Going All-City

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, have you ever had a potato bargain?

I don’t think so. I paid the usual price.

I’m not talking about shopping.

I’m talking about a food term that you hear mainly in eastern Massachusetts.

Oh.

It’s an economical stew consisting chiefly of pork, onions, and potatoes.

And because it’s so economical, another name for this mixture is necessity mess.

A necessity mess potato bargain.

Yeah, isn’t that great?

I didn’t know that.

Where did you find this?

I found it in the Dictionary of American Regional English.

Where else?

Oh, very nice.

You know, foodies look at recipe books and they’re sitting there sighing over the luscious photographs.

Well, I flip through the pages of the Dictionary of American Regional English and look for food names.

What else you got there?

Well, I was going to ask you if you’d like some ming-mang on your necessity mess.

Ming-mang?

Ming-mang.

That sounds vulgar.

It’s not.

It’s a term in the Ozarks for butter and molasses or butter and gravy.

And here’s another one for you, one-eyed Susan.

Any guesses?

No, it’s kind of pie maybe.

I don’t know, a cookie?

No.

It’s a, I don’t know, a ribeye.

You’d have it for breakfast in central Wisconsin.

Kind of Danish.

I see where your mind’s going.

No, it’s a fried egg.

Oh, a one-eyed Susan instead of a black-eyed Susan.

Very nice.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And one of my all-time favorite comfort foods, as you may know, is good old grits.

And I love the nickname that I found for grits that’s used in the northern part of Florida.

They refer to grits as Georgia ice cream.

Love it.

Nice.

That’s very great.

Because you load it up with cream and sugar, right?

Yeah.

Or molasses, a little bit of brown sugar.

Or garlic and cheese.

Grits are awesome.

I know a lot of Yankees who don’t like grits, but grits are awesome.

And so is the Dictionary of American Regional English.

The Dictionary of American Regional English, by the way, is on course to publish its final volume.

They’ve been working on this for more than 30 years.

When it comes out, we’ll share a lot more with you about it.

Absolutely.

And in the meantime, you can watch their Twitter feed, which is a lot of fun.

You get all kinds of great words on there.

Twitter feed is Dare Words, right?

Yes.

Check it out.

If you’ve got a question about regional English or anything that occurs to you at all,

It can be grammar, spelling, punctuation, or a dispute that you had over saying something or writing something correctly,

Our number is 877-929-9673.

And our email address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Betty. I’m calling from Christiansburg, Virginia.

We’re delighted you called, Betty. What’s going on?

I remember as a child growing up, my grandfather had a farm.

And there were a lot of older folks at the time. I’m probably their age now.

But at the time, they seemed old to me. You know what I’m saying?

And I remember hearing some of the ladies, they would say, okay, someone would ask, where is Uncle John or where is Grandpa?

And one of them would answer, oh, he’s out back resting on his laurels.

And I just figured that he was out somewhere, you know, taking a rest some more.

But I just wondered what that meant, where that might have came from and how long it’s been around.

-huh. Well, it goes back to ancient Greece, actually, where the Greeks used to crown victors in athletic competitions with wreaths on their heads of bay leaves.

Oh, cool.

Yeah, the same kind of bay leaves you cook with.

And those are laurel trees?

Yeah, yeah, they’re from the bay laurel tree.

And so if you were being honored, then you had a crown on your head made out of leaves.

You’ve seen pictures of this kind of thing, I’m sure.

Oh, yeah, definitely.

Yeah, and so later on in English in, oh, the 16th century or so, people would talk about winning one’s laurels.

And then later on they’d talk about reposing on one’s laurels or retiring on one’s laurels or resting on one’s laurels,

Meaning that they’re just kind of goofing off after having accomplished something.

But I sense that these women, when they’re talking about your uncle, weren’t exact.

They were perhaps suggesting that he had no laurels to rest on, but he was taking a break anyway.

Yeah.

And, you know, actually, I never heard a man say that about a woman.

So that’s what was kind of fascinating to me also, that the women said it about the men.

So maybe they hadn’t done anything that was that great, huh?

Yeah, that’s funny.

That’s pretty funny.

So that’s a long history, though.

Yeah.

That’s great.

Yeah, it goes way back.

That’s really fascinating to me, and I’ve just always wondered about it.

And I still hear once in a great while someone around here say that,

And I say it even though I just figured you were going somewhere to rest is what I figure.

-huh.

All right.

Well, Betty, thank you so much for calling.

I hope you’ll keep listening.

I will, and I love your program.

Oh, thank you very much.

And thanks for clearing that up for me.

It was our pleasure.

Call again sometime, will you?

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Give us a call with your questions about where words and phrases come from,

877-929-9673,

Or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Will from our summer residence near Birchwood, Wisconsin.

Hi, Will.

Hey, Will.

Welcome to the program.

Where are you the rest of the time?

Well, our home is in the St. Louis area.

Oh, very good. I’m from out that way, born in St. Louis.

Well, what can we help you with today?

Well, my question has to do with an expression to set the soup outside.

My two brothers and I were big Cardinal fans as we were growing up,

And in the late 1940s, early 1950s,

We were in the left field bleachers at Old Sportsman’s Park

When the Brooklyn Dodgers came to town.

And, of course, since they had brought up Jackie Robinson as the first African-American player in modern Major League Baseball history,

Most of the African-American fans were rooting for the Dodgers.

Well, in this particular game, Roy Campanella, one of the other great black players,

Hit a home run that went over our heads in the left field bleachers, and the African-American fans were ecstatic.

And one of them said, old camp, he set the soup outside.

He set the soup outside.

That’s an expression we’d never heard before and we’ve never heard it since.

And so this was around the 1940s?

Could have been the early 50s as well.

But still, we’re talking about 50 years ago or so.

Yeah, more like 60 probably.

And you’ve been wondering for 50 years what this meant.

Oh, yes. We’ve told this story many times because it was such a colorful expression.

And we’ve wondered what the source of it might be.

So, Will, I’ve got a theory for you.

All right.

Do you know how when you make an automobile faster, you talk about souping it up?

Yes.

Well, that soup and that word comes from old slang for nitroglycerin.

And they used to just call it soup.

And this was something used in construction or in building dams or just any kind of massive engineering.

Basically, you make TNT out of it, blow gigantic holes in the walls, the ground or whatever, dig it up.

And soup was the slang for that.

And so it became transferred to making a car faster.

It became transferred to making anything faster or better.

And my theory is that the soup he was talking about wasn’t actual soup that you might eat, you know, soup with barley and chicken.

My theory is he was talking about the strength of his hit as being the soup or the soup being the muscle that he put behind it or the power that he had.

Well, that’s as likely an explanation as anything you can think of.

The soup you eat when you set it outside would seem to cool it off or something.

Yeah, that’s what I was thinking.

Yeah, so he set the soup outside, meaning that nobody could touch it or it was out of bounds.

Yes, yes.

I don’t see any other examples of this being used anywhere ever.

Maybe somebody from the African-American community could send something to you on your website or something,

And if they have any explanation for it.

Boy, I hope. That’s great.

I would love to hear that.

We’re often rescued in that way.

When we don’t set the soup outside.

So let me just summarize this.

It’s a massive home run, and when he hit it,

One of the fans said that he set the soup outside.

Does anyone know that? Have you heard this?

Do you have anything concrete that you can pass along?

Do let us know, 877-929-9673,

Or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Will, thank you so much for giving us a call.

If we find out anything new, or if you find out anything new, we’ll exchange info, all right?

Thank you very much.

Our pleasure.

Thanks, Will.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

I am Sabrina Furby.

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hi, Sabrina.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

You got a question for us?

Yes.

My question or word is the term pitch-in, and I heard it in school.

They said since we weren’t having a test the next week, we were going to have a pitch-in,

And I had no idea what that is, and I said, what is that?

And everyone laughed at me, and I’m originally from Seattle, Washington.

They said it’s probably a southern thing, but I have family in the south,

And nobody’s ever heard of it there either.

So what is a pitch-in?

What it turned out to be is like a potluck where everybody pitches in to help out, like bring food.

But I have friends that were born and raised in Ohio, which is less than two hours away, and they have never heard it either.

This is perfect.

It is perfect.

Isn’t it perfect?

It is perfect.

It’s perfect.

It’s absolutely perfect.

I am so excited about this, Sabrina, because you are just a textbook case.

Literally.

Literally.

I’m looking at the Dictionary of American Regional English.

There’s a big entry for pitch-in dinner, and there’s a map of the United States that shows where you usually hear this expression,

And it’s completely blank except for Indiana.

And Indiana has got all these little dots in it where the pitch-in dinner.

So pitch-in as a potluck is exclusive to Indiana, more or less?

Pretty much.

Little pockets of outside, but the density of the response is in Indiana.

Yes, it’s beautiful.

It’s just this beautiful blank map except for Indiana, which is all filled in.

It’s just so exciting to me.

So to interpret this, in other words, Sabrina, you’ve come across a feature of the local dialect that is very local.

It’s so incredibly specific to that area.

It’d be a way to identify people if you were to interview them and wanted to figure out where they were from.

You’d say, what do you call it when a lot of people bring different food to a party together?

And if they said pitch and you’re like, that’s a 90% chance that you were born in Indiana.

That makes me feel so much better.

Yay.

Well, bon appetit.

Get out and travel.

Yeah, sure.

Yeah, or just sit around and read dictionaries all day.

Well, Sabrina, thank you so much for calling.

You made my day.

All right.

Well, thank you so much for answering my question.

All right.

Cheers.

Okay.

Take care.

All right.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Call us.

We’ve got answers to your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send us email to words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, we got an email from Deborah Daspit, who said that our show has inspired her to collect a lot of the old expressions that her Cajun grandparents used to use.

Oh, nice.

And she noted that most of them have to do with nature.

And some of them we’d know, like, fine as frog’s fur.

You know, how you doing?

I’m fine as frog’s fur.

But one that I didn’t know from before is the expression peach out of reach.

Is this a woman you can’t have?

Yeah, yeah. It’s anything lovely that you want, but you can’t have for some reason or another.

Isn’t that great? A peach out of reach.

I do use peach. If there’s a woman who’s just a great all-around person, I call her a peach.

You’re married. She’s out of reach.

But you can reach us anytime by calling us 877-929-9673 or send an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can always find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the University of San Diego, whose mission since 1949 has been to prepare students for the world as well as to change it.

More about the college and five schools of this independent Catholic university at sandiego.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. And joining us now is our quiz guy, Greg Pliska. Hi, Greg.

Hello, Martha.

Howdy, Grant.

What’s going on?

I was just thinking about things that you should know that you don’t.

Oh, there are a lot of those.

You know, Mr. Puzzle Guy, and I just learned that the Wall Street Journal has a cryptic puzzle and a Great Saturday puzzle, and I didn’t know this.

It’s been there for about a year, and I just didn’t know.

And so now you’re doing it every weekend?

Now I’m doing them.

I’m doing them every Saturday, and they’re great.

Well, puzzle us.

What do you got there, dude?

What’s in your pocket?

Well, you know, since I’ve been looking at cryptic crosswords, I’ve decided we’d play around with a certain kind of cryptic crossword clue known as the double definition,

Which is where the clue is split into two halves as usual,

But instead of a wordplay half, there’s simply a second definition half.

In other words, there are two definitions but only one answer.

Here’s a classic example.

The clue is trim a tree, and the answer is spruce.

In one sense, spruce is an adjective synonymous with trim, meaning neat or tidy,

And in another sense, a spruce is simply a tree.

Nice.

Here’s your first one.

The answer is four letters, and the clue is crazy flying mammals.

Bats.

Bats.

Oh, very good.

Exactly.

It means crazy, and it’s kind of flying mammals.

See, Martha, it’s not so hard.

Here’s another one.

Fish struggle.

Is this like flounder?

How many letters?

Flounder is exactly it, yes.

It’s a kind of fish, and it’s a word meaning struggle.

Here’s one.

Seven letters.

Tightly packed small car.

Compact?

Compact.

Yes.

As an adjective, it means tightly packed.

As a noun, it means small car.

Yeah.

This one is seven letters also.

535 elected officials having sex.

Congress.

It’s actually a new website.

That’s just the politics page.

Yes.

Nice.

Yes.

Here’s another one from the world of sports.

Hit a ball that the batter missed.

Strike.

Strike.

Oh, that’s nice.

That’s right.

Hit means to strike, and a ball that the batter missed is a strike.

Oof, that’s a good one.

Good one.

Opposite of itself.

And here’s one from my business.

Five letters.

Cuts off a musician’s ability.

Cuts off a musician’s ability, which is…

Chops.

Chops.

Chops.

Very good.

Right there.

In at the finish.

If I had a nose, I think it’s Grant.

I think it was.

Cuts off, meaning chops, and then a musician’s ability are his or her chops.

Center of government assets.

This is how many letters?

Seven letters.

Seven letters.

Center of government assets.

Capital.

Seats.

Capital is correct.

Oh, very good.

Capital is the center of government and another word for assets.

Good.

Here’s another one.

Inflexible end of a boat.

Stern.

Stern, exactly.

Stiff, skiff.

Right.

It’s a different kind of puzzle.

Stern meaning inflexible and the end of a boat is the stern.

That’s a tough one.

I’m going to give you one more.

Okay.

Just because I particularly like this one.

Okay.

Punctuation marking the end of a tract.

How many letters?

Five letters.

Oh, I was going to say end period, but…

Does this divide in the middle of a word?

No, it divides after marking.

Punctuation marking and the end of a tract.

Oh, oh, oh.

It could be like a colon.

Colon would be the answer.

It’s the end of the digestive tract.

Oh, different tract.

And it’s also a punctuation marking.

Greg, that was really challenging.

We love that.

Thank you so much.

I’m happy to keep you on your toes mentally.

And you can keep us on our toes, too.

Call us 877-929-9673 if you want to talk about any aspect of language.

Or you can send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks, Greg.

Thank you.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Chris Elman.

How are you doing today?

Hi, Chris.

Where are you calling from?

Calling from San Diego, California.

Welcome to the program, Chris.

Well, I had a question about one of the words that my boss would use.

The word is dronk.

And the context of it is we work in the medical device industry,

And I work in a sales operations function.

And a lot of times we’ve got to go through a lot of data to determine zip code boundaries

For territory alignments or commission structures or quotas.

And, you know, often when we’re talking about these large data sources and kind of crunching the data,

He uses the word, you know, gronking the data.

And so I guess my question for you is he wasn’t sure that really the origins of this word or where it came from

And wanted to see if maybe you guys could help me understand it a little bit better.

Gronk. Chris, did he spell it for you?

It’s never been spelt, but my assumption of the way it’s spelt is G-R-O-N-K.

What’s he like? What’s his age?

I would say that he’s somewhere probably between 50 and 60.

Does he come from an old school tech background or anything like that?

Very possibly.

He said he originally came from J&J.

Johnson & Johnson?

Yeah, so I think that he said that’s where he first heard the word and kind of picked it up.

The reason I ask is I’ve never heard it used that way.

Usually it’s grok, G-R-O-K, without an N in there.

That means you grok the data, means you understand the data.

It’s exactly the same use that you’re talking about but without the N.

Now, there is an old-school Internet term, grok or grok out,

Which means to finish or to kill or to break.

Like you might gronk out a machine by overloading it, or you might gronk out, and they mean clock out or go home, and you’re just done, right?

A lot of different uses for that.

But gronk, as we know it, is a very well-established term in the tech fields.

It’s in Eric S. Raymond’s jargon file.

It’s in all of the computer slang dictionaries.

I know it from the tech business when I was doing that for a living.

It comes from Heinlein’s novel, Stranger in a Strange Land, published in 1961.

It’s a little bit different than he used it there, but everyone acknowledges that he’s the one that coined it.

So you grok data rather than gronk it.

Now, it’s interesting.

He may have just heard it wrong, but I think he’s alone.

Everyone else I know says grok.

So it’s G-R-A-K.

No, OK.

G-R-OK.

G-R-OK.

Yeah.

OK.

Interesting.

You said that was, who coined it again?

Hyman?

Hyman.

H-E-I-N-L-E-I-N.

Robert Hyman, Stranger in a Strange Land.

And it’s a classic science fiction novel from 1961.

You may even recognize it.

It’s the kind of book you might have read as a kid and forgotten about.

Excellent.

Well, I may have to pick up that book and read it to my daughter.

Yeah.

Well, now, Chris, here’s the question.

What do you say to your boss?

Are you going to tell your boss that he’s using a word that isn’t really correct?

It’s his own word, but nobody else uses it that way.

It’s good now I can kind of clarify and help him speak this word correctly.

All right.

Let’s hope he groks it.

That’s right.

Thanks, Chris.

All right.

Take care, guys.

Best of luck.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye now.

You know, Jeff Prucher did a book called Brave New Words.

Right, right, right.

It’s about science fiction terms that have entered mainstream English, more or less.

Yeah, that’s a fun book.

Call us about what you’re hearing on the job.

I just know your workplace is filled with this interesting language, and at the moment you hear it, you’re like,

Huh, I should call Martha and Grant.

Well, now’s the time.

877-929-9673.

Or send your questions and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Here in San Diego, we often find that Spanish and English are mixing in interesting ways.

Yes, indeed.

Did you know there’s a Spanglish word for a hot dog vendor?

A dogguero.

Dogguero.

Yeah, D-O-G-U-E-R-O.

I love it.

So it takes the English dog as the root and adds the Spanish agent to the suffix.

Very nice.

Hot dog better.

Very nice.

Very cool.

If you have some Spanglish out your way, send it along.

I’d love to hear about it, 877-929-9673, or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

This is Gina from Thorntown, Indiana.

How are you today?

Hi, Gina.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Well, my husband came down with a question for me because I majored in English in school,

And he thought I should know this.

And it has more to do with a technical term than how to employ it.

And he said, what’s it called when you use an apostrophe in place of a G at the end of a word?

So say if you’re writing something and you say, I was saying this, and you use S-A-Y-I-N apostrophe.

And I said, well, it’s abbreviation.

He said, no, because apostrophes are used for possession or contractions.

And I looked it up in my books, and he was right, and we couldn’t find anything else.

And so I said, I’ll ask you guys.

Well, I think we can get to the bottom of this one pretty quickly, actually.

Okay, great.

You were right.

Well, I’m going to tell you that.

Here’s the thing.

What’s happening there is really an abbreviation.

It is literally abbreviating the word by dropping a letter off.

And then the apostrophe is just a courtesy to show people that something is missing.

Something was taken away.

We do that throughout English.

You’ll see it in poetry.

You’ll see it in written speech.

A lot of times you’ll see it when people are trying to write in dialect form.

They’re trying to represent the way people speak nonstandard English.

They’ll just drop all kinds of stuff and put apostrophes there to show that something’s missing.

That apostrophe shows that it’s an abbreviation.

The shortened form of a word is an abbreviation.

It’s just an abbreviation.

It’s just an abbreviation.

There’s no other technical word for it.

Well, there are some other things.

You might call it a shortening.

I know that doesn’t sound very technical, but it is what they say in dialect studies.

It’s just a shortening of a word.

When you take an ing word, the gerund form of a verb, and you drop the g, it’s called g-dropping.

I mean, it doesn’t get very technical and doesn’t need to, but that’s what they actually, if you read the academic journals, they just call it g-dropping.

But I’m just saying, you know, the saying is just an abbreviation of saying.

That the English major was right.

Yeah.

Yay.

I did learn something.

Yay, you did.

All that money was worth it.

Yeah.

I can appreciate the confusion, though, because that apostrophe is carrying a heavy load.

That apostrophe is doing all kinds of stuff in the language.

Right, Martha?

Yeah.

I’ve also seen the term apologetic apostrophe.

Have you seen that?

I love that.

That’s for like when you say, or the blue hills, and you put the apostrophe in there just to show that, well, we never pronounce the V in this word in our particular dialect, but I’m going to throw it in there for the people who do.

Yeah, sorry, we don’t have the G here, but yeah, top of the morning, that kind of thing.

Top of the morning to you.

Yeah, yeah.

So you could call it an apologetic apostrophe, I suppose.

Very good.

Singing in the rain.

Yeah, yeah.

So I think somebody’s going to have to be apologetic around there.

They might.

So is your husband there?

Can you just yell to him that you’re correct?

Yes, he is, but he has an office here, and me yelling into his office is probably not a good idea.

So just slip the note under the door that says, two weeks of dishes?

Yeah.

Something of that nature at any rate.

Sounds good.

Congratulations.

Thanks.

Okay, well, thanks again, and it’s wonderful talking with you.

We all listen to you.

Thanks for your excited voice.

Okay, sure.

Have a good day.

You too.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’re here to settle your marital disputes.

Call us 877-929-9673 or send those emails to words@waywordradio.org.

We get lots of email, Martha.

Some of it is great.

Some of it is awesome.

Some of it is funny.

Don’t I know it.

We’ve got this great email from Clinton Bates in Denton, Texas.

Did you see this?

Clinton from Denton?

No.

He’s got a story to tell us.

Well, he found a use of the word bupkis, which is a Yiddish word that means nothing.

Yeah.

Where people, in order to emphasize that it means nothing, they’ll separate the two syllables out.

Right?

What?

Yeah.

So you might say, not only did the government shut down, but the employees are collecting bup and kus.

It just emphasized the zerowness of bupkis, right?

And if you Google this, you’ll find a lot of people are doing that.

Just to exaggerate exactly how nothing bupkis is.

Is that right?

Yeah.

And I think it derives from a word that means either beans or goat droppings.

It’s both, actually.

Is it?

Because goat droppings do sometimes look like little polished beans.

Anyway, if you want to talk about language, this is the place.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Thomas McQueen.

I’m in Arlington, Texas.

Hi, Thomas.

Welcome to the program.

Hi.

I was recently helping a coworker fix a copy machine,

And I was trying to describe a component in the paper tray that had to be slid into place.

And I was trying to describe it, but another coworker called it a dumaflatchy.

And I’d never heard that before.

And at first I thought she actually knew the name of the part,

But then she explained it was basically like a thingamabob.

And I’d never heard it.

I looked it up and barely found any references for it.

I was able to spell it pretty easy because it’s pretty straightforward.

But I have no idea where it comes from,

And I was just really wondering whether it was just some sort of gobbledygook word

Or if it was a word that actually had some sort of relation to something else.

I figured it was probably local.

I’m in Texas, but I just was really curious.

So you’re wondering if Dumaflachi is gobbledygook.

Yes.

Okay, and how are you spelling Dumaflatchy?

I typed it out as D-O-O-M-A-F-L-A-T-C-H-Y,

And I found it with I-E as slightly more common.

So you found the Tim McGraw song?

The what?

I think it’s Tim McGraw.

Isn’t he the one who’s married to Faith Hill?

How does the song go?

Oh, no, I’ve never heard of it.

Oh, maybe your co-worker is a Tim McGraw fan.

He has a song that goes something like,

You flipped the switch on my dumaflatchee, played my piano like Liberace.

You notice I’m not singing it, but that’s pretty sexy stuff.

So we’re just talking about kind of a placeholder word here, right?

When you don’t know the real name of something, you might say dumaflatchee.

Right, right.

And that’s how she knew it.

It sounded like she grew up with it.

Yeah, it’s part of that great tradition of placeholder words, as Grant was saying.

Thinkamabob, doohickey, doo-wat.

Yeah, I’m thinking that Doohickey and Doodad may be the predecessors of Doomaflatchy, which sounds like a more intensified version of it, don’t you think?

Doomaflatchy.

There’s so many of them, and linguists have actually written long articles about them.

There’s a long article in American Speech that mentions a whole bunch of these, like Diddly Flop and Diddleheimer and Didn’t Whacker and Doob and Do Flop and Do Jiggy and Do Whacker.

And the list just goes on and on.

I see people make things up all the time, all kinds of variations, a huge number of spellings.

Just any time they need a placeholder word, they come up with something kind of funny and throw it in there.

But Dumaflatchy, that’s got some currency.

People use it.

It’s not that common.

It doesn’t seem to have a regional component as far as I can tell.

No.

It doesn’t look like it belongs to one part of the country.

Right.

I bet that Tim McGraw song has something to do with anybody knowing it.

Yeah.

Could be.

Interesting.

Yeah, so ask her if she’s a fan.

Somewhere there’s a songwriter with a thesaurus who’s really happy right now.

That’s great.

So I guess the answer is maybe from Doohickey or Doodad,

And just an elaborated version of that.

Thank you, Martha.

Well, thanks so much for calling.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Bye, Tom.

Okay, bye-bye.

You know what?

I bet if we put out the call, we could get lots more examples of this.

Oh, yeah, sure.

What do you call a thing when you don’t know its name,

Or what do you call a person when you don’t know their name?

877-929-9673,

Or send your answers and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Listener Paul Freeman sent us an email that has a collection of witty sayings that his friends have put together.

Some of these are paraprostokians. Do you remember talking about that?

I sure do. Those are phrases that sort of take a sharp right or a sharp left turn.

A lot of times they make use of the fact that words in English have more than one meaning.

And so the first part of the phrase will use meaning A, and the second part will use meaning B,

And the second it takes your brain to switch tracks, you laugh because it’s just kind of interesting.

Yeah, like, tape my wife, please.

Yeah, exactly.

Two different meanings of take.

Or you can pick your friends and you can pick your nose.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

We know how that one goes.

Two different meanings of the word pick.

Well, this list has a bunch of those.

One of my favorites, if I agreed with you, we’d both be wrong.

It just takes you a second.

You’re like,

We’ll do a few more off this list in a little bit.

If there’s something witty or funny that you read or heard, send us an email, words@waywordradio.org,

Or call us on the phone, 877-929-9673.

More of your calls as A Way with Words continues.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

You’re listening to A Way with Words. I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

There is something incredibly appealing about finding out

That something that you thought was lost or was disappearing actually is still with us.

My car keys. I was looking for them all morning.

I have something more interesting, and I know that you’re excited about this too.

It’s people who like to read long articles in magazines and newspapers.

And the reason this is kind of a surprise is because what we hear from media commentaries

And what we hear from supposed experts is that social media and the Internet are making us have short attention spans,

And they keep telling us that we can’t concentrate beyond 140 characters.

Wait, what did you say? I was checking my email.

It turns out that one of the advantages to all this technology is to actually make it easier to consume these 10,000-word biographies that might appear in The Atlantic.

Or these stories in Wired magazine about the oncoming technology wave that’s going to hit us, whatever it might be next year.

Or these interesting stories about the rise and fall of a great personality or the inside business of some industry that you didn’t know existed.

I call all these services long reads.

And the reason I called them that, there was a hashtag on Twitter.

This is just a little identifying word that you put in a tweet.

And people got in the habit a few years ago of when they were linking to one of these great long magazine pieces of just including that little hashtag.

Long reads is one word.

And then you could search for long reads.

And when you wanted something that could consume your brain, something that would involve you thinking, and not these quick passing hits or the little fripperies or lolcats or anything like that, right, that you could find some and add them to your reading list.

Something to curl up with.

Yeah.

And then on top of that, there are now all these services that will take all these stories that you save.

They’re called Readability or Instapaper.

Even the Safari web browser has one built in.

They’ll take all these long reads that you’ve saved and they’ll pipe them to all your devices.

They’ll strip out the ads, take out all the navigation, just leave the content, the article itself, and put them on your Kindle or your iPad, your laptop or your cell phone.

That’s how I read most of the stuff that I read these days.

And you find yourself sitting, say, in a cafe or waiting in line at the bank reading about a firefight in Fallujah.

Or you find yourself reading about the recovery in New Orleans.

And it’s not 100 words or 400 words.

It’s 4,000 or even 14,000.

And it’s on your phone.

And it’s on your phone.

And you find yourself moved in public places.

You didn’t have to bring the New Yorker with you.

You know that stack that you have on the back of the toilet?

Yeah.

You didn’t have to bring all of your copies of Harper’s or make sure that you fished the New York Times magazine out of the recycling pile.

It’s on your phone. You’ve saved it. There it is.

And I think that it deserves to be said that along with perhaps some of us having a shorter attention span, those of us who are inclined to read a lot anyway are finding that technology does a great service to our desire for more information from thinking people who are writing from a position of authority.

And that’s what these do.

So these programs like Instapaper, or it’s a website, right?

Yeah.

You go to the Instapaper website.

That’s right.

They’re the electronic version of My Aunt Margaret.

My Aunt Margaret was a librarian, and she was forever clipping all these long articles.

And we would get these manila envelopes in the mail that were an inch thick because she would see an article and say, oh, I know Martha would be interested in this.

And we would get these huge envelopes full of long reads.

I love it.

Yes.

It’s something like that.

It’s a little bit of a clipping service.

We hope that you’ll join us in sharing with our community of listeners, our community of readers, the articles that you think deserve to be read.

You can send them to words@waywordradio.org or give us a call, 877-929-9673.

And you can find all that great stuff on our website, waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is James McInville. I’m calling from here in Dallas, Texas.

Welcome.

Welcome to the program.

Thank you so much. Nice to be on the program.

What can we do you for?

I had been listening to the show previously, and I heard you guys ask for people to call in that had unique words.

And I run an internet retail company selling niche art supplies.

And my grandma would basically say that I sell graffiti supplies, which I don’t think is true at all.

You sell graffiti supplies.

Graffiti supplies?

Is that what you said?

Basically.

Yeah, that’s the easiest way to put it.

Really what it is is like designer spray painting specialty ink and markers that muralists and people who are influenced by graffiti use.

It’s really all used by people doing legal stuff.

But, you know, it’s part of the culture and whatever.

But the reason that I had called in previously was because as I’ve been in this business

And enjoying the art form for about the last six to eight years,

I’ve come across a number of words that I thought were really interesting.

So I figured I’d try and share some of those with y’all.

All right. Yeah, shoot. Let’s hear it.

Okay, so the first word is the word writer being used to describe someone who does graffiti.

Writer, is it W-R-I-T-E-R?

Yes, ma’am.

And from my understanding of it, it’s basically just, you know, because, you know, we as graffiti writers, you know, walk up and write on stuff.

And so it’s something that, like, makes a lot of sense when you think about it in that context.

But the use of it is very weird, where a lot of people would say, you know, a graffiti artist or a tagger.

But everybody who is really associated with it, if you’re not using the term writer, you’re generally considered, you know, outside of the loop.

Very interesting.

It’s funny how many hobbies and industries have that exact predicament, where on the inside people go by one term, but they’re known exclusively on the outside by some other word.

Pretty interesting.

Right.

It’s fascinating.

What else does a writer use when they’re talking about their work?

One that I personally don’t really like, but I hear all the time, is the term bombing to describe the activity of doing illegal graffiti.

And so if someone’s doing legal graffiti, they wouldn’t typically use it.

Like, if I’m going to do a mural, I wouldn’t use this term.

But a lot of the younger kids, when they’re saying they’re going out to do graffiti,

They’re like, yeah, I’m going bombing tonight.

Bombing, that’s B-O-M-B-I-N-G, bombing, right?

Yes, yes.

I first encountered that term about 15 years ago in Greece, in Athens,

And there was some graffiti that said, a religion called bombing.

And it was done in spray paint.

And at the time, I didn’t know what it meant.

And it wasn’t until years later that I figured out that what they were talking about,

The religion wasn’t actually dropping bombs.

The religion was putting up tags.

Oh, graffiti.

No, yeah, you’re absolutely right.

Yeah, you’re absolutely right.

And part of that, like you’re saying,

Is the idea that people will also refer

To a finished piece of illegal graffiti

As a bomb with a singular word,

Which I think is like the weirdest thing ever.

But yeah, no, you’re absolutely right.

And there’s even that book called Bomb the System,

Which has been popular and stuff too.

Is that about graffiti?

That’s about graffiti on the train system, right?

Right.

I think if I remember writing the book, it starts about graffiti on the train system,

And then it goes into this kind of existential view of society and all this kind of crazy stuff.

But, yeah, it is an interesting book.

Something else that I thought was a good word was the term benching,

And that comes from the subway era in New York City for sure,

Where once upon a time people would sit at a subway station and sit on the bench

And take pictures of the graffiti that came by on trains.

And nowadays, nobody, because of security and whatever, people don’t really do graffiti on transit trains anymore.

That’s just not popular.

But everybody does on freight trains.

And so now that term has been adopted by people who are into freight trains, where anybody who’s observing taking pictures of graffiti on trains is referred to benching.

Oh, interesting.

So you don’t have to be on a bench.

It’s moved beyond that.

Yeah, absolutely.

And that part I thought was kind of weird, but it’s one of those words that really just continued on even still.

James, what does it mean to go all city?

If you’re a…

I love it that you just asked me that.

To go all city is to say that you have graffiti in every part of town.

And so back when it was primarily New York City, to go all city once upon a time with the train systems meant that you had done a train in every system, so in every borough or whatever.

And nowadays it would refer to, and that’s another one that continued on even after that era,

Where nowadays with street graffiti, which is the popular thing in America,

The whole idea of going all-city is to say that in every section of town you have graffiti that’s visible.

Yeah, I lived in New York City during the period when Cost Revs was basically all-city before he got busted.

Do you remember this?

Yeah, absolutely.

He was absolutely, absolutely.

He tagged everything.

I mean, I don’t think there was a mailbox or a blank wall that didn’t have his tag on.

It was crazy.

And he’s actually a very popular mainstream artist now, you know?

And so with that Revs guy doing sculptures and stuff like that.

And so, yeah, going all cities is a big term, and I still hear that all the time.

And the funny thing is that you would think it would only stick to those, you know, big cities,

But you also hear it with people in smaller towns.

So it’s a term that’s definitely survived.

James, this is fascinating stuff.

What we’re going to do is we’ll put a bunch of this stuff on the website.

We’ll find some graffiti glossaries, and we’ll do a link to the book that you mentioned.

And we’ll see if we can find just some of the classic tags to show people, to show them.

And then we’ll have that conversation about it.

I’d love to see that.

You are awesome.

I love it.

If it’s going to be on the website, you ought to link it to my website, oinkardltv.tv.

Okay.

It’s awesome.

So, yeah, we really appreciate it.

And I love the show, and I’ll be listening in the future.

Thank you all so much.

Thanks, buddy.

Okay.

Thanks, James.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

I love it.

Anyway, interesting stuff.

James, that’s awesome for him to share.

We’ll put a lot of this on our website so you can share it as well.

And if there’s something interesting happening in your business, it doesn’t have to be like that,

But tell us about the language that you use in your day-to-day work, words@waywordradio.org or 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lynn calling from Plano.

Hi, Lynn. Welcome to the program.

Plano, Texas.

Plano, Texas. And I’ve got a question for you.

Okay, shoot.

I’m wondering about the word tang.

A friend of mine’s mother passed away just recently in Jackson, Mississippi,

And when he went back to go through her things, he found a spiral-bound notebook that contained her plans for the month, what she was going to eat for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

And two times she had the entry of Tang with molasses, and another time it was Tang with Cairo.

And that was a dinner entree.

And we’ve gone on the Internet, and we just cannot figure out what Tang might be.

Okay.

An entree.

So this is not your family.

It’s a friend’s family, right?

Correct.

From Jackson, Mississippi.

Do you have any idea?

These sound like dinner plans.

They were dinner plans.

For the entire month.

I’m impressed.

Well, she was newly married in 1947.

Okay.

Oh, so these are from around 1947.

Mm—

And she was a home economics major, so I think she was keeping track of what she did.

Are you certain that they’re not a little older than that?

No, the date is September 1947.

Oh, the date is on the plans, the dinner plans?

Mm—

Oh, interesting.

You know why I think that’s odd, Lynn?

Martha knows.

Tell me.

Because I’m almost 100% sure that this Tang is a powdered orange drink.

Okay, but my question is, if you look at the, she has breakfast, then lunch, and then dinner.

Under the dinner, she has Tang with honey.

The next line reads baked potato, greens, pineapple salad, bread, butter, butterscotch pudding, and tea.

Mm—

Ooh.

Whoa.

And she always listed her first line as her entree.

Oh, really?

Do you have some of the other menus where she…

No, I only have those two menus.

Very odd.

But her drink was always listed last on the two entries that I have.

Wow.

How’s her handwriting?

Could it be something else?

Well, it could be, but I went through and I looked at the other letters,

And it comes out as Tang.

You’re right.

There needs to be an entree at the top of that thing.

Maybe it’s an acronym.

Well, no.

It’s a capital T-A-N-G.

All right.

Here’s what we’ve got to do, Martha.

Okay.

We have to turn on the sirens.

Okay.

Start the flashing lights.

Put the word out.

We’ve got a lot.

Here’s the thing.

I grew up in a household where tang or Kool-Aid is a part of dinner or is ordinary.

If you go through these old family recipe books from Missouri and all throughout the South and large parts of the country, frankly,

You’ll often find in the 50s, 60s, and 70s recipes that involve tang.

It was considered an ingredient as much as a food item on its own.

It was cool.

It was cool.

You did stuff like that.

It was with the space program.

John Glenn was drinking it up in space.

What do you think the tang on this menu was?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Or explain tang and molasses or tang and caro syrup to us some other way in email, words@waywordradio.org.

Lynn, the truth is out there, and one of our listeners knows it.

At least one.

Okay.

So keep listening, and we will try to find out.

Well, thank you so much.

Okay, thank you for a really interesting question.

All right, bye.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Hello, you have a way with the words.

Hi, this is Tony Giffray calling from Blacksburg, Virginia.

Hi, Tony. Welcome to the program.

Hi.

Thanks.

Well, it’s always bothered me when others refer to an appointment or a meeting as getting pushed back.

And I understand that they’re intending to say that the appointment will be delayed or postponed.

But to me, the phrase pushed back has the connotation of being pushed backward in time rather than forward in time.

And so its meaning is basically opposite of what my tuition says it would be.

Can you give us an example of that?

Well, for example, someone would say, OK, the meeting tomorrow instead of at 2 p.m., the meeting tomorrow will be pushed back to 3 p.m.

And so it’s understood that that that phrase means it will be pushed back to a later time.

But, for example, I just, I don’t know, to me, time always is moving forward.

So why should a meeting that’s being pushed backwards occur later, or being pushed back occur later rather than sooner?

So the confusion would appear if they didn’t specifically name the time.

If they say the meeting’s being pushed back one hour, you would go, well, wait a second.

Do you mean three or do you mean one? That’s what you’re saying, right?

Well, when I’ve questioned people then, when that sort of confusion first arise,

You know, I always looked to be the idiot because everyone else seems to understand the phrases as being postponed or delayed.

You and my magazine editor, for whom I worked years ago, were on the same page.

And I got into trouble because of this, because she wanted to push back my deadline.

And I thought that she meant I had another week to write the story.

She wanted to push it back a week.

And so I thought, well, I have another week.

And then the day before I was supposed to turn it in, which was a week before I thought I was supposed to turn it in.

She said, you know, you’re going to have the story, right?

And I said, no, you pushed back the deadline.

So, yes, very important implications.

So it has to do with how you’re picturing it and how you’re picturing time moving.

I saw you putting your hands out in a timeline while he was talking, right?

Yeah, I guess so.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah, exactly. And so to me, since time is always moving forward, why should we use back as part of that phrase? I don’t know.

Yeah, it’s definitely one of the less clear pushback. It works together. It is pretty standard that it means to delay or to postpone, but I could see how in a quick analysis you might make the wrong decision about what it means.

I guess I’d prefer that people use the word reschedule then.

Reschedule!

If the verification is going to be there anyway, then everyone should just say reschedule.

Better. That’s clearer speech, which we usually prefer here.

Yes, much better. I like that.

I should note, though, for the record, that pushback and pushforward have been pretty standardly used

In the way that’s contrary to your intuition in English for 150 years.

Okay. Wow, that’s a lot longer than I thought it would be.

But that doesn’t mean that push has got 1,000 meanings, back has got 10,000 meanings.

It doesn’t mean that it’s, even though it’s been used that long, it doesn’t mean that it’s clear for everyone.

Yeah.

Reschedule is a great choice.

Good suggestion.

And seeking clarification when in doubt is even better.

Sitting there silently isn’t going to solve it.

Sure, yeah.

Thank you so much, Tony, for the interesting question.

Well, thank you for clearing things up and, you know, reassuring me that I’m not crazy.

No.

You’re not crazy and you’re not alone.

Thanks.

Great.

Well, thank you so much.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Yep.

Bye.

Language is very confusing.

Give us a call.

We’ll help you sort it out.

877-929-9673.

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

I’m looking at this list that Paul Freeman sent us.

There’s some good stuff on here.

These are the expressions that are kind of have a twist at the end.

There are a couple of them that really make me laugh.

And a couple of it should go, huh, like this one.

Knowledge is knowing a tomato is a fruit.

Wisdom is not putting it in a fruit salad.

Okay, sure.

Well, that’s true, you know, come to think of it.

Light travels faster than sound.

This is why some people appear bright until you hear them speak.

I like that.

What’s a witty saying that you found in your reading

Or that you heard down at the pub?

Give us a call, 877-929-9673

Or send it secretly in email to words@waywordradio.org.

That’s our show for this week.

Don’t forget you can leave us a message even when we’re not on the air.

Call us at 877-929-9673 or email us.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Stay in touch with us all week on Facebook and Twitter.

And you can listen to all our past shows by going online to waywordradio.org.

Or you can get the podcast on iTunes.

Stefanie Levine is our senior producer.

Our technical director and editor is Tim Felten.

Tim also chooses our music.

We’ve had production help this week from Josette Herdell,

Jennifer Powell, and James Ramsey.

A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword Inc.,

A nonprofit organization.

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

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Ta-ta.

Ta-ta.

Neither, either, neither, neither,

Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato.

Support for A Way with Words comes from National University,

Where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

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