Gracious Plenty (episode #1364)

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, we’ve talked about the word binky.

What’s your understanding of that word?

That’s a pacifier for a baby.

Yep, yep.

But recently I learned a completely different meaning of the word.

And the person who enlightened me is Bruce Atchison.

And he’s from Alberta, Canada.

And he belongs to several pet rabbit groups.

Pet rabbit groups.

Yeah, yeah.

You know where I’m going with this?

No.

It’s great.

He emailed us to say that among rabbit fanciers,

A binky is when a bunny leaps up in the air and does a 180.

Isn’t that great?

I’ve seen cats do that.

Yes, yes.

And it turns out there are a zillion videos on YouTube of rabbits binky-ing.

And he says it’s also an exclamation of ecstatic joy of living.

Rabbits, like other animals, get into frisky moods when they let off steam.

A binky is part of their happy frolicking.

So they leap from a standing position and do a 180 and flop back down onto the ground.

Shake their little bunny tails.

Yeah, yeah.

I mean, you sort of see that with kitties, too.

They do that, and then they do Frank and Kitty, you know, where their paws are way up over their heads.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Yeah, and I’ve also known some office workers to do sort of the same thing, you know, around 5 o’clock, almost quitting time.

They start running around the office, you know, going to the Xerox machine.

So binky is just an excuse to talk about cute bunnies.

Well, it’s a new word on me.

It actually was an excuse to go and look at a lot of videos online.

We will link to them.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Well, hello, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey there, what’s up, buddy?

Well, hello, who’s this?

This is Kurt in Grand Rapids.

Hiya, Kurt.

I have kind of a linguistic etiquette question for you.

Okay.

I work in an office, and my coworker was just getting over a cold,

And I was talking to her, and she started coughing.

She had like a little bit of a coughing spell.

And when she got done, I realized we don’t really have a good word in English to say after someone’s done coughing.

When they sneeze, you can say bless you or gesundheit.

But coughing, you just kind of have this awkward silence, and then you kind of continue the conversation.

It’s true, come to think of it.

Can you help me out?

Is there something we could say?

Have you tried anything?

No.

I mean, I took a little bit of German in high school, so I know that gesundheit basically means, you know, you’re wishing them good health.

Yeah, it’s cognate with soundness.

Yeah, but throwing out a gesundheit after a cough, I think, just confuses people.

It does.

I guess it depends on if you want to start a conversation with this person.

Well, that’s true, I guess.

I could teach them a little bit about what gesundheit means.

Yeah, yeah.

Short of that, do you have any suggestions?

I think that it’s all the responsibility of the coffer.

I don’t think it’s like a sneeze where the onlooker is obligated to say anything.

I think the coffer needs to say, excuse me, or pardon me, or I’m going to step away, or send me the doctor bill, whatever.

Okay.

So the onus is really on the coffer.

In my opinion.

Okay.

Although there was a discussion about this on Paul Davidson’s blog a few years ago,

And one of the comments I really love, this woman named Kathleen says,

I bless anything that looks like it hurt.

Aww.

So if it’s one of those deep bone-breaking coughs, she says bless you.

It’s your throat boo-boo.

Either that or I was considering, you know, you remember the show Seinfeld?

Yeah.

Sure.

There was a thing that Jerry was trying to get started where, especially if it was a good-looking woman, if she sneezed, he would say, you are so good-looking.

Maybe we could try that.

I like that.

Well, you know, actually, in German, as a joke, you can say Schoenheit after somebody sneezes, and that means beauty, basically, you know, fine-ness, beauty.

And the idea is, yeah, I hope you look better than you look right now.

So that’s kind of different, isn’t it?

Yeah, a little bit.

I’ll give that one a spin.

Yeah, let us know how that goes, Kirk.

We can talk a little bit about what Shanghai means.

Yeah, let us know how that goes, all right?

I sure will.

Okay, thanks a lot.

Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Thank you, bye-bye.

If there’s something that you say after people cough,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, how are you?

Doing well. Who is this?

This is Sarah calling from Fairfield, Connecticut.

Hiya, Sarah. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Sarah. How are you doing?

Good. How are you guys?

Okay. What can we help you with?

I was calling because I have a lot of family who lives overseas in Lebanon,

And they all speak English, and I visit them often.

And recently, my aunt and my cousin came to visit me here in the States.

And I find that when I speak to them, I tend to speak in their Arab American accent, and I even use their grammar, even though I know it’s improper.

And I don’t think about it.

I unconsciously do it, and I can’t even speak in that accent when I’m not with them.

So I’m wondering why that is.

Interesting.

What does the grammar sound like?

You know, maybe words here and there will be left out, or part of speeches will be left out.

And I’ll tend to speak like them so they can, I feel so they can understand me more, but I don’t think about it.

I’m always wondering why it is I do that.

I even do it with my friends from New York or who live in the South.

I don’t know why.

Oh, that’s a great question.

Do you find yourself being judged for that or do you judge yourself harshly because you do that?

I don’t often judge myself.

I feel, when I speak to my friends from the South or New York, I kind of feel rude because I think that I’ll pick up their words and not intentionally do it.

But when I speak to my family, I never really judge myself or am worried about it.

You’re just sort of a linguistic chameleon.

Right. And my brother does it, too.

Oh, really?

And my mother does it. Yeah, we all do it.

Everyone. You’re right. By all, that means all humans do it to a greater or lesser degree.

It’s part of what gives us group cohesion.

We pick up the language of the people around us as a way of becoming a part of that group,

Demonstrating to others that we belong, and making ourselves feel more comfortable in that group.

It is a natural, normal, human thing to pick up the accents of the people around you,

Particularly family, particularly if there’s a strong emotional connection there.

I asked you whether or not you were being judged,

Because sometimes people who don’t understand that that’s normal

Think that those who pick up accents easily are fakers or posers or are pretending to be something

That they’re not. And there may be cases of that, but by and large, people who do this,

It’s unconscious. They’re not even thinking about it. They’re just doing what is the natural

Human thing to do, which is to speak like the people around you. It’s normal.

That’s great to know. And I think that emotional connection makes a lot of sense since it’s my

Family and I really do speak like them a lot. That’s great.

Yeah. I mean, when I go back to Kentucky, my accent gets more

And more and more Southern every time. Or if I’m tired

Or angry or… Feeling romantic is the other one. I was going to say you inebriated

Bit now. Tired, angry, drunk, or feeling romantic. Those are the conditions under which

Your authentic accent comes out.

So go forward, Sarah. Do this with

Just feel full comfort

And that it’s a fine thing to do.

Yeah, it’s interesting, isn’t it?

It’s going to make your family

Actually feel more comfortable.

The human response to somebody

Who sounds like us

Is to like them more.

And so that’s part of the reason

That we do this.

We forget sometimes

That we are animals

And we do have these natural things

About us that aren’t intellectual

That we do as animals

To make us a part of a pack.

And that’s one of them.

Oh, wow.

Yeah.

Well, thanks for letting me know.

I really appreciate that.

Yeah, sure.

Thanks for calling.

Thanks for listening.

Of course.

Have a great day, guys.

Take care, Sarah.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

What have you noticed about language?

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

Grant, do you know what a purple squirrel is?

No.

I just learned this term from Jeff Lutley.

He’s one of our listeners in New York City, and he does headhunting, you know, recruiting.

And he says that he’s finding more and more in his business that people are using the term purple squirrel

To refer to a person who’s an unlikely job candidate with exactly the right education, experience, qualifications,

Everything that just fits perfectly.

A purple squirrel is sort of like, you know, a rare bird, a black swan.

Although I like purple squirrel.

Workplace language, it’s colorful, 877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, good afternoon.

Hi, who’s this?

My name’s Ruth, and I’m calling from Philadelphia.

Well, thanks a lot for calling, Ruth.

How can we help you?

Thank you.

I have a question about a greeting that I was using until recently

When my daughter begged me to stop using the word.

Oh, hello.

Or phrase or contraction.

It’s Haya.

I’m from upstate PA, which I call upstate, in a rural area about five miles outside of Quakertown.

Mm—

And I now live in Philadelphia, but I’m just wondering, A, is it a word?

And B, am I correct?

All I could find is it means, hi, how are you?

Mm—

And how are you spelling it, Ruth?

Well, it’s just phonetically, H-I-Y-A.

Yeah.

Okay.

Okay.

How old is your daughter?

22?

Mm—

And what did she say exactly?

Mom, no one understands you.

What in the world are you saying?

You sound wacky and you need to stop.

About the word higher?

And do you have that kind of relationship where she’s allowed to talk like that to her mother?

Absolutely.

When it comes to diction, yes.

Okay.

Okay.

You know, you might want to push back a little bit because Martha and I think you’re fine.

Oh, good.

And there are lots and lots of people who say this.

It goes back about 100 years, maybe more, across the United States.

It’s never been that common.

But it’s like howdy and a variety of other kinds of greetings that we have

That are a corruption of a longer phrase or form.

And it’s a perfectly fine way to greet someone.

I mean, I don’t think you would go to Buckingham Palace and say,

Hiya, Queenie.

Right.

Eat curtsy first.

Yes.

And then say, Hiya, Queenie.

So is it a, since my family’s from Brooklyn, does it have any connection to New York, or is it just a backwoods kind of thing?

No, I’m looking, there’s evidence for this both in the Dictionary of American Regional English and in the Oxford English Dictionary,

And they have citations going back to 1914, and they’re fairly sprinkled around the United States.

I don’t see any kind of geographic component to this.

Interesting.

And it’s British and American, by the way. It’s not just American.

Yeah.

All right, so I guess I’ll duke it out with my daughter.

Well, it isn’t quite a duke, but the one thing I would gently say to her is that she’s 22.

You’re an unknown number of years older.

You’ve seen more of the world and had more opportunities to pick up language.

And perhaps there are some things in the world that she hasn’t heard before because she’s not experienced enough.

There you go.

I mean, inexperience is part of it.

Right, right.

Okay, well, I’m happy to know because it’s been bugging me for a while.

Yeah, yeah.

Tell her she needs to get out more.

I will.

Or read the dictionary more.

Thank you, thank you.

You’re welcome.

And listen to our show.

Thanks for calling, Ruth.

Thank you.

Thanks, Ruth.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Who doesn’t say hi-ya?

Well, you know, that’s part of the language thing, though, right?

The push back and forth between each other as we try to guide each other toward language paths that we prefer, right?

Yeah.

That happens in families.

Yeah.

It’s a normal kind of dialogue.

But the daughter here, she might have been embarrassed by her mother.

Maybe we should have asked Ruth, do you say just hi-ya or do you go hi-ya?

I mean, how is this happening?

Hello.

877-929-9673.

Bring us your family disputes.

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

And I’m Grant Barrett, and we’re joined by John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hello, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha.

Hi, John.

I’m back.

What’s up, buddy? What’d you bring me?

Well, I brought you a little something.

I think I brought you a little puzzle that you’ll like.

You know, I’ve been working at the Museum of Mathematics lately,

And I don’t spend as much time with my kids.

But fear not, for I have soaked for so long in childish riddles

That all my riddles are childish.

Okay.

For example, what sort of wild party would a sheep throw?

A ball.

A ball or an even wilder party.

A bacchanalia.

A bacchanal.

Right, a bacchanal.

Right.

We’re off to a rolling start because all of the answers to the following riddles will begin with the sound made by an animal.

Oh, the sound.

Ready?

What’s a cow’s favorite movie starring Cher?

Moon.

No.

Moon.

Moonstruck.

Moonstruck is correct.

I was trying to do it like a sheep.

That’s wrong.

We’re cloning in here.

This is going to be a wild ride.

Here we go.

What would you call a big building dedicated to the history of kittens?

Museum.

A museum is right.

What kind of informal performance by folk singers do barn owls prefer?

Hootenanny.

Hootenanny is right.

The nanny.

Good.

What do you call it when a crow inspires an incident that attracts great public attention?

Not all of these are too easy.

A cause for…

Cause for alarm.

Cause for alarm.

Well, alarm might be wrong, but…

Raucous.

No, I don’t know.

What’s the clue again?

A crow inspires an incident that attracts great public attention.

That’s caw, right?

Caw.

It is caw.

And the word cause is correct.

Akaz Celeb.

That’s it.

Akaz Celeb.

Very good.

Akaz Celeb.

Akaz Celeb.

What about this?

What kind of five-masted ship do golden retrievers sail on?

That’s an amazing clue.

Yeah.

Well, a bark.

Isn’t Nicene barks of yore?

Bark.

Bark.

What kind of ship do you know that begins with the word, the sound bark?

Bark.

Do you know this?

Oh, well, yeah, there is that.

But I’m thinking of a five-mast.

I don’t think the barks are fire mast.

I think it’s four to six mast.

It’s called a bark-entine.

Or a bark-entine.

New word to me.

I did not know that one.

There you go.

Bark-entine, yeah.

What large East Asian country is a popular destination for baby chicks?

That’s cheap.

I know.

No, it’s not cheap.

No, it’s not?

Yeah.

What do baby chicks say?

They peep, but.

People’s Republic of China.

The People’s Republic of China is correct.

Oh, man.

Peeps.

Okay.

Getting a little scientific on you now.

Here we go.

A little medicine for you.

Here you go.

A little medicinal here.

Oh, my gosh.

What compounds released during allergic reactions were discovered by a snake?

Antihistamines.

Histamines is right.

Oh, histamines, right.

What French ham and cheese sandwich is popular with toads?

Croque monsieur.

Croque monsieur is correct.

What kind of boring, difficult, yet unimportant tasks do we usually assign to hogs?

So hogs, oink or snort.

Or?

Or root.

Or?

Snuffle.

Snort?

Boring or repetitive tasks that we give to hogs.

Assigned to hogs.

Grunt work?

Grunt work is right.

Thank you.

Thank you, John.

I think it’s my perfect impersonation of a hog that brought that one around for you.

My spell is finally having an effect.

It was.

I think the barn doors have been unleashed.

There’s no way to get these horses back in.

I’ve made you guys too silly, but I’m just going to get out of here.

So take care, guys.

Is that it?

That’s it.

That’s it.

Come on.

Come on, Dr. Doolittle.

I’m going to share all these with my son.

Terrific. I hope you love it.

Thanks, John. That was a great one.

I know people were playing along at home.

Thanks, Grant.

Take care.

Thanks, Martha.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

We know you love the quiz, and we know you love language.

Give us a call, 877-929-9673.

Email us at words@waywordradio.org, and find us on Facebook and Twitter.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Anne.

Hi, Anne. Welcome to the program.

Hello, Anne. What can we help you with?

Where are you calling from?

Well, right now I’m calling from Warren, Vermont, but I live in Burlington, Vermont.

Okay.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a question that is partially a word question and partly, I’d say, a psychological question.

Okay.

I am curious about why it is that people often, when they are accepting some great honor or award, will often say that they’re humbled.

Because it seems to me that it’s the opposite, that actually they’re honored,

And that you’re humbled when you’ve worked for 30 years and you never got the award.

That’s humbling.

And I completely agree.

What is up with that?

It drives me crazy.

Wait, wait, wait, wait.

Let’s explore this.

You too.

What do they follow it with?

If they are saying, I’m humbled to receive this award when I’m surrounded by all these other people

Who made this happen, I’d like to thank Joe and Jane and Jill and John and all the other.

So there’s a kind of humbling where you’re surrounded by greatness and you’re admitting

That it wasn’t you, it was other people. That’s being truly humble.

I think when somebody says, oh, I’m so humbled by this, what it sounds like to me is, well,

You know, thank you for coming back down to my level. They say I’m humbled, you know.

But I mean, I think it’s calling attention to the award, whether they mean to or not.

It bugs me like it bugs you.

If they didn’t say that, you would say that they should say that they are honored?

Yes.

I think they should say, I’m honored, and I need to honor these other people who also made it possible.

Yes, yes.

But to say you’re humbled, I don’t get that.

It seems either, it kind of implies that, in fact, I’m really excited, I’m proud as can be, and I don’t want to admit it.

I agree completely.

I’m really proud.

But doesn’t it also seem like it’s sort of a recent thing in the last few years?

I don’t remember anyone ever saying that.

Oh, no, not at all.

It’s not decades long.

This complaint has been around for decades as well.

Oh, really?

And I have to say that I think that you two are being unfair, actually,

Because you have to take it on a case-by-case basis,

Because sometimes when people say they’re humbled,

They are genuinely brought down low,

And they find themselves leveled by the emotion of the greatness

And the effect of the people around them, and they’re not up there preening.

Here’s the thing is it’s part of the social glue that’s necessary to express your doubt that you’re worthy of the honor.

Okay. Well, I mean, that’s great if that’s what it means.

It always just seemed a little opposite to me, but I’ll accept that.

I’m not sure I will, Anne.

Okay. I’ll go with that, too.

And is the word you’re looking for disingenuous, maybe?

Perhaps.

Sometimes it feels disingenuous to me, or maybe it’s that, you know, the people who say it, I don’t think they deserve the honor or something.

It’s more gracious to accept the honor in the spirit that was given.

Thank you. You have A Way with Words. That’s exactly what I’m trying to say.

But honor kind of has its own problems. If you say, I’m honored, instead of I’m humbled, basically you’re saying…

I’m grateful.

Grateful. Grateful’s good.

There’s a lot of ways. It depends on the award. It depends on the circumstances.

Right? Well, yeah.

I think I’m honored

And grateful. To make a blanket

Statement to say I’m humbled is wrong is not

Something that I could ever go along with. Well, I guess

I’m not saying it’s wrong.

I’m just saying it seems curious to me.

And it would be

Maybe more

Accurate to say I’m honored

And I’m deeply grateful and I need

To share this with all these other people

That made it possible. I think that’s

Very eloquent, Anne. But don’t they also say

That? I mean, the substance

Let’s throw it out to our listeners.

Let’s see what people think.

That sounds good to me.

Okay.

Well, we’re honored that you called, Ann.

Thanks for calling, Ann.

I’m humbled.

I’m humbled that you took my call.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Yeah, really.

All right.

Okay.

Bye.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Grant, say you have a sore tooth. What’s the best time to schedule your dentist appointment?

I don’t know. When?

2.30?

Tooth hurty? You get it?

Yeah, I was trying to think of something with K9 o’clock. I don’t know.

K9 o’clock? That’s good.

Call us with your language questions, 877-929-9673, or send them an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mike from Fort Worth, Texas.

Hi, Mike. Welcome to the program.

Hi, Mike.

Thank you.

What’s on your mind?

Well, recently I attended a family reunion, and I was sitting next to an elderly aunt,

And we were having the normal family potluck food everywhere,

And somebody came up to her and asked her if she would like more to eat.

And her response was, oh, I’ve had gracious plenty. Thank you.

And it was an expression I’d never heard before.

And I was curious if y’all had ever heard of this expression and where it may have come from.

Great question.

Gracious plenty.

I know that, Grant, that goes back to at least the mid-19th century, and it sort of has a whiff of that.

To the early 1800s at least.

Yeah, I’ve seen it in translations of Plato.

I’ve seen it in Zora Neale Hurston’s work.

And I don’t know that it’s particularly Southern, but it has that whiff of a time when people were more…

I don’t know, maybe I’m being overly nostalgic.

No, I think you’re right. You didn’t just say, no, I’m fine, thanks.

Yeah, or I’m full, or I’m stuffed.

Yeah, you were a little more elegant in your phrasing when you told people that you were satisfied,

And your belly was full, and your plate was empty, and that’s how you liked it.

Yeah, it sort of reminds me of that expression that we talked about that you hear more in Canada,

About my sufficiency is suficient.

Yeah, and there’s another one.

Elegant sufficiency is often a response as well, Mike.

It’s almost always at these big get-togethers, Thanksgiving, the church supper, preacher comes over for dinner, whatever.

There’s a conversation happening and person A says to person B, do you want some more fried chicken?

They’re like, no, no, I’ve had gracious plenty.

Thank you very much.

So it’s in this kind of ritualistic offering and refusal that we have.

All humans kind of have this, the ritualistic offering of more and the ritualistic refusing of more.

Well, it was something I’d never heard.

Similar to what you mentioned, most responses that I’ve heard are, I’m full, thank you, or even more southern, I’m full of the tick, things like that.

That one’s not particularly elegant, but very colorful.

You might hear that from your nephew rather than your elderly aunt, right?

Exactly.

So that’s why it struck me as being so much more genteel of a response than you normally hear.

Yes, that’s the word I was looking for.

Yeah, she must be a classy lady.

Yeah.

She is.

She very much is.

Yeah, and I wonder if it has a religious connotation, too.

You know, you think of the grace of God.

I’ve seen it come up in a variety of religious texts, you know, just not as like the main focus of the piece,

But as their particular wording to talk about the bounty that is given to us by God and so forth.

Interesting.

And that’s what I had asked one relative if they had heard it, and they used the religious connotation as well.

Okay.

Interesting.

Okay.

So sort of starting the meal off by saying grace and then saying gracious plenty at the end.

Exactly.

Oh, very good.

Well, that’s the most that we know.

We do know it goes back to the early 1800s.

It’s fairly common, maybe a tad bit more Southern.

I do know that it occurs in the UK as well.

So there’s probably some history there, but it’s not that common.

And it’s a phrase that…

It’s lovely there, right?

It’s a good one.

Gracious plenty.

I’ve had gracious plenty.

Yeah.

I mean, I don’t know if I’d say that after a Happy Meal, but after Thanksgiving dinner, yeah.

Yeah, sure.

Particularly when you consider the time and trouble that’s gone into it, right.

Yeah, exactly.

Certainly.

Well, that’s interesting.

I appreciate the history on that.

Sure.

Are you going to adopt the phrase now?

Oh, certainly.

Certainly.

I think it can make me sound much better than the tick reference.

You sound pretty good, Mike.

Thanks for calling, Mike.

Thanks for calling.

Thank you.

Take care.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

And we are all over social media.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Oh, good morning.

This is Marcella.

Hi, Marcella.

How are you doing?

Hi, Marcella.

I’m doing well.

I’m doing well.

Thank you.

What can we help you with?

Well, I am very curious about an expression.

I’m Mexican, and I was born in Mexico City.

And I was watching a movie set in occupied France, and it’s Inglourious Bastards with Brad Pitt.

I heard the expression Mexican standoff, and I said, why are they talking about Mexicans during that time and in that situation?

And it was a scene where Brad Pitt, who is Lieutenant Aldo, the American Lieutenant Aldo, is negotiating with a young sergeant that is German.

And the sergeant is on a basement, in a bar in the basement.

And he’s saying, okay, I’ll make a deal with you.

I’ll come down with no guns and you give me the girl.

And so he’s coming down the stairs, but he sees the German aiming at him.

And he says, what do you mean?

This is not the deal.

This is a Mexican standoff.

So the German says, no, it’s not a Mexican standoff because you need three people for that.

And he says, well, if you fire at me, then my people are up there with a grenade and then they’ll fire at you.

So I got very curious and I looked it up.

But most of the discussions online were about the logistics of a Mexican standoff.

I did find a few because I wanted to know why the adjective Mexican.

Yeah, why Mexican standoff.

Yeah, my question is what do Mexicans call that?

Well, see, here’s the thing.

I went back and I realized that you have options for languages on the rented movies.

So I put it in Spanish.

Oh, excellent.

What did it say?

And what it said was…

Punto muerto?

No, duelo.

Duelo.

Just a duel?

Duel, -huh.

Nothing is conclusive.

But these are some of the things that I read.

Marcella, I think we can help you with this.

Oh, okay, great.

I think we can short-circuit some of this.

Oh, great.

One of the things that’s funny about that scene in the movie is that what Mexican standoff means actually is in dispute in English.

There are a lot of different meanings.

Some people think a Mexican standoff is where you manage to get away alive.

Some people think a Mexican standoff is when you have a gun in your face and there’s no way out of it, whether you’re armed or not.

Some people think it’s just when there are three people having a stare down, each one holding the gun, pointing at another person, and each person having a gun pointed at them.

So there’s lots of different definitions here.

But the Mexican in the phrase, that’s where we run into some interesting kind of like cross-cultural conflicts.

Because there are a number of phrases in American English that include the word Mexican that suggests something other than the best possible situation.

Yeah, there’s a derogatory term.

Yes, exactly.

And in this case, what is usually meant by Mexican standoff is that you, when faced with a difficulty, you ran.

That you just escaped.

You got away.

I think of it more as a stalemate, though.

Yeah.

Like they had it.

That’s the thing.

The canonical Mexican standoff, though, is the one where it suggests cowardice on the part of the person who gets away.

And then it’s become modified over time as we grow a little more sensitive to language just to mean stalemate or even just a plain old standoff without any kind of Mexican at all.

Right.

The earliest use of it that we know goes back to baseball and the idea of a pitcher getting out of a game without getting out of a doubleheader, having won one and lost the other.

Right.

Oh.

But, yeah, it carries a whiff of condescension and prejudice.

And you might have thought that it goes back to one particular event, like, I don’t know, the Alamo or something like that.

Yeah.

But I avoid using it.

I haven’t seen it listed in dictionaries as being derogatory or objectionable, but I still avoid using it for exactly the kinds of reasons that Grant was talking about.

Yeah, I would avoid using it as well.

So standoff and stalemate work just fine if all your meaning is that each person has a gun pointed at them and can’t get away without getting shot or can’t shoot without being shot first.

Mm—

Oh.

And I’m interested in the subtitling.

It sounds like you did a lot of legwork, Marcella.

That’s exactly what I would have done.

Yeah, well, I just get very curious about something, and I pursue it.

Marcella, thank you so much for calling.

No, thank you for having me.

I’ve always wanted to be on your show.

Take care.

I talk back to the radio when I hear you.

Thank you so much.

All right, thanks.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

More of your questions about language. 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.

A little knowledge can be a dangerous thing, especially if you’re talking about foreign languages.

Grant, I know you’ve had this experience where you’re tripped up by what linguists call false friends.

Right.

You think, for example, that you order tuna off a menu in a Spanish-speaking country.

That’s a mistake if you ask for tuna because tuna is either a prickly pear cactus fruit or a musical group of university students.

Yeah, and there’s the classic embarazada, you know, which means pregnant rather than embarrassed.

I’ve made that mistake myself, the embarrassed part.

But, you know, it occurs to me that we have some false friends in English as well.

You know, English words that look like they mean something when really they don’t.

And one of the ones that I’ve run across several times recently has been the word bombastic.

You know, people think that bombastic refers to language that’s thunderous or violent.

I mean, you know, you can hear the word bomb in the word bombastic.

But the truth is that it comes from an old word that means cotton padding, you know,

That you would pad something with.

And so if your writing is bombastic,

It’s sort of characterized by, you know, fluff.

Wordiness and lots of useless turns of phrase.

Yeah, airy, ostentatious kind of writing.

It goes all the way back to a Greek word for silkworm, actually.

And another one that tripped me up for a long time,

In fact, sometimes it still does, is innervate.

Ooh, what does that mean?

To take the nerves out of something?

Yes, very good.

Most people think it means to invigorate.

But the truth is that that’s exactly it.

It goes back to an old Latin word for sinew.

And so if you take the sinews out of somebody, you’ve sort of left them sort of muscle-less.

Well, I’m thinking of a whole bunch more of these.

Yeah.

Enormity is a big one.

People think it means very enormous, but it actually means horrible or terrible.

Yeah, yeah.

It has to do with being out of the norm, literally.

Although that word really seems to be going through a big change.

It may have already jumped the shark, right?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

And then noisome is another one, right?

Noisome, yes.

People think it means very noisy, but it doesn’t.

Right. It’s a relative of nausea. It’s just icky.

Yeah. English has got traps and pitfalls everywhere you go.

Call us. We’ll help you navigate until you get to the Minotaur.

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

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hello, Martha. This is Art from San Diego.

Hi, Art.

Hi, Art. What’s up?

Well, I’ve got kind of an odd entry point into my question for you.

I’ve been a student of Zen Buddhism for a long time, and the other day I came across the word alone.

And for some reason, I looked it up somewhat superficially in Wikipedia, and I saw that it derived from the word all one.

And I smacked my forehead and said, oh my gosh, one of the key observations of Zen is that people feeling that they are alone cause a lot of harm and suffering to themselves and others.

And one of the key breakthroughs or enlightenment states is to feel that you’re all one.

So I’m saying, oh my gosh, Martha and Grant have got to tell me how our culture has changed all one to almost its opposite, alone.

The original meaning of all one, though, wasn’t like the Zen Buddhist interpretation of all one, all being one.

What it was more like was all on one’s own.

So you were a single person.

It wasn’t about being part of a greater whole.

All right.

So my next association with that was, oh, my gosh, that’s like that word atonement,

Which has six or seven different meanings, but all of which have to do with making recompense and feeling guilty instead of being at one.

Would that be another kind of a cultural zapper?

Well, a tone does come from at one, just jamming those two words together.

Very interesting.

Yeah, there’s another path to take when we think about the connections that these words have,

And that is that the words lone, lonely, and lonesome actually come from alone.

And so when we think about all one turning into alone, then turning into lonely and lonesome and lone,

Then we actually have this strange etymological tree

Where all of these words that seem kind of like ordinary English,

We can pick out the moments when they appeared.

Yeah, I can see the continuity there.

There’s another interesting thing linguistically happening with all one.

Spelling was really ambiguous, shall we say,

Or very creative in the early days of English.

And so sometimes they would spell it as one word or two words with one L or two Ls.

And what happened was eventually they became jammed together in one word

With one L, and then people did what’s called misdivision.

They thought that maybe the word actually was a-loan, L-O-N-E,

And so that’s how we get the lone and lonesome and lonely now,

Because people misdivided.

They thought it was the article A with the word loan.

Fascinating.

Not even Samuel Johnson could halt that bar.

No.

The human imagination could it.

No, those kinds of misdivisions are less likely now that spelling is more standardized,

But they still happen occasionally.

You’ll see them definitely in the writing of children.

All right.

Well, thanks, Art.

Thanks for calling.

Really appreciate it.

Thanks for your answers.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Wendy from Ben Lomond, California.

Hi, Wendy.

Welcome.

Hey there.

What’s up?

So I wanted to talk to you guys about the expression, write on.

I realized lately I had this experience where I said, write on, in a situation, and the words

Kind of just flew out of my mouth, and then I had a kind of quiet horror.

I felt like I’d gone back in a time machine and I should be wearing a tie-dye t-shirt.

Right.

With beads and a peace symbol and all that?

Exactly.

And a fist upraised, you know.

Right.

On.

I went through this kind of linguistic journey where, first of all, I realized that I actually

Say right on fairly regularly in conversations.

And then I started noticing other people saying it.

Like, Martha, I heard you say it a couple of times on podcasts.

Oh, and I’m wearing a tie-dye shirt and beads.

And no headband here.

What are you smoking?

And I heard my Pilates teacher say it a couple of times.

And then I heard it on a sitcom, Up All Night.

And so I thought that perhaps I wasn’t a walking anachronism after all.

No, no.

So this is a situation where somebody’s doing something

And another person to encourage them says,

Right on.

Or it’s kind of agreement or just shows enthusiasm for what’s happening

Or what they’ve just done or said?

Yes, and I also realized that when I,

After I kind of got over my initial horror,

I realized that when I do,

When those words kind of fly out of my mouth,

That I’m usually in a very warm-hearted place,

That I actually have a lot of affection for those words.

So then I kind of put my research hat on

Just for a tiny moment,

And I looked at Merriam-Webster,

And I saw that it was a,

I thought that the term probably originated

In the late 60s,

But actually in the Merriam-Webster

It said 1925

Oh yeah it’s a little older than that still

At least back to 1911 it pops up in the Journal of American Folklore

Okay so I thought that you guys would probably have a lot of information

About these words that I love

But it’s definitely marked in American English

As either being African American

Or associated with the 60s and 70s

Or all three

Those two decades plus African Americans

Or a little bit of the kind of hippie movement

Right on, brother, or kind of the precursor to keep on trucking or keep on keeping on.

But it’s a…

Worst I would never say.

Worst I would never say.

Never?

There’s nothing wrong with right on it.

Maybe, again, a little dated or a little marked as being from another era.

But you’re right.

I hear it everywhere and see it often.

And I don’t think most of the uses are ironic or even self-conscious.

I think it’s just a thing to say, and so it comes out.

Yeah, I don’t know that I’m particularly warm-hearted when I say it.

Maybe.

We were going to talk about your cold, icy heart.

So, yeah.

Right on.

Keep on keeping on.

You’re just fine using that, all right?

All right.

Wonderful.

It’s good talking with you.

Okay.

Rock on.

Okay.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Rock on.

Rock on.

You say that.

Rock on.

I do.

Sure.

You’ve got to encourage people, right?

Rock on.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Remember when Kathy called us from someplace in the south and she wanted to talk about names for big mosquitoes?

Yes.

And remember one of them was gallon nipper and we were laughing about the idea that they nip you and take out a gallon?

Well, it turns out that Del Suggs wrote us from Tallahassee and he says that gallon nipper is actually a term for a really large mosquito.

That’s G-A-L-L-I-N-I-P-P-E-R.

They’re called gallinippers.

And so I looked this up and it turns out that there are all kinds of variations of gallinipper,

This name that goes back to the early 1700s,

Like gallinipper, gullinapper, gurnipper, ganipper, gabber-nabber, galleywhopper, and grannynipper.

Grannynipper.

Got to have an extra sharp beak for that.

That’s saurophora ciliata.

That’s the name of the insect.

So how big is this thing?

The size of a robin?

Boy, I saw some photographs online.

Almost.

Really?

Almost as big as a robin.

Not quite, but they’re bigger than mosquitoes.

They are narsty.

Well, send us your narsty language, 877-929-9673,

Or email words@waywordradio.org,

And find us all over social media.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Nelda.

Hi, welcome to the show.

Hi, Nelda.

Thank you.

Well, I have a question.

I have a sister who’s left-handed,

And I got to thinking about her being left-handed.

And I know they’re called Southpaws.

And I wondered why right-handed people are not called Northpaws.

The word Northpaw does exist, but it’s sort of a jokey opposition to Southpaw.

The word Southpaw has been around since, what, the mid-1800s,

And Northpaw came along a few decades later.

But you don’t really see it that much.

And I think that’s because right-handed people, righties, like you’re right-handed, right, Grant?

Yes.

Yeah.

We righties are the default.

Right.

So we usually don’t have special terms for the ordinary people.

We have special terms for the outliers and the exceptional ones.

Do we have an east paw and a west paw?

The strange four-handed person?

No.

Not that I know of.

No.

But we do have several terms for left-handers, right?

We have Southpaw in Australia.

It’s Molly Duker.

But usually you’ll find throughout language, and not just in English but other languages,

It’s the exceptional people or the exceptional traits that get this special linguistic treatment.

Yeah.

Either that or we just chase them out of the village.

Well, when I asked my sister this question, she said they’re not called Northpaw.

They’re called Wrongpaw.

Oh, I see.

So she’s a left-handed activist, is she?

I guess she is.

Except for righty and right-hander.

Yeah, I don’t know any of this.

I don’t know of a single term for right-handed people that’s kind of exciting or even slang fun.

Really, not at all.

Yeah.

And, you know, if you talk about dexterity or dexterous, that comes from the Latin for right.

I mean, it’s a positive term.

And the Latin word for left gave us the word sinister.

Right, the idea if you’re left-handed, there must be something weird or unusual about you.

I don’t think you were actually burned at the stake or anything.

No.

The eyebrows were raised.

I’ll have to tell her she’s sinister then.

Yeah, I think you should.

See what she says.

All right.

Thanks for calling, Nilda.

Bye-bye.

You know, we didn’t talk about the fact that the word southpaw got reinforced by baseball

Because of the idea that you would put batters facing east.

That’s the way they would arrange the diamonds so that they wouldn’t be looking into the afternoon sun when they were playing.

So if the pitcher is on the mound and the batter is facing east, then a left-handed pitcher would be a southpaw.

Right, and left-handed pitchers are harder to hit if you’re used to right-handed pitchers.

Exactly.

Oh, interesting.

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Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi there, this is Kit Hedley from Dallas, Texas.

How are you?

Hi, Kit.

We’re doing well.

How are you?

What’s up?

I had a little question about my wife, the art teacher.

Okay.

She’s got a little bit of a thorny relationship with the word.

It’s a word that I would pronounce crayon,

And as a kid I’d pronounce crayon as if it was spelled C-R-A-N.

But she’s got a way of pronouncing it that I’ve never heard before.

Okay.

What is it?

She always says, unless she puts a whole lot of effort and thought into it first,

It tends to spell out as crown, as in King Arthur.

Crown.

Crown.

So hand me the purple crown.

I want to color this picture.

Exactly.

Or essentially, like I said, she’s an elementary school art teacher, so it tends to come up a lot.

Yeah, I guess so.

And so you’re from, are you from Dallas?

Actually, she is from Houston, and I was originally raised in Portland, Oregon.

So we’ve got a few of those little differences, but this is one that I can’t take down as far as a southern thing or anything like that.

I’ve even asked her mother about it, and she’s got no idea where it came from.

Well, we have in American English four or five different pronunciations of the word C-R-A-Y-O-N.

We do, indeed.

Yeah, and it’s super interesting.

Crayon is the most common one.

It’s the one that you’ll find listed first in any good dictionary.

Yeah, as far as it’s spelled, I mean, that seems like it makes the most sense.

Yeah, you say that, but English is a tricky little one.

I was going to actually call it names, but English is misleading.

Don’t call English names.

But there are a lot of really crazy, not crazy, they’re perfectly fine, but they’re dialect pronunciations, and they conform to geographic boundaries and historical kind of pathways of getting people to a new place.

So some people say crann, some people say crayon, some people say crayon, and some people say crown.

Really?

Yeah.

This is a real thing.

It’s a real thing.

Yeah, it’s not just your wife.

That’s kind of what I wanted to hear because, I mean, she’s been a little bit, I don’t know if embarrassed is too strong a word for it, but she tends to, nowadays, she tends to go with colors instead of crayons.

She avoids the word completely.

She does.

Which I’m sad because I don’t want to lose it.

I think it’s cute.

It’s adorable.

Yeah.

It’s adorable.

Yeah.

And it’s not, it’s one of those things that’s really hard to get your mind.

If you don’t say it, it’s hard to get your mind around it.

If you say crayon and you hear somebody say crown, it just sounds plain wrong.

And you kind of are frustrated and flustered and just can’t get your mind to it for a minute.

But I love your approach, Kit, to think of it as durable first is a great first step to accepting it and going,

Okay, I need information.

Who else does this and why?

Right?

Yeah, exactly.

So we don’t know why.

But we don’t know why.

But it does tend to be what’s called a Midlands pronunciation.

This throughout the middle of the United States, let’s say the northern part of the south and the southern part of the north, kind of along the Ohio River Valley down into Kentucky and Tennessee and across to Missouri.

And there are speckles of people who pronounce it this way in Texas.

In fact, Kit, we can put a link on our website to a fabulous dialect map that will show those different pronunciations, the four that Grant talked about.

And then there’s a miscellany.

There are different pronunciations beyond those.

But you can see exactly on this dialect map

Where crown is distributed for crayon.

Awesome.

Or I say crayon.

Do you say crayon?

I say crayon.

Crayon, yeah.

At least I think I do.

It’s one of those things where when you try to say it right, you do,

And then when you’re not thinking about it, you might say something else.

So, Kit, were her children correcting her in class,

Or was she having conversations with other parents?

No, I don’t know if it had as much to do with the kids as it had to do with probably the other teachers and something like that.

And also, it just kind of became within herself, too, because she became really aware of it, you know?

Well, it is a tough question, right?

Because if you know that it affects people that way, because pronunciation is really, really personal.

And if you’ve heard a word all your life one way and then you hear somebody else saying it a different way, that can be really irritating, you know?

So I can see why she might, you know, bite her tongue a little bit.

Right, right. You might be self-conscious because being in front of a classroom is a little bit of a performance.

And so you start to think about the influence that you’re having on this audience, these kids, and maybe it makes you second-guess yourself.

Thanks for calling.

All right. Thanks, guys.

Take care.

Bye, kid.

Bye-bye.

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

Things have come to a pretty pass.

That’s the end of this week’s show.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette. So long.

Bye-bye.

Neither. Let’s call the whole thing off.

You like potato and I like potato.

You like tomato and I like tomato.

Potato, potato, tomato, tomato.

Let’s call the whole thing off.

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

And oh, if we ever…