Green-Eyed Monster (episode #1419)

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.

I have a new friend who was a flight attendant for many, many years, and she’s been regaling me with the jargon that they use.

Oh, boy.

And, Grant, you’re going to love it.

It’s just delicious.

I’ve got a long, long list here, but let me just share a couple of them with you.

Do you know what a two-for-one special is?

No.

This is when the plane hits the runway once and goes back up a little bit and then hits the runway again.

On the way down?

Yes, it’s something that the pilot is supposed to do if the runway is slick because it breaks the water plane and makes it land more smoothly, actually.

Wow, okay.

So a two-for-one special, bump, bump.

Right.

These are things that we’ve experienced, that we’ve seen, but we didn’t know that there were terms for them.

Because we don’t fly all the time, but they do, so they need the shorthand.

Yes, exactly.

You know what the double ding is?

Get in your seat.

No.

I don’t know.

That’s when they reach 10,000 feet.

My friend describes it as the best sound in the world because it means you’re almost home.

The double ding.

Ding, ding.

Oh, oh, yeah.

Yeah, and then landing lips.

What are those?

Take a guess.

When your mouth is closed really tightly because you’re nervous.

I don’t know.

You’re like, meh.

That’s a great guess, but it’s happier than that.

Landing lips are what you put on right before the passengers deplane.

The fake smile.

Thank you, thank you.

Well, no, you actually put on lipstick because, I mean, most flight attendants are female, right?

So you have landing lips.

Some of them do it too, but yeah.

Yeah, and boarding lips too, so that you can present a good front, right?

Sure, that’s expected.

One more term, equipment.

The coffee maker, the most important thing on the plane.

I love that you said that because they regularly refer to planes as the equipment.

Oh, okay.

Isn’t that great?

A giant multi-ton vehicle is just equipment.

Are we taking the equipment back?

Sounds like something you could fit in a shirt pocket.

Right, but it’s not.

And I have lots and lots of these.

Some of them are a little naughty, and maybe I’ll share some of those later in the show.

Ooh, delicious.

But anyway, we love to hear about jargon from anybody’s workplace.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Yes, hi, this is Jennifer Briggs from Crawfordville, Florida.

Hi, Jennifer.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Jennifer, what’s up?

Well, I come from a family of engineers, and we were at a dinner, and someone said, well, that’s as dead as a doornail.

And the engineers couldn’t figure out what a doornail was, so they kind of took a different route with it.

And I guess there may have been beer served there, but somebody said maybe it’s a doornail, and it’s bad beer, so it’s dead as a doornail instead of a doornail.

That’s funny.

I don’t know where that, so we couldn’t figure out that.

Oh, my God.

There may have been beer served.

I know how that goes.

Mayhaps, I think she said.

Engineers and beer.

And they probably made it themselves, given that they’re engineers, right?

Lots of copper tubing.

Right.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Lots of sterilization and bottle caps.

Measuring everything.

Okay, I’m getting the picture.

So they actually came up with an etymology of Adorn Ale?

Yes.

And it was bad.

They made bad beer.

So it was dead, like, flat.

Okay.

Oh, wow.

So what would Adorn be in this?

This is a misdivision, we call this, where you take a word and you divide it incorrectly into false component parts.

My brother did a job share engineering job in Germany, and I think there may be an Adorn Germany or something.

I don’t know where he came up with that.

A charming little town called Adorn.

Where they keep making their ale even though it’s terrible.

That’s great, but it’s wrong.

Yeah, it’s not true.

Funny, but not true.

I kind of figured that.

There are a couple of stories about the phrase dead is a doornail.

One of them is to think about those big medieval doors that you see in Europe.

I mean, this is an expression that goes all the way back to the 1350s at least.

And if you think about those big medieval doors in Europe, those big nails hammered into them look pretty much stuck in there.

They’re immovable, right?

Yeah, yeah.

They’re not going anywhere.

So they’re basically dead.

And in a lot of those doors, the knocker would actually knock on the head of one of those big nails.

And so that nail is really going to be dead because it’s getting hit all the time.

So that’s one theory.

Like unusable again or something?

Or like dead?

Dead means fixed in place.

Yeah.

Like think of a dead stop, coming to a dead stop.

Yeah, yeah.

There’s another term in carpentry that has to do with a nail being dead, and that’s if you hammer it all the way into a piece of wood and then you clinch it on the other side by hammering the other side of the nail.

Then it’s in there dead.

So you can’t get it out unless you curve that pointy end or somehow have the super strength to yank it out.

Yeah, so it may be a pun on the word dead.

And this alliteration helps keep it alive, too, right?

Yeah, yeah, because there have been other phrases in English like dead as a herring, because most people experienced herring as dead in the store.

Okay.

Or dead as mutton, I think, is another one.

Dead as mutton, right.

Yeah, but dead as a doornail is more alliterative, as you said.

So that’s the best theory we have.

There are other theories floating around about where the doornail comes from.

And now there’s a new one.

Now there’s a new one.

A doornail.

But more than likely, it’s this actual particular kind of heavy-duty nail banged into a door.

Okay.

Well, I’m surprised they didn’t come up with that.

Well, they’re engineers, right?

Unless they’re medieval architectural engineers.

Right.

No, they are not.

All mechanical.

Oh, there we go.

Yeah, yeah.

Everything’s machined.

Right, right.

They probably wanted something a little more complicated and elegant, right?

Right.

Oh, that’s funny.

Cool.

Thanks, Jennifer.

Well, I will pass that on.

Thank you very much.

Bye-bye.

Okay.

Thanks a lot.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

I promised a little dirty airline slang, so I’m going to give you some.

Which dirty am I getting?

I know you.

You do.

You know me too well, Grant.

Give it to me anyway.

Let’s hear it.

Okay.

If an airplane is dirty, what do you think it means?

I think that the last flight crew didn’t clean up the seats.

Well, that’s probably literally true.

I don’t know.

But if an airplane is dirty, it means that it has all of the flaps and slats and landing gear hanging down.

Oh, okay.

So you’re flying dirty.

Flying dirty.

Okay, gotcha.

I told you.

You’re not streamlined.

There’s lots of weird turbulence because you’ve got projections sticking out everywhere.

Exactly.

Oh, right.

Exactly.

I didn’t even talk about crotch watch.

No.

Yeah.

You know what that is.

When you’re pushing the cart down the aisle and you have to watch where you put your body because the passengers are squeezed in so tightly.

No.

No.

What is it?

A crotch watch, also known as a groin scan, is when they go up and down to check to make sure that everybody’s seat belt is buckled.

Oh, okay.

That makes a little sense.

All right.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org and on Twitter under the handle Wayword.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is David from Irving, Texas.

Hi, David. Welcome to the show.

Well, hello. My question is about the phrase, the green-eyed monster.

It’s a phrase I’ve heard growing up representing jealousy.

And I know you can be green with envy, but why in the world with jealousy is it a green-eyed monster?

The green-eyed monster is first mentioned in Shakespeare in his play Othello.

Iago says, oh, beware my lord of jealousy. It is the green-eyed monster. But the idea was probably circulating before that. Actually, in The Merchant of Venice, Portia talks about green-eyed jealousy.

And so a lot of times Shakespeare picks up ideas that are circulating in the culture and in the

Zeitgeist. So it probably existed before that. And it may be related to the old medieval idea of the humors, the four humors in the body and the different colors being related to different emotions, like black bile being connected with melancholy. And green was connected with bile as well. So it may have to do with the bodily humors. So the bile of the body is actually green, right? Is that stuff that comes out of the gallbladder next to the liver, right? Kind of gross.

Yeah. Yeah. So there was a lot of connection between colors and humors. And actually in French, you’re not green with envy, you are yellow with envy. Interesting. And, you know, I think I remember that envy and jealousy have often been conflated, that they’re not necessarily considered different emotions completely. Oftentimes, particularly in the older works, they’re treated as the same because jealousy and envy share a lot of properties where you want something that you can’t have, even if it’s just a situation.

But a lot of people now draw a distinction between the two, right? So I could see how green with envy and green-eyed monster can represent two different sides of the same emotional palate. Does that make sense, David?

It makes total sense. So basically, Shakespeare introduced the monster. Oh, he is by far and away, yeah, by far and away the popularizer of this term. We have no records of the green-eyed monster before Othello. Absolutely. He gets a lot of credit for this one. Very good. Thank you.

Cool, right? Yeah. Thanks for calling, David. So the whole line from Iago is, oh, beware, my lord of jealousy, it is the green-eyed monster which doth mock the meat it feeds on. The cuckold lives in bliss, who, certain of his fate, loves not his wronger. So there’s this whole idea here that the green-eyed monster desires a thing and yet belittles it and makes fun of it because it can’t have a little bit of sour grapes going on there, too, right? Really interesting.

Yeah. We love talking about all aspects of language here. 877-929-9673 is the number for you to call to talk about language. Or send us an email. That address is words@waywordradio.org.

I was just paging through the Dictionary of American Regional English, which you know I am wont to do. And I came across the term stepmother slice. Stepmother slice. Yes. And I’m looking at a citation from 1915 that talks about the famous stepmother slice of bread that is too thick to bite. There are references to it being thick. Too thick to bite.

Yeah, stepmothers get a bad rap in a lot of languages. Well, you know, in the animal kingdom, adults of both genders tend to kill the young that aren’t theirs. So, I mean, stepmothers, she’s like the classic character from folklore and mythology. Yeah, in ancient Rome. Yeah, there were references to stepmothers. But the stepmother, I was wondering if she took it for herself because the stepmother is perceived as like squandering resources on herself and her own offspring rather than the kids that she’s taken under her wing that were the children of some other woman.

It could be. It could be. It looks like there’s no real good explanation. Although, language is not really fair to stepmothers. No, it’s not. I’m here to say. You know, the German word for pansy, Stiefmutterchen. What’s that? Something, a stepmother something. Yeah, little bitty stepmother. Yeah, because some little pansies have what look like a frown on their, you know, they have these little markings. That’s not very nice.

Well, language is our bread and butter. Give us a call, 877-929-9673 or email words@waywordradio.org. We’re taking a backstage tour at the magic show of the English language. Stick around for more. 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 on the line is John Chaneski, our quiz guy. Hello, John.

Hi, Grant. Hi, Martha. Hey, John. What’s up? Well, I have a nice little puzzle for you. I think you’ll like this one. It’s pretty fun. In the song, 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover, Paul Simon lays out a few words of advice for those looking to end a relationship. Now, I don’t know if a trained counselor would recommend any of his suggestions, but I do know that he doesn’t even come close to 50. He’s got like five. There’s like five there, yeah.

So I’m going to pick up where he left off. Here are some more ways to leave your lover. Just like Paul does, I’ll be addressing a particular person for each way, and I’ll give you a clue to the person that is the name. And then a clue to the method. And you have to give me the lyric, just kind of like it is in the song, okay? Okay. Okay. Let’s see how this goes.

For example, if I said, oh, Mr. Tyson, even a boxer like you should have no trouble finding a three-wheeled, human-powered vehicle on which to make your exit, the answer would be… Leave on a trike, Mike. Yeah, hop on a trike, Mike, or leave on a trike, Mike. Very good. So that’s how it’s going to work. Okay. Ready to try?

Yeah, sure. Let’s go. Sure. Okay. Just like the song, some of these are forms of transportation, and some of these are just things you do to sort of break it off at someone. Okay. Oh, Ms. Lynch, a successful comic actress and game show host like you certainly has enough cash to flee the scene on a 747. Get on the plane, Jane. That’s very good. Okay. Nice. Good pitch, too.

Oh, Mr. Vicious, no one would expect a punk rocker to go into isolation by adopting a lifestyle that involves total self-sufficiency without using electricity or other public utilities. Get off the grid, Sid. Off the grid, Sid. Off the grid, Sid. That’s one way to do it. Oh, Mr. Giamatti, one of the most popular ways for actors like you to cut ties with their ex is to produce a book that reveals every dirty detail of the relationship. Right-a-tell-all, Paul. Right-a-tell-all, Paul. Very nice, Martha.

Oh, Mr. Cronkite, it’s not very classy, but you can do what others have done, just not show up at the church on your wedding day. Leave her at the altar, Walter. Oh, Mr. Liotta, if you’re too lazy to walk away, you can just get one of these things that the security guards at the mall use. Get a Segway, Ray. Hop on a Segway, Ray. Nice.

Oh, Ms. Orman, surely a financial whiz like you has enough set aside to book a four or five night trip to the Bahamas on a well-appointed ship. Take a cruise, Suze. Take a cruise, Suze. Oh, Mr. Nicholson, no doubt a famous actor like you knows that a relationship can end like a movie, slowly becoming darker and darker. Fade black, Jack. Martha, we’ve really found your…

My niche. What can I say? Your niche right here. Giving people musical advice. Finally, oh, Ms. Derek, the simplest way is just to rise from your chair and exit. Just go, Bo. Get up and go, Bo. Get up and go. Very good.

So there are seven ways to leave your lover, or ten ways, or nine ways to leave your lover. Good luck, you guys. Great stuff, John. Thanks, John. We’ll talk to you next week. You’re welcome. Talk to you then.

This is a show about words and language and how we use them. We welcome your calls and emails. Try us on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D. Give us a call at 877-929-9673. Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello. You have A Way with Words. Hi, this is Martha. This is Martha. And there’s Grant. Hey there, what’s up? Okay, this is Phil Blackwell. I’m calling from Whitewater, Wisconsin, southeastern part of the state. Hi, Phil. Hi, Phil. We were at dinner a couple of weeks ago with our 42-year-old son and his wife. They’re two small children. And our daughter-in-law’s parents, who were visiting from Connecticut. And during dinner, I saw that our son had some food on his chin. And so in good Blackwell family fashion, I just said, hey, Pete, gazelle on the lawn. So he wiped the food off. And the mother of our daughter-in-law looked at me and said, what did you say? I said, well, I just said gazelle on the lawn. It meant that Pete had food on his face. And she said, where did that come from? Well, that’s something that we learned in our Blackwell family generations ago.

And it’s always been kind of fun for us to sit there and use that as a way of giving notice to somebody that they had food on their chin or their upper lip.

But I’m interested to know, assuming that we did not make that up, where did that come from?

And was that ever used seriously as if someone expected to look out the window and see a gazelle and thereby diverting the guest’s attention?

Or was it always kind of a humorous way of saying something that needed to be said and it was kind of a non-offensive way of doing it?

I like this one. We’ve tackled this before, right?

Yeah.

A couple years ago.

Gazelle on the lawn.

So you’re going to love this, but I have some questions first.

You said that this is a part of the Blackwell family history. How far back?

Well, I remember when I was a little kid sitting at my grandparents’ house in Ohio, and this was sort of a normal pattern of speech.

And they came from England. My dad was born in Manchester, but came over as a kid.

Oh, so let me ask you one question about your grandfather.

Did he serve in the military?

And if he did, where?

I don’t know.

He was a police officer by the time he got to Cleveland, but I’m not aware of military service before then.

Here’s why.

We know that this expression goes back at least 100 years to the Arabic-speaking countries, including countries that derive some of their language features from Arabic but don’t actually currently speak Arabic, for example, in India and Bangladesh and so forth.

And there’s an expression in Arabic which you use to basically say it’s literally the same thing.

There is a gazelle in the garden.

What you mean is that you have some kind of material or food or something in your beard.

And the garden is a word bustan or something like that.

Bustan.

It means both forest or small grove of trees.

And it can also mean beard by poetic license as well.

So if you’re talking about a gazelle in the garden, you mean you have something in your beard.

And so we find this as far back as 1906 in the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal.

So which would be Bangladesh, basically.

It’s super cool, right?

So that’s why I was wondering if he had served in the British military, perhaps was stationed somewhere in South Asia or somewhere in the Middle East.

You just never know. Maybe that’s where he picked it up.

Was it ever intended seriously to divert guests’ attention, or was it just a polite way of saying that you better clean off your upper lip?

Well, it’s polite and poetic.

You know, Arabic has a great deal of poetry built into it in the form of proverbs and sayings and colloquial expressions.

We do in English as well, but ours either become so embedded in the language that we forget that they’re idiomatic or proverbial or they’re joking.

But in Arabic, they’re such a rich part of the language that I’ve had Arabic speakers tell me that they can’t actually do without them or else they feel that their language is barren.

And it’s soil with nothing growing on it unless they can use these poetic expressions.

And so I think that this is just one of those expressions that you use, started as poetry or metaphorical way of talking so that you wouldn’t cause offense.

All humans do this.

We speak indirectly about others in order not to cause offense.

And this is a great way of doing that.

Yeah, it sounds metaphorical to me, too.

I’m thinking about a phrase in Spanish for if you have something sort of in your nose or slightly hanging from it.

The phrase is pan en el horno, which is you have bread in the oven.

Or you have a bat in the cave.

Mm-I’ve heard that one, yeah.

Thank you so much for your call. Really appreciate it.

Give us another call sometime, all right?

All right.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Well, we know something weird is going on in your family.

We only want to hear the language parts.

877-929-9673, or send in an email to words@waywordradio.org, or join us on Facebook.

We have a Facebook page and a Facebook group, and they are hopping.

Some more airline slang for you.

Backside of the clock.

Backside?

Is this the return leg on a journey?

It has to do with actually traveling.

It’s when you go to a really extremely different time zone.

Oh, cool.

You’re flying backside of the clock.

Sounds like a great title for a book or movie.

Yeah.

Backside of the clock.

Something from Back to the Future.

I know.

I know.

It gives you a mental image, too, doesn’t it?

And it reminds me of the old CB radio slang of catch it on the flip-flop for some reason.

Flip-flop, good buddy.

10-4.

10-4.

What’s your 20?

What’s your language question?

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Elisa calling from Long Island, New York.

Elisa from Long Island.

Hi, Elisa.

Welcome to the show.

Hi, thanks for having me.

Yeah, sure, no problem.

What’s going on?

Well, I have a question about the pronunciation of a word.

The word frequent and frequently, I pronounce those that way.

But when I’m thinking about the verb, I always pronounced it frequent.

And my cousin made fun of me because she said frequent is not a word.

And I was like, oh, okay.

So then I’ve been saying it as I frequent this place.

But I was listening to this British podcast, and one of the hosts actually pronounces it frequent.

So now I don’t know who is right.

Okay.

We like this.

What podcast was it, just so we know?

It’s called Answer Me This.

Oh, yeah.

She does a great show.

Yeah.

Top-notch stuff.

Ellen Zaltzman, right?

Yes.

Really interesting about the verbs in English is that generally, if we have a two-syllable noun, the first syllable has distress on it.

If we have a two-syllable verb, the second syllable has distress on it.

This is generally tons of exceptions.

And it depends where you live, which dialect you speak, and so forth, and actually what era you are inhabiting, right?

Get in a time machine.

Perhaps it’ll be different 100 years ago.

Or even just 50, depending where in the country you are or in the world.

And so I am not surprised to find that you ran into difficulty with this because frequent is not a strong candidate for the typical example of a verb whose second syllable has stress on it.

That’s what’s happening there.

But in any case, so this rule generally applies, but it’s not universal, and it’s kind of catch-as-catch-can in English.

It has moved faster in some dialects than it has in others to kind of standardize this.

We have, as I’ve mentioned before, these conflicting things happening in English where we strive to make the English more like itself.

We try to remove the irregularities and make it behave a little more consistently.

And so some of the verbs are doing that quite nicely, but some of them are not.

Okay, so it’s not a matter of British versus American English.

No, it’s not at all.

Not across the whole spectrum of two-syllable verbs and nouns.

It isn’t.

There’s a really great page, by the way.

I don’t usually say this about Wikipedia, but I’m going to say this.

But under the entry for heteronyms on Wikipedia, there’s a really great list of these words where the noun and the verb are spelled the same, but they have stress on the different syllable.

Or there’s something different about the pronunciation when you compare the noun and the verb or the noun and the adjective, the adjective and the verb, and so forth.

Cool?

Wow, that’s really interesting.

So I can say frequent.

Yeah, you can say frequent.

No problem with that.

Yes, I say frequent.

Oh, good. I feel so much better about it now.

So just to be clear here, because I might have misspoke a little earlier, frequent is the verb and frequent is the adjective.

And they have different stress.

Frequent has the stress on the second syllable.

Frequent has the stress on the first syllable.

And they are not the same word, but they have the same root and have related meanings.

So you could say, I frequent the library, or you could say, I frequent the library?

I think I actually say I frequent the library, and it might have been because people gave me the cocked eyebrow when they heard me say frequent.

But you know what I think, Elisa?

I think you should just do it.

Just go for it.

I will.

All right.

I will just do it.

Thank you so much.

Yeah, sure.

Our pleasure.

Thanks for calling.

All right.

All right.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

Call us with your language question, 877-929-9673, or send it an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

And you can find us on Twitter.

Our handle is WayWord. It’s not unusual at all in India to speak more than one language,

Sometimes two, sometimes three. And I found a great quotation about this the other day from

Salman Rushdie, and I wanted to share it. If you listen to the urban speech patterns in India,

You’ll find it’s quite characteristic that a sentence will begin in one language,

Go through a second language, and end in a third.

It’s the very playful, very natural result of juggling languages.

You’re always reaching for the most appropriate phrase.

That’s cool, right?

I think that’s really cool.

I mean, we think here about Spanglish, which is also very handy that way,

But to go through three different languages to come up with what you want to say, I love it.

But it’s all in your head, and it feels like the same inventory, right?

Well, I think you reach for what works best, right?

Right.

And you risk in some cultures, for example, if I draw on a French phrase, people might just think I’m being pretentious.

But if these are both, are all three everyday languages, then it’s totally cool and normal.

Yep.

Love it.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Mark calling from Chico, California.

Hello, Mark.

How are you doing?

I’m doing pretty good this morning.

Well, I have what I call a designation frustration.

A designation frustration, okay.

Yes, and it’s looking for a certain word of how to designate a certain person.

My ex-wife is remarried several years ago, and we’re all good friends.

Her new husband is a wonderful guy.

Love them to death, love them both to death.

And so it comes up in conversation when we’re hanging out.

What is the designation for your ex-wife’s new husband?

Is there a word for that?

Ooh.

I’ve done a little bit of research, and the closest thing I found was like in an urban dictionary kind of thing, a slang kind of thing.

But it is more the opposite sexes.

It’s a designation for your ex-husband’s new wife.

And it’s not a very nice one, but the term is floozy.

Oh, yeah.

Floozy.

And we all share the same sense of humor, so sometimes I’ll introduce Jesse as my floozy.

But I know that’s not the right term.

So what I’m looking for is, is there a real term?

Now, Jesse, is that her husband or is that your ex-wife?

That’s her new husband, yeah.

Oh, so you’re interested in this man as a floozy, which has got a double joke to it.

That’s great.

And so you all get along great.

Yeah.

Wow.

Okay.

Okay.

All right.

So none of the derogatory ones I was going to suggest work.

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

Sleazy is kind of derogatory, but it’s said with a smile, and then it’s kind of an in-joke that we have among us.

I’ll share two, though, that are derogatory if you want them, just in case.

Maybe we can ameliorate them. What are they?

Well, one is to call the new spouse of your ex the second shift.

Second shift? I got it.

And then the next one is even worse. It’s to call them Tupperware because they’re getting the leftovers.

Oh! That’s pretty good, too.

There was some discussion on your Facebook page, and the one that I recall that someone came up with is also derogatory towards me, I guess, and that was My Replacement.

My Replacement.

My Replacement.

Oh.

The latest model, maybe.

Is that derogatory?

Yeah.

Maybe that’s…

It depends on your level of self-esteem, I suppose.

Yes.

Or mine.

Yes.

Yours sounds very healthy.

Yeah, I was going to say, the fact that you guys have a great relationship, that’s amazing.

It usually doesn’t go that way, Mark.

I don’t have a term for this.

I mean, I don’t have any nice ones.

But, you know, this is the kind of thing, Mark, we have a giant audience that loves to crack jokes and make puns.

I have no doubt in my mind that they will have some suggestions for you if you’re open to listening to them, all right?

Yeah, in English or some other language.

Yeah, who knows, right?

Maybe there’s something magical in Chinese that we’re all going to learn.

I don’t know.

Yeah, I just…

All right.

So, Mark, here’s what we’re going to do.

We’re going to throw this out to the listeners.

If you have a name, a nice one, for your ex-wife’s new husband, something other than their given name, let us know.

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

And, Mark, we’ll keep an eye on that and let you know what we find, all right?

Wonderful.

Thank you very much.

Yeah, sure.

Say hi to Amy and the new guy.

I shall do so.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

So if you have a word for this, what should Mark be calling his ex-wife’s new husband?

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Or tell us on Twitter at the handle W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

I often like to quote Ralph Waldo Emerson and what he said about language being fossil poetry.

I found another quotation that’s sort of related to that from Richard Trench.

And it goes, language is the amber in which a thousand precious thoughts have been safely embedded and preserved.

I never quite thought about it that way.

I think about an insect in amber, but precious thoughts.

Because a particular construction or phrase, an idiom, must have at one point been brand new.

It was the brainchild of somebody who needed to communicate.

Yes.

Thomas Carlyle said the coldest word was once a glowing new metaphor.

Right.

You don’t pick them off trees.

They come to a human mind, and then they spread from there.

Yeah.

But I love the image of them preserved in amber.

Nice.

I wonder if we can make T-Rexes out of them.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

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.

Sometimes people like to complain that English is going to hell in a handbasket,

That it’s getting corrupted, that it’s being destroyed.

But you know, the truth is that there’s been this kind of linguistic hand-wringing going on for centuries.

The other day, I found a complaint like that from the 14th century.

This was a Benedictine monk who wrote that,

By mixing and mingling first with Danes and afterwards with Normans,

In many cases, the country’s language is impaired, and some use strange stammering, chattering, snarling, and grating gnashing of teeth.

Oh, it sounds terrible.

It sounds terrible.

Poor English. What’s happening to English?

Poor English. All that, you know, Norman French coming in, of course, country and language, which were used in that.

Are from Norman French.

There you go.

That’s outstanding.

And of course, there’s the famous Cicero quote, right?

This is pretty much in every linguistics 101 test where from the year 258, he’s calling for a purge of language to get away from the common usage and get rid of the distortions.

I’m just summarizing here.

But this is, how long ago was that?

That’s a long time ago.

And more modern stuff.

I’ve got one for you.

You’ll love this.

A hundred years ago, when the telephone started to become more common, people railed against the word phone as a shortening of telephone.

Oh, yeah.

This guy here, this is Hammond Lamont in the book called English Composition from 1907.

Purely typical of the kind of screeds people wrote at the time.

Nothing extraordinary about this man at all.

He’s just one of many.

He writes, still other barbarisms are those words which, though really not in the English language, are used by the ignorant and vulgar.

Some of the more common vulgarisms are, and these are on his list, phone, photo, pants, co-ed, exam.

Gym, bike.

Terrible, right?

These are all utterly standard now.

And talk about being on the wrong side of history.

So it sounds like the moral of the story, Grant,

Is language changes, but human nature does not.

Give us a call about the things that peeve you off about language.

877-929-9673

Or put the whole thing in email to words@waywordradio.org

And find a community of other people who are interested in language on Facebook.

We have a really active Facebook group.

Hi, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Colleen Player. I’m calling from Dallas. And I had a quick question about the origin of a phrase I heard when I was interning at the juvenile detention center here.

Oh, great. Okay. One of the cafeteria workers would say when kids would inevitably get in trouble for doing something that she had told them not to do, such as running in the hallways or not throwing their food away when they were done, she would say, one day these kids are going to learn that fat meat’s greasy. And I was just wondering where that originated.

That fat meets greasy. And they’re going to learn what’s what. Is that what it means? One day they’re going to learn and not get in trouble because she just got through telling them something that they continued doing. And she said, one day they’re going to learn fat meets greasy.

Was she an African-American speaker? Yes. This phrase is heavily associated with African-American vernacular English. As a matter of fact, the African-American linguist Geneva Smitherman has an entry for this in one of her books. The book is called Word from the Mother, Language in African-Americans. And so she just studies this stuff and has lots of entries on this. And it turns out it’s one of those phrases that has never leaped over from African-American English into mainstream American English. So it kind of belongs.

And what’s really cool about this, you can find this again and again in the historical record. Novelists use it and newspaper writers use it and people just kind of throw it into their posts online. And every single time that I can find, because we’ve talked about this once before on the show, every single time I can find it, it’s always an African-American user. And the reason I’m delighted by this is because it just shows that there’s still a nice cohesiveness to this dialect of American English.

So fat meets greasy. Yeah. So there’s two ways to interpret this. It’s not just meat that is fat, but there’s a particular part of the pig that’s called fat meat. And it’s actually usually given as one word. And so it’s cut. It’s like almost all fat and almost no meat on it. You fry it up. It smells good. You eat it maybe with some beans or some bread or that sort of thing. And it’s super scrumptious. But in general, it’s supposed to be considered obvious that fat meat, the tasty stuff, is going to get your hands and your face greasy, right?

Exactly. So that’s the idea, right? That one day the kids are going to learn what is obvious to everybody else. Obvious to everybody on the whole planet. Of course. Fat meat’s greasy.

So, Colleen, what do you make of all that? I think it’s great. It sounds like something one of my grandparents would have said, but I wasn’t sure where it started, so that’s good to know.

Yeah, it goes back to about the 1940s, maybe earlier. Well, Colleen, you must be picking up some great language there. We’d love for you to call again if you hear more.

Oh, great. I definitely will. Well, thank you so much for calling. Thank you, Martha and Grant. You all have a great day. You too. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673 is the number to call to talk with us about language, or you can send an email to words@waywordradio.org. Some more airline slang. You know what a lean-over is? It doesn’t have to do with serving passengers in the aisle.

No, I have no idea. What is it? It’s a very short layover with not enough time to lie down. Okay, a lean-over. It’s a little layover. Yes. Got it. Yes, we want to hear your workplace jargon, so call us 877-929-9673 or send it an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words. Hi, it’s Clayton from Mesa, Arizona. Clayton, welcome to the show. What would you like to talk about? The origin of the English expression, so long.

So long. I’ve heard that the Crusaders brought it back from the Middle East. They bastardized the Arabic salam into so long, and we’ve kept it ever since. Is that right? No, probably not right. We’ve heard that as well, and it’s interesting. You have some vague phonetic similarity there, but the historical record doesn’t support it.

More than likely, we got this from German, as did many Scandinavian languages. There’s a version of it, which is adusolange, S-O-L-A-N-G-E. It looks like so long, S-O-L-A-N-G-E, and it means roughly the same thing. And it appears around 1850 in English and a bunch of Scandinavian languages. There is no record of any kind of transition from the Arabic into any of the other European languages at all. We would probably see that in plays or in manuscripts or in something else. But we just simply do not see that at all. So it probably did not come from Arabic.

So what does the adieu so long mean in German? I know adieu is French means adios. Yeah, goodbye until I see you again. Yeah, probably so long. So long for now. For me, I learned so long from old-time radio shows. When I was a kid, I would listen to rebroadcast of, like, The Jack Benny show or Fred Allen or Fibber McGee and Molly and that sort of thing. And for some reason, it always seemed to be the way that the on-microphone guests were parting from each other. So long, so long!

And it had dropped from being apparently a higher register of English. For a while, it was the custom in the more fashionable circles in New York to say so long when they were saying goodbye to each other and then kind of became more common throughout the rest of the country in everyday speech. It’s interesting. I always assume that so long meant it’s going to be so long before I see you again. It’s just going to be unbearable.

All right. Cool. OK. Thank you. Yeah, sure. Pleasure. Thanks for calling. So long. So long. So long. It’s been so long since we heard from you. Call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email. The address is words@waywordradio.org.

I’m so delighted when I come up with a new slang term from a community that I don’t belong to because I feel alien. It’s like going to, say, a country that you’ve never visited and seeing the Capitol for the first time. It’s nice.

Yes. There’s this word headcanon. Headcanon. Headcanon. With one N in the middle. C-A-N-O-N. Headcanon. Oh, headcanon. Let me think. Let me think. Headcanon. It’s the canon-like literature. It is. It is that. Okay. It’s the canon you have in your head where you want to get two famous people together or two famous characters from two different TV shows together in the same plot or the same scenario because in your mind they belong together. So it’s the canon you have in your head.

For example, some people want to get Johnny Lee Miller from the show Elementary where he’s playing Sherlock Holmes together with Benedict Cumberbatch who plays Sherlock Holmes in the same show where they can have all these kind of jokes about Sherlock Holmes together. In their head canon, these two actors who play Sherlock Holmes are together in a play or a television show or a movie. So I would say in my head canon. In my head canon, Johnny Lee Miller and Benedict Cumberbatch are starring together.

Yeah. All right. Okay, cool. Cool, right? Yeah. 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org. Hello, you have A Way with Words. Good morning. My name is Wally Edelson. I’m calling from the Panhandle area in Santa Rosa Beach, Florida.

Hi, Wally. Hi, Wally. Welcome to the show. Hi there. Well, what would you like to talk with us about? Okay. On vacation, one of my aunts during the summertime would often take me and my sisters to either the Pocono Mountains or the Catskill Mountains, and she always said, we are going to take a trip to upstate New York or upstate Pennsylvania. Now, if my grandmother was taking us for a ride to New Jersey, she never said we’re going to upstate New Jersey. She said we’re going to take a ride to North Jersey or we’re going to go to the seashore, South Jersey. I never heard anybody say we’re going to upstate Connecticut or upstate Ohio. And I wondered why I’ve only heard the expression upstate New York over the years and or upstate Pennsylvania.

This is a really great question. And it has to do with how much we talk like our neighbors.

When we come up with these regional terms, and there’s a bunch of these you might use, upstate, downstate, outstate, in the city, in the country, up north.

And all of these, depending where you are in the country, have a very specific meaning. Maybe they have no meaning or maybe they have a lot of resonance.

In New York City, if you say upstate, you generally mean north of New York City. If you’re already north of New York City, you probably mean north of where you currently are.

Some people include Westchester and so forth. But generally in New York, it’s all up the Hudson River. That’s upstate.

And that belongs to New York. And it is kind of this local privilege to use upstate. And sometimes they talk about downstate.

It’s a lot less common, but they do use it. And so other states have come up with their own term. Here in California, for example, we say NorCal or NoCal.

There was a failed attempt to brand the north of California as upstate a few years ago, but it didn’t stick. And that’s what we say. We say SoCal and NorCal.

That’s it. That’s how we talk about California. We don’t say upstate California. We don’t say downstate California.

Well, you say South Florida, North Florida, where you are. Yeah, and you say the panhandle. And a bunch of states have a panhandle, but it’s very particular to their own state.

Oklahoma has one. Missouri has a boot heel. And so we have these regional designations for areas, usually unofficial, that are passed from person to person, that we all understand what they mean.

And, again, it’s just like local slang or it’s just like local dialects. It belongs to a place and a people.

So it’s really idiosyncratic then. Nothing consistent across the states. There’s no formal way to come up with these terms.

That is fascinating because what prompted me to ask that question as I was listening to your program a couple weeks ago and a gentleman was on the air with you.

He was in Manhattan and he said, I just returned from upstate New York. And of course that just put a signal for me to be brave and pick up the phone and call the station.

Right. There we go. Yeah. Well, it wasn’t that scary when she got on, right? No, it was easy. It was easy as a breeze.

I really love the show. I’ve learned a lot about culture, about language, about regions. And I applaud you for keeping this show going.

It’s fantastic. Thank you so much, Wally. It’s our pleasure to talk to you. Thanks for calling today.

Yeah, we appreciate your calling. My pleasure. Bye now. Okay, take care.

So if you move to a new place, listen to your neighbors and use whatever they use, right? One of these shows, we’ll have to spend an hour talking about why downtown isn’t always down and uptown isn’t always up.

Yeah, let’s do that. Yeah, and then there’s elevation, too, you know? Up the road, down the road. What are you talking about?

Well, what’s going on in your region of the country linguistically? Let us know, 877-929-9673, or send us an email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org. Grant, you know what a push present is? Yes, this is a gift that a father buys for a mother who just gave birth to their child.

Right, because she’s just pushed it out after carrying it for nine months. Here’s a car. Yeah, here’s some diamond earrings.

Or whatever you need. Here’s a Slurpee. I don’t know. Right. Here’s my mother to help take care of the kids.

Yeah, right. Call us with the slang that’s caught your ear, 877-929-9673, or send it to us in email.

The address is words@waywordradio.org. Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi. Hi. My name is Keisha Smith. Hi. Where are you calling from, Keisha? Indianapolis, Indiana.

All right. Welcome to the show. How can we help? I had a question. My mother is from down south. She’s 70. Let’s see.

And they had a ton of things that she had and still uses when I was growing up as a child. But one of the ones that I’ve heard so many times was instead of cursing, I guess, or saying an expletive, she would say, well, I’ll just be John Brown’s slew foot.

And I’m like, what? John Brown’s blue foot? Like B-L-U-E? S-L-E-W, I guess. Oh, slew foot.

Yeah, and so you break a plate, and instead of saying, darn it, oh, John Brown’s new foot. And I’m like, oh, that’s different.

The slew foot is the key part here, but we can describe them both. Slew foot is a foot that is kind of twisted or turned to the side or got something wrong with it.

You’ll often hear this in terms of an animal that is born with a misshapen paw or leg or that sort of thing. And John Brown, you probably remember from your schooling, was an abolitionist, a slavery abolitionist who was hanged for leading a raid.

And he was often, because he was hanged, he was often used as a euphemism for damned. So you would say, I’ll be John Brown, you’d mean I’ll be damned.

So if you say that I’ll be John Brown’s slew foot, you mean not only will you be hanged and damned, but there’ll be something misshapen about you as well.

Oh, wow. So yeah, there would be compassion. Yeah. Yeah. Pretty bad situation, right? Yes.

Yes. That’s interesting. I remember my Aunt Maiso from North Carolina saying, foot, just as an exclamation. Just without.

Must have been the short version of it. Maybe so. Just foot. I had a friend whose grandfather was also from the South, and she had heard him say, I’ll be John Brown.

And I’m like, oh, okay. Yeah. Yeah. That’s probably exactly what Grant was talking about.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Okay, that helped a lot. All right. Well, we appreciate your calling.

All right, well, thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks, Keisha. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.

We love those family expressions. Call us 877-929-9673 or send them to us in email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org. Granted, I have some more airline slang for you.

Having crew juice on the debrief. Crew juice on the debrief. Having alcohol after the passengers have disembarked.

Very good. Going to the bar with the crew. Let’s go get some crew juice. Do they actually say that?

They do. They absolutely do. Okay. Let’s get some crew juice. Crew juice. 877-929-9673.

Things have come to a pretty bad day. That’s all for today’s broadcast. But don’t wait till next week to chat with us.

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That address is words@waywordradio.org. Our senior producer is Stefanie Levine. The show is directed and edited this week by Tim Felten.

We have production help from James Ramsey and Tamar Wittenberg. A Way with Words is independently produced and distributed by Wayword, Inc., a nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations who believe in lifelong learning and better human communication.

The show is coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California. Thanks for listening.

I’m Martha Barnette. And I’m Grant Barrett. Bye-bye. So long.