Gilded Age (episode #1633)

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 received some feedback about our conversation regarding the expression tight as a tick.

Yeah, we had a call about why we say tight as a tick.

And Martha and I explained that it’s those little guys who bite your skin and fill themselves with your blood.

Exactly.

Well, we heard from Holly Gaff, who is a professor of biology at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia.

And she says that she enjoyed learning about the history of that expression.

And then she writes, however, as a tick researcher for more than 25 years, and I sort of dreaded what came next, she said,

I did want to encourage you to not refer to ticks as insects.

They are not insects.

I normally do not correct people since it is not really important, but given your interest and love of precision in language, I thought I would reach out.

Ticks are arthropods, but then they split off from the lineage that leads to insects.

So I just wanted to say thank you, Holly, and thank you for modeling how to correct someone.

Yeah, that was very gently done, and I appreciate it.

However, you must be a brave soul to spend so much time with ticks.

I hope she really enjoys her work because I don’t want to do it.

Yeah, well, I think it would be fascinating to hear more about it, right?

By the way, we also had a number of comments from people who thought maybe it had to do with ticking,

That blue and white striped cloth that you might have on a mattress or a pillow.

But it’s not from ticking, is it?

No, no.

Yeah, we did have several people mention that.

But the fact is that that’s not the origin of it.

Yeah, it absolutely has to do with the arthropod.

The other bot to tick.

We would love to hear from you.

We know there’s something you’ve been doing for decades that has a ton of cool language attached.

877-929-9673.

That’s a toll-free number in the United States and Canada.

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Go to our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Hi, I’m doing well.

Who are you and how are you and where are you?

So my name is Karen, and I am from Charlotte, North Carolina.

And I’m doing great.

Thank you.

I’m excited to find out the answer to my question.

Welcome to the show.

Let’s hear the question.

Okay.

So my son has a chin dimple.

His dad has a chin dimple.

I think that they’re really cute.

His dad refers to it as a butt chin.

And I told him that I don’t like that because that has a negative connotation.

And I think the word chimpel, you know, it’s a contraction.

And dimple, chimple is really cute.

Everyone loves dimples.

But nobody, when I say it, everyone’s like, huh?

And I’m like, you know, chim dimple, chimple.

Everyone acts like they have no idea what I’m saying.

So I want to know.

C-H-I-M-P-L-E.

Someone else has to have used this, right?

Other people have definitely used it.

It’s even in one slang book that I have.

And it’s on Urban Dictionary, which is, of course, the source of all kinds of crazy stuff.

So you’re not bothered by the fact that this word has the other word chimp inside of it?

C-H-I-M-P?

Well, no.

So you’re not calling your husband and your son chimps?

Little chimps?

No, because it’s a chimple.

It’s not.

And you don’t think people are going to think it’s a chin pimple?

No.

Everybody I’ve said it to is like, oh, that’s actually kind of cute.

It is cute.

It absolutely is.

It’s way cuter than butt chin.

I like butt chin, though, but I’m a crass individual.

That’s what I grew up called.

I had an uncle with a butt chin, and that’s what we called it.

I do have an interesting little fact to wait about it, though.

Oh, yes, please.

Please share.

Yeah.

So the reason people have those is because it’s actually a genetic variant that causes a split in the jawbone at the bottom.

And so their skin sinks into that space, and it causes that.

That’s very cool.

How about them apples?

I love it. Well, yeah, chimpel is a fun word. We’ll hope that others pick it up here. And I can just hear the affection in your voice as you talk about your family. So that’s sweet, too.

Yeah, I think they’re really cute. And I wish more people thought that they were as cute as cheek dimples because nobody calls them butt cheeks.

Well, here we go.

Here’s a rhyme that you can take back.

All right?

A dimple in the chin, your living comes in.

A dimple in the cheek, your living you seek.

And so this is an old rhyme.

So basically, if you have a dimple in the chin, your money comes to you easily.

If you have a dimple in the cheek, money comes to you very difficultly.

Or how about this rhyme?

Your husband would look weird if he had a beard.

I just made that up.

But mine are real, Martha.

Here’s another one.

A dimple on the chin, a devil within.

Yeah?

Ooh.

I can see how all of these apply.

That’s what’s been said.

All right.

Well, Karen, thank you so much for calling.

I hope that word spreads.

Yeah, absolutely.

You weren’t the first one to coin it, though, so you can feel proud, but not that proud.

I did not think that I was.

Thank you so much.

I hope you guys have a wonderful week.

All right.

Be well.

Take care of yourself.

Okay, you too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We all talk about word history with you.

Grant, I was pleased recently to learn the term wooden hill.

Do you know what a wooden hill is?

Give me a context here.

Give me a domain or an industry.

Well, you might go up the wooden hill to Bedforshire.

Is it just a wooded hill with a forest?

No.

It’s a flight of stairs.

Oh, gotcha.

A wooden hill.

Why would you go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire?

Because this is an expression that parents in Britain used in the late 19th century to encourage children to go to bed.

You’re going to go up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.

So Bedfordshire is a pun on bed.

I see.

I see.

That’s delightful and clever.

I appreciate it.

Isn’t that lovely?

Up the wooden hill to Bedfordshire.

Share your favorite words and phrases with us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is John Vanderpluie. I’m calling from Norfolk, Virginia.

Hi, John. Welcome to the show.

Yeah, thank you.

Well, I’ve always been curious since I have to sneeze.

Remember, I’m out in the sunlight. My siblings did the same thing.

And quite a few of my friends think that’s very bizarre.

And I’ve actually done a little research. It seems to be a thing.

And it apparently is hereditary. So is there a phrase for having to sneeze when you walk out in the sunlight?

Yes. And I am one of those people as well. I always sneeze twice. What about you?

Just once. Once is all I need, but it definitely happens.

Well, John, people have been thinking about this ever since the time of Aristotle, at least.

He wrote, why is it that one sneezes more after one has looked at the sun?

If you’ve done some research on this, you probably know that this goes by lots of different names.

It’s called the photic sneeze reflex.

Some people call it pepper on the sun.

There was another researcher who found that three generations of his family did this kind of sneeze when you go out into the sun.

And his last name is Perutka.

So some people call it the Perutka sneeze.

And I think my favorite name for this, and probably Grant’s favorite name as well, is autosomal dominant compelling heliophthalmic outburst syndrome.

The acronym for which is ACHOO.

Oh, that’s cute. I like that one.

Yeah, maybe the ACHOO part.

Yeah, yeah, that’s good.

And, you know, some people have a hard time sneezing.

That’s called arrested sternutation.

Oh, and if something is sternutatory, that means that it causes you to sneeze.

Pepper is sternutatory.

Yeah, it comes from the Latin sternuere, which means to sneeze.

And arrested sternutation is sometimes called sneeze freeze, just for short.

That’s easier to say.

That’s very enlightening. I appreciate that.

So, Martha, that was photic sneeze reflex, sometimes called solar sneeze reflex.

Pepper on the Sun, Achoo, which is autosomal dominant compelling helioophthalmic outburst syndrome.

And did I forget one?

You forgot Perutka Sneeze.

Perutka Sneeze.

Which one are you going to choose, John?

I like the Perutka Sneeze.

That one is brand new to me.

The Achoo I’ve heard a couple times.

I forgot about the acronym part, but I’ve heard that long-winded one.

That’s why I didn’t remember it.

Yeah.

Well, the Perutka is P-E-R-O-U-T-K-A.

Or, John, you could always go back to Old English.

The Old English word for sneeze is fnora, which I really like.

F-N-O-R-A, fnora.

That’s cool.

I like that one, too.

Thank you, John.

We appreciate it.

Take care of yourself.

Yeah, I appreciate everything you do.

All right, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We love it when you’re doing your own research.

You can bring that to us, and we’ll tack on our own.

And together we’ll solve these language mysteries.

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And if you’re somewhere else, Mexico, the United Kingdom,

Go to our website at waywordradio.org.

And you’ll find a dozen ways to reach us.

Kaylin in Park City, Utah, left us an interesting message about the word nonplussed.

And she has lots of questions about its meaning and its origin and its correct usage.

Yeah, she said that she gets into heated arguments with her fellow skiers about this word nonplussed because lots of them say, well, nonplussed means, you know, you’re not bothered by something.

But she’s hanging on to the original meaning of the word, which is to be at a loss, to be perplexed.

Because all the way back in the 16th century, nonplus was a noun.

It came from Latin nonplus, which means no more.

And so if you’re brought to a nonplus in one of those arguments, then you hit a wall.

You can go no further.

And by the early 17th century, nonplus was being used as a verb. And then something happened in the early 20th century where people began to use the term nonplus to mean unfazed or unruffled or unperturbed. It’s like, you know, try to look nonplus, you know, don’t look as if anything’s bothering you.

And maybe there was some confusion with words like nonchalant, you know, which also means unfazed.

But I remember hearing Barack Obama talking about his daughters and how they weren’t really bothered by the media glare.

And he said, I’ve been really happy by how nonplussed they’ve been by the whole thing.

And that made me sit up straight because that’s not the original sense of the word.

And I know that etymology isn’t destiny and we don’t have to hang on to the original sense of the word.

But for me, I think it’s time to put nonplussed out to pasture because the meanings are so different.

And you look it up in dictionaries and it’s got both of those meanings, which mean two different things, pretty much the opposite of each other.

Yeah, it’s definitely a skunked word where you just risk confusion.

I want to know why Kaylin is talking about nonplussed on the ski slopes.

She’s talking to fellow skiers about whether they’re rattled or chill.

Yeah, well, you know, if you just had a yard sale on the slopes.

To translate that for those who don’t know, yard sale is when you do a full body plant and part of your gear goes that way and part of your gear goes that way and it looks like you’re selling everything.

Right, right. And maybe you’re nonplussed by that.

I mean, you know, if that happens to you and you say, I was nonplussed, what does that mean?

I’m with Kaylin that, I mean, this word may end up ensconced in future dictionaries with the meaning of not bothered.

But until then, I just avoid the word.

Yeah, absolutely.

We would love to hear about the language that you’re discussing on the slopes as you look for the good pow-pow.

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. And here he is after doing 24 escape rooms in a row.

We’ll see if he can get away from us. It’s John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Luckily, hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Luckily, I escaped from the last one because that’s the only one that counts.

So now I’m here. I’m finally here. Yeah.

You know, guys, it’s an interesting age we live in. No one can dispute that.

But there are always people saying, we live in this age or we live in that age until more rational minds come along and set them straight.

For example, I heard someone going on about, we live in an age where everything is untidy.

Everywhere you look in every home, there are clothes on the floor, dishes in the sink, papers.

Truly, we live in such an age.

And then a more rational person comes along and says, you think we live in a mess age, but you just read the word message.

Oh, I thought it was going to be a garb edge.

It could have been a garb edge.

All the clothes all over the floor, yeah, it’s a garb edge.

There are clothes all over the floor.

It is a garb edge.

Very good.

I’ll describe an age we live in, and since you’re both more rational than I am, you set me straight if you can.

Okay?

All right, here we go.

For eons, we’ve all lived as individuals, but finally a time has come where you and I are living together, an age of cooperation between you and me.

Age of cooperation, living together, you and me.

Martha always laughs as if she’s got it, and sometimes she doesn’t, sometimes she doesn’t.

Well, I do this time, but let’s talk about it a little bit more.

Well, if you’re talking about an age with you and me, we’re talking about, John, usage.

Oh, that’s right.

Usage.

Oh, I thought you meant an us age.

I thought it was an us age.

Right.

So you can tell me what age I’m mistaking it to be.

Or if the two of us are Spanish speakers, it’s a dos age.

Dos age.

I like it.

Very good.

Dos age.

All right.

Let’s move on.

Truly, this is a golden age of music.

No longer are individuals singing alone or playing instruments alone.

Finally, we’re living in an age where people are gathering in small groups to play music.

Gathering in small groups to play music.

Well, I’ll rip it off slowly.

Yes.

John, it’s a bandage.

Yes, that’s right.

It’s a bandage.

Oh, it’s a bandage, not a bandage.

Okay, yes, I got it.

Thank you, Martha.

Thank you for setting me straight.

You’re welcome.

This one seems made for Martha.

She’s doing so well.

So far, so good.

It’s great.

Look around you.

Everywhere there are construction projects that use the power of the river to create electricity.

Massive public works projects are going up that make reservoirs and provide hydropower.

It’s a damn age.

It is a damn age. It sure is.

Do you say otherwise?

It’s a damage.

Oh, I’ll say.

It’s damage. Yes, it’s damage.

Now, you must admit that nowadays we can get anything we need from a tiny capsule.

You know, vitamins, minerals, medicines of all kinds.

We can just swallow them quickly and easily like never before.

And gather them all up and steal away with them.

Because I think we’re talking about pillage, John.

Yes, pillage.

It’s pillage, not pillage?

It’s a pillage.

Oh, okay.

The Vikings might have something to say about that.

That one cracks me up for some reason.

I like that one.

That’s good.

Anyway, you guys did fantastic.

Great job.

Those are all your ages.

Thanks, John.

We’ll see you next week.

Give our best to the family.

Thank you.

You too, guys.

Bye-bye.

You can hear all of John’s quizzes and all of our past episodes on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, Grant and Martha.

What a delight to be speaking with you.

This is Carl.

I’m calling from Sebastopol, California in beautiful Sonoma County.

Oh, hi, Carl.

Welcome to the show.

It’s very lovely there.

It sure is.

Well, my question is one that goes all the way back to my childhood, and it’s about the name of a drink that we had a lot of when I was growing up.

So, the background is that I was born early in the baby boom generation and lived for the first decade of my life in a tenement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New.

York City with my parents.

We were Jewish and so I grew up generally aware of the long history of Jewish immigrants settling on the Lower East Side, but I really didn’t know a lot about the details of all of that until I was maybe 10 years old and came across my mother’s copy of Harry Golden’s book for two cents plain. And I started reading about the history of Jewish immigration and got to know something about some of the organizations that I had first-hand contact with. And I also learned what the name of Golden’s book meant, and it was the way that a Jewish immigrant might order a glass of plain seltzer for two cents specified the size of the glass. And plain meant no syrup because maybe they just wanted it plain, or maybe they didn’t have the extra couple of pennies that they needed to have the syrup.

So the drink that I grew up with is kind of related to that. It was a mixture of milk and seltzer or carbonated water with chocolate syrup stirred into it, and we called it an egg cream. And I never understood why we called it an egg cream because it had neither eggs nor cream. And so, of course, you know, being a modern baby boomer, I looked it up on the Internet and I read that, well, egg might come from the German and Yiddish word Echte or Echt, which means genuine. But then the name becomes genuine cream and there’s still no cream. And so it still doesn’t make very much sense.

So I figured I’d call the experts and find out what the truth is. Oh, goodness. Yeah, the whole idea that we’ve got a drink called egg cream that doesn’t have eggs and creams is so delicious, so to speak, that I can’t resist it. It’s just one of those really delightful foodie language things. You’re like, what are humans even doing naming their things? Like, who even is in charge of naming food? But probably what happened was, it isn’t from the Yiddish, but probably it’s, originally there was egg. And originally there was cream.

There have been many drinks that have gone by the name of egg creams, including drinks where they whip up the whites of the egg into a really nice froth. And you might add some flavoring, some sweetness to that. You might have heard of an egg phosphate or an egg lemonade. Sometimes they had eggs, sometimes they didn’t. And so I suspect what’s happened here is the name kept going long after the ingredients changed. That’s the prevailing theory among food researchers anyway. Because you will get things like even an egg-based shampoo at one time was called egg cream. You will see ads for it where people are saying, my egg cream is the best for your hair. And they’re trying to get you to buy it.

Wow. You know, that’s fascinating because having a froth on it was part of the art of making an egg cream. You had to stir it up and you generally put the chocolate syrup into the milk first and then you added the seltzer and you got this nice froth on it. So that takes it right back to those old drinks. Yeah, it really does. And if you’ve ever had any kind of those really finicky and difficult to make desserts that involve whipping up egg whites, not only are they amazing to look at, but so much else can be added to them, like citrus or what have you, to add flavor. So I could totally see an earlier version with actual eggs in it.

Well, thank you so much for that answer. I had no idea that it might be related to drinks and products that actually had eggs and cream in them. Yeah, yeah, that’s the most likely answer. Carl, thank you so much for sharing your memories and your stories with us. We really appreciate it. It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for talking with me. It’s a delight, and I absolutely love the show. Oh, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Carl. Take care. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673. We’re still hearing from listeners about restaurant codes, those codes that are invisible to the rest of us but make service more efficient. And Mark Zink is a chef in Charlotte, North Carolina. Years ago, he worked in a white tablecloth restaurant in New Orleans, and they had a system of their own. He says the salt shaker was oriented to face the host of the party when they were first seated. Wine glasses were removed or added to reflect the orders for the course. Different style glasses for different wines, no glasses for teetotalers. And the orders were trade up in a clockwise sequence to match the seats so that each person was served each course simultaneously without the stereotypical, who gets the chicken? You know, there are all these little things. There are all these little things, all these little efficiencies that we add that make stuff go more smoothly. I really appreciate that kind of attention to detail.

Yeah, I wouldn’t have thought about placing the salt shaker to indicate where the host is, but that’s super cool. I wonder what they do if the customers rearrange stuff in between courses. That’s a good question. Martha and I would love to talk to you about your codes and ciphers. 877-929-9673. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Oh, hi. Oh, this is Katie Tompkins from Everett, Washington. Hi, Katie. Welcome to the show. Hey, Katie. Oh, hello. Hi, it’s so exciting to be here. What’s on your mind?

I don’t know if you guys have ever watched the TV show Gilded Age. It’s a TV show that takes place kind of right around the turn of the century, late 1800s. And there’s kind of two sisters in the show. And they, you know, they’re very proper. They are having like a little quibble and one of the sisters is, you know, going to be missed dinner the next day. And the kind of more uptight sister is kind of in a, you know, fluster about it. And she says, if ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. And yeah, so I kind of have my guess to what it means, but I don’t really know what a tinker is. So I was calling in to see if you guys could shed some light on it.

And so what was happening on the show when this expression came up? Yeah. So one of the sisters kind of has a crush and she was going to go out to dinner with him and miss the family dinner. And the other sister, kind of the uptight sister, was like, well, what if it turns into something more? And she replied, well, if isps and ants were pots and pans, there’d be no need for tinkers. So I kind of guess it’s like there’s no need to speculate or there’s no, you know, who can tell the future kind of type thing. But I don’t really know because I don’t know what a tinker is for the metaphor.

Yeah, that’s a pretty good guess. A tinker is a kind of metal worker. It’s a really, really old word, Katie. It goes back all the way to the 13th century. And the term tinker was applied to traveling workers, primarily in Ireland and Scotland, who would go from town to town and they would offer their services repairing metal utensils and pots and pans and, you know, things in your kitchen. They were called tinkers. And so if you’re saying if ifs and ands were pots and pans, then you wouldn’t need tinkers because you can just, you know, why would you need them? So the idea is basically just because you talk about something that doesn’t actually make that thing happen, doesn’t get the task done. Or I think in the case of the sisters, you know, who knows what’s going to happen?

Exactly. Okay. Okay. Interesting. Oh, wow. Yeah, it’s a super interesting word, and nobody’s sure of the origin. I mean, I’ve always thought about the idea that, you know, if you’re working on metal, it kind of sounds like tink, tink, tink. Although some people have speculated that maybe it has to do with the word tin. You know, that it’s an extension of the word tin. And I should note that the word tinker has been applied in a derogatory way to itinerant groups, such as the Irish travelers and the Scottish Highland travelers or groups of the Romani people who originated in northern India and are sometimes called gypsies, although that term is now regarded as offensive in many circles.

And you might be wondering, what about the verb tinker?

You’re tinkering with something in your garage.

How about that?

Oh, interesting.

I know that.

So that’s really interesting.

I wonder, yeah, if that relates to actual, yeah, what a tinker is.

I don’t know.

Yeah, yeah, it does.

It’s the idea of doing something with your hands, sometimes clumsily.

You’re tinkering with something, and you haven’t quite figured it out yet.

And there are lots of versions of this rhyme.

There’s a longer one that you might appreciate.

It goes, if wishes were horses, then beggars could ride.

If turnips were watches, I’d wear one by my side.

And then it goes into the ifs and ands were pots and pans, there’d be no work for tinkers.

Sometimes it ends, there’d be no work for tinkers’ hands, so that it rhymes.

Oh, that would make sense too, tinkers’ hands.

Yeah, tinkers’ hands, yeah.

Oh, that’s funny.

Katie, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much.

Yeah, it was wonderful chatting with you both.

Thanks. Take care.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how are you?

My name is Jeff McDonald.

I’m in Wilmington, North Carolina.

What’s on your mind today, Jeff?

Well, I grew up in the South,

And I always heard the term barn burner

To describe an exciting athletic event.

And I mentioned that to my wife a couple weeks back,

And she looked at me quizzically and was obviously I knew that I’d said something that she hadn’t heard before.

And so we were curious as to what the origin of that might be.

A barn burner about a particular kind of athletic event?

Well, not really. I mean, you know, I guess I guess a lot of basketball, played basketball in high school.

And so, you know, you hear a lot of around sporting events mostly where, oh, it was a barn burner.

And so I just kind of wondered where that originated.

So meaning it was very exciting.

Exciting. Yes. I’m sorry. Yeah.

Like if it was a close game, very exciting.

You know, people refer to it as a barn burner.

Yeah. A couple of different ways to go with this.

But let’s just talk for a second about why burning a barn is exciting.

The short answer is really simple.

They’re usually made of wood and filled with things that burn.

So they burn very easily and very quickly.

And if you have arsonists, arsonists may go choose a barn over something else just because they’re known to burn well.

And if you’ve got tractors or other gas-powered equipment in there, you might get some gas and oil fires too.

A barn burner, meaning a humdinger or a doozy, is just something that goes off very well like a barn on fire.

But there is another barn burner. Have you ever heard the political barn burner?

No, I haven’t.

So there’s this kind of joke or aphorism or saying about a farmer who is so upset with the rat infestation that he has

That in order to get rid of the rodents, he just sets the whole barn on fire.

And it’s been used as a metaphor to talk about, particularly in politics, about people who just go to extremes.

They’re radicals.

And as a matter of fact, there was a radical wing of the Democratic Party in the 1830s and 40s that was known as the Barnburners.

And they had another layer to their name there.

They were a spinoff group from the Locofocos, L-O-C-O, F-O-C-O.

And that was a kind of friction match.

You know, those little redheaded matches, those sticks of wood that you can scrape along the side of the box.

And so barn burner was a playoff that little faction’s name, loco foco.

And the foco, by the way, comes from the Italian word for fire, foco.

And loco probably comes from the word locomotive, indicating speed or mobility.

But in any case, yeah, your barn burner, the happy fun barn burner,

Is just about something burning quickly and easily.

Well, thank you so much. I appreciate it.

All right. You take care now.

Will do. Thank you very much. Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling, Jeff.

Thank you.

Has a word or phrase caught your eye or ear?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

A Way with Words is about language seen through family, history, and culture.

Stay tuned for more.

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.

I just finished an astonishing memoir by a Jamaican poet, Sophia Sinclair.

It’s called How to Say Babylon.

And it’s the story of being raised in a home dominated by her strict Rastafarian father.

And he tries to keep their family isolated from what he and his fellow Rastas regard as the sinister forces of Western ideology, colonialism, and Christianity, or what they call Babylon.

And her memoir is about the struggle to break free of her father’s control and find her own identity.

And Sinclair’s family is close and they’re devoted to one another.

And she details all of this in lovely passages about their life in Montego Bay.

But her father becomes increasingly domineering and full of rage.

And she and her siblings come to fear his unpredictable wrath.

And their mother, who’s a teacher, often steps in between to try to absorb the worst of it.

And she also endures taunts at school because Jamaica is a predominantly Christian nation

Where the Rastafari were considered outcasts.

And so by her early teens, Sinclair becomes despondent and even self-destructive.

And that is when her mother gives her a book called Poems of a Child’s World

And gently suggests that she read it.

And her mom says, poetry is the best of what I’ve come to love about this world.

And that’s when Sinclair discovers how, as she puts it,

Poetry could cast a light on a meager world and make it boundless.

And she also begins to read the dictionary page by page.

And as she puts it, gathering the meaning and root of each known word,

Gems clinking in my heavy sack.

And poetry becomes her way out.

And there’s so much more to say, Grant.

I don’t want to give away any spoilers.

Let me just say that this is a deeply insightful, very sensuous work.

It’s a memoir that reads like a novel.

It’s sometimes searing, but it’s also full of love and hope.

It’s about family and forgiveness and resilience.

And it’s also about the difference that mentors can make, whether on the page or in person.

And one of those mentors tells her at one point, the best way to really understand a poem is by embodying it.

So Sinclair determines to make herself a sacral vessel, as she puts it.

She memorizes dozens and dozens of poems.

And she’s since become an internationally acclaimed poet herself.

And I’m sure that that’s what makes her prose writing so great, being able to draw on that store.

And I’m thinking I don’t have much of anything memorized in terms of poetry.

I have a lot of Bible verses from being a preacher’s kid,

But I find myself really wistful about the way that some people can just pull out a poem for an occasion

Or a poem comes back to them when they’re thinking about a topic.

I don’t know. Do you memorize many poems?

No, not since I was required to in school.

I’ve always been one to know where to look things up or how to find them.

And it just hasn’t seemed like a necessary act.

I do wonder about the time spent memorizing a poem and how that feels to her.

Does she feel that it’s a chore?

Does she feel that it’s a joy?

Is it something she takes bit by bit so it doesn’t really matter how long it takes to memorize?

I’m just curious about her process and what emotions she has as she’s doing it.

Well, I think, you know, if you read the book, you understand that she hangs on every word and she just has this store of poems.

At one point, she meets the great poet Derek Walcott and they’re talking about his poetry.

And he asks how many of his poems she has memorized.

And she says, oh, about eight.

I just I can’t imagine, you know, meeting a famous poet and saying, oh, I have eight of your poems memorized.

No, it’s just not a part of our culture anymore to memorize Shakespeare or great poems or the ancients, you know, the classics.

Yeah, and I think it just, when I’ve done it in the past for school, I think that it’s just made me think in different ways, more rhythmically, more musically.

And that reminds me that if you’re thinking about listening to this book as an audio book, I would heartily recommend it.

She’s an excellent reader, and at times she slips in and out of Jamaican patois.

And it’s just a gorgeous read, whether you’re listening or reading it on the page.

I would highly recommend it.

And the book and the author are?

It’s called How to Save Babylon, and it’s by Sophia Sinclair.

We will link to that book from our website like we do all of the books that we mention.

We would love to hear about your experiences with poetry.

Send us a message by email, words@waywordradio.org,

Or you can call us toll-free in the United States and Canada, 1-877-929-9673.

And if you’re listening somewhere else in the world, there are lots of ways to reach us, including WhatsApp.

You can find that information on our website at waywordradio.org.

Earlier we were talking about the rhyme that goes, if ifs and ands were pots and pans, and then there’s some other things following that.

But there is a much longer verse, actually there’s lots of verses, to a poem called A Chapter of Ifs that was published in the mid-1800s.

And I thought I might share some of this.

Sure, let’s hear it.

Here’s some of it.

If ifs and ands were pots and pans, t’would cure the tinker’s cares.

If ladies did not carry fans, they’d give themselves no airs.

If down the starry skies should fall, the starlings would be cheap.

If bells talked reason at a ball, the band might go to sleep.

And it goes on and on with many more verses and starts naming famous people who do this and who that.

But the whole idea here is that let’s not wish for things that can’t be real because they’re just not going to come to pass.

Oh, that’s nice.

Put away your tinkering and give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hey there, this is Tim calling from Ridgewood, Queens, New York.

Well, Tim, welcome to the show. What’s on your mind?

Well, I grew up in Western Connecticut and my parents still live up there. And about a week ago, my mom and my stepdad were on a hike and they sent me and my siblings like a nice sunshiny selfie with a beautiful lake in the background. And I was trying to figure out which lake it was. And I was running through some options in my head around where they live. Is it like Lake Launona? Is it Lake Waramog? Is it Candlewood Lake? Is it Bantam Lake? And I kind of got sidetracked by a random thought, which was like, why is Lake in front of some of those names? And after I was like an intrusive thought, like, why is it in front of some and why is it after others like Lake Launona, Candlewood Lake? And then of course, I got sidetracked by another thought, which was maybe Grant and Martha would find this interesting. So I dialed you up.

And here we are.

I never got around to responding to them about the hike, but I’m curious if you do find this interesting.

Talk to my parents, talk to Grant and Martha.

Which one will it be?

Tim, you’re our people.

We get sidetracked all the time by language, so this is great.

We totally understand.

So the question, just to reframe this, is why are some lakes Lake Name and other lakes are named Lake?

Right?

So the examples you gave were?

Lake Lillanona and Lake Warramog, Candlewood Lake and Bantam Lake.

Those are all like in western Connecticut, but I’m sure there are examples all over the place.

There absolutely are.

For years, people have been asking us about this, and we’ve had pretty good answers, I think, Martha.

I think we’ve done pretty well.

But I have to tell you that this time when I researched this, I came across a paper published in the August Journal, Freshwater Biology.

And this paper answers the question once and for all.

And it’s by Beatrix Beisner and Kaylin Carey, published in 2016.

And the title’s Lake Name or Name Lake, the Etymology of Lake Nomenclature in the United States.

And what they did was analyzed around 1,000 lake names and found that most lakes are in the name lake format.

So what’s the example that you have where lake came last?

Candlewood Lake.

Candlewood Lake.

I think it’s the biggest lake in Connecticut.

Candlewood Lake and about 80 of them take that format where the word lake is after the name rather than before the name but what they also found is that larger lakes are more likely to have a lake name format which is where we put the lake in front of the name so Lake Erie or like Ontario like Cuomo like Geneva stuff like that right I feel like when I was thinking of examples in my I had the famous lakes, like the Great Lakes, are all like that, Lake Erie, Lake Superior.

There’s another component to that, and you’ve touched just gently upon it, the famous lakes.

Why are they famous?

It’s because we’ve known about them for a long time since the French explorers explored North America.

And there is some idea here that those lakes in particular, and perhaps some others, adopt the French naming format.

So the French would be more likely to put lake first and the name second.

And in this study, Beatrix Beisner and Kaylin Carey discovered that southern and eastern U.S. States reflect Gallic and Romance linguistic traditions.

And they favor lake name, lake followed by the name.

And so it’s just really, really incredible.

They finally got to the bottom of it.

And really, it’s all about size.

The bigger a lake is, the more well-known it is, as you say, they’re more likely to have lake name, lake followed by name.

Okay, interesting.

Well, that is a little bit converse to what I was saying about Candlewood Lake being the biggest lake in Connecticut because that’s named lake.

But then I’m thinking the other biggest lake in a state that I know for some random reason is Lake Winnipesaukee in New Hampshire, and that’s the opposite.

So, I don’t know.

I’m all mixed up.

There are no universals with this, right?

This isn’t an absolute rule.

There are going to be exceptions, but generally that’s what’s happening here.

By the way, before we go, I’m going to leave you with two words.

They mean the study of lakes and bodies of freshwater or the person who studies lakes and bodies of freshwater.

And this is limnology and limnologist, L-I-M-N, which comes from a root word meaning lake.

Limnology and limnologist.

Very interesting.

Okay.

Well, Tim, thank you so much for your call.

Take care of yourself.

Yeah, it was great speaking to you both.

I appreciate the opportunity.

Love the show and have a great day.

All right. Bye-bye.

You can go to our website, waywordradio.org, to look for that.

And you can send us your queries to words@waywordradio.org.

You know that feeling when you first walk into a mall or a large supermarket and it’s just overwhelming, there are distractions everywhere, the sights and the sounds and people walking this way and that.

And unless you’re really focused, you end up just kind of wandering around, overwhelmed, and you come home with more things than you originally set out to get.

Do you ever have that experience, Grant?

I don’t know any malls like that anymore.

They’re all kind of quiet.

But yes, I remember the feeling.

Well, there’s actually a term for that.

It’s called the Gruen transfer or the Gruen effect.

Oh.

Yeah, the Gruen transfer or the Gruen effect is named for Victor Gruen, G-R-U-E-N.

He’s an Austrian-American architect who designed the first suburban open-air shopping center in the U.S. outside of Detroit.

And the Gruen effect is described as the moment when consumers enter a shopping mall or store and, surrounded by an intentionally confusing layout, lose track of their original intentions, making them more susceptible to making impulse buys.

I was so happy to learn that there’s a term for this thing that happens to me.

And I learned about the Gruen effect from the always fascinating substack called Frit-O-Nancy by our friend Nancy Friedman, who is a naming and branding expert.

That’s the Gruen effect.

Now we know why Martha comes home with snow tires instead of groceries.

And snowshoes, probably.

Snowshoes.

877-929-9673 is toll free in the United States and Canada, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

And if you want to talk to us via social media, try our website.

We’ve got everything there at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, how are you?

This is Janice Johnson, also called Jay. I’m from Hampton, Virginia.

We’re glad to have you, Jay. What’s up?

Okay, whenever I was getting ready to leave home to go a distance, or any of the young people in the family, my grandfather would send us off, and he would say, “Remember, you belong to the land of the blue hens chickens.” I mean, none of us ever knew what he was talking about.

“Remember, you belong to the land of the blue hens chicken?” That’s how your dad would send you off? Or your grandfather?

My grandfather sent us off with that.

And what did you think he meant?

I have no idea what he meant. I tried at one point to kind of investigate it with a person who’s my mentor in storytelling. And the only thing we could find was something about a regiment in Delaware.

There you go. Just can’t figure out how that would connect to him.

That’s the connection. He didn’t have a connection to Delaware at all?

No, not as far as I know.

Huh. That’s interesting.

Well, yeah, Blue Hen’s Chicken has referred to someone from or associated with the state of Delaware since at least the 1840s. And before that, it meant a particularly feisty person. And as you suggested, it does go back to a group of soldiers who fought during the Revolutionary War. Supposedly, they wore blue outfits and were noted for their fighting prowess. And they were compared to fighting roosters, game cocks, bred from the blue hen, which is a type of chicken. And that chicken was known for its strength and aggression in cockfighting.

So this troop from Delaware, this group of soldiers, took that name or were given that name, and it later became an emblem of Delaware, just to stand for it and its people. And even it’s the state bird. The blue hen state is a nickname that Delaware has with pride.

But I don’t know why your, you know, I don’t know why you, your grandfather would bring up Delaware if he didn’t have a connection.

Maybe he was just referring to just the idea of being a fighter and being strong and going after what you want.

Yeah. How did you feel when he sent you off that way? Did it straighten your spine?

I don’t know that it stayed in my spine. I felt like it must be something special for him to say that. I really couldn’t figure out what the connection was.

That’s our best guess. In any case, we hope that you will remember, you belong to the land of the blue hens chickens. Give us another call sometime, all right, Jay?

All right. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. Take care. Bye.

All right. Bye-bye.

We welcome your calls about anything. Was it something you heard last week or something you heard from a grandparent years ago? 877-929-9673.

Here’s an old word that I think deserves reviving. It’s slatch. S-L-A-T-C-H. Slatch.

Sounds like high school slang for somebody you dislike.

Yeah, the slatches over there.

No, this was a term that was used in the 17th and 18th century to mean a brief respite or interval, like a short period of some kind of weather. You know, we must wait for a slatch of fair weather.

Oh, yeah, that’s good. I see a need for that. That’s a little lexical gap that we can fill.

I think so. I mean, you know, in Britain, sometimes they say bright intervals. You know, there are going to be bright intervals of sunshine, but a slatch of sunshine I like.

We hope there’s a slatch in your day that you can put down what you’re doing and give us a call and talk to us about language. Share your stories, comments, thoughts, and questions at 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Our team includes senior producer Stefanie Levine, engineer and editor Tim Felten, and quiz guide John Chaneski. We’d love to hear from you no matter where you are in the world. Go to waywordradio.org/contact.

Subscribe to the podcast, hear hundreds of past episodes, and get the newsletter at waywordradio.org. Whenever you have a language story or question, our toll-free line is open in the U.S. and Canada, 1-877-929-9673. Or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

A Way with Words is an independent production of Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Special thanks to Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye.