. There’s this gap then between the end of the Vietnam War when we might have had soldiers pick up the term from Thai speakers to 1987 when it first appears in print as far as I know and that gap is really unusual. We would have expected it to kind of appear right away like so much other language that we got from the Vietnam War. That would make sense why it would have gone from, you know, people who were stationed in Thailand during the Vietnam War to, you know, and then they get stationed elsewhere in Japan and the Philippines and it eventually just percolates its way among the military population. The only other competing theory that is worth pointing out, it doesn’t have anything to do with the Thai language at all. And it’s the idea that maybe it’s a combination of nitpick and annoying because a lot of the uses of this term, it is like exactly like you said, it’s a small problem.

So it’s a small thing.

That’s annoying or in a couple of cases I’ve seen people refer to the nit noise of bureaucracy, like all the things, the paperwork that you have to fill out and the approvals that you have to get and the hoops you have to jump through in order to get funding or to get your program approved or to move forward to the next step. But that sort of has the ring of folk etymology.

Yeah, it does. It has after the fact etymology. Very much sounds like an after, like a made-up story after the fact and it reminds me of the term skosh too, which our soldiers picked up from in Japan, right?

I mean from a word that means a little bit. I’m very familiar with that word too.

The one other fact that I want to throw in here for what it’s worth is that the dog of the ambassador to Vietnam at the time of the evacuation of Saigon was named nit.

Noi really.

Yeah, nit Noi was a black poodle and he left with his master Graham Martin on one of the last helicopters to flee Saigon. Yeah, so it’s possible that there’s a connection there.

I’m betting that’s a toy poodle and not a standard. But I could see an ambassador naming, do you mean your dog after if the, oh he’s, he’s in fun, of course. Oh, what an annoyance.

He’s no, I mean, it’s a little problem. Well, he might have been a little, it’s a no way sometimes used for in Thailand for as a nickname for people who are small or for her cute.

Yeah, so it’s not necessarily derogatory in Thai at all. It’s just a, it’s actually one of the like the standard words that you learn when you first live or work in Thailand. It’s very, you pick it up like right away.

Interesting because I have visited Thailand, but it was as a tourist. I, it was only there for, you know, less than a week.

Interesting. Well, I’ll tell you one thing that’s gonna be really amazing, Shannon.

We have military communities listening to the show on both coasts, I assume, and I count on a flood of emails and phone calls of people telling us their experience with nit Noi.

Well, hello to all the fellow military. And we’ll find out more if they have the answer. We will soon get to the bottom of it.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

I appreciate that.

Thank you.

We really appreciate that.

Okay.

Goodbye.

Bye.

Bye.

Well, if you’ve got a linguistic question that’s bothering you, call us eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three. Send it to us in email. The address is words at waywordradio dot o-r-g and hit us up on twitter at Wayword. More nerdy wordy goodness coming up. 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. We’ve been talking about the book Landmarks by Robert Macfarlane. And this is a book that seeks to rewild our language by collecting hundreds of specialized and poetic terms for the natural world. And I wanted to talk a little bit about the genesis of this book.

It goes back to 2007 and two events, one of which was that in 2007 somebody handed him a copy of the Pete glossary. Now that’s pe at glossary and this is a glossary of hundreds of Gaelic terms for the moorland on an island off the coast of Scotland. And he was so excited to find all these different terms associated with, you know, what you just think of as an expanse of land, you know, the moor. The other thing that I know you know about was that in 2007 a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary made headlines when it culled a lot of familiar words from its print version. Words like acorn and bluebell and buttercup, dandelion, fern, ivy, lark, and mistletoe, pasture and willow. And they added new words into this edition like block graph, blog, broadband, bullet point, celebrity, chatroom, committee, cut and paste, and voicemail. And this of course created a great hue and cry as you know quite well.

It wasn’t really fair, right? Grant, I mean attacking a dictionary for removing words like that is like hitting a thermometer because it’s cold outside. The reason these words were cut is because they’re not as common as the words that they were replaced with. Broadband and voicemail are more common than dandelion and willow. Willow was one of the words, and so it needs to be the words that British people are using. And so it’s a reflection of culture, it’s not a direction of culture. This book by Robert MacFarlane is an interesting mix of poetic essays and also just lists of words that might catch your fancy. Like for example, the word zonzawn. The definition is a wave-smashed chasm in a cliff, and there’s also zwir in that part of the country. Zwir, which is the whirring sound made by partridges taking flight, which if you’ve ever heard it, you know, it’s his words. Like that.

The other thing that I appreciate about his book is that he is well aware of the danger of making too much of the words themselves. And he has an interesting comment about that. He says there are experiences of landscape that will always resist speculation and of which words offer only a remote echo or to which silence is by far the best response. Nature does not name itself. Granite does not self-identify as igneous. Light has no grammar. Language is always late for its subject, sometimes on top of a mountain.

I just say wow. It’s true. It’s really true, right? So Robert MacFarlane and the book is landmarks. Landmarks. Give us a call. Let us know what you’re reading, what you liked about it, and what leapt out at you that has to do with language. Eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three. Email words@waywordradio.org and you can find us on Twitter at W A Y W O R D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi Emily. Hey Emily, where are you calling us from? I’m calling from Las Cruces, New Mexico. Las Cruces, New Mexico. Nice, that’s on my list of places to go when I do a Southwest road trip. Exciting. Yes, I recommend it.

Okay, Emily. What can we do for you today? I’m a graduate student. I recently asked the professor of mine to write a letter of recommendation for me, and he agreed to do so, and I was very honored and pleased. And then he went ahead and sent it to me, which was even more of an honor that I got to read it. And so I was reading through it and feeling very flattered until I got to this one sentence that really kind of stopped me. And it was he said, yes, she is sassy. And sassy, I was sassy. Yes, it kind of gave me pause, and I wondered why it was, but it wasn’t sitting well with me. And because it what it came across to me sort of as a veiled criticism of sorts. And then I thought about it some more, and it occurred to me that all of my classmates are men. And it occurred to me that I would be the only one in the class who you would say that of. It was occurred to me. There was a very gendered term.

Yeah, so he’s saying all these wonderful things about you and your creativity and all of that, and then he says, yes, she is sassy. I should be fair. It was in the context of he was sort of like praising my smarts and what he called them like my suspicion of received wisdom. So he was, it was in the context of saying very glowing things. But it just felt to me like there was something sort of speaking around and beyond him. That’s sort of like this double standard that he was reinforcing through the use of that word, which I felt it was just not appropriate to the context of a letter of recommendation, certainly. Boy, that is my, I wanted to call and ask her if I first of all about the word sassy and fast and also sort of like how to handle a situation like this.

What a great question. I asked you to extrapolate a little bit on what you think the veiled criticism was. Well, first of all, I know that fast sort of implies rudeness and impudence. And so the criticism seems to me that if on the one hand it’s a word that refers to being like witty, intelligent, quick, bright, but then it has a sort of undercuts it with the fact of like a comment about speaking out of turn or that’s what I thought you meant. That is exactly how I would have taken that. That comment had I read the letter about a woman that I knew and somebody said that she’s sassy, I would have thought, oh, what they’re saying is she has a mind of her own.

Is that what you’re saying? She has opinions. Yeah, it seems like an outdated or sort of tone-deaf thing to say. So I wonder if the receiver will think, you know, maybe that wasn’t meant in this way or I am just not sure if it’s sort of discredits the letter in a way. Yeah, that’s a good question because you don’t know the mind of the recipient, and they might know that your professor meant it with good intentions. And so they might, yeah, the worst possible reading rather than the best possible reading. And it sort of says more about him than about you, I think.

Yeah, yeah, unfortunately, I would agree with what you’re saying here. And certainly if you Google around about the word sassy, you’ll find many, many women who agree that sassy is a kind of loaded term in many contexts, certainly in a professional environment. What would he have called a male colleague, a male fellow student? Because what he would just said he was assertive. Right.

Yeah, probably. Oh, yeah, I guess, I guess maybe assertive. Yeah, I don’t know. I think that what he was getting across was just this sort of he was trying to communicate intelligence. But then I don’t understand why then there had to be an aspect or an element of, you know, like knowing one’s place in that because that doesn’t come into play when you’re talking about a man. So are you hesitant to use the letter now?

Yeah, I am. I mean, so this is someone who I’ve worked with for a couple years now. He’s a good reference. I would like to use it to ask again, but then I suspect that this is the first letter that he wrote. He might use the letters a similar. He might just send it, you know, a similar letter again, and I don’t know how to address that with him, if I should or if I should just go elsewhere for my letters.

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, we’re definitely in your camp. And it just sounds like he has so much respect for you that maybe this really is about him and his own, you know, language. And I think it’s worth a conversation. Maybe he just didn’t know. I mean, certainly things come out of my mouth where a second later I’m like, oh wow, that’s sexist. I shouldn’t say that. Maybe the part of it, if you say to him, his next words will be, oh wow, you’re right, I didn’t even think. And that might solve itself really easily.

Yeah. Yeah. Emily, thank you for sharing this story and the situation with us. We really appreciate it, and we love to hear your follow-up if you do talk to him or decide not to send us an email. Let us know how it turned out.

All right. Okay, for sure. Thanks for your advice, guys. I love your show.

Yeah, it’s a great question. Thank you so much here, Emily. Good luck with the job.

You’re welcome.

All righty.

Thank you.

Bye.

Bye. Eight seven seven ninety nine nine six seven three. Here’s another term from the book Landmarks by Robert MacFarlane about terms from nature. Snow bones. What are those? Snow bones in Yorkshire are long thin patches of snow still lying after a thaw?

You’ve seen these. Yeah, yeah, they’re left because of small depressions in the land maybe or the trees shadowed that part but not another part. Yeah, hard trust it. Nobody wants unless you have a bowl of marinara, then you’re good. Then you’re really good. Eight seven seven ninety nine nine six seven three.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Dirk.

I’m calling from Glasgow, Kentucky.

I know Glasgow.

It’s beautiful down there.

What’s going on?

It is. There is a word that I’ve heard used lots of times growing up and I thought maybe it was a cultural thing. It’s called, it’s a, it’s a poor tool.

It’s a boondock. And what it is is a chain tensioner that farmers use to start down say tractors on the back of a trailer and I don’t know where it came from. I tried to look in and get up and the only thing I come across is that it’s a tool that’s part of a crane system. And I also have found that they make, they make leavers, extensions, feeder bars for boondocks, but I can’t find an actual dog.

So you’re saying boom, BOOM and then dog, boom dog.

Yeah. Yeah, dog, DOG.

And so now what you’re describing is a, this is the ratchet leg device that pulls a cable or a strap taut across the bed of a truck to hold something on it.

Yes, exactly.

Okay. And is there actually a boom involved in this? That I’m thinking of the boom like a long spar or board or some kind of projecting arm.

Well, there’s a lever arm. It’s about, let’s say 18 inches long. Okay, but it doesn’t seem like a boom.

That’s, that’s where my question comes into mind.

Yeah. There’s so the word is, we can break it down into its two parts. I think what we’ve got here is a term borrowed from some other kind of, some kind of kind of mechanics or engineering or some other physical occupation, perhaps shipbuilding or oil drilling or construction or that sort of thing because the boom is kind of like the ship’s boom. It’s a typically a long arm that projects out either to hold something or to provide support for something else.

And then the dog is really interesting. A dog has been used, oh, for a couple hundred years at least in a wide variety of context. But almost all of the mechanical of some kind to refer to any kind of device that holds something in place. So it could be a gear, a cog, a peg, a wedge, a dowel, a stick, a chain, a rope. Many, many other things have all been called a dog, but what they almost always do is hold a thing in place. So a boom dog typically holds a boom in place or hold something to a boom.

So the boom, does it fall or pivot around or swivel?

Oh, wow. So it sounds like the device that you’re talking about on the flatbed trucks. The term probably comes from someplace where there actually was a boom. There’s just not a boom anymore, but the device is still useful. Gotcha, and it is still a dog because of the nature of holding the strap tight.

Yep. Yeah, I’m picturing a dog that, you know, you hold a stick out to and they just grab it and they won’t let go. Maybe that’s it.

Yeah, maybe that’s the origin for sure.

Definitely makes a lot of sense. It’s just that maybe over time the boom has been replaced with just a short lever and still being referred to as the boom I guess.

Mm—

Well, interesting. How about that? One of the places that this term might have come over to the flatbed use that you have is from logging because a boom is a raft or raft or collection of logs sometimes often floating on the water, but I could see it certainly. Boom certainly applying to a stack of logs or timber on the flatbed of a truck to Derek.

Thank you so much for calling us. Thank you very much.

You guys have a great day.

I really enjoy the show.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye. Eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Rebecca Easter. I’m Rebecca.

Welcome to the show.

I was calling about a term that I’ve heard you since my childhood.

I grew up in Carteret County, North Carolina.

We’re on the coast. And in the eastern part of the county we call it down east. It’s part of it is along the barrier islands and near the Cape Lookout seashore. But there’s a commu, a series of communities down there and they have a specific, it’s almost like a brogue that they use. But there’s a lot of terms that they use and one of them is mommy.

I think it’s spelled M. Oh, mm. Icked and usually I’ve heard it used to mean flustered or if someone’s had a really rough day, if they’re bothered or frustrated they’ll say that they’ve been mommy that day and it’s just a, that’s one of the many terms. There’s also an area called Psalter path where there’s another pocket of folks that use similar terms with a similar accent.

Mm—

They also, they just, many of the things they say are beautiful to me.

It’s almost poetic. Like if they’re, if they want to indicate that they think something’s funny that they, they would be laughing a lot, they’ll say I’m bent double, like bent over double laughing. They also use words like our terms such as in the Merkel’s, which is, there’s a lot of Merkel bushes around here.

So if you take a turn off the path, you’ll end up in the Merkel bushes or lost.

So those two things like bent double and in the Merkel’s I can understand kind of, I could see maybe where they came from, but mommy, I have no idea and I’ve always been curious.

That’s really interesting.

Yeah, what’s super cool about mommy is it’s a really old word.

Yeah, it goes back to England and like the late 1500s early 1600s. In fact, Shakespeare used the term mommy, M a mm o ck. Yeah, you find that in one of his plays and it means to tear. Later it means to fluster or the noun mommock, M a mm o ck means an untidy heap or mess, a litter, a confused shapeless mass, a dirty mixture, a confusion, a muddle.

And it’s really interesting that although you see it in the south, you especially see it in that part of the country where you are. Maybe every time someone asked us about this question, it’s there’s somebody from North Carolina.

Yeah, I mean, it’s really, I know that I lived in, I’ve lived in Nashville, Tennessee. I lived for a while in Pennsylvania, South Central Pennsylvania. Never, and I would occasionally, you know, you revert back to your childhood. I’ve had a bad day and I would say I’ve been mommock today and people would look at me like I was crazy. No one had ever heard of it.

That wasn’t from here.

I like your approach to this new language or this language that belongs to the area where you talked about. It is beautiful. And I think that’s a great attitude to take to this kind of speech that it is not mainstream or standard.

Oh, yes. To me, it’s poetic. You know, I can say I’m laughing or I can say, oh, that’s funny. But when I say I’m bent double, you know, that paints a really beautiful picture very quickly. It’s pretty concise, but it just adds a, there’s another dimension I think to communication down here because of that.

Absolutely, and that’s what we keep saying again and again on the show. Proud of your dialect.

Oh, yeah, I love the delight that you’re taking in it. Thank you so much for calling and if anything else from down east strikes your fancy and you want to share it, please give us a call.

All right, we’ll do. Thank you so much.

What more 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 eight seven seven nine two nine nine six seven three and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org or hit us up on Twitter at Wayword Ord 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 Kellman.

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.

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