Gone Pecan

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

Grant, you play online Scrabble, right?

Oh boy, do I.

Well, I wonder if you have the same experience that one of our listeners had.

Keith Hampton of Brownsburg, Indiana, says that sometimes when he is stumped for a word, he’s looking at all these letters and he’s got to play something, he just plays anything. You know, puts those letters up to see if maybe they’ll work. You know, sort of like throwing it against the wall and seeing if it sticks.

And he did this recently with a made-up word, and it turned out that the game accepted it. It was a word. It was already a word.

Yeah.

Nice.

And the word was haverals.

Haverals.

H-A-V-E-R-E-L-S.

Haverals.

What’s a haveral?

Well, that’s what he wanted to know. He looked it up in the dictionary, couldn’t find it, and did the next best thing, which, of course, was to call us.

And so I did some digging, and it turns out that in Scotland and northern England, to haver is to talk garrulously and foolishly, to talk nonsense. So a haveral is someone who havers or talks without sense, somebody who’s given to idle, foolish chattering.

Now, what a great word.

We don’t know anything about that.

No, we don’t. We don’t.

So the next time, you know, you’re watching the 24-hour cable network, you know, haverals, stop.

But that is a great strategy for Scrabble and Words with Friends and Word Feud and those kind of games because, I mean, you just do consonant, vowel, consonant, vowel, consonant.

Yeah, never know.

And you’ve got a really good chance.

But because we have this instinct about prefixes and suffixes and roots, and sometimes you can put them together in logical ways.

Yeah, stick on an S and get another point.

Yeah, there we go.

877-929-9673.

Email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant. It’s Megan from East Hampton. How are you?

Great, Megan. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Megan.

Well, I’ve only just discovered you guys because I finally found SoundCloud and found out about podcasts and things like that. So I’ve been listening to some of your older shows, and you made a reference. At some point, you were talking about schools and things, and you made a reference to grammar school.

And it occurred to me that grammar schools, which are also called elementary schools, which makes sense because they’re elementary topics, why would they be called a grammar school if you’re learning so much more than grammar?

That’s a great question.

It’s a really good question.

That never occurred to me.

Yeah.

It’s just like the name for the thing. I didn’t even think of to break it apart.

Right.

We always call it grammar school.

Yeah.

Or elementary school, but still grammar school.

Well, Megan, the reason is that that’s what the earliest schools were centuries and centuries ago. The first schools were institutions that were connected with cathedrals and monasteries. And in order to train people to go into the ministry, the first thing you had to learn was Latin.

Very good. Latin grammar.

And this is what century are we talking about here? 1300s, 1400s?

The 12th century.

12th century. Okay.

Yeah, they were called the scolae grammaticales.

Oh, so this term has, we just have an English version of the old Latin term, which is 800 years old.

Yes, yes, exactly.

That’s awesome.

But think about it.

That’s a lot deeper than I expected.

We love it when that happens, Megan.

We’re very shallow here.

Deep is an accent.

Along those lines, though, does high school have the same sort of connotation? Is it just because it’s the higher grades, the higher numbered grades?

No, it’s about the pot smokers out back behind the track.

No, it is that.

It’s exactly that.

Yeah, yeah.

And then for a while, grammar school and elementary school sort of existed side by side. And grammar school really dropped off in the 1960s.

It does sound dated to me now.

Yeah.

Yeah, grammar.

Megan, thank you so much for your call.

And glad to have you as a new listener.

Sure, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

There’s a ton of those in English. Just like these tiny little things that when you stop to think about it, you’re like, wait a second, that makes no sense.

Yes.

But here we have 800 years of history.

Hundreds and hundreds of years.

Wow.

And so the first things that people learned were grammar and rhetoric and logic. And then you moved on to university where you learned geometry and arithmetic and astronomy and music. And those were the seven liberal arts originally.

Very good.

But it starts with grammar.

You know, I like these small little casual questions that reveal the depths of the English language. If you’ve got one of them, give us a call, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Liam Scoil from Dallas, Texas.

Hi, Liam. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Liam.

Hi.

How can we help?

Well, so I really like collective nouns. I really like the idea of them. And I was wondering what the collective noun for a group of cyclopses is.

Any particular reason? Are you being chased by some?

Well, I was playing a game with a friend, and we had an army of Cyclopses, and we just realized that neither of us had any idea what that could be. I know it’s got a bunch of Latin origins, but I don’t think the collective nouns seem to ever have a Latin base to them.

Maybe a monocle of Cyclopses.

The best one we came up with so far was a Corneacopia.

Oh!

Oh, corneacopia.

A corneacopia of cyclopses.

Oh my gosh, that is painful.

But I like it.

I keep saying cyclopses, but there are two possible plurals, right? You can either say cyclops as a plural and singular, or you can say cyclopses as the plural.

I think the more common one actually is cyclopes.

Ooh, nice.

Yeah, and that reflects the Greek origins of the word. It comes from Greek words that mean round eye. And Cyclops in Odyssey.

But there was a whole race of Cyclops. They were titans in ancient Greek history. And you know the story of Cyclops with the big eye going after Odysseus and all of his guys?

Yeah.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

And so the plural, the more common plural, actually is Cyclopes, which is C-Y-C-L-O-P-E-S, and that reflects the Greek roots.

Cyclopes.

Unless you’re talking about the freshwater crustacean, you’re not talking about the freshwater crustacean, are you?

No.

No, unfortunately.

Those tend not to show up in video games. They’re little bitty ones. They look like they have one eye, and those are just cyclops, if they’re plural, like fish or deer.

I mean, I was going to say an Argus of cyclops.

Oh, that’s good.

You know, Argus was the guy in Greek myth who had 100 eyes all over his body.

Liam, you win at the radio today.

Yeah, I think corneacopia has got to be it.

Oh, that’s good.

I like Monocle.

Thanks for calling, buddy.

Yeah, Monocle as well.

All right, thank you very much.

All right, bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Wait, did I say cyclopes? I meant to say cyclopes. That’s the most common plural of cyclops, cyclopes. Although I hope you never have to use it.

Call us 877-929-9673.

The things you learn when you travel.

Grant, my friend Pam Morgan was vacationing in Europe, and she heard a slang term, and she knew I’d be excited about it, so she texted me right away. She had fallen into a conversation with a woman from the Philippines who was talking about something grandiose, and the woman described it as Imeldific.

Like Imel DeMarcos.

Yeah, and I thought, I don’t know about that, but I Googled it, and there’s several thousand hits for that.

And they’re all Filipinos using it?

Yeah.

That’s cool.

Imeldific.

Imeldific, right. Reference to Imel DeMarcos. We all remember the excess of all the shoes and the big houses and everything plated with the gold and what have you.

Yeah.

Thanks, Pam.

877-929-9673.

Hi.

You have A Way with Words.

Yes.

This is Kathy from Wyoming.

Hi, Kathy.

How can we help you?

Well, I’ve been perplexed for quite a long time about someone who will say they’re going to borrow you something instead of loan it to you. Like, for instance, they’ll show up at the door and say, I was wondering if you would borrow me a cup of sugar.

Interesting.

This is something you hear a lot there in Wyoming?

Well, no, not an awful lot, but it seems like it just comes out of the blue sometimes, and I’m always taken aback.

Where in Wyoming are you, Kathy?

Riverton.

Riverton, okay. Where in the state is that?

That is kind of central west, sort of, west of Casper.

Yeah, I’m just curious at all. You know, this borrow-lend or borrow-loan confusion is fairly common in English. You may even hear it on television and the radio sometimes.

Yes, I have.

And Martha, we’ve dug into this question before, right? Borrow and lend.

And there’s a really interesting thing that I want to relate to and try not to make it too wonky. Linguists who look into this confusion, they notice that there’s something particular about this kind of confusion.

There’s only one thing different, really, about borrow and lend. And it’s actually which direction the thing is traveling. Is it going from person A to person B, or is it going from person B to person A? And actually, who’s doing the speaking?

This is why the confusion is so obviously easy to do, is because the two words are actually remarkably alike in every other aspect. And we see the same confusion happen in other word pairs, which are also almost exactly the same, except for the direction in which something travels.

For example, teach and learn are often confused. You might think of in Mark Twain, I’m going to learn you a lesson, right? Because the thing is that which way is the information traveling? To A to B or B to A? And we’ll also see it in bring and take.

Yeah, we get that question a lot. Again, two verbs that are almost exactly alike except in the direction that the thing is traveling. Or who is doing the bringing or the receiving or the giving, right? They’re very similar.

And so what’s happening here is that there’s a cognitive kind of dysfunction. There’s just a mistake that happens in the brain, but it happens a lot. And people come out with barrow. And sometimes so many people come out with barrow that it becomes ensconced in the dialect.

And so you will find in some of the Caribbean dialects of English, barrow is pretty much the standard word for lent. And you’ll also find in some languages around the world, the word for barrow and lend is the same. Older dialects of Gaelic, some dialects of Arabic.

But I have to say, borrow and lend feel very, very different to me, don’t they to you?

Yes, it does. It just seems wrong somehow to have someone say, well, if you’d like, I can loan that to you. And instead of that, they say, anytime you want to, I’ll borrow that to you.

Right. When I hear borrow, I think, I’m not going to get that back.

Exactly. Yeah, lending is different. It’s definitely nonstandard. Even though I tend to be fairly kind of open for people can say things any way they want, it’s one of those things you really want to avoid saying when you’re in a formal situation or if a job is in the line.

Or if you’re going to the bank, will you borrow me some money for a house? You kind of probably want to use the proper verb there, right? But you’re right to be just a little bit tweaked by it because all of your signals, all of your education, your experience are telling you, wait a second, wait a second, this verb is not quite right.

And yet, so many people make the mistake, you kind of have to look at the reason why and go, okay, it’s kind of a forgivable mistake because these words are so similar. Lots of people are making this mistake. I get why they’re doing it. I’m going to try not to make that mistake myself, right?

I don’t know. I guess I hadn’t thought of it that way, but that kind of makes sense. But it still sounds wrong to me.

I’m with Kathy on this.

Yeah, there’s no argument about it sounding wrong. But just trying to explain the mistake sometimes is just as interesting as noticing the mistake in the first place.

All right, Kathy, well, thank you for calling.

Thanks, Kathy. Bye-bye.

Okay, thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your linguistic confusion, 877-929-9673.

Word wizardry and a word quiz. Stay tuned.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Companies, whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere. More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

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 I think we’ve got John Chaneski here.

John.

I hope so.

Hello.

Hi, everybody.

John Chaneski here.

Hi, everybody. We’re ready for a quiz. We’re raring to go.

All right. I call this puzzle, I don’t think so, MW. As you know, in puzzle and word circles, MW is?

Merriam-Webster’s dictionary.

Merriam-Webster, the dictionary. Now, the reason I call it that is this. I subscribe to Merriam-Webster’s word a day on email. So every day, Merriam-Webster emails me a new word, its definition, word history, etc. Along with that are two sample sentences using the word of the day.

Now, my beef is this. Quite often, M.W.’s first sample sentence doesn’t resemble anything that I believe anyone would ever say. Now, I’m going to give you a sentence with a blank, and you have to tell me what word you think M.W. is illustrating.

Okay?

Okay.

Okay. For example, lying in my tent that night, I could hear the campfire crackling and the crickets blank, and none of the city sounds I was accustomed to. Can you guess what word goes in that blank?

Chirping.

Chirping.

Something with two L’s in it. What’s the word?

Trilling.

Okay, those are both great words. This is what I’m actually hoping we’ll get some great words out of this. The crickets. The definition is to make a shrill creaking noise by rubbing together special body parts. You’ve got to love any definition with special body parts in it.

And creaking.

Was that Frida Nancy?

No, that’s a great guess. The answer is stridulating.

Oh, stridulating.

Yes, yes, yes.

Right. Now, don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying no one uses these words. I’m just saying that their sample sentences don’t match the vocabulary of a person who would use that word.

You don’t say stridulating around the campfire?

I can imagine a scientist using it, but they wouldn’t say, you know, they use other words along with that. They’re of a similar vocabulary level, okay?

Spell the word for us.

S-T-R-I-D-U-L-A-T-I-N-G.

Great. Stridulating.

All right. This is good. I like this quiz. Let’s go. Let’s have another one.

Good. I hope you’ll find it fun. Here are some more. Renaming the high school gymnasium after the beloved late basketball coach would blank her memory for years to come. The definition is, of course, to celebrate or extol. There’s a verb form of encomium.

Encomium.

Yeah, that’s also a good word. Now, the word they’re looking for is emblazon.

Emblazon.

That doesn’t actually sound right.

I know. That’s why I say, I don’t think so, MW. Let’s go on. Like I said, I don’t expect you to get one. Maybe you won’t. But we’ll move on. We’ll have fun.

Okay, here we go. Located on a secluded, white, sandy beach, the resort, with its many amenities, including a first-class luxury spa, is like a utopian blank. The definition is an imaginary land of great luxury and ease.

Shangri-La.

Good answer.

Xanadu.

Good answer. It begins with a C.

Utopian?

A utopian cocaine.

A what?

Cocaine.

Spell it.

C-O-C-K-A-I-G-N-E.

Oh, okay, sure, yeah. Here’s the next one. She was in a blank for days before the meeting, but when the actual day arrived, she found she was surprisingly calm.

Tizzy?

Tizzy’s good. The definition is a state of extreme agitation, of course.

Yeah.

Not fantad.

A whirlwind.

A whirligig. It begins with an S.

Gracious.

Stupor.

I don’t know. If you change the last letter, it means to turn on a pivot.

Swivit.

Swivit. Yes, swivit. She was in a swivit for days before the meeting.

We’re learning. We’re learning things.

Here’s the next one.

Okay, sure, yeah. As we drove away from the city, apartment buildings gave way to homes with yards, then at last to a blank landscape dominated by tall pines.

Sylvan.

Yeah, that’s nice.

Sylvan’s a good word.

Sylvan’s good. Or woody or forested or…

Could be desert. This one begins with B. It means having abundant trees or shrubs. There’s a word on the tip of my tongue.

Bosky.

Yes, Bosky.

Very good.

You guys think you got at least two so far.

You’re doing all right.

U-S-K-Y.

On this incredibly hard quiz.

So that’s the end of it?

That’s it, yeah.

All right, Martha, you did really well.

Yeah, you guys did pretty well.

Thanks, John.

Much appreciated.

John, thank you.

Thanks, guys.

Take care of yourself.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Madison, and I’m calling from San Diego.

Great.

Madison, welcome to the show. Hi, Madison. How old are you? I’m 10. 10. Okay. What would you like to talk with us about? Well, I have a question on the word please, because like some people say, because I think it’s like could be optional, but other people think it could, it’s just being polite and still a command. The word please. Can you tell us when you might think it would be optional? Well, like at the pool one time, there’s like a sign that said, please take a shower before you enter the pool. So I thought it could be optional, but yeah. If you didn’t have please on the sign, then it’s what, an order or a command? Yeah. Aha. That’s a pretty sophisticated question, Grant. It is indeed. So Madison, the sign said something like, please take a shower before going into the pool, right?

Yeah.

And you couldn’t wait to get in.

Yeah.

Well, I still took the shower, but I was thinking in my head, is it optional or is it still wanting you to do it?

Okay.

That’s a good question.

Let me ask you, if you use please in other circumstances, does it also feel optional to you? If I say, please take off your shoes before entering the house, does that feel optional?

Yeah, that sort of does.

But sometimes I say, please, to my brother, like, leave me alone. Like that, I use it as a command.

So that’s like the sarcastic eye-rolling please, though, right? Like, please leave me alone.

Yeah.

Followed by mom.

This is a really interesting question.

Do the politeness terms imply that you’re not serious about a request? I mean, that’s how I’d put it in linguistic terms, Madison. And if I add a polite word to the top or bottom of something that I want, does that mean that I’m indicating that I’m not very serious about it?

Well, I think, yeah, it wouldn’t be as serious as it would be to not say a polite word. But, yeah.

Another question I have for you, Madison. If the pool never used the word please on its signs when they say things like, please check in at the front desk, or please no diving in the pool, or please no running around the edge of the pool, if they just took please off everything, wouldn’t that feel a little harsh and maybe even rude for them just to have all these bossy commands everywhere?

Well, yeah, I guess.

But it would still be straightforward instead of making it less serious.

Mm-Yeah.

So if your mom said, please clean your room?

Yeah. I would think it’s more optional. I would think it’s like I would do it, but it would still be less serious than if she said it with no please.

Interesting.

Interesting.

I’ve got to remember that for my son because for me, we try to be very polite in our house to each other, even for things that the person has no problem with doing. Please pass me the salt. Nobody has a problem passing you the salt, but yet you still use the polite terms.

Yeah, I’m thinking that if you’re going to a hotel or a public pool and they say, please take a shower, it’s sort of like you’re their guest, right? I mean, it’s sort of a polite form of address.

Yeah, and in English, Madison, we use these polite terms as a way to kind of ease each other into the expectations that we have for each other. We use please and sorry and thank you and a variety of other words in order just to make sure that we’re not all barking commands at each other all the time. And we all kind of understand that these terms mean, oh, Martha said please take off your shoes before entering the house. That means she really wants to do it. She’s not going to be really aggressive about it. But because Martha’s a friend of mine and I care about her feelings, the please tells me that she feels the same way about me. And so I’m going to do it for her. And that’s kind of what I’d say about the pool. Their please is telling you that they respect you as a customer and as a guest. And even though they really want that thing done.

Okay.

Madison, I think you have the best attitude possible, which is to note the word and then go ahead and do the request. That’s cool, Madison. Thanks for calling. We really appreciate it.

Thanks for having me.

Are you a competitive swimmer, by the way?

No.

No, okay.

Just thought I’d ask.

All right.

Take care of yourself, Madison. Good luck.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, that was a sweet-sounding voice, wasn’t it?

Yeah, it was.

Just a sweet girl.

Call us, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Marty from Philadelphia.

Hello, Marty. Welcome.

Hey there, what’s up?

Oh, well, I just kind of have a question that’s been mulling in my mind in light of all the current events. And the current event I’m talking about is President Obama’s evolving on same-sex marriage and becoming that cover on Time magazine where it’s called the first gay president. I just thought back to when I was a young preteen, I went to see a movie called Our Hearts Were Young and Gay. It had Dorothy Gishon and some old famous almost silent movie people in it. And the word gay, it’s just an ordinary word we used to mean happy. And so I guess my question is, when exactly did the word gay stop meaning merry or pleasant and happy and start meaning homosexual?

Well, there can be some overlap.

The gay gay?

Okay.

And another part of the question I was thinking of was, why gay? Why not, again, cheerful or merry or some other word? How did that happen?

All right.

Let’s break this down. It’s pretty simple. The research that’s been done on this is very solid. Talking about gay happy, English gets it from French. It shows up in the 1300s, meaning merry or jolly or that sort of thing. And it continues to be used in this way in English for a very long time, for centuries and centuries. But then in the late 1800s, hobo culture arises on the rail lines and the railroads of the United States. Now, the reason this is relevant is that the culture also had this big body of slang. And this slang kind of seeped out to the wider world through railroad journals, through linguists and people who were interested in language. They’re just kind of like the passing fancy of the journalist who would like to write about these odd folks who would travel from coast to coast on the rails. One of the terms that they used was a term gaycat. G-A-Y-C-A-T or G-E-Y-C-A-T. Sometimes one word, sometimes two. And now this term had a lot of meanings. A lot of slang, it moved fast, it shifted meaning. For example, one of the uses of gay cat was somebody who would go into town and actually get work from time to time, which true hobos never did. They considered it beneath them to ever work. But these people would sometimes, you know, go in and chop wood or go in and wash dishes and make a little money. But also part of the gay cat culture was they tended to be inexperienced hobos, inexperienced at traveling and providing for themselves. So oftentimes they would take an older, more experienced hobo as a mentor. And there was always the assumption that these gay cats were actually the sexual partners of these older hobos and that there was a one-on-one, the one-to-one relationship there between two men because it was almost always men. And therefore by the 1950s, gay cat broke apart. Cat of course started to be used fairly regularly in the 30s and 40s just to mean guy or dude or man or something like that. And gay broke off of gay cat and started just to refer to men who were homosexual. And you can see it pop up in fiction and news reports of the police raiding gay bars and that sort of thing in the 1950s.

And by the 1960s, gay, meaning homosexual, is firmly entrenched in English.

And, of course, move fast forward to the 90s and gay starts to mean weird or unusual or quirky or odd.

Oh, like that’s so gay.

Yeah, that’s so gay.

But the other question you’ve got is the one which I really love, and it’s something that people often forget to ask, is, well, what happened to gay meaning marry?

And the thing is, it’s called semantic collision.

It’s when you have two words.

English is filled with examples of this.

Two words from different environments, different etymological sources that come together and occupy a space in the language where they’re easy to confuse.

Where if I say we went to a gay party last night, you could either think I had a really married time or you can think that everyone there was a homosexual.

So this semantic collision means I need to push one of those words out of my vocabulary and stop using it.

Well, sort of like queer.

Yeah.

Queer is the same way with queer.

Exactly.

We rarely use queer anymore to mean quirky or odd or freaky or weird.

So that’s the history of gay as we know it today.

And it’s a really interesting question, probably one that comes up a dozen times a year.

So I’m glad to talk to you about it, Marty.

Yeah, Marty.

Well, thank you.

Thank you so much.

I really feel very well educated, and I will share my wealth of knowledge with all my friends and relatives.

And I thank you for that.

Thanks, Marty.

Bye-bye.

Excellent.

Bye, Marty.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

words@waywordradio.org.

Grant, I’m reading a terrific book about antigravity.

I just can’t put it down.

That’s terrible.

I know it’s terrible, but you know what?

I thought I could buy your respect and your indulgence if I reminded everyone that the fancy term for pun is paranomasia.

Oh, paranomasiacs.

Paranomasiacs.

It’s time for paranomasiacs.

Oh, good.

Well, since you’re singing, I’m going to tell you that this girl said she recognized me from the vegetarian club, but I’d never met her before.

That’s awful.

I know.

877-929-9673.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Andy Cosmojo.

Andy Cosmojo?

Andy Cosmojo from where?

From Madison.

From Madison.

Madison, Wisconsin.

Welcome to the show.

Can I call you Joe?

Yes, absolutely.

Okay, Mr. Joe.

How can we help you?

Well, maybe you can solve this debate a friend and I have been having.

It’s about the term road warrior.

Now, I believe the term road warrior means somebody who travels on the road works on the road.

And he told me that I’m wrong and that a road warrior is a military personnel who’s retired.

On active duty. Really?

Yeah.

It can be both things, though, right?

I guess, yeah.

I don’t know that latter meaning a road warrior.

I don’t either. Retired military personnel?

Yeah, he says it’s an acronym for retired on active duty.

Oh, interesting.

Road warrior. I just never heard that.

It’s possible that it exists.

But outside of military slang, almost everybody, including a million self-help authors who write about how to do your work well, road warrior means somebody who travels a lot or someone who commutes to school or work a long distance.

Oh, okay. So you’re a road warrior.

I am a road warrior, absolutely.

So that means lots of motel rooms and continental breakfasts or what?

How many miles a year do you put on your car? About 30,000.

Yeah, you’re a road warrior, definitely. Awesome. Well, good.

I’m glad to be a road warrior.

Yeah, I mean, it’s entirely possible for one term to have more than one meaning.

English works that way.

So you and your buddy both can be right.

I’ve never heard his definition of it.

Well, maybe his is a backronym, you know?

Right.

Retired.

On active duty.

Retired on active duty.

Yeah.

You could see where you could.

I could see how it could be a real term.

It doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.

I’ve just never heard of it.

But by far and away, the other road warrior, the one that you use, Joe, that’s the more common one.

Oh, excellent.

Yeah, yeah.

So congratulations.

You win.

You win English language.

Hey, all right, I win.

And as your prize, I give you this gift, language.

Oh, excellent.

I love language.

Thanks for calling.

All right, thank you guys.

Take care.

Okay, drive carefully, Joe.

Bye-bye.

All right, bye-bye.

You want to settle a language dispute?

Call us, 877-929-9673.

I’ve got some riddles from 1835 for you.

They come from a book called The Choice Collection of Riddles, Charades, and Conundrums.

Oh, man.

And it’s supposedly by Peter Puzzlewell of Rebus Hall.

Somehow I think they’re having me on.

Here’s a short one.

Okay.

Enough for one, too much for two, and nothing at all for three.

It’s a secret. Enough for one, too much for two, and nothing at all for three, because it’s not a secret anymore.

I’ll share some more riddles later in the program.

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, the show about language and how we use it. I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. Imagine, you’ve just wandered into an English pub and the person next to you looks interesting. You’d like to start up a conversation. So how do you begin? Well, whatever you do, don’t introduce yourself. Here’s some advice from a British book on pub etiquette.

The, hi, I’m Chuck from Alabama approach does not go down well in British pubs.

Natives will cringe and squirm with embarrassment at such brashness.

If your introduction is accompanied by a beaming smile and an outstretched hand, they will probably find an excuse to get away from you as quickly as possible.

The British, quite frankly, do not want to know your name or shake your hand, or at least not until a proper degree of mutual interest has been well established, like maybe when you marry their daughter.

It’s a bit of an exaggeration, but not much, according to Lynn Murphy.

She’s the American linguist living in the U.K. who has a great blog about the differences between American English and British English.

It’s called Separated by a Common Language.

And she writes that the British just have a different concept of personal privacy.

When she takes her own daughter to the playground, the British parents will strike up conversations and might ask about each other’s children’s names.

But they don’t introduce themselves, not the first time they meet and maybe not the second.

And Grant, what’s really interesting is that now there’s some new data confirming these kinds of differences in small talk and conversational openers.

A linguist recently surveyed teenagers in England, Ireland, and the U.S. about how they start conversations at parties.

And it’s really interesting.

Sure enough, most English teens say they’d start with just hi or something like that, a greeting.

The American teenagers prefer greeting and identifying themselves and sometimes asking the other person’s name.

And the Irish teens take a different tack altogether.

They’ll refer to the context somehow and evaluate it, which usually amounts to something like great party, isn’t it?

But it’s really interesting to me that there are all these different ways.

We get so used to conversational openers in this country.

But say in Finland, if you talk about the weather, you know, nice weather we’re having, which is perfectly legitimate here.

People look at you like, well.

I can see it.

Yeah, duh.

Thank you, Captain Obvious.

That’s interesting.

Very interesting stuff.

We’ll link to the study on the website.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi.

Who’s this?

This is Robin Ligon Williams calling from New Orleans, Louisiana.

Welcome, Robin.

Hi, Robin.

How are you doing?

I’m doing pretty good.

How are you guys doing today?

All right.

How can we help you?

Well, I had called because I had an interesting expression that I wanted to share with you guys.

The expression is one that I’ve heard ever since I’ve lived in New Orleans.

It’s called gone pecan.

Gone pecan.

What’s it mean?

Well, it’s used in a lot of different ways.

Gone pecan could be a person.

For instance, if somebody partied too much at Mardi Gras and they didn’t really have control of themselves anymore, because you know that happens quite a lot down here.

No.

You wouldn’t know, but yeah.

If they’re really out there, if they’ve really gone overboard, we say that’s a gone pecan.

Oh, really?

And you’re from New Orleans originally?

No.

I am not.

I am from New York City originally, but I moved to New Orleans in my early 20s, and I lived here for almost 12 years. And I moved to Indianapolis, and then I moved back to New Orleans.

Okay.

Very good.

I’ve spent probably half my life in New Orleans at various times. And so you haven’t probably heard that term anywhere else.

I’ve never heard it anywhere else.

So it refers to the person, like Robin’s gone pecan. It means that she overindulged or something?

She’s kind of, it’s either she’s really down on her luck, she’s, you know, nothing’s going well for you, or you’re just kind of, you’re really, you know, you’re not really in control of yourself anymore. You know, you’ve really overdone it.

I’ve heard it in a lot of different contexts, actually.

Great, do you know this one? And then also in relationship to something, you know, like if some, you know, if a car gets demolished, for example, it’s a gone pecan. You know, it’s kind of beyond hell. It’s a goner.

It’s a goner.

It’s a gone pecan.

I asked you about your history and whether or not you were from there because I’m pretty sure you’ve never heard it from anyone else who wasn’t from Louisiana.

Unless they also picked it up from somebody from Louisiana.

Yeah, I believe it’s a co-op real expression.

Yeah.

The earliest use I found was in 1990. I’m pretty sure it’s older than that. But I seem to remember, tell me if you remember this, Robin, a song by the country singer Jerry Reed that includes it. And it might have been part of his, I don’t know, his patter that he did when he was imitating trucker lingo. I’m not 100% sure.

Does that ring any bells?

I’m not familiar with the Jerry Reed tune, but I’ve heard it in songs from time to time. But I mean, I think it comes kind of somewhere from like maybe Lafayette, Louisiana, and sort of the Cajun area, Abbeville, those areas. I think it really comes from there.

But the first time I heard it was from an Irish-Italian person, who we call that a Yat. That is another nickname for Irish-Italian immigrants or people who come from that background. I heard a yat say gone pecan.

Well, it is indeed a very distinctive local expression. One of the things that is important to note out, to note, is you can’t really say this expression unless you say pecan and not pecan. Gone pecan just doesn’t have the same ring as gone pecan.

It doesn’t work. It doesn’t work.

But I think the way that the yat say, they say gone pecan. It’s more of a gone pecan.

But Italian immigrants here have more of a Brooklyn accent, actually.

Yeah.

Yeah, that’s funny.

Yeah, go on pecan. It’s very odd.

All right, Robin. So does it have to do with the nuts or the rhyme or what?

Yeah, it’s the rhyme. You’re a goner. You’re gone. Gone is often used in English to mean depleted or destroyed or somehow ruined or at the end of your resources, right? And it’s a natural rhyme. There’s a lot of kind of these rhyming, slangy phrases in English. So gone pecan is just kind of a natural rhyme.

Okay.

Yep.

Cool.

Thanks, Robin. Much appreciated.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

My dictionary definition that I wrote was a person who was doomed, defeated, or beyond rescue, a goner.

I like that.

And is it like, so it’s like a dead duck or something? Just something that’s completely gone? Or can you say somebody is gone pecan?

It’s almost always the person.

Okay.

Yeah.

So a person is gone. Like one of the citations that recorded was a politician who was trying to stay in office and yet these very revealing phone recordings had come out that exposed them as a fraud and a grafter, right? And that person was headed out of office. They were a gone pecan.

A gone pecan.

Okay.

All right.

We’d love to talk about local and regional expressions. We’d love to hear yours, 877-929-9673 or words@waywordradio.org.

We have in the past talked about the variety of words for drunk.

Oh, yes.

I got another one to add to the list.

Another one.

All right? And it is high lonesome, as in he goes off on a high lonesome occasionally.

Oh, my goodness.

I love that.

How poetic.

Yeah, and it sounds like the country songs, right? The high lonesome whistle or the…

Crying into your beard.

Yeah, yeah.

I can just picture him. He’s got a broken heart. Your wife ran off. Your dog.

Yeah.

Oh, my gosh.

Share your language, the words that you like, the language that appeals to you, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi.

My name is Stephan Lombard. I’m calling from Portland, Oregon.

Hi, Stephan. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Stephan.

Thank you.

So I have a question for you.

Mm—

Words like Hollywood, Wall Street, Downing Street, place names. They’re place names first, but they also are used in reference to people or things that go on there. So when, you know, in the news they say, meanwhile, on Wall Street, they’re not talking about the street itself. They’re talking about the financial sector.

Right.

And so I know there’s a name for that kind of thing, but I don’t know what it is. And I’d also like to know if you guys have some other examples.

Well, Stephan, the word you want for that is metonymy.

Metonymy?

Yeah.

M-E-T-O-N-Y-M-Y.

Metonymy. And that’s from Greek words that literally mean change of name. The nim in there is like synonym and antonym. Metonymy. And that’s for words like the White House, for example. The White House said this or that. Well, it wasn’t the house itself, right? So or the Pentagon, for example, or maybe even the Oval Office.

Right. It’s something that substitutes for the actual thing. It substitutes for the larger whole.

Right. Right.

Instead of saying all the financial businesses in the United States have reported their numbers, you say Wall Street quarterly reports have just come in. We can blame Hollywood for this. Well, we’re not blaming the city. We’re blaming the movie industry.

Yeah. Or even it goes other directions as well. We can talk about on Main Street, they feel like this is a good move for the government.

Right. So Main Street stands in for your average American. Or in the U.K., you might say on High Street. The High Street has a different opinion than the pundits do.

Yes. Yes.

OK.

So those are all metonyms.

Yes.

Metonyms. Wonderful. Wonderful.

How will you go forth and use this, Stefan?

You know, I have no idea.

That’s what we like to hear.

Like most of the obscure word usage things, I can’t ever think of a practical use for them, but it’s nice to know.

That’s why we exist.

Thanks, Stefan.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye. Take care.

Bye.

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

We spoke on an earlier show about taxi driver slang and how among some taxi drivers the term bingo is a term you use if you can’t pick up a person hailing your cab, and so you call your dispatcher and you say, hey, I got a bingo at 4th and Walnut, and then they know to send somebody to go pick up that.

Yeah, yeah. Well, we heard from Daniel Humphreys, who wrote us from Cincinnati, to say that he drove a cab there for many years, and a term that he and his colleagues used was bunco. And Grant, you may know this one. This is when you arrive at an address and nobody comes out. And, you know, it’s been used in the slang of the underworld to mean a fraud or, you know, police slang, the bunco squad for fraud. And I’m wondering if there’s a connection there.

And I asked Daniel about this and he said, I don’t know if it’s used elsewhere. The closest most cab drivers come to attending a convention is to travel to a foreign city and ride in someone else’s cab. I like that. Let us know about language from your workplace, 877-929-9673, or email us words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Margaret.

Hi, Margaret. Where are you calling from?

San Diego.

Welcome to the show. How can we help you?

Well, I sent you an email about my experience trying to buy canned plums in the grocery store and found out, well, they disappeared from the shelf. And when I asked the grocery clerk where I could find them, I thought maybe they’d been moved.

She directed me. She said, well, I’m not sure about those, but we have these.

And she led me over to a package of dried plums.

And I said, well, no, that’s not what I’m looking for.

And then she said, well, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to tell you.

So then I started going to other grocery stores and calling around.

And it turned out that almost nobody knew what I meant when I said canned plums.

And they kept directing me to dried plums, which I thought was really interesting.

And they’ve just disappeared.

They’re not on the shelf.

But then I started thinking, everybody’s directing me to dried plums.

That’s the new term.

And I thought, well, okay, that’s marketing.

Instead of prunes, instead of calling them prunes, right?

Instead of prunes, right, because prunes have such a negative connotation, apparently,

Because they’re associated with old people.

And so I didn’t think anything more about it.

They just disappeared.

And then about three weeks ago, I was in another store, and I saw a package of freeze-dried grapes.

I was just stumped because I didn’t think that a common term like raisins was going to disappear

Or that marketers would even attempt to make that term disappear.

Well, are they different? Are freeze-dried grapes different from raisins? I don’t know.

They might be just a little bit different. They might actually preserve the color a little bit more.

They don’t turn brown.

At least that was the packaging.

And I hadn’t bought them, so I really don’t know.

Because the reason I ask is because my mother used a freeze-fruit cocktail for us.

That was our fancy dessert.

Oh, nice.

And, you know, when you freeze-fruit cocktail, the little grapes in there have a really cool consistency.

So maybe, I don’t know, maybe freeze-dried grapes are different from raisins.

Because they’re dried differently.

And the other ones are, what, sun-dried?

Yeah.

Yeah, probably.

Or heat-dried somehow.

Air-dried.

So it sounds like you’re a little befuddled by the fact that some of these names just seem to drop off the product.

Well, I’m not too confused because I know how marketers and brand names can cause language change.

But it was the fact that it happened to raisins, which I consider such a basic term that they couldn’t possibly disappear.

And then I sent a humorous email, I hope it was humorous, to some of my friends that said,

Well, how are we going to explain craisins?

Because that’s another thing that you can buy in stores now, which are dried cranberries,

Which one company has labeled craisins as a play on cranberry and raisin sort of smashed together,

Indicating that it’s a dried cranberry.

But if raisins disappears, then nobody’s going to know why this little dried cranberry is called a craisin.

Well, I don’t think they’re going to disappear.

I think the raisin people and the crazin people are up in arms because they have a difference of opinion about whose product is best.

The crazins, I think, have a lot of sugar added, and the raisin people are upset about that.

I follow these things.

Because the raisin people don’t add sugar?

No, they don’t add sugar.

Oh, they say that they don’t?

They say they don’t, yeah.

Interesting.

How dare you call something crazins?

Let me ask you a question.

Did you ever find the canned plums that you wanted?

No, they’ve disappeared about four years ago.

You can order them online.

And then I did ask at a store on Monday just in case maybe that was a temporary problem

And they’d been put back on the shelves.

But, no, they’re still gone.

So, Margaret, what were you going to do with those canned plums anyway?

Is that part of a recipe or you eat them out of the can or what?

No, I just ate them out of the can.

Growing up in the Midwest, you didn’t get that much fresh fruit, especially, of course, in the winter.

And it was just something from my childhood.

And I saw them on the shelves one day and I bought them.

And then I was buying, you know, a couple of cans a month.

And then they disappeared.

Oh, okay.

That’s okay.

Okay, so you were upset about not having your comfort food then.

I understand now.

Yes, exactly.

Well, Margaret, I hope we’ve helped.

Oh, you have very much.

Thank you.

Okay, take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

You too.

Bye-bye.

What have you noticed when you’re shopping?

Food names, product names?

We’d like to know.

877-929-9673

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Road trip. Judy Vickery wrote us. She is from San Diego, and she and her sister are on a road trip across the country,

And they got to Effingham, Illinois, and they wanted to know about that name.

So they wrote us an email, but they didn’t ask about the effing part of Effingham.

They wanted to know about the ham part.

They wanted to know, is ham short for hamlet?

And that’s a pretty good guess. It’s sort of related to the word for hamlet, which means, of course, a small village.

But this kind of ham in that kind of word probably comes from the ham that’s in Old English meaning home or homestead.

You see the same kind of ham in Birmingham and in Gotham, the word Gotham, which probably meant something like the homestead where the goats were.

And so there are a lot of those place names like that that are old and hard to trace.

But anyway, Effingham, Illinois, and Effingham County are named for Thomas Howard, who was the third Earl of Effingham in England, who in 1775 refused to take arms against the American colonies.

So Binghamton is a little redundant at the end.

Binghamton.

Yeah, Tun, Farm.

I think Tun is farm, is it not?

Oh, was it?

I’m not sure.

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

Things have come to a pretty path.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

For more A Way with Words, including hundreds of episodes, a blog, a newsletter, a dictionary, mobile apps, and conversations with other listeners, go to waywordradio.org.

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Just as we do, they believe in lifelong learning, better human communication,

And the value of a thing well said or well written.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

Support for A Way with Words comes from the Ken Blanchard Company.

Whose purpose is to make a leadership difference among executives, managers, and individuals in organizations everywhere.

More about Ken Blanchard’s leadership training programs at KenBlanchard.com slash leadership.

And from National University, where flexible online classes let you earn your degree or credential on your schedule.

More at nu.edu.

On May 16th, join Marth and me as we go to Dallas, Texas, to the Lakewood Theater for a live event.

In conjunction with Aberg Center, a literacy organization and KERA.

You can get tickets and more information at abergcenter.org.

That’s A-B-E-R-G, center dot O-R-G.