Good Egg, Bad Apple (episode #1664)

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 Grant, I want to voice an unpopular opinion.

Okay, I’m stealing myself.

Let her rip.

Okay.

My unpopular opinion is about emoji, those cartoon-like symbols of everything from smiley faces to clowns to sushi.

I don’t think we need any new ones.

Oh, wow.

We do have a lot, like 3,800 plus all the Unicode symbols, which aren’t emoji, but aren’t words either, are letters.

That’s right.

And we’re going to be learning about some more emoji in a few weeks because new emoji are released every few months by what’s called the Unicode Consortium.

That’s a nonprofit that sets the global standard for text and symbols across all digital platforms.

And this year’s additions so far have included a purple splatter, which I kind of like, and a face with bags under the eyes, which could come in handy.

I don’t know.

Maybe that’s a sign of the times.

But, you know, I will admit that I do find some emoji super handy for communicating meaning and nuance.

You know, I have a lot of laughing emojis in my texts and also hearts.

Do you have any go-tos that you’ve got?

Yeah, I think the heart ones, I think even before emoji was incredibly common, you know, the lesser than sign and the three.

That’s still one of the top symbols that people use that isn’t a word or a letter.

For me, I think it’s the little party horn with the confetti coming out.

Oh, really?

Yeah, for some reason that one’s just somebody sends you good news and you want to celebrate and so you send the little party horn back.

That sums it up really quickly, right?

Yeah, yeah. It’s just that you can hear a yay and a little toot and some sparklies falling down, and it’s just kind of nice.

It evokes the moment really well.

Yeah. Well, one of the new ones that’s rumored to be coming out is one that looks like Bigfoot, Sasquatch.

I mean, do we really need that?

Maybe that’s the one you use when you’re about to set off on a diet. It’s the before picture.

Well, we’d love to hear your opinions about emojis or any other aspect of language.

You can give us a call at 877-929-9673 or send your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there. This is Kim from Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Well, we’re glad to have you, Kim. What’s up?

Well, I have a question for you regarding a word that is actually Turkish, but it sounds a lot like an English word.

I know that English has adopted a lot of words from other languages.

And this one almost sounds like an approximation.

The Turkish word for red is Kırmızı.

And I taught ESL.

And when I was working with Turkish people, I heard this word and I thought, that sounds remarkably like the English word crimson.

And so I was wondering if crimson is the root word for the word crimson.

I know turquoise or turquoise is also related to Turkish.

It’s what the French considered the Turkish blue.

So I’m rambling here.

I’m sorry.

You’re almost on the money.

It’s not that English got it from Turkish.

It’s that they both got it from the same source.

Oh.

And you’re right.

They are related.

Crimson and Crimiza, is that how you say it?

Yes.

Are both from the same origin.

And it actually is an insect.

What?

Yeah.

There’s an insect whose Latin name is Kermes vermilio, K-E-R-M-E-S-V-E-R-M-I-L-I-O.

And English gets three words for red from that insect.

And it’s crimson, vermilion, and carmine.

All come from the same insect at different times.

Oh my goodness.

Yeah.

And throughout the Middle East and Europe, pretty much every language has a color that’s red or red-like, reddish, that comes from the same insect.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, there’s this insect that breathes on a certain kind of tree, a couple of different kinds of trees in the Mediterranean.

And they look like little red pills, almost like little red balls.

And they got a red dye from that through a complicated process.

And that red dye for a long time was what you used for red.

As far back as like old Persian in like 500 BC and maybe before that back to Sanskrit, we can find in old texts different words all referring to the same insect.

And a lot of times they look like Kramuza or Carmine.

And so it’s in Arabic and it’s in Spanish and French and German and Croatian and Greek and Hebrew.

All of them have words going back to this one insect.

Well, who knew? That’s amazing.

Grant knew.

There’s another. So what happened, though, this red apparently isn’t doesn’t is not very fast, as they say.

It doesn’t stay very well in fabric and it fades easily.

And so there’s another insect discovered in Mexico, which is cochineal.

And so that’s C-O-C-H-I-N-E-A-L.

It didn’t generate as many words, though, for red in a variety of languages like the Kermes Familia did.

Yes, they look like blood.

Yeah, exactly. It’s a brilliant red.

Well, that is fascinating to learn. Thank you so much.

I had no idea that that question was going to have so many tangents.

Well, it’s the kind of thing that you can take back to students and get them doubly interested in language.

Well, there we go.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Take care of yourself.

Thanks so much for the question.

Bye-bye.

You’re very welcome.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

Well, if a word is making you wonder about it, give us a call and we’ll talk about it.

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

You know, when it comes to punctuation, I have always loved the M-Dash.

I use it a whole lot.

And there’s a great description of exactly how people feel about M-Dashes.

Andy Zeisler, writing an essay about them in Salon, wrote, it’s the black licorice of dashes.

Those who like it, love it.

Those who don’t will loudly and repeatedly let you know.

Yeah, absolutely.

For me, it says Emily Dickinson.

And I love her poetry.

So I’m never going to talk bad about the M-Dash.

Yeah, I’m a fan.

877-929-9673 is this magical toll-free number in the United States and Canada.

And you can find all of our episodes on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Greg McDonald in Mena, Arkansas.

I had a flight instructor.

I’m a professional pilot and I have flight instructor back in the 80s to mid 90s in that range.

And he he had this saying that was just sort of odd at the time.

And we all kind of just grown to accept it, but we didn’t really know what it was.

And so what he would say is, it’s when you were doing something wrong and you would say, oh, I thought, you know, I thought I should have done this or I should have thought I should have done that.

He would say, well, you thought like Nellie.

And we never knew what that meant.

It was just this odd saying, but we all knew what it just meant.

We didn’t think correctly.

You didn’t think correctly.

You thought like Nellie, like the woman’s name, N-E-L-L-Y?

Yes, yes.

So it was just this odd thing.

And he said it all the time.

And so we kind of adopted, even in my own family, I’ve said it from time to time, and they all laugh, even though nobody really knows where it came from.

Oh, that’s so interesting.

Did you ever ask him about it? Like where he got it from or any clues to his background?

He’s passed away now.

And, you know, it was one of those, he was a no-nonsense guy.

And so he would be kind of too much intimidating to ask a question like that.

I see.

You just kind of were better off just assuming you knew what it meant and going on with life, you know?

Gotcha. I know those types. My dad was one of those types.

You thought like Nellie, so that meant you thought wrong, basically.

Correctly.

Yeah, yeah.

It was just like, oh, you knew you screwed up.

You should have just kept your mouth shut is what you should have done.

You know, it’s not that common.

It only pops up in a couple places in my reference materials, and then there’s a few people who use it online.

It really isn’t.

There are some variants.

You thought that peanut butter was jelly.

You thought the cat pooped jelly, but a different word for poop.

Oh, weird.

Okay.

And you thought that poop was jelly.

Again, a different word for poop.

But yeah, so it’s just a longer version.

You thought like Nellian thought poop was jelly is the longest form with a little bit of rhyme in there.

That is interesting.

So you think maybe he just modified that a little bit then, huh?

Yeah, it just clipped.

You’ll often find that old expressions get clipped and shortened to their versions like happy as a clam at high tide.

And we now just say happy as a clam.

Oh, okay.

Oh, that actually makes sense.

So that’s really awesome.

Yeah, but I find it back in the 1970s, but not much older than that.

So we don’t really know much about it.

The nice thing about this show, though, Greg, we have a big listenership across the United States and Canada and around the world.

And so maybe somebody else remembers this and has little bits of data they can throw our way.

We’ll see.

Yeah, and Greg, I’m wondering about his intonation.

Was it like a disgusted you thought like Nellie or like a joking you thought like Nellie?

He was such a pleasant person.

I mean, he was never, like, he had a hard external shell, and he always tried to, you know, bring that to the surface.

But, I mean, he was not mean or condescending at all.

You would just, you know, oh, I thought I should have put the flaps down at this point.

And he would just say, well, you thought like Nellie.

You know, it was just this offhandedly comment that he would say.

And you would get the point.

So, Greg, before we go, I take it you’re a pilot?

Yes.

And what do you fly? What’s your work?

Well, actually, so I fly in the corporate world at this time.

I’ve done just about everything there is up to this point.

Well, call us again sometime with your aviation jargon.

We’d love to hear some of that, too.

Yeah.

Okay. Man, I’m so glad that we got to talk.

All right. Take care of yourself.

Fly safe.

Flap those arms.

Bye, Greg.

Bye.

Bye.

If you thought you couldn’t get answers on A Way with Words, you thought like Nellie.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673.

You know, Grant, earlier we were talking about emoji, and for the longest time, I thought the word emoji had something to do with emotions.

I thought that was the origin of the term, but it’s not.

Yeah, it’s a wonderful linguistic coincidence, and I love it for that.

Yeah, emoji is actually a combination of the Japanese terms e for picture and moji, which means written character.

So together, emoji means something like pictogram. How cool is that?

Yeah, that’s very cool. And it’s not sourced from English like so many Japanese for modern culture are.

Right, right. Now here’s a question for you, though. How do you say the plural of emoji?

Oh, that’s in dispute. But I will stake my claim on the plural and the singular are the same.

Yes. Yes. Technically, that’s true because the plural of emoji in Japanese is the same word as generally happens in that language.

The singular and the plural are the same. And in English, the plural of emoji can be either emoji or emojis.

The first one, emoji, is a little more formal. But, you know, when I think about it, I think I use both.

Text or call 877-929-9673.

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 waltzing in with rings on his fingers and bells on his toes and a fluorescent scrunchie on each wrist, it’s our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hello, Martha.

Hello, Grant.

I’m selling rings and bells and fluorescent scrunchies, by the way, if anybody’s interested.

Great.

It’s the only way I could think of to transport them around.

But anyway, my side gig, of course, is doing quizzes for you guys.

And here’s one.

It’s about books.

And, you know, it seems like there’s very few original, really original works out there.

We see a lot of rehashing of stories.

And if we’re lucky, it’s a good sequel.

So I’m thinking of getting into writing sequels to classic books.

I figure all I have to do is change a tense here and there.

For example, if I took a classic Gabriel Garcia Marquez novel and retold it in the past tense about two romantic youths who at one time became enamored in Colombia during the turn of the last century, I could just call it Loved in the Time of Cholera.

There’s not much there, but, you know, it’s simple, but it’ll still make a million.

Got it?

Okay.

Yeah, I think.

We’re just going to change the tense of some words and book titles and hopefully make a million dollars.

All right.

Here we went.

I mean, here we go.

All right.

It’s a spooky Stephen King novel about a kid who at one time had psychic powers at a haunted hotel.

Psychic powers at a haunted hotel.

This would be The Shone.

The Shone is fine.

Yeah, very good.

I’ve taken The Shined.

The Shined.

Either one is very good.

Yes.

Though he actually did write a sequel to that.

So maybe I should move on to something else.

It’s the story of an Air Force bombardier during World War II who was trapped by a paradoxical loophole in military regulations.

Caught 22?

Caught 22, yes.

It all happened because most books happen in the past.

But yeah, these are our past books.

My sequel to Jonathan Swift’s story of a fantastical journey plainly states that the titular character is finished with roaming about.

Okay, Gulliver traveled.

Gulliver’s traveled.

Yes, Gulliver has traveled.

Yeah, Gulliver’s traveled.

Very good.

If Milan Kudera thought his four protagonists and their dog can’t take the etherealness during the Prague Spring, just wait till it’s all over.

The unbearable lightness of having been.

Very good.

I would have also taken the unbearable lightness of been.

Having been is good.

Here, this one’s a play.

In this one, the boy who never grows up is disappointed to find out the first play he was in was widely dismissed by the critics.

Peter Panned.

Peter Panned.

Don’t want to get on his wrong side, but they did.

Finally, in this book, I examine how author Elizabeth Gilbert is doing now that her travels to Italy, India, and Bali are finished.

Eight Prayed Loved.

Eight Prayed Loved.

A triple.

Yes, very good. I don’t know. I don’t know if I’ve got the skills to write these sequel books, but I’m going to try anyway. Thank you, guys. You did fantastic.

Thanks, John.

Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you next week. Take care.

You too. Bye-bye.

Call or text toll-free 877-929-9673. And if you’ve got a quiz or a puzzle or some stumper for us, the email address is words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Aaron. I’m calling from sunny Los Angeles, California.

Sunny Los Angeles, just up the road. How you doing, Aaron?

I’m calling with a burning question.

All right, set it loose. What is it?

Okay, so I was in London with my girlfriend visiting her family.

She’s English, and we’re on the tube, as they call it.

And they made an announcement, please alight from the front.

And I didn’t think anything of it.

And then I was sitting on my couch in Los Angeles.

I was reading a book and I read the word alight.

And I was like, oh, well, we don’t really use that word.

Where does it come from?

Why alight?

And then I kind of did some lazy Googling and couldn’t really come up with much.

So that’s why I called you guys.

What did you take it to mean when the announcement blared and said, please alight from the front?

Luckily, I had a translator with me sitting next to me.

So she was able to direct me to the front of the train so we can exit from there.

I also just took it from the context of exit from the front.

Gotcha. So alight meant exit.

Yeah.

Okay.

And you’d never heard that before?

Not in the U.S.

You know, I love public transit and I love using the bus system in L.A.

And they never say alight.

Yeah, alight almost sounds more formal or, you know, a higher register, doesn’t it?

Alight from the bus.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah.

Well, it’s a super interesting word because it goes back to Old English alighton, which means alight.

But originally, the idea was literally to lighten, to take off or take away.

Like if you lighten the load on a horse by getting down from it.

You’ve given me a wonderful opportunity.

Do you like puns?

I do.

Yeah, I do like puns.

Okay, Grant doesn’t.

I’m going to go to the bathroom now.

Be back in a minute.

Okay, perfect.

And then when you alight from the bathroom, we’ll have finished here.

Well, the word light can also mean to lift off of something, like light off or light down.

And so, you know, I’m a preacher’s kid.

And when I was an insufferable little girl, I used to go around telling this joke about when were cigarettes mentioned in the Bible?

And that’s Genesis.

I don’t know when.

I’m glad you asked.

Genesis 24, 64, which goes,

And Rebecca lifted up her eyes, and when she saw Isaac, she lighted off the camel.

Lighted off the camel.

She struck a match and lit the camel on fire?

I got to tell you, as an ex-smoker, this is, you know, especially someone who smoked camels.

I didn’t know they were biblical.

It’s right there in Genesis 24, 64.

Oh, that’s ridiculous.

Burned into my memory.

I might have to get back into it.

That’s the word just for the joke.

Flash your pack of ciggies and tell the joke.

Erin, I have not thought about that in decades, so thank you for reminding me, and I know Grant is grateful as well.

Grateful.

Appreciative of your call, at least.

It was interesting to me because, so a light meaning to lighten, so you’re basically lightening the train by leaving it?

Well, originally, and now, of course, the meaning has changed, but yeah.

It just, yeah, it’s so interesting.

It kind of clues me in when I’m reading a book where the author is from,

Obviously depending on some of the language that they’re using

And some of the ways that they spell the words,

Even though they change how they spell the words for, like,

U.S. Publications of things, but still, like, the use of a light.

I was reading Paranisi, the book Paranisi, by Susan Clark, I think her name is.

And wonderful book, really, really, you know, fun read. And then I read, that was the book that,

That got me thinking again about a light. Cause she used the word of light in it. And I was like,

Oh, she must be English. And then, and I, I like, then I looked through the whole book for like

Other clues that she was, and then she was turns out. There we go. Yeah. A little textual

Mystery solved by word choice. That’s very cool. Aaron, thank you so much for sharing with us. We

Really appreciate it. Call us again sometime. Great. Thank you so much. All right. Take care

Of yourself. Bye-bye. Thanks, Aaron. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Martha and I love to hear about your

Books and your reading and your encounters with other dialects and language. 877-929-9673

Is toll free for voice and text. And you can find all of our past episodes and other ways to reach

Us on our website at waywordradio.org.

In the pre-cell phone era of the late 1980s in Japan, electronic pagers were all the rage.

You know, you wore these devices on your belt or you kept them in your pocket and they buzzed or beeped when somebody called your phone number.

And then a little screen would show the number that the caller had punched in, hoping that you’d call back.

But high schoolers very cleverly learned to key in numbers that had meanings of their own.

For example, the numbers 999 meant thank you.

And the reason is because if you want to communicate the idea of three nines in Japanese,

You can say san-kyu.

San is three and kyu is nine.

So it’s a cross-lingual pun.

Oh, it’s because it sounds vaguely like thank you.

That’s very cool.

Yeah.

I think that’s something we should be using in English instead of T-Y, you know, just 999.

That’s not cool.

That’s very cool.

877-929-9673 is toll free for chat and text.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Grant and Martha.

This is Dan Ryan calling from South Bend, Indiana.

Hi, Dan.

Dan?

A college friend of mine was visiting me recently, and as we were reminiscing about different friends,

I found myself saying so-and-so was a really good egg.

You know, I know the meaning of the word has to do with a person who’s dependable and good nature and kind.

But I’m wondering, like, how that came to be.

After that, I have another question for you related to the good egg.

Okay, yeah, sure.

Good egg actually is a little newer than bad egg.

It started out talking about people who were untrustworthy.

So around the 1850s or so, there’s this thing that you can do with eggs.

You can candle them, which is you hold them up to a light source and look through them to see if the egg is good, you know.

And if an egg isn’t good, then you’ve got a bad egg.

And a bad egg, as we know, is sulfurous and stinks.

And there’s nothing quite as nasty as a rotten egg or a bad egg.

So it’s kind of straightforward from a time when this country was more agriculture focused, you know, and people were a little closer to the farms and the land than they are now.

And so good egg comes along later, probably first in the United Kingdom, perhaps at Oxford University in the early 1900s.

And people would in the college slang, they would talk about good eggs, meaning good guys, good, good fellows.

And then it shows up again and again in fiction.

And so the two expressions now exist side by side.

So you can have a good egg or a bad egg.

Oh, interesting, because when I think of the term, the opposite of a good egg, I think of a bad apple.

Oh, yeah.

And a bad apple to me is, you know, is a troublemaker.

Somebody who, you know, there’s that expression about a bad apple, you know, spoiling the bunch.

That’s right. Yeah, that’s the original use of bad apple.

This expression that not only is the person bad, but their bad behavior infects others and causes others to misbehave as well.

Unfortunately, in the modern era, people have taken to using bad apple alone, not the full expression, to just mean someone who is solitary in their badness and their misbehavior as a way of excusing them and say, well, it’s fine.

It’s just one bad apple.

But that wasn’t the original source of it.

Most European languages have some version of this expression.

One rotten apple spoils the barrel.

And it goes back to at least the 1300s in English.

And even appears in Latin, but it’s not always the same.

Other languages have slightly different versions.

Like in Spanish and the Iberian languages, they’ll say a bad goat leads the whole flock astray.

That’s a good one.

That is very interesting.

Yeah, well, Dan, thank you for those questions.

We really appreciate them.

You’re welcome.

While I have you, I just want to tell you that I really enjoy Martha’s puns, and I enjoy Grant’s groaning reaction.

I’m outvoted.

Keep up the puns, Martha.

Thank you, Dan.

You are definitely a good egg.

Well, sorry, both of you.

I appreciate the show so much.

Take good care.

I’m stuck with this bad apple of a co-host.

What am I going to do?

Take care of yourself, Dan.

But it’s infectious.

It’s contagious.

You could do worse.

Take care.

It could be worse.

You’re right, Dan. Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

If you, like Dan, are wondering about a word or phrase, this is the place to talk about it. 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how’s it going?

It’s going great. Who is this and where are you?

Oh, I’m Craig. I’m in southeastern Montana, as close as you can get and still be in here and not in Wyoming.

Gotcha. All right. Beautiful country, I bet.

It’s kind of semi-arid desert.

Okay. What’s on your mind, Craig?

Well, okay. You know, I’m retired, and my buddies and I, we sit around and drink beer and talk stupid things, right?

And one of the guys looked at me and said, I forget what topic we were covering, but he said, you know, it doesn’t matter. We’re old geezers anyway.

And I got to thinking later, geezer.

Okay, and then I listened to your program, and I thought, you know, I wonder what geezer is.

Geezer, G-E-E-Z-E-R, geezer.

And you’re a geezer.

You claim it?

Oh, yeah, I’m an old geezer.

You know, I’m retired.

I just sit around and read too many books and walk my dog and play in my flower and rock beds and, you know.

All right.

Sounds like the right kind of retirement to me.

Martha, what do we know about geezer?

I’m interested that you say that you’re an old geezer. That’s as opposed to a young geezer. You already went through that stage.

You’ve heard of it before, haven’t you?

Oh, of course. Of course.

And, Craig, if you happen to have the English dialect dictionary around, that one was from the very late 1800s. It defines geezer a little bit differently. It defines a geezer as a queer character, a strangely acting person.

What’s interesting, Craig, is that in the U.K. today, the term geezer is more often just kind of a term of derision that’s especially applied to men, just kind of meaning a weird or an odd guy or also just a chap or fellow. It’s different in the U.K. You don’t have to be necessarily advanced in years to be a geezer.

Oh, really?

Yeah.

And you’ll dig this as well. It appears to come from an older word that’s been around since the 15th century. And that word is geyser, G-U-I-S-E-R, which referred to a masquerader or a mummer. You know, these were the people who dress up in costumes with old clothes or sheepskins or sticking bundles of straw under their jackets and masks.

This sounds just like you, right? Masks or face paint.

I’ve not stuffed any straw under my jacket in years.

Not yet.

Oh, in years.

Okay. So geysers would go from house to house, making merry and entertaining folks by putting on little plays on holidays like Halloween. And sometimes that word geyser was spelled G-E-Y-S-E-R. And so geysers, whether you spell it that way or G-U-I-S-E-R, they were people who were literally in disguise.

And so these funny, odd characters, these geysers, the idea of them led to the word geyser. But again, as I said, it’s a little bit different in Britain. In the United States, we use it specifically to mean old fellows like you.

So here’s something to take back with you, Craig. In British slang, you can call someone a diamond geezer, like the precious stone. And a diamond geezer, that’s a compliment. So it sounds like you’re a diamond geezer.

Oh, well, thank you, sir.

So this is Old English language.

That’s modern, actually. In modern London, you could call somebody a diamond geezer and people would get it.

That one from the 1500s.

Yeah, well, the word has come a long way since geyser.

So correct. It sounds like you’re enjoying retirement. Keep it up. And maybe we’ll talk another time about whether you’re a coot and a fogey.

Hey, there. You know, this is kind of cool. This is kind of a bucket list. The last time I was on NPR only once before in my life. That was 30 years ago.

Wow. So this is kind of a bucket thing.

Yeah, back when we barely had computers, you know, and all the phones had these great big two-feet antennas that stuck out of them.

Oh, yeah.

All right. Well, take care of yourself, and thanks for calling. Be safe out there.

Yeah, behave. Thank you for helping me.

All right. Bye-bye.

Bye, Craig.

Adios.

877-929-9673.

There’s more A Way with Words on the way. Stay tuned.

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. In 2013, the Oxford English Dictionary added the word emoji. And two years after that, lexicographers at that dictionary chose for their own word of the year an actual emoji. It’s the one that’s officially known as face with tears of joy. And that’s the little round face that’s crying with laughter.

And this little symbol beat out other trendy terms at the time, including on fleek and Brexit and dark web. And the fact that the OED was acknowledging this symbol in that kind of way got people to thinking more about just how emojis function as a way of conveying meaning.

And as you know, linguist Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gahn have argued really convincingly that in text-based communication, emoji function a lot like gestures. And one other thing that I find really interesting about emoji is the way that these little units of meaning get repurposed to mean new things.

Like, for example, my stepson, who’s in Gen Z, uses the skull emoji to indicate that something’s extremely funny because people that age use the slang expression, I’m dead, to mean something’s really funny. Something really strikes them as amusing.

And there’s another emoji that he uses that looks like a blue trucker’s cap. And that’s now commonly used to indicate lying. And that’s a reference to the slang expression cap, which means lie or no cap, meaning no lie. So if somebody sends you something that you doubt, you can just send a blue cap back, meaning lie.

And one other thing, without giving away any spoilers, if you watch that riveting Netflix crime series, Adolescence, you know that the meanings of certain emoji are a key part of the plot. And as for the peach emoji, of course, I’ll just say that sometimes a peach is not a peach. I think that one’s well known. It’s a little naughty.

Yes. And if you want a really deep dive into this stuff, there’s a new book called Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of the Emoji. It’s by Keith Houston, who’s the author of another wonderful book about the history of punctuation called Shady Characters.

But one of the things that really struck me in this book is the fact that it’s really difficult to pinpoint exactly when emoji took off and who invented them. So those are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about since I’ve read this book. And I’m wondering, Grant, you’ve been digging into it. What struck you?

Well, I appreciate a lot of what you just said. I had so many different paths to take. One of the things that I love to talk about when you and I are on the road doing our live presentations is paralinguistic restitution, which is what emoji and emoticons do. They put back into the written language things that are really easy to do when we’re speaking aloud.

So paralinguistic means related to linguistics and restitution means restoring. So that’s what emoji are doing. They’re helping us bring the written language to the level that we’re capable of when we’re speaking face to face. And the other thing is that the skull emoji, I love not only the fact that it’s a new iteration on I’m dead, meaning I’m dead from laughter, but we have other slang about, you know, you’re killing me, we might say, if somebody’s making us laugh till our sides hurt.

And so there’s this whole slang path that now ends in this emoji. It’s kind of cool. Well, that book, again, if you want to check it out, is called Face with Tears of Joy, A Natural History of the Emoji. It’s by Keith Houston. Keith Houston. We’ll have that link on our website.

And you can call or text us toll free 1-877-929-9673 in the United States and Canada. And if you want other ways to reach us, no matter where you are in the world, you can go to our website at waywordradio.org.

Hey there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Vlad. I am from Tucson, Arizona, and I was calling about White Dog.

White Dog.

Tell us about White Dog.

White Dog, yes, the phrase, yeah, for unaged whiskey. What brings this to mind?

Well, I used to be kind of an amateur historian in alcohol production, and I actually made a small distillery here in Tucson. And I just always saw that phrase coming across a lot of the books that I read. And it just always interested me in why it was called White Dog.

What is White Dog in a distillery?

So it is unaged whiskey. So normally when you age whiskey, you put it in a barrel and it turns brown. And if you don’t do that, it’s the same color as vodka.

Gotcha. So before you put it through this years-long process to give it some flavor.

Yep. The color of what we normally think of as whiskey comes entirely from the wooden barrel. When it’s not aged in a cask or anything, it’s completely clear.

So white dog, W-H-I-T-E-D-O-G, probably is connected to some other words for either unaged alcohols or illegal alcohols or just stuff with a lot of punch. So white lightning and white mule, for example. And all of these have this notion that after, so the white describes the clarity. It’s not truly white. It’s clear.

Right.

Yeah. That was always clear to me.

I was always curious about the dog part.

Yeah.

The dog part.

So the dog or lightning or mule.

So white lightning or white mule or white dog.

It’s all about the comparison to the bite or the kick or the zap that you get from the super powerful alcohol.

But there you go.

The white dog just refers to about the bite of this clear alcohol.

Just the fact that, you know, you take a dram of that and you’re going to feel it.

Well, yeah, and I’m thinking about the expression, the hair of the dog that bit you, you know, the remedy that you take the next day if you’ve had too much alcohol.

They’re unrelated, though, so the white dog is not the source of it.

Yeah, right, they’re unrelated, but I’m just talking about the same idea of biting.

That’s one of the things that I was curious about is that if that was related to the hair of the dog that bit you.

So that’s interesting to learn they’re not actually related.

No, they’re not.

I think that goes back actually to antiquity.

Oh, wow.

But, Vlad, thank you so much.

Do you still have the distillery?

No, unfortunately, we did not survive COVID.

Oh, I’m sorry to hear that.

Well, it sounds like you’re still interested in the work.

Maybe one day you’ll pick it up again.

I’d hope to.

It’s a lot of fun.

All right.

Take care of yourself, and thanks for calling.

Thank you so much.

You guys have a great day.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Vlad.

Bye.

Grant and I love talking about language from the workplace or from hobbies or passions.

Call us to talk about it.

877-929-9673 or send your email to words@waywordradio.org.

My friend Claudio in Pisa, Italy, sent me a wonderful phrase that I’m going to start using.

La mamma delle semi è sempre incita.

The mother in something is always something?

Is always in the city?

The mother of fools is always pregnant.

Oh, yeah.

I love it.

Fantastic.

And our toll-free line is always open, 877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Becca in Dallas.

Hi, welcome to the show.

What’s on your mind?

So I was about, I think I was 17 or 19.

I can’t remember exactly when, but I was at a friend’s house.

We were watching one of those ghost hunting shows.

It was Ghost Adventures.

And we had the subtitles on because her parents were in another room watching a show.

And the host of the show said the word macabre, which I know the word macabre.

I’ve always heard it.

I know what it means.

But when I saw the subtitles, I had to tell my friend real quick, pause it, pause it.

Wait a minute.

Because I realized in that moment, I had never seen the word macabre written out.

At least not with someone else to tell me that’s what that word was.

When I’d seen the written word macabre as a child, I thought it was pronounced macabre.

Macabre.

I didn’t have anyone to tell me that that was the wrong way to pronounce that.

So I grew up thinking that the written word macabre, or macabre as I thought it was, and the spoken word macabre were two different words.

We spent about 20 minutes, me freaking out because I was mind boggled, absolutely bewildered.

I was calling my mom, my dad, like, hey, how do you spell this word?

How do you pronounce this word?

And my best friend was just sitting there, how could you not know this?

So macabre, M-A-C-A-B-R-E.

Martha, I think that one catches a lot of people up.

Well, yeah, I was going to say, Becca, if it makes you feel any better, I made the same mistake for years.

And as Grant and I always say on this show, I mean, if you mispronounce a word because of your reading, more power to you.

You know, good for you for doing all this reading and your mouth getting ahead of your head, as Grant said.

So, yeah, let’s talk about this word macabre, which is how you pronounce it, right? Macabre?

And you can also pronounce it macabre in English.

And it’s a word that comes from French.

And how was it used in this film that you were watching?

Oh, like I said, it was like a ghost hunting show.

So they were talking, the host was saying, oh, how he’s always had an interest in the macabre.

Right, right.

So the creepy, sort of grisly, horrible kinds of things.

Yeah, it’s an interesting word that has a history that’s kind of tantalizing.

It may have to do with the Book of Maccabees, which is part of the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox canons of the Old Testament.

And that includes stories about the martyrdom of Jewish heroes, the Maccabees, for refusing to abandon their faith.

And the suffering that they endured was considered exemplary, and they died holy deaths.

And then in medieval France, this story was commemorated with a dance called the Danse Macabre, or Dance of Maccabee.

And there were grisly depictions of this dance in medieval art.

You may have seen them, like there’s a procession in which skeletons are leading everybody from kings to peasants, you know, off to their death.

It’s sort of the idea that, have you seen that before?

I think so, yeah.

You know, it’s sort of this reminder that we’re all going to end up the same way eventually, which is kind of a macabre thought, I guess.

Two things to toss in here.

One is, one of the difficulties of this word, Becca, is that it still hangs on to a little bit of its Frenchness, even though it’s been in English for a very long time.

So even people who know the word still, you know, understand how it spells, still sometimes have difficulty saying it.

Because that weird schwa sound at the end that some people say is not really common in English.

Genre is another word.

But the other thing is, I was looking in my pronunciation guides here.

In the mid-1960s, the NBC, you know, the Broadcasting Network Handbook of Pronunciation, listed the pronunciation as macabre, with an at the end.

Oh, wow.

But by the 1980s, that same manual in a new edition had changed it to macabre.

So even the word itself is not stable.

It’s the common pronunciation is growing more French as people try to sound a little more elite or they’re just more aware of its Frenchness, whereas perhaps in the past they weren’t.

Okay.

I’m glad to know I got maybe a little bit of the pronunciation right.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah, macabre is pretty far, but you got the consonants.

But Becca, those sight words and book words, yeah, like Martha said, if you’ve got a big catalog of them, more power to you.

It means you learned them from reading and nobody’s going to put that down.

Yeah, you got a big vocabulary.

I am proud of that.

Yes.

All right.

Take care.

And thanks for calling and sharing your story.

Thank you so much.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye, Becca.

Martha and I would love to hear your language misunderstandings.

877-929-9673.

You can call or text toll free.

You can also email us words@waywordradio.org and go to our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

All right, who is this and where are you?

Calling from Berlin, Maryland, and my name is Nancy Corbett.

Hi, Nancy. Welcome to the program. What’s on your mind?

So I have a produce stand and I sell white sweet corn.

When people buy the corn, sometimes they buy a dozen or they buy half a dozen, but they can also buy it by the ear.

So when they come up to pay, if they put them in a bag, I’ll just say, how many corn do you have?

Or I’ll say, how many ears do you have today?

And, you know, sometimes they say six ears or sometimes they say a dozen.

But sometimes people say they have four corns, plural, and other people say they have four corn, or they say four ears, but they never say four ear.

So it’s always confused me.

When they put an S on the corn, to me it sounds strange.

So I thought I would ask you all because I’m sure you could get to the bottom of it.

Martha, if you walked up to Nancy at her produce stand and you had an armful of corn, what would you say when she asked you how many you had?

You know, I never really thought about this.

I guess I would say four corns.

I think I would, actually.

You’d say the plural.

Yeah, I would.

But that’s just a reflex.

That’s so interesting.

I don’t know, Grant, is that your reflex as well?

Well, I’m looking at it as a linguist and thinking about it from that perspective.

And now that, you know, it’s one of those things where if you ask about it, then you can’t unconsciously do a thing.

Yeah, yeah, that’s true.

I mean, corn is usually a mass noun.

Right, like sheep or milk.

We don’t say I have, typically.

But you can pluralize these things, Nancy.

And that’s the thing.

English allows it to be plural even though it’s a mass noun.

And we do that for clarity and also just to be a bit briefer, not to have to say all the way, I have three ears of corn.

I would say I have three corns.

And you understand what they’re saying.

They know what they meant.

And clarity has been transmitted from person A to person B.

Right.

Okay.

So there really isn’t a rule.

Well, there’s a rule in formal language, but these kinds of casual encounters are a little looser, and English permits it.

We do the same thing at a diner.

If you went to a diner, bacon and coffee are both mass nouns.

But you’ll tell the waiter, we’ll take two coffees.

Right.

And what you mean is two cups of coffee.

You’ve just alighted or left out the cup.

You know what? I think that there are going to be a lot of listeners who want to weigh in on this one way or another.

Really? Okay.

Yeah. And maybe stop by your stand as well.

Yes. Would love that. I can sell them four-ear or four-ears.

Look for Nancy’s Produce Stand in Maryland, everyone.

Does it have a name?

Yes. This is called Bluebird Farms, and we’re also a plant nursery.

Oh, nice.

Nice.

Okay, we’ll pop by next time we’re there.

Nancy, thank you for this thorny topic, this corny topic.

All right. Thank you so much.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

A Way with Words senior producer is Stefanie Levine.

Tim Felten is our engineer and editor.

And John Chaneski is our quiz master.

Go to waywordradio.org for all of our past episodes, podcast links, and ways to reach us.

If you have a language, thought, or question, the toll-free line is always open in the U.S. and Canada.

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A Way with Words is an independent nonprofit production of Wayword, Inc.

It’s supported by listeners and organizations who are changing the way the world talks about language.

Although we’re not a part of NPR, we thank NPR stations throughout the United States that carry the show.

And special thanks to our nonprofit’s volunteer board.

Michael Breslauer, Josh Eckels, Clare Grotting, Merrill Perlman, Bruce Rogow, Rick Seidenwurm, and Betty Willis.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

So long.

Bye.