Gold Dance (episode #1573)

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, and I am sorely tempted to start a new hobby, if only for the slang.

What’s it this time? Painting bridges? Naming clouds?

No, no, no. I got tired of those. But the vocabulary of the hobby I’m talking about includes terms like coinball, nighthawk, gold dance, and my favorite, canslaw.

C-A-N-S-L-A-W.

Cancel off.

Coinball?

Is this like something you buy at the fair?

I’ll have a cornball, coinball, and a corndog.

And an elephant ear.

No, these are all terms that come from the field of metal detecting.

Oh, right.

So a coinball is a chunk of dirt you find with a coin inside.

And maybe in their lingo, it has friends.

That is, there are other little coins in the same hole that you dig.

And canslaw is shreds of aluminum cans left after a lawnmower ran over them, which I think is just so picturesque.

And a nighthawk is somebody who detects illegally at night.

And a gold dance is what you do if you actually discover gold.

Oh, yeah.

The little happy jig.

Yes.

The little happy jig of discovery.

Yeah.

Smile on your face.

Yes.

And I was all excited about this, having watched the wonderful BBC series Detectorists.

Yes.

Have you seen that?

I’ve seen a couple episodes.

It’s fun, but weird.

Exactly.

Well, it’s like us.

It’s a couple of passionate nerds who are maybe socially awkward.

Yeah, yeah.

Keep going.

Yeah.

I think it’s just hysterically funny.

I am really luxuriating in this show.

But apparently metal detecting is becoming very trendy in this country.

You can go on Instagram and see very fashionable photos of women with their metal detectors.

There are Instagram metal detecting influencers?

Is this what you’re telling me?

This is what I am telling you.

Look, unless you’re wearing white socks with sandals and you’ve got a dad bod, I don’t think you can be a real metal detecting influencer.

I just don’t think there’s an opening for you.

So, Martha, I guess you’ll be sharing some more metal-detecting language later.

I absolutely will.

I am just so excited about this new hobby, new potential hobby.

Well, if you find nuggets of wonder and brilliance in what you’ve been reading and hearing, share it with us, and we’ll share it with everyone else.

877-929-9673.

Or if you’ve got thoughts and questions about language of any kind, send them to us in email, words@waywordradio.org.

And if you’ve got responses or ideas, put them on Twitter @wayword.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hello.

This is Larry Brandhorst.

I’m calling you from a little town of Sparks, Georgia, right at the moment.

What can we do for you, Larry?

I was wondering, these newscasters, like news shows or talk shows or whatever, and even on the radio, if like I’m sitting there listening and they go to a commercial break and then they, when they get done with their commercial break, they always go like, welcome back. You know, it’s like, and I’m going like, welcome back. What do you mean? Welcome back. I didn’t go anywhere. You guys are the ones that left me. Even if I was watching the show and I was really interested in it, they left, you know, and then they’re welcoming me back. So it’s like they got it 180 degrees backwards.

Okay.

I got a couple things to say that I think will take a little bit of the edge off of this for you.

All right?

Okay.

One of those is that the welcome back is part of the glue of broadcasting, as it’s sometimes called. And we use this on radio, too, where you’ve got to do things to ease people in and out of the different segments of the show. And you can’t make too many assumptions about what happened in between. Both what happened on the station’s side, the radio station or television station’s side, or on the listener’s side. So those television shows that you’re watching, they don’t know maybe what the local station did in between their segments. They don’t have a lot of control over the commercials, for example, necessarily, except maybe even if they’re local news. So they’ve got to come up with something fairly basic to kind of cover all the eventualities to ease you out and to ease you back in.

The other thing they want to do is they want to make it brief. They want to do something simple. Welcome back is two words. It kind of does the job. And they want to make it friendly. Welcome does that. But there’s another thing. There’s a linguistic concept here known as the least expenditure of effort. And the linguists who have proposed this talk about how a lot of our social transactions are formalities that are pretty much meaningless, except that they fill this back and forth ritual. When you go to the grocery store and you’re in the checkout line, you say hello to the clerk and they say hello back. And they say or they say, how are you? And you say, how are you? And neither one of you really cares all that much, but you’re required by social convention to have that back and forth. And this happens a lot of the times in a lot of places. You know, when you’re in the workplace and you pass a coworker that you see 15 times a day, you make some kind of gesture, either a grunt or a noise or a head nod or something to acknowledge their presence. So sometimes you just raise your eyebrows a little bit because the social convention requires that you make some expenditure of effort, but it’s the least expenditure of effort. It doesn’t matter what it is. And so welcome back fills that. It’s the least expenditure of effort that they can do just to meet that social convention.

Well, Larry, now you have me feeling self-conscious because of course on this show, after we take a break, we come back and we say, you’re listening to A Way with Words.

You’re probably sitting there going, I know.

No, no, I don’t do that. I just, it’s the welcome back. It’s like I actually left and I did something and came back. That’s the part that, you know, so like when somebody comes in to work the next day and stuff, and I’m already there early and I’ll say, hey, welcome back. And they look at me like I go, well, you left and you went home and stuff and you came back to work, didn’t you? They go, oh, yeah, yeah. And then we start, or whatever, you know.

Martha, I think I agree with Larry. I think if I were scripting a show like that, I would just skip the welcome back and just say, as soon as I started the segment, I would say, today we’re talking with Larry about greeting and saying, hello, Larry, welcome. Larry, you were saying before the break, blah, blah, blah. Like, I would just go right into the segment and just skip the welcome back because either way, all I have to do is summarize what we’re doing and go right into the segment, right?

Or take the opportunity to, you know, get some exercise, run around the house, and then come back.

That’s probably very healthy.

Make them truthful.

Actually go away.

Help them out.

Yeah, but then I might miss the welcome back, and I’d have to just come in and jump in, you know.

Either way.

Oh, Larry, we’re going to get so many calls about this, and people who agree with you and have better ideas for the TV folks. I just know who we are. So thank you for opening that can of worms, and we’ll be sure to share what people have to say on the show, okay?

Yeah, no problem.

I appreciate it.

You guys enjoy the day.

Thank you.

All right.

Be careful out there.

For sure.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What should television people be saying when they come back from a break?

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Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Sam.

I’m calling from Brooklyn.

Hey, Sam.

Welcome.

Well, what’s on your mind today?

So I am originally from Arkansas. And when we were kids, when we were swinging next to each other, if we started swinging in sync, we would say, get out of my bathtub. And I then moved to Missouri and discovered that no one there used that expression. Years later, I was a classroom teacher here in Brooklyn and discovered that no one here used that expression.

And then recently, I was talking to a friend from Maine who did know what that expression meant.

And used it in the same context that I did.

So I think that you had discussed in the past where that expression might come from, but I was really curious about how it would be common in Arkansas and in Maine, but not in any of these states in between.

Oh, that’s a great question.

When you were a kid in Arkansas on the playground, you’d be swinging, and what’s happening when, and then what’s the expression that you say again?

When you’re swinging, you know, when you get to a point where you’re swinging side by side, really in sync with each other, one of the kids would say, get out of my bathtub.

Get out of my bathtub.

Yeah, that’s it.

So what we talked about before was maybe one of the reasons that people say get out of my bathtub is because that dirt hollow underneath your feet kind of looks like a bathtub.

Oh.

And Jacqueline from Michigan, the last time we talked about this, she said they not only used it for when they were in sync, but when someone would get in the path of your swinging in that dirt ditch, you would also shout, get out of my bathtub.

And there were other ones.

Anna, who grew up in New Hampshire, said they would say, get out of my window.

Crystal from Bonsal, California, said they would get out of my shower.

And Sue, also from California, says they would say, get out of my toilet.

So there’s like a theme here.

There’s like a bathroom theme.

Anna in Ohio said they called it double dating.

And similarly, Catherine Tallahassee said they would yell, look, we’re married, if you’re swinging in sync.

There’s all these variations.

And that’s how children’s folklore works.

Children not only pass it to each other, but they come up with their own innovations.

They want something that’s theirs.

Now, the great folklorists Iona and Peter Opie have done a lot of work and have several books of children’s folklore.

And I’ve talked about it on the show before, and it’s some of my favorite work at all in all of folklore.

And they talk about this strange circumstance, for example, when a rhyme would be about, say, the royalty in London.

There’d be a rhyme on the playground that they would collect.

And then they would get, say, a letter two weeks later from one of their correspondents in Australia, one of their informants, with that same rhyme.

And you wonder, how could that happen?

How did a children’s rhyme make it across the oceans and these two continents and these two playgrounds?

And it’s because the networks of children work the same way that adult networks do.

Children, they pass these things just as quickly as they pass the common cold, really.

They’re little sponges for everything, including funny little rhymes and funny little sayings.

And they’re also quick to parrot.

They’re quick to say something back and repeat it later.

So in some ways, children are more social than adults, and they’re more likely to see this stuff, this folklore spread across great distances.

Well, thank you so much.

This was really wonderful.

Thanks for sharing these memories.

Call us again sometime.

Thank you.

Bye, Sam.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, here’s a little bit of metal detectorist slang that I think you’ll appreciate, and that is joke tag.

J-O-K-E, joke tag.

It’s when they find something that’s not valuable and they put on it a Roman-era coin, but it’s just a pull tab from an old Fanta.

There are a lot of pull tabs for sure, and people call those beaver tails as a matter of fact.

Beaver tails, that’s funny.

I don’t know, what’s a joke tag?

A joke tag is something that you use to play a practical joke on other detectorists.

It’s a small metal plate that you put your name on and you leave it behind for other people to find.

That’s kind of evil.

It is, isn’t it?

But, you know, you got this little community of fellow enthusiasts.

It’s fun to play a little joke every once in a while.

What’s the language of your little community?

877-929-9673.

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

I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett, and here he is, ducking in the doorway like Gandalf in a hobbit hole, our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

That’s right.

Any 6’5 person has to duck in this tiny little warren you call your studio, or my studio, actually, for some reason.

Okay, how are you guys doing?

How are you this week?

Fantastic.

You?

Good, good.

I’m doing great.

There’s this old joke.

The joke is, what’s a synonym for a thesaurus?

Well, it’s a book of synonyms, of course.

Now, let’s run some common titles and phrases through a thesaurus and see what comes out the other end.

For example, if I asked you to identify the novel self-respect and bias, you would answer…

Pride and Prejudice.

Yes, Pride and Prejudice, 1813, Jane Austen.

Very good.

So you’re on board already.

Now, the clues coming up are a mix of titles and phrases.

Bear in mind, I’ve synonymized each word separately, and the synonym may not reflect the original intended meaning of the word.

Ready?

Okay.

Okay.

We’ll start with some easy ones.

It’s one of the most famous works of art.

The Ultimate Repast.

The Last Supper.

Yes, The Last Supper.

Good.

How about the board game, Frivolous Chase?

Does this have to do with trivia?

Yes, it does.

Trivial pursuit?

Trivial pursuit, that’s right.

I don’t think the kind of trivia I do is not frivolous.

Just going to put that out there.

Now, sometimes I just synonymized the key words in a phrase.

For example, this is something you might hear regularly, though you may not believe it.

Your shout is significant to us.

Your call is important to us.

Please stay on the line, and a representative will be with you shortly.

I don’t even believe when Grant says it.

Now, you guys are too good at this.

I’ll just give you the clue, and if you need a category, I will provide.

Okay, here’s the first one.

The sizable blow supposition.

The name of my next album.

The sizable blow supposition by Grant Barrett.

I love it.

The big bang theory.

Theory, yeah.

Yes, to blow something is to bang, blow.

Yeah.

End of a vendor.

Willie Loman.

Yes.

Death of a salesman.

Death of a salesman that’s right Arthur Miller.

How about this one.

Subsist.

Cacinate cherish.

Pray love.

Live laugh love.

It is live laugh love.

Live laugh love.

Anyway we lived through that puzzle.

We laughed at a few of the answers.

And I just, I love you guys.

You’re fantastic.

So well done.

Oh, thanks so much, John.

Thank you.

Words and language, slang and grammar.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s some more slang that I keep running across as I read about metal detectorists.

One of them is rhubar.

R-U-B-A-R.

Can you guess what that is?

No, I don’t.

It sounds like foobar or rebar.

It does.

But if you find something that’s metal that’s been buried for a long time, it might be rusted beyond all recognition.

Yes.

Rusted instead of fouled up.

Indeed.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, Grant.

This is Willem, and I’m calling from Chicago.

How are you?

Hi, Willem.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Willem.

I recently finished graduate school.

Thank you very much.

And while I was in graduate school, I had a professor at Northwestern who would constantly say when he was giving lectures, quote, end quote, and then he would go on to talk.

And I always found it kind of funny that he said, quote, end quote, as opposed to, quote, unquote.

And this particular professor is from Argentina.

So a part of me felt like, oh, maybe it’s just a colloquial thing.

Like maybe in Argentina they say it differently or it’s translated differently.

So I didn’t really think anything of it.

You know how when you hear something new for the first time and then, of course, you hear it every day for the next year kind of thing?

Sure.

So I started hearing that all the time.

And then I thought, am I crazy?

Is it, quote, end quote and not, quote, unquote?

Because I thought it was, quote, unquote.

And then, of course, I started looking it up and the etymology from what I could find isn’t really defined.

Like there’s not a clear etymology for quote, unquote or quote, end quote.

But boy, is there a conversation and a debate online about which one is correct.

So I thought I should call you guys since you are obviously the experts on record and say, what is the definitive answer? That is my question. Definitive. The definitive answer. But I’m wondering where else you hear end quote. Do you hear it or are you reading it?

No, no, I definitely am not reading it. I’m hearing it. And what’s interesting is I’ve always thought that it was quote unquote, if you’re saying that as a pair before giving the quoted text in speech.

So if I were to say, so Martha, I was talking to Grant and he said, quote, unquote, this guy is crazy. Like I could see it being quote, unquote. But if I’m saying a longer quote, if I say, hey, I was reading a book by Sam Harris and Sam went on to say, quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, end quote. Then I could see where it would be different, you know, different between quote, unquote, end quote, end quote.

But I recently was listening to one of the many audio books that I constantly listen to. And the author of this particular audio book said, quote, end quote. And then he went on and quoted this long paragraph. And I just thought it was so weird that he said, quote, end quote, at the beginning of the long paragraph as opposed to quote, unquote. Am I making any sense?

Right. Yeah, you’re raising several important points, one of which is that quote, unquote, as you pointed out, is its own idiom. I might say yesterday I gave myself a quote-unquote haircut, which adds a little bit more meaning, right? Maybe that haircut doesn’t look as good as if I went to see.

It’s interesting also that you mention audiobooks because if you’re an audiobook narrator, particularly in nonfiction, the company you’re working for may have a house style where they prefer that you end a quotation with the word end quote. So as you said, quote, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, end quote. And in the same way, reading audio books, if there’s a caption, for example, they’ll say caption. Martha has a terrible haircut. End caption. Or if there’s a longer explanation, they’ll say reader’s note. Martha couldn’t get to see her stylist and she has actually tried to do artistic projects before. End note.

So you’ll have end caption, end note, and end quote. You’ve probably read enough online to know that end quote and unquote apparently arose in response to the need to render speech in writing, starting with the telegraph in the 19th century and then later dictation devices. It’s less natural in everyday speech, but it’s useful in things like audio books.

But I’m interested that the Argentinian professor used end quote because it’s not as common as unquote as it, Grant. No, it isn’t. Not at all. Quote, unquote is used both in the UK and in North America, but quote, end quote is mainly American English. And it’s really rare, although the sticklers, the people who are usually kind of prim about their English tend to prefer quote, end quote, because they for some reason think that unquote undoes everything that came before, like that it stops it being a quote. And it actually doesn’t.

Oh, that’s so funny. I love it. Well, thank you so much. This has been so great. And especially, you know, during the pandemic, I just can’t tell you how much the show has been such a great form of support because I can listen to an episode over and over and over again and always get something new.

And I certainly love all the book recommendations and just finished reading for the second time Diary of a Comic Queen, which was unbelievable.

Oh, Mary Norris. Yeah, it was so funny and just so interesting. So definitely keep the recommendations coming over the airwaves. So thank you.

Thank you both so much. This has been so great. Thank you, Will. We appreciate the call. Call us again sometime. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

You may be a little shy about being on the radio, but it doesn’t take anything but dialing the phone to be on A Way with Words. 877-929-9673 or explain your thoughts in email words@waywordradio.org.

In English, if something isn’t that far away, we’ll say it’s just a stone’s throw. But I love the German expression. It’s Katzensprung, which means cat’s jump. It’s a cat’s jump away. Oh, and I love that because it’s just comprehensive in English. Cots and sprung. That’s very good. Cat sprung. Right. Just a springing cat.

I love that expression because you can just picture it, right? I mean, as many times as you’ve seen your cat spring from one spot to another. It’s just a little distance. I’ve got one who is a great jumper. She can do like a nearly 10-foot vertical leap on top of my big bookshelves. It’s lovely to see.

We know we have a lot of bilingual, trilingual, and multilingual listeners. Tell us the interesting words in the languages you know, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Sandy. I’m calling from Richmond, Virginia, but my heart is in the Berkshires of Western Massachusetts.

Oh, lovely. That’s great country. Yeah, if you know it, yes, it is. I have a word that’s been a mystery in my family for many years. My mom went to Smith College in Northampton, Mass. And once a year, they would take a day off from school and they would go to the mountains and they would have bacon bats. As far as I know, my mom recently died, so I’m afraid she doesn’t have the answer. She’s been dogging me to get the answer to this.

They would get together and they’d play games and I’m thinking they would sing, games for sure. It was all women’s college. Well, mom had always wondered what this word meant and what the origin of it was. And I Googled it, and she didn’t seem to be terribly satisfied. And so I decided I would probably ask some of the old-timers here around the lake what their definition of bacon bat was. And one of them said, well, we go across the lake and we would have hot dogs and hamburgers. And we would just bat thoughts around. Just shoot the breeze. And then this other guy said, oh, no, we would have hot dogs and hamburgers. And then we would go down the next day and play softball. And that’s where the bat came in. And then my husband had this crazy notion that maybe it had something to do really with bacon and with a bat, but maybe long ago they called sticks bats. So the question I have for you, is it bake and bat or is it bacon bat? And is it bat like softball or is it bat like things that fly around? That’s my question.

All right. So, Sandy, we’re talking about, let’s just get this right, B-A-C-O-N space B-A-T. Two words, right? Bacon bat? Bacon bat. Nobody really knew how to spell it. Or maybe it’s bake, B-A-K-E. Well, let’s clear that one up right away. Martha and I both know that it is bacon bat, bacon like the meat.

All right. And the really interesting thing is that this is an entirely different definition of the word bat. There’s an old sense of bat that means a spree or a debauched activity. It may come from an old phrase, to go on the batter, which means to walk the streets for purposes of prostitution.

I don’t think my mom would agree with that. No, no, no. It didn’t mean that after a while. It lost that meaning after a while. Yes, yes. I was getting to that. For college girls back in the day. And then the earliest we see this is 1907 and associated indeed with Smith College. No kidding. Yes, absolutely. And so it, the idea was a spree sort of with the air of being naughty a little bit, you know, you’re getting to go outside and experience the great outdoors. You’re doing something other than, than being stuck at college studying. And so, yes, it was a much watered down version of the term bat, but it was a great excuse to go out and do something different, to party outdoors. Here’s a wonderful description of that kind of activity from a few years later in the Yampa Leader, which is a Colorado newspaper. Check out this description, Sandy. A young college friend informed me that the very latest thing in outdoor affairs was a bacon bat. We all feel the call of the wild on these glorious days.

And I’m sure many of our readers will want to have a bacon bat just as soon as they read this.

Provide plenty of delicious bacon, sliced very thin, sweet potatoes, and several dozen finger rolls. Build a fire, roast the sweet potatoes, or take a frying pan and have the potatoes boiled at home and fry them over the coals. Grill the bacon on the ends of long sticks, insert the finger rolls and you have a meal fit for a king. And this writer also suggests you bring coffee and says roasting Irish potatoes and taking a jar of butter with plenty of tissue paper napkins.

Hard-boiled eggs are a welcome addition with a jar of tiny cucumber pickles and olives both ripe and green. That was their version of it, but what was the date of that? That was 1911.

And they talked about tissue paper?

Tissue napkins.

Tissue napkins.

Yeah, and there were different versions.

Yes, but there were different versions of this, but it was the idea of luxuriating outdoors with other people and really tasty food.

Yes, take me away.

It does appear to have started with Smith College, which, as you know, is in Northampton, Massachusetts. That 1907 that Martha mentioned was part of their Mountain Day.

Do you know what that is?

Well, I do because I went to school in Northampton, too, and we would have a Mountain Day, and it was always a surprise.

So Mountain Day, which they still have and they had in 1907, is a day where nobody but the school president knows. But on an unknown day, the clock tower bell is rung, classes are canceled, and everyone heads for nature or is supposed to.

And so in 1907, according to newspaper articles, 1,500 girls headed for the woods, and they had bacon bats in the woods.

That’s wonderful information, which I could not have Googled.

I knew I could get the information from you.

Oh, you’re geniuses.

How cool.

Thank you.

Sandy, thank you so much.

Thanks for sharing your memories.

Thank you so much.

That was good.

That was fun.

Appreciate it.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Thanks, Sandy.

Bye-bye.

There are lots of words we hear from the other generations, younger and older, that we need a little explanation for.

Martha and I can help you sort that out.

877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org.

Ross McIntyre of Lyme, New Hampshire wrote us to say that he’s been pondering the relationship that we humans have with the machines in our environment. And this was prompted by an experience he had when he parked on the upper level of a parking garage and he left after hours.

And so what he was supposed to do was take the little ticket that you get at the beginning from

That machine and put it into an envelope along with the payment. Well, he left the payment,

But he forgot to include the parking ticket in there. And he got home and he was looking at that

Ticket and had the number of the ticket and the time and the date of his arrival. But it also

Contain the words upper spitter. And he was thinking, what in the world? Is there actually

A machine that gives you a ticket that’s called a spitter? Because it spits out tickets? Yes,

Yes. In that industry, those little tickets are called spitter tickets. And that device,

That machine that gives you the ticket that spits it out is called either a spitter or an entry

Station or a parking ticket dispenser. But spitter is a term in the industry.

I love it because that’s what it does.

It spits out tickets.

Right?

The tickets better.

That’s fantastic.

Send us your stories about language.

Our email address is words@waywordradio.org or call us 877-929-9673.

This show is about language seen through family, history, and culture.

Stay tuned for more of A Way with Words.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and there is some exciting news in the world of language. That’s the publication of The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English, edited by Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinemiller.

It’s the successor to Montgomery’s 2004 volume, The Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English, which was focused on eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina. And he was the Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English and Linguistics at the University of South Carolina.

He died in 2019, but Hein Miller, his former assistant, carried on the project. And one thing that’s really exciting about this is that it’s expanded to include parts of eight states from southern West Virginia to northeastern Alabama.

So this means there are thousands more entries and census and citations. There are even photos in this dictionary. It’s got this wonderfully expanded section on the grammar and syntax of Southern Appalachian and Smoky Mountain English.

Which Grant, as you know, is really wonderful because there’s such a stereotype about speech in that area. Some people think of it as reflecting somebody who’s uneducated, but the truth is that there’s a system, there’s a grammar, there’s a structure and a beauty.

It’s not arbitrary. There are historical reasons for these features, and the volume itself, as you know, is glorious. It is a fantastic successor to the original volume, and it did merit, even though it is technically a second edition. It is so very different from the first. It has so much more material. It is worthy of the new title. And I got to say, this is a fine work of lexicography.

As a dictionary editor, I can appreciate all of the hard work. And it’s not just Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinemiller. This is based on the work of Joseph Hall, who in the 1930s, as a doctoral student, began doing linguistic research in the Smoky Mountains. And he went into people’s homes and communities and gathered immense amounts of information in print form and audio tapes over decades.

And that formed the original core of what Dr. Montgomery had been working with. And that information is in here as well. So this is a passion project for multiple people. And you can sense the care and even the affection for Appalachia and the people of Appalachia that is in this book. I think they’ve treated the language and the community with a lot of respect. And I think this is a work of lexicography that will be appreciated for centuries to come. This is a fantastic book. Indeed.

And it’s a book that you can just sit and browse and see the wonderful poetry of the vocabulary of Southern Appalachia. I was just looking at words for specific times of day, like day bust, which is another term for daybreak, or good dark, which is after twilight. It’s when it’s good and dark outside, or blue snow is fine powdery snow that’s very cold.

There’s a lot of poetry there, but it’s really worth reading the part about the grammar and syntax of that area. I spent part of every summer in western North Carolina, and I heard this stuff all the time, and it’s so great to see it described in grammatical terms, like, for example, the postposed one. In the Smokies, to identify alternatives, speakers will use the word one instead of not only or either. For example, they’ll say, this medicine will kill you or cure you one. They’ll end the sentence with that.

Or settlers come here in the 1830s or the 1840s one. That is just a natural feature of the speech in that area. And I heard that growing up. And it’s so great to see it detailed and explained in this volume.

Yeah, that’s one of many things. This book that we both recommend is The Dictionary of Southern Appalachian English, published by the University of North Carolina Press. It is edited by Michael Montgomery and Jennifer Heinmiller.

And we’d love to hear your questions and observations about any aspect of language whatsoever, so give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send your stories and email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Alouette Islin from Nelson, New Hampshire.

Alouette, hello, welcome to the show. What a lovely name.

Thank you, I like it.

What would you like to talk with us about?

Well, I am curious about the origin of the word hosie, as in, I hosie the front seat. And some people say dibs. And, you know, I’ve been talking about this to people, and they’re like, hosie, I never heard that. And I said, well, it’s like dibs. And they say, oh, I know dibs. But have you heard this word, hosie?

Oh, yeah, we’ve heard it and lots of variations of it. So where did you grow up?

I grew up in various places.

I was born in Massachusetts.

We lived in Burlington.

And then we moved to Marblehead.

So I was in Massachusetts for most of my childhood and then Milwaukee.

And now back to the East Coast again.

So I’m not really sure where I heard this word.

I sort of think of it as a childhood word.

So probably something that I heard a lot in Massachusetts.

Oh, sure, sure.

That makes a lot of sense.

So many kids in Massachusetts grew up saying Hosey or Whozy or Hornsy or Hansy to claim something, to lay claim to whatever object you want.

And isn’t part of the whole game that you have to say it before anybody else?

Yes. Yeah, the first person who says it wins, right?

Exactly.

Right, exactly.

It’s pretty local to New England. And Grant, I’m not sure that we have an origin for that.

Some people have suggested that maybe it’s a version of Holdsy.

You know, I’ve got a hold on this thing.

Yeah. There was some report of it from Horace Reynolds in his American Speech article that he had a report of it from southern England.

But it’s not confirmed that it’s possible that it came over from the UK.

Right, and it’s one of many, many, many, many terms that children find useful.

Dibs and honeys and finny and fin dibs and a wacky and fin wacky, and those are just the U.S. ones.

Yeah.

I don’t know those. I mean, I know dibs, but I haven’t heard the others.

Hosey is common in New England, or as Grant said, finny is another good one. I finny that.

And then, of course, there’s this whole group of expressions for defending what you’ve claimed,

Announcing that you’re not going to share it with anybody else.

Like no divvies, like I’m not going to divide it up.

There’s a whole slew of these.

Wow. Okay.

In this article in the American Speech,

There’s an Irishman in Cork who says when he was a kid,

You had to say the whole string of them.

You would say fin dibs, fin shackies, no dibs, no achies, no chips,

No divvies, and no have-eens.

And that’s how you got to, so that’s how you said, I’m not sharing this.

It’d be something that you brought from home or bought at the store.

And it just meant I’m not sharing any of this.

So no one else can have what they call the first boar on your apple, a first bite, or a Snooksy or Lixies of your lollipop.

They could not have a share of it.

So do you use that now?

No.

I’m not sure why.

I mean, I was listening to your show, and it came into my head, and I thought, I need to ask these folks where this comes from.

And no, I haven’t used it lately.

I mean, would you still use it as an adult is what I’m wondering.

Yeah.

In certain company, yes.

In certain company.

If you were in a restaurant and you want a particular something behind the glass, you say, I hosie that piece of chicken.

You wouldn’t do that?

I hosie that last bagel.

Yeah.

You’re going to buy the sliced pizza place.

I hosie that last pizza piece.

I could see myself saying that, yeah.

We’ll put a bunch of these on the website when we post the show.

But, Alouette, thank you so much for the call.

Thank you.

Take care.

All right.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Maybe while we were talking about terms for claiming or defending what you have when you were a kid,

All this dibs and hosy, maybe you thought of a term that you used that we didn’t mention.

Well, we’d love to hear that.

Any of your variations are welcome, 877-929-9673.

Or what else came to mind when we talked about the games that kids play,

The weird words that you used and the rhymes and chants?

Send them to us in email, words@waywordradio.org, or tell us on Twitter @wayword.

Among detectorists, those people who use metal detectors to find cool stuff buried underneath the earth,

There’s a term dials and smiles.

Dials and smiles.

Yeah.

Always like a rhyming compound. What does that mean?

That’s a hardcore detectorist.

That’s somebody who really loves tweaking the dials on their detector.

You know, they’re really into the technology because there’s, of course, a whole range of these metal detectors.

Oh, yeah.

I can see the fascination of the Gazich as much as the discovery.

Yes.

I can see you really getting into that, Grant.

I can see me getting too far into it.

I need to go to some of those East Coast cities, though, where they have, you know, many more hundreds of years than we do in California of settlement by the French and the English and the Dutch.

The Spaniards, and we have a greater chance of finding something important.

Of course, we could always find a lost wedding ring or something like that.

But dials and smiles.

That guy is all dials and smiles.

He really likes tweaking that equipment.

Well, we like to give you smiles on the dials.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Philip.

I’m from DFW area in Texas.

And I was wondering about the phrase low sick, the low sick or low sick.

I’m not sure exactly which one.

As a police officer, that’s a phrase we use.

We’ll say it over the radio so that other officers know the status of whatever the victim is.

You know, if he got hit by a car, we would say he’s low sick, meaning that his chances of survival are low or slim.

But we don’t want to say that over the radio.

So I was just wondering where that came from and how that came about, and if it’s low-sick or low-sig or what.

So you’re a police officer in the Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas area, right?

That’s correct.

This kind of plugs into a couple different things, and I’ve definitely got information for you.

The term is low-sick, L-O-W-S-I-C-K.

That’s two words.

While I do find it in one dictionary of police jargon and slang, it’s actually in American

Southernism, and it’s largely used by Black Americans in the American South.

And it goes back about 100 years.

If you look online for people using it, there are a couple places where you find police

In Dallas using it and maybe police in Atlanta.

But mostly it’s used by Black authors that I can find anywhere in print using it, including

One noteworthy example is a short story by

Langston Hughes, Simple Stakes Acclaim

From 1957 and you can find it in the

Young adult novels of Mildred Taylor such as

Roll of Thunder Hear My Cry from 1976.

So it’s really interesting to me because

This low sick meaning near

Death or very very ill, so ill that you

It just really looks like you’re not going to make it.

This term appears to have migrated from

Being an everyday term for some people to being very specific in some police departments in the

South but not all police departments in the south wow that’s interesting so it’s not low sig i always

Thought it was low sig because they had like low vital signs or something low sick okay good to know

Maybe it was low sig for low signal like like a radio might have a low signal if its battery was

Weak or like a you know if they’re about to be deceased i would say they have low vital signs.

So low-sick is kind of what I was thinking.

No, it’s low-sick.

It’s just you can actually feel low.

I say this sometimes.

If I’m feeling low, it’s like my mood is low, my spirit is low.

I might be having a little bit of a mollez or a queasy stomach.

And then you can be sick.

And this is a combination of both those words.

So if you’re low-sick, you’re like doubly not well.

Low-sick is like the most sick you can be without croaking.

Okay.

Well, that definitely follows in line with how we use it.

I appreciate it. Thank you very much.

Yeah. I’m always looking for in-house uses of language

Because this is one term I’d really like to get a handle on.

The fact that it leapt from being an everyday term for black Southern Americans

To being used specifically for some police departments in the South

Is really interesting to me.

Appreciate the input, sir. Thank you very much.

All right. Take care now. Be safe out there.

Yes, sir. Bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear about the slang in your workplace. Give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha and Grant. This is JJ calling from the western shore of Lake Michigan in Racine, Wisconsin.

Hi, JJ. How are you doing?

Pretty good. Pretty good. I have a little language mystery I was wondering if you might help me make my way through.

Oh, yeah. I grew up in Coventry, Rhode Island, and I moved to the Midwest in the early 1980s. I learned pretty quickly that there were a lot of different words for things in Racine compared to Coventry, although both areas do use bubbler correctly. One idiom, however, has a very distinctly different meaning pretty much, I guess, everywhere in the world except for where I grew up.

One cold winter day, I was walking to my friend Dan and Sarah’s house and I slipped on an icy sidewalk. When I walked up to their door, I guess I must have looked distressed because they said, hey, are you all right? I said, as I was holding my lower back, no, I just took a dump on the ice and I think I hurt myself.

Laughter ensued and I felt pretty incensed because I really thought I had hurt myself. I said, no, I think I hurt my tailbone. And it wasn’t until I rephrased myself that, hey, I slipped and fell and I think I hurt myself. And they’re like, what are you talking about? And that’s when I realized that the idiom that I had used did not mean the same thing that it did in Rhode Island where I grew up. Not at all.

When you said you took a dump on the ice, they were imagining something else.

They actually were for a good probably 10 minutes because they were like, oh dear. You took a dump and you hurt yourself in the process. I did not get a lot of sympathy.

And you know what’s most strange is when I’ve been back in Rhode Island, I’ve asked people about this. And they deny it. They deny it until we were driving on the road and a motorcycle swerved and the guy almost fell off. And my friend Nina said, hey, that guy almost took a dump. And she turned around and looked at me. She’s like, we do use it. Other than on that momentarily unthought response, they won’t admit it.

But, yeah, you know what? And actually, the oldest meaning of dump back as far as Middle English was about falling. It’s about somebody falling. It was used in passages like they dump in the deep and to death they pass, things like that. So the earliest usage was about people falling. And then later it was about things being kind of jumbled together in a pile or poured out into a pile or dropped in a pile.

Well, I would always tell my fourth graders at the start of the year, as I would explain how I would say things differently, that Rhode Island was settled first. So the way we used it was the first and right way.

I’m a linguist and we will argue, but I appreciate the comedy in that.

Yeah, I’m sure the fourth graders appreciated it too.

Yeah. JJ, thanks for sharing. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, guys.

All right. Take care now. Be careful out there.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Grant, of course, the word that also comes to mind here is polysemy, P-O-L-Y-S-E-M-Y, polysemy.

That’s right. Lots of words are polysamous. That means that they have more than one meaning. Sometimes they’re similar meanings. They’re shaded a little differently. But yeah, dump has multiple meanings, and they can cause hilarious conflicts of misapprehension if you’re in a circumstance like JJ was.

We know that you’ve had these things happen as well where two people just didn’t understand each other, and it led to hilarious confusion. We love those stories, and we’d like you to share them with us, 877-929-9673, or tell the story in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Rachel Elizabeth Weisler. You can send us messages, subscribe to the podcast and newsletter, and catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada, 877-929-9673, or email us words at waywordradio.org.

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

Many thanks to Wayword board member and our friend Bruce Rogow for his help and expertise. Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Until next time, goodbye.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.