Gnarly Foot

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

A few hundred miles off the east coast of Australia, there’s this beautiful little place. It’s called Norfolk Island. And it’s just 13 miles square. There are only 2,000 people who live there. Most of them are descendants of British sailors and Polynesians. And when you look at photos of the place, Grant, the place is just gorgeous. It’s this typical South Pacific paradise. So that’s enough to make you envious right there.

But there’s one other thing that makes me really wistful the more I read about this place. And maybe it gives you a little insight into their culture. A lot of people on this island go by nicknames. And in fact, the island’s phone book includes them. You can go online, Grant, and look at this because there, for example, lots of Buffetts on Norfolk Island. But if you want Darlene Buffett, you go looking for Dar Busy Bee. Dar Busy Bee. Dar Busy Bee. There’s a guy whose nickname is Carrots. There’s another guy named Lettuce Leaf. There’s Pumpkin and Wiggy and Pinky and Pixie and Moose and Sluggy and Diesel and Boo and Hose and Pusswa. I don’t know about those last two.

Do people use these or is this the person who put together the phone book took it upon themselves to assign nicknames? I don’t know. I mean, I guess if you have that small a population, maybe there are lots and lots of people with the same name. Or maybe you just know people by their nicknames. But there was something about that that just made me wistful. I wish I had my nickname in the phone book.

What’s your nickname? Which one would it be? Probably be Big. I think I told you about that. Yeah, and you’re Gertie, right? Yeah, my little sister said if I’d have been a girl, I’d have been called Gertrude, so she called me Gertie for a long time. And Big for me was short for Big Moth, which everybody called me in college. But I don’t know. There’s something kind of lovely about that.

Yeah, there definitely is. Nicknames have a special place. They provide social glue. Good stuff. You can find it online. We’ll link to it from our website. And in the meantime, you can call us with your questions about language, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how you doing? This is John from East Hampton.

Hello, John. Welcome, East Hampton, New York.

-huh. Great to have you on the show. What’s up?

I had a little bit of a debate with some friends one night over drinks. We were talking, and sometimes I just make up words. This one friend of mine, Bill, he shot back at me, and he said, “That’s not even a word.” And I said, “Well, it is now.” And he said, “No, it’s not. That’s not a dictionary I know.” I said, “Well, how do you think words get into a dictionary?” And, you know, we got into this whole debate, and then he said, “Well, if you use that word scrabble, you would lose.” And I said, “We’re playing life by board game rules. How could you possibly say that?”

Yeah, yeah. And so, like, I used the word micro-nuscia. Right. And I turned to a friend of mine. I said, “You understand what I meant when I said that, right?” So I communicated a thought. You understood it. It’s a word. But then we got to talking like what makes a word really a word?

You couldn’t have said it better. But let me ask you, micronutia means what?

It’s smaller than minutia.

Right. Very good. And I understood that. I think I understood that.

Yeah. Right.

So the build guy was giving you a hard time.

He’s a gracious host. He has a whole bunch of us over at his house every Friday. But he loves to take a stand and then stick with it, and he wouldn’t budge. I even called him back. I said, “Bill, please tell me that you’re not serious about this war thing.”

I am too. I’m serious. I’m like, “Okay, then. I’m sorry, but I’m going to have to go to the experts on this one.”

You have arrived at the right place. Because we are on your side.

Yes, we agree with you.

We are back in your play, buddy. If you can say it and the meaning is understood, it becomes a word.

Right.

Now, granted, it’s not in the dictionary. But as you said, how do words get in the dictionary? It carries meaning clearly.

Right.

And it sounds like Bill engages in microneousia all the time, right?

He’s always splitting hairs.

There we go. This is exactly what happens. He splits hairs about everything. And at this point, I said, “You know, Bill, I’m really not interested in this microneousia.” At which point he said, “You know, that’s not even a word.”

Yeah, it’s a common myth that somehow the dictionaries are the final word on what’s a word. It’s absolutely not true. The dictionaries contain the barest fraction of all the English words. Even the Oxford English Dictionary, which is vast, even the upcoming Webster’s Unabridged, the new edition they’re working on, they don’t have anywhere near all the words in English. They can’t. It’s just not enough space and time.

And, you know, before the time when we could all Wikipedia and go to Merriam-Westers online, I used to keep at least three different dictionaries in my house because there were variations of words or meanings that just never made it to one dictionary or another.

Right, and some people like to say that the dictionary isn’t the social register of words. It’s the phone book of words. It’s what’s out there.

And with your help, Micronusha is…

Well, Micronusha is already out there.

I see a lot of hits on Google, actually.

Yeah, if you Google it, you’ll find it in books and blogs and news articles. And it’s always kind of in a register of English that indicates it’s not official.

You would lose at Scrabble.

You would.

But the Scrabble dictionary contains not that many words, relatively speaking. It’s nowhere near complete. It’s like a specialty dictionary. It’s kind of like picking a slang dictionary off your shelf and saying, “If it’s not in here, it’s not a word.” It’s kind of arbitrary.

For the purposes of the game of Scrabble, the Scrabble dictionary is fine. For life, no.

No. Micronutia conforms to the morphology and the rules of English. It is a perfectly cromulent English word.

That’s terrific to hear.

Thank you very much.

Thanks for calling, John.

Okay, John. Thanks.

All right, guys. Love you, Phil.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

I bet he loves it even more now.

It’s a common argument. It’s the dictionary defense.

That’s not in the dictionary.

Right.

You’re like arguing semantics when you can’t argue the facts.

Right.

That’s one of those kind of weaselly arguing techniques, right?

Yes, indeed.

And we have to remember that dictionaries are put together by humans, such as yourself, Grant.

And we all know that I’m error-prone.

Well, you’re perfect, right.

No, they’re put together by humans with a limited amount of time, a limited amount of money, and a limited amount of space, right? There are errors in there.

There are errors.

Indeed.

Ask me any time. I’ll point them all out to you.

Ask us anything. Call us at 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, y’all. It’s Betty Anderson calling from Idlewild, California.

Hey, Betty.

Well, hi there.

I didn’t know they said y’all in Idlewild.

Well, they don’t, but I was raised in Nashville, so it comes out sometimes.

Oh, great.

Oh, it’s natural. Good, good. Well, welcome to the show.

Thank you. I’m so happy to be here with you rock stars.

How about my guitar? Do you want to hear something?

Rock stars for nerds. That’s us.

Besides the song, what else can we do for you?

Well, I have a question that to me sounds kind of strange, but I thought if anybody would be interested in this, it would be you guys.

We appreciate strange.

So there’s this phenomenon that I experience when I’m writing a long document or something, and I’m using the same word a lot, and the word starts to look like it’s not a word. Like, is that a real word? And is that the right spelling? Like something like the word among. And so I’ll write a few times, and then I start looking at it like among. A-M-O-N-G, this doesn’t look like a word to me.

And I don’t know what you would call it, if you’ve ever experienced that, but it’s just this kind of strange thing. And I thought you guys might have some input on that.

Oh, yeah, do we? Oh, yeah. There’s a term for that. I believe this applies. It’s called semantic satiation. You are satiated. Yeah, but if you say this term way too long, then it starts to look really weird. Yeah, it becomes depleted of its reservoirs of subtlety.

Words are, when we talk about words mean, there are all these connotations and denotations. And sometimes they’re hard to articulate, but we understand them in our heads. And when you use them in multiple places, in a paper, for example, they have a slightly different subtlety and connotation, each paragraph and each sentence that you use them in. And so in the intersection, you start to say, well, over here I met among to mean among three. Over here it means among five. Oh, interesting. Over here I don’t even know how many people it’s among. You’ll lose the meaning.

But I have my own term for it, which we haven’t talked about in the show for a long time. I call it the gnarly foot.

The gnarly foot? G-N-A-R-L-Y. Now, everybody, while you’re listening, take off your shoe. Take off your sock or your hose. Okay. Taking it off. And look at your foot for a really long time. And in a minute, you’re going to go, why is this ugly thing connected to my body? This is hideous. Oh, aliens have taken me over and they’re in my leg. I didn’t notice that that nail needed a trim. Yeah, it’s the same feeling because you’re like, this is an absurd thing to be a part of my body. How is this part of the human body? This ugly knobby thing with calluses and bit nails and crooked toes. Well, that’s going to be your foot.

That is not my foot, you know. Well, I’m not going to say very much about my feet. Keep looking. Keep looking at that foot. Keep them in shoes for a reason. That is wild. Okay.

So if you’re writing a document and let’s say you’re using, for example, the word among, would you suggest using a different word if it starts to get that blurry kind of feeling, or do you just trust and keep going with it? It’s the writer’s choice. Some writers, they won’t use the same word, and then they struggle to find a better word, and that leads them to making mistakes with the thesaurus. They choose a word that’s not exactly right. Other writers have no sensitivity at all to repetition and will overuse a word to such a point you’re like, did you not have an editor? Do you not have a dictionary?

Yeah, I think it’s a pretty transient feeling. I would just lie down until it passes. Yeah, exactly. Or go work on a completely different document or a different part of it. That’s true. Yeah, that’s a good rule for writing anyway.

Well, I used to get this when I used to help my mother grade her papers, you know, when I was in high school and I was grading her kids junior high papers. I mean, you would just start looking at the words, and they would be spelled wrong, and you’d be going, wait, oh, maybe that is right. Right, because when you read enough bad writing, then you start to forget what good writing is. You have to go back and read some more Edith Wharton or something like that just to catch up, just to fix it in your head.

So I think the conclusion we’re coming to is take a break and come back to it and have another look at it. And the term that you want, the official term, is semantic satiation. And my term for it is gnarly foot.

I like gnarly foot. It’s easier to say 10 times fast. Yeah, it could be all one word, gnarly foot. Gnarly foot. Gnarly foot. Thanks for calling, Betty. Thanks, you guys, so much. Have a great day. Yeah, our pleasure. Thank you. Bye-bye. Bye.

But really, that’s kind of a first-world problem, right? Definitely. To be literate to start work and to be employed to write things where you get tired of the words. That is a total FWP. But it’s fixable. It’s fixable. All right, have a lie down. That’s my solution to everything. Every good writer has a hammock.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. And we are all over social media. Look for us there. I learned a new radio word this week. Great. What is it? It’s bleeble. B-L-E-E-B-L-E. Bleeble. Bleeble. It’s a tiny little, just a little something that you might throw in, like a sound or a word or something like at the top of the hour, you’re like BBC Radio or, you know, the call letters.

Huh, that’s called a blebel? It’s just a blebel. Whatever it is that you throw in there just kind of to fill a hole or provide glue or just to add color or excitement, it’s a blebel. Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673. Stay tuned for more from A Way with Words. Thank you.

To A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett, and on the line is John Chaneski. Hello, John. Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. So today’s quiz is about this and that. That is to say it’s about three-word phrases containing and. Okay? Okay. Yeah. I’ll give you a punny, funny, or phonetic clue to a common three-word phrase with and in the middle. And if I really have to, I’ll give you a more straightforward clue.

For example, if you once saw The Man in Black at a classic horror movie starring Sissy Spacek, what would you have seen? Cash and Carrie? Cash and Carrie, yes. Nice work. Johnny Cash. Same-named actresses, Doris and Felicia, attend a costume party with two guys dressed as Lancelot and Galahad. What does that bring to mind? Day and night. Day and night or days and nights? Days and nights, there we go, yeah. All right.

If I dress up as a woman for comedic effect, now bear in mind for comedic effect, okay, and a single tear escapes my eye, what is that? A single… Drag and drop. Drag and drop is right. Way to go, Martha. Nice. If you see a country carnival located in the center of a town, you might say it was this. Fair and square. Very good.

If a car belonging to a bad guy wrestler breaks down and he calls AAA, what’s that? Oh, what are they called? What are the bad guy wrestlers called? Yeah. The good ones are called baby faces, and the bad ones are called heels, heel and… And toe. Heel and toe. There we go. Oh, good teamwork. Great teamwork on that one. Very good.

Suppose you see a famous fictional pirate and then hear his crewman assent to his order. What’s that? R and I. I don’t know. Famous fictional pirate. Which one? Where do I begin? I know. Glass beard, red beard, green beard, blue beard. Literature and Disney film. Famous fictional Disney pirate. Hook and Eye? Hook and Eye. Hook and Eye.

If Oscar winner Helen gave you a quarter of a bushel of apples, what would that be? Hunt and Peck. Hunt and Peck is right. I’m typing, yeah, yeah. Martha, you’re on fire. Oh, yeah, you’re doing great. I was working on Mirren there. If Sherlock Holmes actor Jude went into a diner, he would likely let the waitress know what he wanted. What would that be? Law and order. Law and order, right.

All right, here’s one more, okay? If you hand some filberts to your friend and he just takes off running, what does that remind you of? Nuts and something. Yeah, nuts and… Nuts and… Bolts. Yes, nuts and bolts. And you guys were fantastic. That’s it? Oh, that’s it? Congratulations. Are you going to bolt? I’m free. You’re bolting now? Darn. I am bolting. I got a dash. Thanks, John. Take care. Bye, Grandpa Martha. Give the best to your family. Bye-bye, John. I will do. Bye-bye.

If you’d like to talk about language, call us 877-929-9673 or send an email to words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hello there. Hello. Who’s this? Jane Sislucis calling from Marquette, Michigan. Jane. Yes. Hi. Welcome. Thank you. What’s that? What can we do for you? Okay. Well, Grant, I understand you grew up in Missouri, but I don’t know where you grew up. I was born in St. Louis and lived all over the state, southeast, middle, eastern side mostly. Gotcha. I grew up in St. Louis. Okay, great.

Even though I haven’t lived at home since I was about 18, I visit frequently.

And I was listening a couple weeks ago, and this prompted the call was about what you call outsiders in your town.

And it made me think about growing up with the word Hoosiers, because I know there’s a whole state of Hoosiers over in Indiana, and they’re proud of the fact.

But growing up in St. Louis, it was actually a put-down, kind of white trash, kind of redneck.

I’m not happy to say that that’s what it is, but I know it still exists because I do talk to my family and I go there.

I could never understand as a kid when I had the realization that Hoosiers was a good thing somewhere else, a bad thing where I lived.

So, what can you tell me?

Well, quite a bit, actually.

My father has Hoosier in his speech, just as you do.

For him, it is somebody who is uncouth or uncultured.

It might be the kind of fellow who leaves his gum under a handrail or goes wading in decorative fountains or wears sweatpants on his head when he can’t find a hat.

That kind of person.

Just really not, you know, thinking about the way they present themselves to the rest of the world.

That’s a Hoosier?

Yeah, in my father’s.

But it’s got a really long history.

And the original origins of Hoosier are indistinct.

There are a lot of theories that are proposed.

I know we’ll get email from lots of listeners in Indiana about this.

But none of them have good solid basis and facts, so we won’t go into them here.

But we do know that at some point, once Hoosier got fairly well established, you’ve got to remember migration patterns.

There was people traveling down the Ohio River and ending up in St. Louis.

And St. Louis is a linguistic mutt.

It’s a strange thing to look at the language map of the United States that illustrates the dialects.

And to see that St. Louis is surrounded by patches of dialect that are different from St. Louis itself.

It’s about the 60 to 100 mile radius.

But it’s got a spur of dialect influence that you can literally see on the map that goes up Highway 55 to Chicago.

So St. Louis has remnants of its German heritage.

It has remnants of being a river town of people coming up the Mississippi, especially when African-Americans started coming north.

It has remnants of being a huge city.

You know, 100 plus years ago, St. Louis was one of the major cities in the United States.

It’s got all these weird kind of heritages.

Plus, stuff is kind of stuck there because it’s its own self.

I won’t say it’s insular, but St. Louis doesn’t often look to the outside world for influence except for Chicago.

So anyway, point being that Hoosiers stuck there and they mean it to mean, or just as you say, a redneck or someone who’s not from the city, someone from the country who doesn’t know how to behave and doesn’t have manners and that sort of thing.

It means that in North Carolina, in the Smoky Mountains.

Yeah, Hoosier with a small H.

It’s more like a Hooger, though, right?

Well, there’s Hooger.

There’s, yeah, with D-G-E-R and J-E-R.

The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English has a reference to a feller who don’t know nothing except what they learned in the mountains.

In town, they speak of a country hooger or a mountain hooger.

Here in North Carolina, they speak of Tennessee hoogers.

In Tennessee, they speak of North Carolina hoogers.

Interesting.

So, yeah, they brought that over to the area you’re talking about.

Right.

Well, I know that it still exists very strongly.

My sister told me recently that there’s a term I never heard.

If you live on one end of Broadway in St. Louis versus the other end, you might be called a hoogioire.

Is that…

An upscale hoogioire.

Never heard of that one.

I like that, hoogioire.

Nor have I.

The hoogioisee, right.

But you are right to say that people who live in Indiana take it as a point of pride.

Hoogioire is not a derogatory term as far as they’re concerned.

But it was, at one time, almost completely a derogatory term.

They just took it and owned it.

Okay.

Very good.

Thanks for calling.

I really appreciate it, Jane.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

We got a ton of email when we asked you what you call people who are from away or from out of town or not from, you know, who weren’t local.

If you’ve got more of that, we’d love to hear it.

877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is David from Frederick, Maryland.

Hi, David.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, David.

What’s on your mind?

Well, I have a question about a phrase my wife uses.

My dad gave me an appreciation for words and instilled a carefulness in my sisters and me about using them properly.

So when my wife requests that I shut the light when I leave the room, I still feel the need to correct her, even after being married for 23 years.

In her defense, she cited Bob Dylan, who used the phrase in a song, shut the light, shut the shade.

You don’t have to be afraid.

But she doesn’t even like Bob Dylan.

So, did I get over it?

David, I want to ask about her background.

I wonder if she has any Yiddish in her background or Italian, maybe?

Well, she blames her past on her less-than-educated parents.

But she does perhaps have some Yiddish in her background.

Where is she from?

She’s from outside Philadelphia.

Interesting.

I just wondered because there’s a Yiddish phrase that translates as close the light rather than turn off.

And a lot of people say close the light.

So it sounds like I need to get over this.

It’s a well-known enough dialect phrase that you will find pockets of people across the United States and Canada who actually say shut the lights.

The producer of our radio show says shut the lights.

She’s from Kansas City and her parents are from Connecticut and New York City.

And you’ll find people in New York State and Pennsylvania and Texas.

And my children now.

And your children.

Right.

So they’re going to blame their parents like your wife blames her parents?

Right.

Well, and Bob Dylan too, right?

Yeah.

In that song, I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight.

It’s common enough that in any fairly vigorous discussion forum about language, it comes up.

Because people have the same encounter that you have.

They know somebody or live with somebody who says shut the lights and it seems wrong or odd to them.

Yeah.

There are some kind of lanterns where there’s a little door that you close and open to increase or decrease the light.

And so you are literally shutting this door when you want to reduce the light.

And the Italian phrase for shut the light.

What’s that?

Well, it’s shut the light.

I mean, it’s cutie, I think, something like that.

Close, close.

Yeah.

And there’s also some notions related to circuits involved with electricity.

Usually closing a circuit means to make it work.

Yeah, that’s the weird thing.

Yeah, but there are notions of open and close that don’t have to do with doors or passages or a space that you can travel through.

They’re more about off, on, or binary even, zero or one, black or white.

Open and close are very broad terms.

So in other words, I think what Grant is saying, David, is that there are so many different phrases, actually, for turning the lights on and off.

I mean, my dad from North Carolina used to talk about cut off the lights.

He would say mash the button and cut off the lights.

Very nice.

And the other thing is, David, we get email pretty regularly from people thinking that turn off the lights is wrong.

You’re not turning anything.

They don’t usually have a really good replacement for turn off the lights, but you’re like, you’re not turning.

What’s being turned here?

That’s funny because that’s what I grew up saying, turn off the lights.

Yeah, it’s an up and down switch.

How is that a turn?

Yeah, and it’s not switch off the lights.

Is it point the switch down?

Is that what you should say?

David!

I’m not going home.

You’re not going home?

She loves you.

Just don’t leave the lights on and she won’t say that anymore.

Okay.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

All right.

Thanks a lot.

Take care now.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a word that I heard again this week, but I don’t think I ever previously understood exactly what it means.

It’s the word affordance.

Do you know the word affordance?

Affordance.

In architecture and design, it refers to a part of an object or a building or a thing or even in user interface design for computers, a part that you can do something with.

So the handle on your cup is an affordance.

Really?

A button on the front of a machine is an affordance.

A latch or a switch or even like the thumb places where you put your thumbs in a dictionary.

We know it’s got the thumb cutouts.

That’s an affordance.

An edge that you can grab is an affordance.

Sometimes in language we have affordances.

We offer opportunities for someone else to speak or to take a turn.

Or we give them an opportunity to laugh or to express dismay or excitement.

An affordance is a really interesting concept.

I’d never heard that word.

Affordance.

So, again, the simplest form is a handle on a cup.

Yeah, I love that.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Sylvia Lyons calling from Middleborough, Massachusetts.

Hi, Sylvia. Welcome.

How are you doing?

I am fine. Thank you so much for taking my call.

Happy to. How can we help you?

Well, we’re a homeschooling family,

And so we actually have discussions about grammar at the dinner table.

Oh, wow, that’s great.

How many kids are we talking about?

Well, we have eight, but we only have four at home now.

And so the oldest one at home, she’s a junior in high school,

And actually the one who is probably the most passionate about grammar,

She’s a freshman at college this year.

Excellent.

And the question, one of the questions that she’s had

And she comments on occasionally is about numbers.

And she’s wondered regularly whether numbers are nouns

Or whether they’re adjectives.

And I actually have looked this up in dictionaries,

And they are listed both as numbers and as adjectives.

But she feels really strongly that they can’t be adjectives

Because she says, well, you can’t look out the window and say,

Oh, those are really lovely nine clouds.

Because if they’re adjectives, you know, they must be like a special class of adjectives.

So she’s really wondering, well, what part of speech then would numbers be?

That’s a great question.

And I love that you’re discussing it around the dinner table with four kids.

Which dictionaries did you look it up in, if I may ask?

Well, I went to an online dictionary.

We actually don’t keep too many paper dictionaries around anymore.

We have a lot of books in our house.

I bet.

This is handled a lot of different ways in a bunch of different dictionaries.

I’ve worked for at least three different dictionary publishers as a dictionary editors,

And this topic comes up every time that you start a brand new line of dictionaries.

What are we going to call our parts of speech?

Because you learn certain parts of speech at the basic level of grammar, right?

Nouns and adjectives and adverbs and verbs and so forth.

But it turns out that when you get deeper into language, that these boundaries between them are very unclear.

Nouns, for example, can be attributive.

We can talk about a school bus.

Well, what is school doing there?

It’s a noun in front of a noun.

A radio show.

Yeah, a radio show.

They’re kind of behaving like adjectives, but they’re not.

So we call them attributive nouns because they lend a little bit of their connotation to the word that follows.

And so we can go through English again and again and find a lot more stuff like that.

We can talk about the American flag as the red, white, and blue.

Well, red, white, and blue are adjectives, and yet we’re treating them together as a noun.

How can that be?

And again and again in English, we run into these things.

It’s part of the reason that nouns easily become verbs, and verbs easily become nouns.

It’s just one of those strange things.

One of the dictionaries I worked for didn’t even call,

They called them determiners, called numbers determiners.

Just skipped the question altogether.

Other dictionaries don’t call them nouns or adjectives.

They call them simply cardinal or ordinal numbers,

Depending whether you’re doing 12 or 12, for example.

And it’s a way around it.

12s are definitely a special class in language.

They deserve special attention.

A dictionary is only the starting point.

I think if your daughter’s really keen to get into this,

I highly encourage her to look up some of the stuff that we’re talking about today.

There are infinite number of books and papers and even lectures online that she can find

That will talk at length about where the separation from part of speech should be placed.

Think about it this way.

Where does blue stop and purple begin if you’re looking at a spectrum?

This is exactly the same problem when we think about the difference between adjectives and nouns

And different parts of speech.

That is really interesting.

I had never thought about that.

I always kind of assumed that it was really a rather black or white thing,

Whether it’s nouns or verbs.

That is really, really interesting.

Who knew?

Yeah.

Who knew?

It sounds like you’ve got a wonky family, and bless you all, because it’s wonderful.

My house is also full of books.

We talk about grammar at the table, too.

But if she’s really into it, she can make a whole life and career of getting to the bottom of this

And trying to figure it out.

It’s interesting stuff for the brain.

Yes. Well, thank you so much.

You should at least invite Grant over for dinner. I think you all can have a blast.

Well, I’m sure it would be so fun to cook a meal.

Thank you so much, Sylvia. Best of luck to you.

All right.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language questions at Come Up Around the Dinner Table, 877-929-9673.

We were talking a while back about book spine poetry or book mashes, you know, where you pile up books and then you see the poetry created by those titles.

On our Facebook page, a listener from San Francisco who goes by the name Urban Canines posted a photo of the one that he or she created, and I really liked it.

The titles are Shortcuts to Bliss, Running with Scissors, Naked, Why Didn’t I Think of That?

That’s great. That’s good. So that’s incidental poetry.

Yeah, yeah. Found poetry, air poetry. Yeah, yeah. Running with Scissors, Austin Burroughs, and Naked by, is that David Sedaris?

I think so.

I forget.

If you have bookmashes you’d like to share, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

It’s the bouncy house for language 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 Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

It’s hard enough to describe a complex subject,

But imagine trying to do it

With only the thousand most common words in English.

It’s really hard.

And I’ve been playing with that idea, Grant,

And I know you have too.

It’s a useful way of shaking things up.

And our inspiration for that was the thing called Upgoer 5.

You remember this, Grant.

The cartoon by, what, XKCD?

XKCD.

It’s a drawing of a Saturn V rocket, the one that took Apollo astronauts to the moon.

But it’s labeled using only the thousand most common words in English.

So, for example, thousand and common aren’t among the most common words in English.

So the cartoon says it’s about the ten hundred words people use the most often.

And the whole diagram of the rocket has things like instead of the space capsule, it’s called the people box.

And the oxygen tanks are called breathing type air, which are different from the helium tanks, which are the funny voice air.

And that’s prompted a lot of people to start playing with this idea.

In fact, there’s even an online Upgoer 5 text editor where you can try to write things.

Oh, interesting, yeah.

And it’ll flag any words that aren’t in the thousand most common English words.

It’s kind of a funny exercise.

If you get stuck as a writer.

I could have used something like that when I was a dictionary editor.

You know, a lot of learners’ dictionaries have this reduced vocabulary.

Of course.

And it’s not about the most common words when you’re making a dictionary.

It’s the ones that they most need to know.

And those two groups don’t necessarily overlap.

Yeah.

Because common words sometimes are common for a reason that doesn’t have anything to do with utility.

Yeah.

Right?

So what you would do that, you’re writing a book for people who don’t know English well,

You have to explain things like nuclear power.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

Using a reduced vocabulary.

And if you use a word that’s not in your master list, then you have to define that word in the definition using the words that are in the master list.

Yeah, yeah.

It is a good brain exercise, but it’s incredibly difficult to do day in, day out for thousands of entries in a dictionary.

I’m sure it is.

I mean, people for fun have been, like scientists, have been going there and describing the work they do.

And it’s really difficult to describe those things that way.

You know, there’s a whole Wikipedia written in simple English.

For real?

Yeah.

It’s not ordinary English.

It’s written for people who may not have English as their first language

Or for people who are young enough not to understand the full vocabulary of an adult.

Oh, no kidding.

What is it called?

Mini Wikipedia?

Simple English, I believe.

Simple English Wikipedia.

And, you know, the Voice of America does broadcasts in simplified English as well.

And they talk slowly like this for people who are learning English

And maybe, you know, they need a little extra time to comprehend the words.

Wow.

This is all these different ways to get into the language using simplification.

Well, we’d love to hear your thoughts about words, big and small.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Tracy from Sherman, Texas.

Hi, Tracy. Welcome to the show.

Hi.

What’s happening? What can we help you with?

Well, there are some words my father has been using all my life.

He is from deep east Texas, and when he’s wanting to get something, claim something, he’ll say, oh, we need to cabbage on to that.

And I’ve always loved Origins of Words and have yet to find the origin of this one.

And would he talk about it in terms of swiping it, like from somebody else?

It would be more like swiping.

It wouldn’t be like purchasing.

It would be like obtaining it.

-huh.

Oh, this is great. This makes me really excited, Tracy, because this goes way back. It goes back to the idea of employee theft back in the 17th or 18th century.

Now stick with me here. Like imagine that you’re a tailor and you’re working in a dress shop for somebody else.

And so you cut out the pattern for a dress and then you have all these leftover scraps. Right.

So you just sort of tuck them in your pocket and take them home to use later.

Wow. And and people refer to that as cabbaging something, maybe because it looked like a rolled up.

You know, all those rolled up scraps look like a cabbage or maybe it had to do with a play on the word garbage or grabbage.

You know, playing on that word.

But it’s a word that’s been around for quite a long time, meaning to steal or pilfer.

Oh, interesting.

And here we find it in East Texas.

Yeah.

Oh, that’s good.

I can use this in my classroom.

This is great.

Oh, what kind of class do you have?

Well, I teach history for 6th, 7th, and 8th grade.

So I would teach ancient history to my 6th graders, Texas history to my 7th graders,

And American history to my 8th graders.

Oh, great.

Then you’re as excited as I am because this is something that your dad used, and it goes way back.

It’s got a great history to it.

That is a great, great word.

Yeah, and so, like, you might also carry a cabbage sheet around to cheat on a test, for example.

Well, maybe you shouldn’t tell your students about that one.

Well, he’ll be very tickled because I’m typically a little embarrassed when he uses the word.

Oh, really? No, no, it’s got a great history.

Yeah, he’s plugged right into a long history.

Yeah.

Good stuff.

Yeah.

Tracy, thank you so much for sharing your word with us.

We really appreciate it.

And good luck with your classes.

Thank you very much.

Take care.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

I love that.

I do, too.

Pockets of history right in your community, right?

Yeah.

Next to you, and you didn’t quite know it.

Yeah.

You thought the speaker was just being odd or unusual or they made it up, and you realized,

Well, there’s 200 years or more of history here.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And it’s a story.

Yeah, yeah.

This is why we do the show, right?

This is why I’m fanning myself right now.

If you’ve got something like that, we’re going to try to get to the bottom of it.

877-929-9673 or email us words@waywordradio.org.

We got an email from Paul Haskin who wanted to know, what’s the origin of hoodwink?

Hoodwink.

Hoodwink, you know, to put something over on somebody, to deceive them.

Yeah.

Well, it goes back to the idea of literally putting something over on somebody, a hood, because that’s the way thieves would work sometimes in the markets.

Oh.

Throw a cloak or something over somebody’s head and then they rob them.

And the wink in there has to do with closing your eyes.

You know how we think of wink as being just a brief thing?

But wink used to mean just closing your eyes, period.

And back in the 1500s, John Lilly wrote, though I wink, I sleep not.

So it’s like, though I have my eyes closed.

So if you hoodwink somebody, you’re literally putting something over on them.

So that they can’t see.

Yeah.

Oh, very good.

Yeah, tricky.

877-929-9673 or send everything you want us to know an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have Way With Words.

Hi, how are you?

Good, who’s this?

My name is Sue. How are you?

Great, welcome to the show.

Hi, Sue, where are you calling from?

I’m calling from Eureka in the real Northern California.

I was working one day, and I work in a grocery store, and we have senior day every Tuesday.

And a woman came through my line, and it’s always, you know, really, you don’t want to offend anybody,

But you want to remind them, and, you know, they get a discount.

And she came to my line, and the way I say it is, oh, today’s our senior discount day.

Are you eligible?

And she looks at me, and she says, yes.

And, you know, I’m checking in her groceries, and she says, thanks for the tap on the shoulder.

And I kind of, I couldn’t tell if she was offended or if it was, you know, she was glad I reminded her.

So, Sue, she did take the discount when you offered it?

Sure, she did.

Okay.

Oh, yeah, of course she did.

All right.

So she couldn’t have been that unhappy.

No, no, I don’t think she wasn’t happy, but I just was, like, a little worried, you know, because I don’t want to offend people.

Yeah, I don’t think there’s any problem with it at all.

I think it’s just a matter of, you know, thanks for calling my attention to it.

I’ve never seen it used sarcastically, really.

And I don’t think it’s some greater, grander intimation of mortality, you know, death with the scythe and, you know, the hood sort of tapping.

It is your time.

It’s coming soon.

Yeah.

No, I think it’s just a matter of calling attention.

Grant, you haven’t run into that.

No, no.

I’ve seen it pop up in religious books.

People talk about getting the tap on the shoulder from God, which calls them to their mission or calls them to service, that sort of thing.

Right.

But that’s the only non-literal tap on the shoulder I can think of.

But you’ll find zillions of people talking about taps on the shoulder where they actually meant, oh, I’m tapping on the shoulder because it’s a really polite way to touch you and get your attention so that you’ll do a thing that you might not have been aware of.

Yeah.

It’s interesting how much that has to do with where it’s appropriate to touch people on their body if you don’t know them.

The shoulder is a pretty safe place.

Yeah, come to think of it.

So you’re good to go, Sue.

You’re cool.

All right.

Great.

Well, thanks for explaining that to me.

Cheers.

Take care.

All right.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We love taking your calls, 877-929-9673.

And even better, we love reading your emails.

We read them all, words@waywordradio.org.

We were talking earlier about the Upgoer 5 text editor grant.

I wrote something, and I wondered if you could guess what it is.

Using only the top 1,000 words from the English language.

Okay, yeah, let’s do it.

This is a plot.

A man is from one place and his wife is from another.

A lot of stuff happens out in the world, like people fighting far away.

A lot of things happen at their big house, too, like dressing up for dinner and trying to get married.

They have three daughters, but the man’s mom always gets the best lines, like, stop feeling sorry for yourself and find something to do.

I don’t know. What is that?

Okay, you’re probably thinking of a book, but this is actually a television series that I’ve been watching.

It’s Downton Abbey.

Oh, okay.

So that’s your reduced description of Downton Abbey.

It doesn’t sound so real when you put it that way.

No, it doesn’t.

It’s not so alluring, is it?

No, not very sophisticated at all.

It misses the dog butt at the beginning and everything.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, guys.

It’s Bruce from Ocean View, Delaware.

What’s going on?

Well, not long ago, I had my daughter in timeout for hitting one of her brothers.

She was either Garrett or Wyatt, one of the two.

And so she earned herself a little timeout.

And so I sat her down, and I set the timer on the microwave for a minute and a half.

That’s about how old she was a year and a half at the time.

And so she did her little time, and I said, okay, time’s up when the microwave beeps.

It went beep, beep, beep.

And so she went about her way, and I got to thinking, beep, that’s a weird little word.

Microwaves beep, and trucks beep when they back up, and horns beep, but these are all modern things.

What about when, you know, before there were cars and microwaves and electronic devices that beep?

Why would there be a word beep?

Well, there wasn’t.

I mean, but think about living in a pre-beep world.

I mean, beep was probably music to your daughter’s ears, right?

Sure.

Beeps drive me crazy.

You walk down the aisle of a toy store and everything’s beeping.

Oh, my gosh.

Everything beeps.

The microwave is a great culprit, right?

Because every button press makes a beep.

Yeah.

And it makes a beep when it goes off.

That’s what I was wondering.

Was it a word that was made up to describe the sound that these things make?

The sound that car horns make, I think, first.

Yeah, I think it was.

Early on, the early 1900s.

But it’s interesting.

I mean, car horns had a lot of different sounds starting out.

I mean.

Oh.

Yeah.

Yeah, I don’t know how you spell that exactly.

Like a clown’s horn kind of honk, too.

Yeah, that and some of them had bells on them.

In fact, you can go online.

I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, Bruce.

You might enjoy this or do this with your daughter, maybe, and your kids.

Go online.

There are sites where you can go and listen to old car horns from, say, 1910, 1911.

And your kids will like them.

Some of them sound pretty flatulent.

They don’t really sound like the beeps that we think of as beeps or honks today.

But beep, as far as I can tell, started out in the early 1900s with car horns and then got applied to beeping devices, electronic devices.

It’s imitative, onomatopoeic.

It’s our verbal representation of what we’re hearing.

Maybe not all that accurate, but it kind of stuck.

Right, right, right.

That was fun.

Okay.

Yeah, that’s cool.

And it’s funny because you might think that beep is a lot older, right?

I would think.

But what’s beeping before car horns?

What’s beeping in Beowulf?

Nothing.

Nothing beeps in me.

No microwaves.

And it was one of those words that it just stuck to me for some reason.

It’s one of those things that just keep saying it over and over again.

Why is that stuck to me?

So that’s the way that you time your child’s time out?

We do.

She’s actually going on two now, so she’ll have two minutes for the next time out.

She’s doing the big time now.

So she’s almost up to the popcorn length, right?

So there’s a little snack that she’s done.

That’s right.

Yeah.

How does she feel about that microwave?

Oh, it’s the worst. I’m a big, bad meanie.

I know the feeling, brother.

My five-year-old thinks I’m the worst person in the world sometimes.

And his hero.

Right, right, right. But then after the time that’s up, it’s all good.

Well, great. Bruce, thank you for calling.

Thank you so much.

Thanks. It was fun.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We should make a list of those sounds that didn’t exist before, well, modern devices existed.

There’s tons of that stuff, right?

Well, and blooper, right?

May derive from the sound of a radio.

The blooper as you switch from signal to signal?

Yeah.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Then there’s to be bleeped.

That’s later.

Yeah, much later.

Yeah.

Yeah.

To be bleeped out when something naughty is said.

Not that we ever would do that here.

Never.

If you’ve got something to say, naughty or not, 877-929-9673, or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, you remember talking about the term cumshaw artist?

Yeah, this is somebody who is really good at procuring things maybe illegally to, like in the military, material and resources from other places in order to get their work done.

Yes, yes. We talked about it a while ago on the show. A guy who was a Vietnam veteran had called in and was talking about that term.

And we got a response that I’d like to share. It’s from Alan Johnson from Plano, Texas. He was at an Air Force base in Thailand in 1972, and they used that word.

He was talking about the fact that they needed to add on to a building, but they were short of all the wood, the two-by-fours and plywood that they needed to do it.

And as it happened, there was a naval base nearby. And so late one night, some Air Force guys from Alan’s base drove onto the Navy base with this flatbed truck, and they started helping themselves to the lumber that was stored at the naval base.

And then their sergeant spotted a Navy patrol coming at them. And so he ordered his men to start taking the wood off of the flatbed truck and just sort of stacking it into piles.

And so the Navy shore patrol comes up and they ask what’s going on.

And Alan writes that the sergeant said to him, well, we had extra building materials at the Air Force base and nowhere to put them. So we knew that you had this lumber yard. So we brought this stuff over here to store it.

And the shore patrol officer said, oh, no, you guys take that Air Force stuff back to your base and find some place to put it there.

So as the shore patrol carefully watched, the airmen sullenly filled their truck and drove off to the base to take their Air Force stuff back to the Air Force base.

So he writes, everybody was happy.

But it’s always one of those kind of Peter robbing Paul, right?

Yeah.

It’s just like it’s two different hands of the government.

Yeah, I love it. That’s real Kamsha artistry, I think.

Yeah, because there’s always that element with the Kamsha artist.

There’s somebody who’s really clever at getting a hold of things that are rare or hard to find.

Yeah. 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s all for today’s show, but join us online on Facebook and Twitter, or sign up for our weekly newsletter for the latest in language news at waywordradio.org.

You can also leave us a message anytime at 877-929-9673, share your family stories, or ask us to resolve language disputes at work, home, or in school.

You can email us, too. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

If you happen to miss our broadcast, you can hear us by podcast anytime at all.

Find us on iTunes or our website.

Our production staff includes Stefanie Levine, Tim Felten, James Ramsey, and Josette Herdell.

Special thanks today to Mark Kirshner.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

The show is recorded at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett. Adios.

Bye.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

But oh, if we call the whole thing off, then we must part.

And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart.

So if you like pajamas and I like pajamas, I’ll wear pajamas and give up pajamas.

For we know we need each other, so we better call the calling of…