Gung Ho (episode #1492)

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. It wasn’t that long ago that the term helicopter parents was pretty new.

It came out in the late 1980s, and you know about helicopter parents.

Yeah, these are the parents. They’re hovering over everything their child does just to make sure it’s all perfect.

Right. But in Denmark, they use a different term, which I think is really cool,

And it translates as curling parents. Not helicopter parents, but curling parents.

Curling is in the sport?

Yes.

Oh, so they’re using a little brush to smooth the way for their offspring.

Yes.

They’re on the ice.

Yes.

And their little stone-headed child.

Isn’t that great?

Curling foreldra or something like that.

That’s awesome.

Sweeping all obstacles away.

Right.

That’s awesome.

Yeah, this term is on the cover of a book published in Denmark with a picture of these parents who are sweeping things out of the child’s way.

It’s really cute.

And when I was digging into this, I learned the word soup, S-O-O-P.

Yeah.

Do you know this term?

Soup means to assist the progress of a curling stone.

It was the earlier version of what we now call sweeping.

Oh, very interesting.

How about that?

Soup and sweep are connected.

Yes.

It’ll obviously be very nice.

So curling parents.

We know a lot of our listeners speak something other than English at home or grew up speaking

Something other than English.

Share your interesting words with us, 877-929-9673.

Or send us an email to words@waywordradio.org.

Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Aman from Orlando, Florida.

Hi, Aman. Welcome to the show.

Hi, what’s on your mind?

My question is about a new word.

I’m not sure if it’s a new word.

I was on my way to the movies with my boyfriend,

And we were in the parking lot, and we couldn’t find a parking space.

So we started to follow people that were exiting out of the movie theater,

And I started to use this word called sharking because we were kind of like jaws.

We’re kind of like following behind them like sharks trying to find an open spot.

So my question is, is there a word for people who are hunting for a parking spot behind people who are leaving?

And is sharking a new word or is that something that I just heard?

Yeah, and you’re circling like a predator, right?

-huh.

Yeah. Well, interestingly enough, I think other people have been there and thought the same thing.

There’s an expression, sharking for parking.

Wow. Okay.

The other expression that I’ve heard in relation to this kind of thing is just referring to people like that as vultures.

Circling around.

Yeah, circling the prey.

Oh. So is it all just with animals, like vultures and sharking?

Yeah.

Is there more like a vegetarian way of describing it?

Now, let’s see. That’s a great idea. What would that be? Are you all vegetarian?

I don’t eat that much meat, so I’m just thinking for that part of me that, you know, it’s more of a Herber war.

Well, you’re wanting to harvest that spot.

Oh, harvest. Yeah, harvesting, I think.

Although I think the one that you naturally came up with makes a lot of sense, sharking.

People talk about being a parking lot shark, and they talk about shark circling.

I mean, like all the metaphors, like we’ve all seen the documentaries of sharks going after something that they really wanted.

I know that feeling where you just don’t want to walk all that distance.

And so you just keep circling around and around.

Right.

Until you get what they call Hollywood parking.

Have you heard this one?

No, I have not.

Hollywood parking is parking that’s right there by the door where you want to go in.

It’s like in so many movies, you see people go someplace and there’s always a parking space right there.

So they don’t have to circle around like in real life.

But anyway, Iman, you’re in good company.

So sharking and vultures are the two ones that are used most often.

Yeah, there’s a vulture.

Yeah.

There should also be a word for, do you do this when you’re going to your car

And you hold up your keys so people know that you’re actually going?

Oftentimes I would just kind of turn around and just kind of say,

No, I’m not going to my car.

Yeah, there’s a whole language of parking lots, right?

You have that experience where you’re in your car and you’re kind of like plugging your phone in and getting your seatbelt together and stuff.

And somebody pulls up behind you and they get out of the car and they’re practically at your window.

And instead of saying the words, are you leaving?

They mouth them.

Are you leaving?

Like with no sound.

I’m like, your sound can travel through glass, you know.

You can actually say the words to me.

But it’s weird that they leave their door open and the car is right there.

It’s like, is this your way of telling me to get the lead out and hurry up?

Yeah.

Or they make a key in the ignition motion, you know.

You going?

You going?

No, I’ve never had that.

I think we’re just too polite in Orlando.

We don’t have any horns.

I don’t think I’ve ever heard a horn in Orlando since I’ve moved here.

Well, if you want to feel even better about your parking and driving situation in Orlando,

Come to Southern California.

We have all kinds of parking and driving delights.

Anyway, Amon, this was fun.

Thank you for calling us.

We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much.

I’m a big fan of the show.

Thank you so much for what you do.

Take care.

Thanks, Amon.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So that’s our next book, right?

All the weirdness in parking lots and all the language that needs to be created for the weirdness in parking lots.

Yeah, there’s so much communication that goes on.

And I get it.

Some people don’t have the blue tags that let them park in the spots for people with disabilities, but they still need to be close to the door.

So I get some of the driving habits where you circle around until you’re a little bit closer.

I get it.

But some of us, we do the circling, defying all logic.

It’s true.

But, you know, the truth is that I try to park as far away as I can and get in those steps.

Free exercise.

Yeah, yeah.

I love it.

Yeah.

The number to call if you’ve got a life situation that needs a word but doesn’t have one, 877-929-9673.

We recently asked for suggestions of what you call a group of librarians.

The collective noun.

The collective noun.

And you didn’t really have very much to say.

We got almost, no, that’s not true.

Not at all.

I would say that in the last 12 months, this might be the most response that we got.

And that is saying something because you all have opinions.

I’m telling you.

How many did we get?

Hundreds of responses to this?

It was like shoveling snow in a blizzard trying to get through that email box.

And we heard from Susan Smolenski, who is the library director at the Arvin A. Brown Public Library in Richford, Vermont, who let us in on a secret, which was that this went out on a listserv in Vermont to all these librarians.

I don’t know. Maybe that’s a collective noun, a listserv of librarians.

But they weighed in and she sent a long list of their answers.

Check this out.

A shelf of librarians, a dewey of librarians, a chapter of librarians, a volume of librarians, stacks of librarians, a folio of librarians, a catalog of librarians, an encyclopedia of librarians, a circulation, a sheaf, a webinar of librarians, a collection of librarians.

And I really like this one, a misdemeanor of librarians.

A misdemeanor of librarians.

Now that’s a very special collection indeed, wouldn’t you say?

I would say indeed.

Is there any one of those that jumped out at you?

No, but there’s some I think we’re going to mention later in this show that I really like.

Indeed, we will.

877-929-9673.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, my name’s Carl Forney. I live in Chicago.

Hi, Carl. Welcome to the program.

So I was spending some time with my in-laws in eastern Kentucky and West Virginia over Thanksgiving,

And we came across a word that I’d never heard before.

My wife and I grew up in Cincinnati, but the word was bribe,

But it was used to describe the musician Lyle Lovett.

R-I-B something?

We went with R-Y-B-I-E.

And what does R-I-B mean in your family?

So, like I said, it was used to describe Lyle Lovett, and that’s kind of where it got started.

It kind of means thin, gaunt, maybe even sickly, but there was no definition,

And we weren’t able to find anything on the Internet.

Okay, Riby. And yeah, I think if you look Lyle Lovett up in, or if you, I think if you look

Riby up in some dictionaries, you might see Lyle Lovett because he’s a really skinny guy. And yeah,

The word Riby is a term that’s not all that uncommon in that part of the country,

Eastern Kentucky, West Virginia. And it means a long-legged, thin person, a lanky person,

Or somebody who’s really, really skinny.

Yeah.

And it probably goes back to the Scots language.

There’s a lot of Scots, Irish influence there in that part of the country.

And a ribe in the Scots language is like a tall, straggling cabbage plant,

Like one that’s failed to form properly.

And, yeah, so from that you get somebody who’s tall and emaciated, long-legged.

So a little ribe-y person.

Yeah, I can see that.

Okay, so it comes from Scott’s Arrive.

Yeah, as far as we know.

A failed cabbage plant.

Yeah, yeah.

Okay, that’s fascinating.

Yeah, I’m not aware of it being much more widespread than that.

No, it’s super rare.

But it’s a wonderful term, right?

Arrivey fella.

Yeah, someone from Ashland was familiar with the term,

And the other folks were from Logan, West Virginia.

Yeah, Ashland is right there in Boyd County, there on the border, right?

Yeah, just kind of right in the middle of cold country.

And everybody’s, you know, the family, everybody’s been in that area for as long as anybody can remember.

Yeah, I have a friend from Ashland as well who says that some of his family says ribby.

You know, like somebody’s got ribs, like they’re really, really thin, like ribby or ribby.

Interesting.

Yeah.

They were pretty adamant about the pronunciation.

The spelling was highly debated.

Yeah, well, in the Dictionary of American Regional English, the main entry is for R-I-B-E-Y.

R-I-B-E-Y.

Yeah.

Okay.

And if you want to see just a little bit more about this, you can also look it up in the Dictionary of the Scots Language, which is in full online.

And it combines a couple really great historical works on the Scots language and Scots English.

Okay, definitely worth checking out.

Okay, well, thank you so much for your call, Carl.

Thanks for having me on.

Well, we know they talk a little different out your way.

Call us and we’ll talk about it together, 877-929-9673.

Or email us, words@waywordradio.org.

Or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

We were talking earlier about the search for a collective noun for a group of librarians.

And we heard from Peter Clark in Ranchester, Wyoming, who suggested that a collective of librarians is a Marion.

A Marion librarian?

Marion. Madam Librarian.

I don’t know what’s that from.

From the Music Man.

Oh, okay. There we go. My wife wouldn’t know that because it’s set in Iowa, I think.

Okay. All right. And, you know, a lot of people suggested a hush of librarians, but I don’t know that that really fits the librarians that I know.

A shush. I think there are a few shushes.

A shush. Yeah. Sarah Sanfilippo from Southern Vermont College in Bennington, Vermont, said, yeah, that a lot of people are probably suggesting a hush or a shush.

But her preference is a riot of librarians. And knowing the librarians I know, a riot fits.

Yeah. And knowing the librarians I know, I was surprised. I mean, we got the stereotype of the hushing librarian, but we didn’t get the stereotype of the sexy librarian.

Which is a thing.

Right.

Let me tell you.

We could call it a sexy of librarians.

Oh.

Right?

Let’s go ahead and noun that word, right?

I like that.

Noun that adjective.

Well, no.

Doesn’t that already exist for public radio hosts?

The sexy public radio hosts?

I don’t really know what you’re talking about.

Maybe not.

Well, we love collective nouns.

We love all kinds of nouns, don’t we?

And verbs and adjectives.

We do.

Deep into the language and the surface.

The fun stuff.

The serious stuff.

We talk about it all.

Yes.

Bring it to us.

877-929-9673.

More of what we say and why we say it as A Way with Words continues.

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 it’s time for our quiz with John Chaneski, our quiz guy.

Hi, John.

Hi, Grant.

Hi, Martha.

Hi.

I have something pretty exciting for you today.

I was watching television the other day, and I heard someone state that a certain style

Of music was a, I’m quoting here, a very important genre in his life.

-oh.

Now, of course, now, look, I could have written a letter or a tweet, and I tried to educate

People, but I thought I had an epiphany.

This could be very good for me, for John.

This could usher in a new era when I’m on everybody’s lips, the John era.

So let’s go ahead and from now on, genre is genre.

And thank you very much for promoting my brand.

Let’s educate everyone in this new era.

If I say from now on, when you talk about a person’s role in society as a man or a woman,

As opposed to their biological sex, you’ll be talking about what?

The Jinder?

Jinder?

No, no.

Their Jonder.

The Jonder.

Okay.

That’s right.

Yeah.

Now, if you’re not on board yet, just try it out.

See how it feels.

You might like it.

Now, here’s a few more.

From now on, if you work your way up to a very high rank in the military, we’ll refer to you as what?

General Chaneski.

A general.

Yes.

General Chaneski.

That’s me.

From now on, if you research your family tree, you soon become an expert at tracing descendants from an ancestor otherwise known as what?

Genealogy.

Genealogy.

That’s right.

Similarly, if you’re studying how two people with brown eyes like my parents can have a kid with gorgeous steel blue eyes like mine, you must be interested in what science?

Johnetics.

Johnetics.

Specifically, my Johnetics, right?

If they know their parents are on board with the John era, it might be tough to get millennials on board.

It’s been the same since the 60s when kids complain that older people just don’t understand due to what?

The generation gap.

That’s right, the generation gap.

That’s right.

Now, you may think the idea of the John era sounds selfish, but I’m sharing it with people named John all over the world.

I believe you should promote the quality of being kind and magnanimous, or as we’ll be calling it from now on, what?

Gentleness?

Generosity?

Generosity, yes.

Please.

Please give and be generous, if you will.

The John era extends not only to words, but places.

It’s a global phenomenon.

From now on, if you want one of the world’s best watches or chocolates or to visit the headquarters of the Red Cross, you’ll travel to what city in Switzerland?

Geneva.

John Eva

Yes

Even being John

I still had no control

When the little mom and pop stores

In my neighborhood

Were squeezed out

By the big chains

Like Starbucks

And Barnes and Nobles

This happens when middle class folk

Move into an area

And it’s now called

What?

Jontrification

Jontrification

Correct

That’s it

Welcome aboard to the John area

You guys

That’s what we’ve done

Thank you very much for the quiz

I am still looking at it

With a jaundiced eye

But we’ll see how it goes

Yes, very generous of you.

Thanks.

Thanks, John.

Your name is John, right?

It is John, yes.

Have I mentioned John enough?

Yes, it’s John.

We’ll talk to you next week, buddy.

Quit Johning around.

Take care.

Yes, we talk about all kinds of words and names on this show,

And if you’d like to talk with us, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send your questions and comments in email to words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, is this Martha?

This is Martha. Who’s this?

This is David Helms from Huntsville, Alabama.

Hi, David.

Welcome to the show.

Hey. Well, I have a question about the peace symbol.

I was thinking about it.

I’ve heard some numerous different orientations of the original meaning of it.

I’ve signed it for years in my name.

I put a little peace symbol in my name, and I just love it.

You dot your I with a peace symbol in David?

No, actually, I put it in the swoop of my D.

Oh, really?

Oh, that’s super cool.

I have a little piece symbol in there, yeah.

And how did you get attached to it?

Oh, it’s just, you know, it’s a piece, and I love that.

That’s a great concept, and, you know, it would be nice.

You know, that’s a good thing.

Yeah, this is the circle with the line going down the middle

And then two lines coming off at angles.

Right, right, yeah.

Yeah, I had one of those when I was growing up

That I wore a lot around my neck, and I was always told that it was the image of a dove’s foot.

Oh, really?

Yeah, like a dove footprint, but I don’t think that’s the real story.

Interesting. I’ve heard no nukes or anti-atomic, which is also an interesting thought,

But I don’t know what the origin is, or where does it go back to? Is it ancient,

Or is it something that was just developed in the 60s?

Earlier than that.

Yeah, earlier than that.

There’s a book I would recommend.

Yeah, there’s a book I would recommend to start this off,

Which in my opinion does a really good job summarizing what we know about the peace symbol,

Especially its early days.

And it’s called Peace, the Biography of a Symbol,

And it’s by Ken Kolsbun, K-O-L-S-B-U-N.

So Peace, the Biography of a Symbol, and it’s published by National Geographic.

And it’s a small book, but it does a good job of summarizing these.

There are versions of the symbol as early as the 1930s, but it wasn’t until the 1950s in the UK when a textile designer of no great reputation,

But for some reason he became the guy, used it in an anti-nuke march.

And his name was Gerald Coltom, H-O-L-T-O-M.

And from there, the symbol kind of caught on in the anti-nuclear movement.

And then later became, by the mid-1960s, became very generalized just to mean peace in general.

But because its early use was anti-nuke, it doesn’t mean that it only ever means anti-nuke.

It still means it has its new meaning, and that’s the meaning that we all know it by.

It’s just a pro-peace symbol.

Yeah, so it was associated with the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, I think.

Yeah, and there are some myths out there that the symbol is a combination of the letters C, N, and D,

Or that it’s a combination of runes from the old runic writing system.

There’s maybe some truth to these, but there’s not a lot of evidence to prove it

Because the shapes are so basic that you could pretty much find

Just about any symbol in this symbol that you wanted to look for.

That’s fascinating. It goes back to the 30s.

Yeah, versions of it that are similar.

There was a movie, though, in 1961 called The Day the Earth Caught Fire,

And it was a film about the effects of nuclear testing,

And that was the film that really introduced it, certainly in the counterculture movement, the symbol.

It became directly associated.

And that’s kind of when it also made the leap from just not only anti-nuke, but to anti-war.

I got you.

Okay.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

But again, David, I recommend that book.

Look it up.

See if you can find it in your library.

Peace, the biography of a symbol by Ken Colesbun.

K-O-L-S-B-U-N.

Okay, Grant.

That sounds great.

Thank you so much.

Thank you, David.

Really appreciate it.

Good talking with you.

All right.

I appreciate you folks.

Thank you.

Enjoy the show.

All right.

Bye, David.

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

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Here’s an expression from the world of bicycling that I like, on the rivet.

So-and-so is on the rivet.

Is that forward in your seats?

Yes.

How did you know that?

I think I saw that recently.

Oh, really?

Maybe we’re reading the same articles or something.

Oh, maybe we were.

Right.

On the rivet is when you’re on the nose of the saddle going as hard as you can because

Bicycle seats for racing have a bunch of rivets in the back and then one rivet up in front.

So you’re leaning forward and just going all out.

I like that as a metaphor for somebody who’s really into whatever they’re doing in regular life outside of biking.

Yes, they’re gung-ho, right?

They’re on the rivet.

877-929-9673 or Twitter, W-A-Y-W-O-R-D.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Melinda Ames in Omaha, Nebraska.

Hello, Melinda. Welcome to the show.

Thanks.

What’s going on?

Well, we’ve been having a lot of discussion around the name of a Sicilian pizza that we’re familiar with from my father’s family or my husband’s family and a couple of my friends that are Sicilian, their families.

We’re like, where does this come from? Is it only from the Midwest? And so we’re trying to figure that out.

What’s the word?

The word is gutaruni, but I found it spelled a whole bunch of different ways.

It refers to a double crust pizza.

So this is like crust on top and crust on bottom and fillings in the middle?

Right.

Kind of like a calzone, only big, like a pizza.

A pizza-sized calzone.

Yeah, like a rectangular.

It’s rectangular.

Yeah, and Melinda, what’s it stuffed with?

From Dave’s Nana’s recipe, it’s potatoes and spinach or potatoes and meat or potatoes and broccoli.

There’s not cheese and stuff in it.

It’s just kind of this stuffed big pie thing.

Okay, you’re going to have to forgive us because both Grant and I are drooling right now.

It’s so good.

You’re too fine.

Yeah, it’s super good.

And I’ve seen it spelled Goody Rooney, like G-O-O-D-I-E Rooney.

I’ve seen it spelled G-O-U-D-A, Rooney.

I’ve seen it spelled C-U-D-A-R-U-N-I.

So there’s so many, but when we try to Google it or look it up,

It seems like it’s a Sicilian heritage,

But we don’t find it anywhere else across the country except the Midwest.

Yeah, it’s interesting.

Do you have it in restaurants there, or are you eating it at home?

It’s mostly handmade, but there is one or maybe two Italian restaurants that serve it.

Oh, they’re in Omaha.

Because there is a whole Little Italy area of Omaha, right, with a lot of Sicilians there?

Yes, ma’am.

Yes, indeed.

And the original version of this is called Coutaruni, C-U-T-D-U-R-U-N-I, Coutaruni.

It’s from Lentini in Little Italy.

And as you suggested, it’s a type of big focaccia that is spread into a disc shape and then folded over,

Originally over things like black broccoli and onion or other wild herbs.

It was a way of using up stuff that you have there available.

And it goes back to an old word that basically means a really big focaccia.

Yeah, and you might make it in the embers or ashes of a fire, kind of throw it in there, and it gets you in this nice blackened crust.

Yeah.

-huh.

Oh, it’s so good.

And a lot of the families in Omaha, in Little Italy, are from Carlantini, which is really similar to Lentini in Sicily.

There you go.

Yeah.

I have found the word kudaruni referring to the bread as far back as the 1600s in old Italian dictionaries.

Oh, how cool is that?

Italian Sicilian dictionaries.

There’s a few out there that translate the Sicilian dialect to what is basically mainstream Italian language or into Latin itself.

Oh, cool.

You can find it mentioned, yeah.

And I would have thought that it had some kind of picturesque etymology, you know, like calzone, because it’s a distant cousin of the calzone, which means trousers.

But apparently it’s just a big old focaccia.

Yeah.

But a couturouni, we’re talking about a family-sized thing here, right?

This is something that everyone has a piece of, right?

Oh, yeah.

Drizzled with olive oil, maybe?

Yeah, could.

Or some cheese sprinkled on top, but no cheese inside.

Yeah, here I thought Omaha was all about steaks, but I think I have to go visit Little Italy in Omaha now.

You do, because there’s a really rich heritage there in the Italian festivals and everything like that.

And sometimes you’ll see it at those, along with, of course, the traditional sausage and peppers and all of that.

Yeah, and we have a standing invitation to your house if we’re ever in Omaha, correct?

Awesome.

You’re here.

I’m open.

That’s great.

All right.

Thanks so much, Melinda.

Thank you.

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

We love questions about the etymology of food words.

If you’ve got some of those, bring them on.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hello.

This is Jerry calling from Washington, D.C.

How are you, Grant and Martha?

Great.

Well, what’s on your mind today?

I’ve always had this question I wanted to ask, and it’s the term gung-ho.

And just a little bit of background story is I speak Mandarin at home, and I speak English.

Gung-ho sounds like it’s related to a Chinese word.

It doesn’t sound like anything I know personally.

I’m just curious if my hypothesis of where this word comes from is even true.

So that’s my question.

So Jerry, what do you think of the word gung-ho, or the two words gung-ho is meaning in English?

Right.

So I’ve heard multiple different uses for this word.

Some people use it as an exclamation like, oh, gung-ho, job well done.

That’s one way, or some people have used it as, oh, he’s gung-ho-ing after that project.

It’s just a positive connotation to my knowledge, and that’s how I’ve always used it.

But I don’t really know what it really means, you know what I mean?

So just so everyone at home knows what we’re talking about, it’s G-U-N-G space H-O, gung-ho, right?

Right.

Okay, great.

And it has to do with great enthusiasm.

Right. It does indeed. And so your question is, is this truly of Chinese origin?

Right. Well, I’m only guessing because it sounds like Cantonese, but I don’t speak Cantonese.

I speak Mandarin at home. So it doesn’t sound anything related to that, but I’m just guessing.

And I could be wrong.

It’s usually attributed to Chinese in general. It’s really interesting.

If you look this up in slang dictionaries and regular dictionaries and specialty etymology dictionaries,

None of the ones that I have actually tell me which dialect of Chinese it supposedly came from,

But they all will tell you that it came from Chinese.

And I’m putting that in quote marks because, as we all know, Chinese isn’t really one language.

It’s a lot of languages with a very similar writing system or identical writing systems, right?

Right.

The short version of this is during the early 1900s, there were these kind of work cooperatives in China,

You know, kind of precursors to the communist era working organizations.

And in English, they were known as Chinese industrial cooperatives.

They’re kind of a group decision-making and self-management.

And in Chinese, and this is the Roman version, the Latin letter version of this, the romanization of it,

The Zhongguo Gongye He Suo She, something like that.

And shortened to G-O-N-G-H-E, an E usually with an acute accent on it.

So it kind of looks like Gonghe.

And you can find this word, gung-ho, written as kong-ho with a K instead of a G,

In English-language Chinese newspapers in the early 1900s, in 1916, for example.

And so it’s the Chinese writing in English for an English-speaking audience

About their government and their organization.

And sometimes it’s English-language Chinese newspapers writing in response

To whatever the Chinese government was doing.

So it’s kind of like these propaganda newspapers from two different sides of the political spectrum, all writing about these cooperatives.

Fast forward a little bit.

So by the late 1930s, early 1940s, when World War II breaks out, there’s a huge American presence in that part of the world.

And the Chinese and Americans were, for the most part, allied against the Japanese and had some agreements together.

They did some exercises together.

They kind of operated together.

And there was a fellow in the Marines by the name of Evans Fordyce Carlson, who later became, I believe, a brigadier,

Who borrowed Kung Ho as Gung Ho and began to use it among his Marines as a way of emphasizing working together.

And he became the guy who was known as the popularizer of it in the Marines.

And so that’s how, for the most part, that this idea of Kung Ho and the original Chinese version entered the language as Gung Ho.

It was through the U.S. Marines.

Wow, that’s a rich history behind that. I didn’t know that.

Yeah, and by the 1950s, in the Marines, Gung Ho underwent another transformation.

And even now, Gung Ho is often used to describe people who are too enthusiastic.

Like the new recruit who is all about the rules or all about the Marines.

They have the energy and enthusiasm of the convert.

So gung-ho now in the Marines isn’t necessarily a compliment.

I’ve always used it as kind of a positive thing.

I didn’t know that it can be used as a negative connotation, if you will.

Yeah, in the Marines, you can have that negative conversation.

But I would think in everyday American English, gung-ho, you might go,

He was really gung-ho, and he said he was completely committed to our strategic plan or whatever it was.

Yeah, I think of it as very positive.

Well, Jerry, thank you so much for your call.

Well, thank you for your time.

Thank you, guys.

Love your show.

Thanks.

Thank you.

Take care.

Bye-bye, Jerry.

Well, we’re gung-ho to hear from you, so call us 877-929-9673 or send us an email.

That address is words@waywordradio.org.

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.

You know, my son Guthrie is 11 this year.

Can you believe that?

That can’t be possible.

And pretty much the whole time that he’s been alive,

I’ve been talking about the books that my wife and I are reading with him and to him in our home,

Like at bedtime or other times of the day.

And as he’s grown up, the complexity of those books has increased,

And the differences between the good guys and the bad guys have become less obvious.

I think a really good example of that kind of complexity that he’s growing into is the book

One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams. Let me set the scenario for you. There are three young

Girls living in Brooklyn, New York, Delphine, Veneta, and Fern. They’re African-American girls

Who are going to Oakland, California to stay with their mother. Now, years ago, their mother

Abandoned them, basically. And going to California is an opportunity for them to reconnect with her.

But once they get to California, they realize even at the moment that they land at the airport,

That their mother doesn’t really want to have anything to do with them. She is a member of

The Black Panthers. She’s fighting a revolution. She believes in changing the country. She is

Trying to right old wrongs. She is trying to demonstrate black power in a world run by white

People. And these three young girls have to negotiate this new relationship that they’re

Trying to build with their mother, as well as their mother’s relationship with the Black Panthers and

The revolution at large. But here these three girls are with their mother in Oakland, California,

And they’re trying to develop this new definition of family. What is it like to try to have a

Relationship with somebody who didn’t necessarily want you or didn’t want to be a part of your life?

And the girls, as they figure that out with their mother, Cecile, also figure out this idea of

Family, which is the three of them, the unit of the three sisters who can depend on each other,

And are learning about the world together through their own perspectives

And running up against these challenges together as a family.

So they have these two interesting interlocking ideas of family

That both interlock and are disconnected, which I find very appealing.

And again, that’s the kind of complexity that you wouldn’t find in books, perhaps,

That you would read to a five-year-old or a six-year-old.

So the book is One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia Williams.

I would recommend it to kids 18 to maybe 12 or 13.

I think it’s manageable by anyone in that range.

And my son, by the way, my son Guthrie loved the book.

He said it was like living in a corner of history.

He felt that the book was real to him and what these girls were experiencing, he was experiencing as well.

That’s beautiful.

It is.

It’s very well written.

It’s easy to read aloud, which is something that I look for in a book at bedtime.

And there are two more books in the series which we’ve started.

Okay.

Give me that title one more time.

One Crazy Summer by Rita Garcia-Williams.

Great. Well, we’ll put a link to that on our website.

And if you’d like to talk about any aspect of language, books you’re reading, or words you’ve come across,

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Jane calling from Madison, Wisconsin.

Hi, Jane. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

At my daughter’s high school, at the beginning of each semester,

The kids introduce themselves and they state their preferred pronouns.

And for kids who are gender neutral, they use the pronouns they, them, and theirs.

And I have a couple of questions around that.

First of all, have we come up with any other pronoun that folks who are gender neutral are using instead of the plural?

And if we haven’t, do we ever use the plural in a singular way?

Well, there are lots and lots of those pronouns floating around.

Some people use ze and zeer for that.

Instead of they and their, right?

Yeah, and there are long lists of pronouns that have been tried out and used.

But I think it’s wonderful that they have this practice of asking people what their preferred pronouns are.

Yeah, it’s very common in our community, and I think it’s great, too.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, and so what do they say in terms of the verb that they use with that pronoun?

I don’t know.

It surfaced at a New Year’s party that I was at this year, and I got in conversation with a friend the next day.

I said, you know, do we ever hear the term they is coming to the party?

And I don’t think that we ever mix those two things, what feels like a plural with a singular.

Yeah, and I’ve heard people complain about that.

They sort of tie themselves in knots about whether it should be a singular or a plural.

Right.

So if they is used to refer to a single known individual,

Why wouldn’t you use the singular conjugation of the verb?

Right.

But the truth is the pronoun’s the guide, right?

Right.

It is always they are, even if they is known to be one person.

All right.

That’s good to know.

I look forward to learning those other pronouns that seem like it would make much more sense

Than trying to use they, them, and theirs.

Part of it is, Jane, that there’s this barrier to entry, if I can borrow a term from the business world,

Which is the more you are asking people to change at any given one time, the less likely it is for the change to take place.

So this is why a lot of these other proposed non-binary pronouns or gender neutral pronouns have not stuck,

Because you not only had to teach them the word and how to say it, but you had to incorporate into the already existing body of English.

Whereas they has a long history of being used as a singular pronoun when the gender of a person isn’t known.

For example, you might say a customer said they were looking for a stepladder, right?

We used they even when we know that it was a single customer.

And so we already have this tradition of they as a singular.

We have a tradition of already using it with a plural verb no matter what, no matter whether they was singular or plural.

And so it’s far easier to now introduce this next step of allowing people to make a choice and say, I want to be they, even though you think of me of having a specific gender.

You think you see a gender in me.

Thanks. I think that’s a great explanation.

I’m wondering, I know that some of the formal writing, like in journalism and in newspapers, I feel like there’s still kind of a struggle there for them.

Do you think that’s true?

I do.

Yes.

Many of the style guides haven’t caught up, and print is by nature conservative with a lowercase c,

Which is it persists in the old traditions and ways long after the spoken language has already changed and moved on.

Well, I suppose they avoid trends that way.

They’re waiting for something to stick for the long term.

That’s right. Exactly. They’re waiting for something to stick.

Yeah.

Jane, thank you for your call. We really appreciate it.

Oh, you’re welcome. Thank you.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

If you’re looking for a master list of these pronouns that have been proposed to be genderless, look for the word epicene, E-P-I-C-E-N-E.

Epicene, just look up epicene pronouns.

And I believe Dennis Barron, who goes by Dr. Language, has a master list of these.

And there’s a lot of them.

And you’ve heard of almost none of them because most of them don’t stick.

877-929-9673.

Political commentator Molly Ivins was always good for a turn of phrase from her native Texas.

She called the state legislature there the finest free entertainment in Texas.

And one expression that she introduced me to is that when you have a colleague who’s just sort of spacing out or something,

Then they suddenly become invigorated, she would say, who put Tabasco sauce in his oatmeal?

There we go.

Yeah, I can see that.

Right.

And you know what?

Tabasco sauce in oatmeal is a thing in certain parts of the country.

I did not know that.

Well, aren’t there parts of the country where they put hot sauce on everything?

I guess, yeah, I guess that would be Texas, wouldn’t it?

I went to a diner in Nevada and I ordered just a typical, you know, egg and sausage breakfast.

And the woman said, you want hot sauce?

And kind of this way that met my answer was yes.

So I took it but didn’t use it.

But in your oatmeal?

No, not in my oatmeal.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, this is Linda Taylor from Houston, Texas.

Hi, Linda.

Welcome to the show.

So I listen to you so often, and I hear you refer to dictionaries all the time in your research and your answers.

And I got to thinking, how many dictionaries are there in existence?

You know, why are there so many English dictionaries?

And what are the differences?

So I thought I’d call Grant, and I saw in your biography that you’re a member of the Dictionary Society of North America.

That’s right, yeah.

So what better source to ask this question?

What better source?

And he’s a dictionary editor with lots of lexicographical experience.

Yes.

The Dictionary Society of North America has been a really important part of educating me about things linguistic and lexical.

And a lot of what I bring to the show, I learned from my colleagues in the Dictionary Society and the works that they’ve produced and the books that they’ve written.

So you’ve asked a really important question because a lot of people in their minds, they say, oh, they look it up in the dictionary.

They talk about the dictionary as if there’s just one giant monolithic work.

And there isn’t.

Just like everything else in life, there are a lot of different ways to do dictionary work.

And there’s different attitudes that you can have going in.

For example, there’s the mainstream dictionaries that might be used by students.

Or there’s dictionaries that might be used by learners of English, the ESL dictionaries or the ELT dictionaries.

And there’s specialty dictionaries, which are really kind of more about getting something on the record for the small number of people that will use it.

Like, for example, I have a Sicilian dictionary, which was a self-published work.

And there aren’t that many copies of it.

And this guy felt that he needed to put the Sicilian language that he knew in print.

And there we go.

So there’s all these different goals.

But I should say, let’s kind of restrict it to talking about the mainstream dictionaries.

They’re different because not only because of the attitudes that they have going in,

But they’re different because they have different inclusion policies.

So, for example, a dictionary that’s a collegiate dictionary targeted at college students

Is really going to start thinking about what is being studied in college.

They’re going to study physics and science and economics and agriculture and the humanities and that sort of stuff.

And so let’s include a bunch of those words.

Whereas a dictionary that’s a general purpose dictionary also has to throw in and say, oh, here’s the rare words used by Dickens and the rare words used by Jane Austen and the rare words used in Shakespeare and that sort of thing as well.

So we’re going to throw them in there because they once appeared in a really important work in English.

And we need to have them just in case somebody wants to look them up.

So anyway, the short version is these dictionaries all have a goal,

And you can’t treat dictionaries alike.

Merriam-Webster isn’t like the Oxford dictionaries,

And they’re not like the Cambridge dictionaries or the Collins dictionaries,

The Macmillan dictionaries, the American Heritage dictionaries.

Because they have different approaches and emphases.

They have different approaches, yeah.

They have different audiences, or they come from a different perspective.

I never knew that. Interesting.

I usually, and you’ll see this on our website, we have a reference section,

Which has a much longer version of what I’m saying here.

If you just kind of look in the menu at the top of our website to resources and go down to reference works,

You’ll see in there that I recommend, and I say this every time I talk about dictionaries at length,

That you have two dictionaries, either on your computer or in your home.

Because you need to be able to compare entries side by side.

Because the other thing about dictionaries is final as they look and as complete as they seem to be,

They’re often very far behind.

They can be 10, 20, 30 years behind.

And even if they put a new edition out, that doesn’t mean that every entry got a refreshing new examination and new citations put in.

Sometimes those entries are 100 years old and they’ve barely been touched.

Linda, do you own dictionaries yourself?

You know, Martha, I’ve gotten lazy and I use the computer.

It’s just easy to just go online and pull up dictionary and put in a word.

Or onelook.com, too.

You can look at a lot of dictionaries that way.

Absolutely.

But I do subscribe to several, you know, word of the days.

And, you know, I’m just a word nerd.

Excellent.

You know, Linda, there’s nothing wrong with using online dictionaries.

They’re not somehow inherently weaker or less than a paper dictionary.

And, in fact, if you go to Merriam-Webster’s site, they update their online content far more often than they do their paper content.

And so you’re going to get fresh new stuff.

Right.

And Merrim-Webster and American Heritage both will do things online that they can’t do on paper because they have a ton more room.

Oxford does the exact same thing, just a lot more space.

So they can do things like put in more illustrations or more citations.

Audio pronunciations.

More audio pronunciations, not even just in the format.

Exactly. That’s another feature that I do like about the online dictionaries, pronunciation.

Linda, you’re one of us. Take care.

Thank you so much. It was just a pleasure talking to you both.

Thank you so much.

I really appreciate it.

Thanks a lot. Bye-bye.

Thank you. Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Tyler from Tallahassee, Florida.

How are you guys doing?

Excellent, Tyler. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Tyler?

So, yeah, I was just calling because I’ve been growing my current beard now for about two years.

And I’ve had facial hair since I was about 15 or 16, and I’m 28 now.

So it’s been quite a while.

And I’ve heard quite a few expressions about my beard.

Most of them are pretty cliche and involve lumberjacks or, you know, pitchers from baseball teams.

But a few days ago, I was getting a coffee at my local coffee shop,

And the barista complimented me on my man lettuce.

He said, you have really nice man lettuce.

And, you know, I stopped for a second because I’ve never heard that one and never heard anything close to it.

So I was hoping you guys might be able to let me know where that comes from.

Man lettuce.

I’ve never heard man lettuce, but if you’re growing a magnificent beard, I could see how somebody might call it that.

My beard doesn’t look like a head of lettuce, but it looks like, you know, maybe a bunch of shredded lettuce put onto my face.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, give us a picture here.

What color is it?

So my beard, it’s got variation in color.

It’s a medium brown up to a light brown.

And, you know, I’d say from the mustache down straight down to my chin is lighter,

And it gets darker as you get closer to my ears.

Okay.

Okay.

So this sounds pretty big.

But it’s not green.

Yeah, no, no, definitely not green.

But, yeah, yeah, pretty long.

I’ve been growing it for two years.

If I were wearing a tie, you wouldn’t be able to see the knot.

So I guess that can give you an idea.

Okay.

All right.

You know what?

I have never heard the term man lettuce.

Neither me.

No.

When I forget to shave my legs, maybe that’s Lady Parsley.

I don’t know.

So it sounds like you just were teased by something unique to this barista.

Yeah.

A very creative one.

Yeah, yeah.

He said that he has heard it from his brother-in-law,

Has said it on a couple of occasions.

Okay.

That’s all I know about it.

Well, you’re in Florida.

Nobody’s compared it to Spanish moss?

No, but that would seem to make sense.

Yeah, not quite lettuce.

Have you guys heard that one before?

No.

No.

I just made that up.

You know, the only other thing I can tell you about beards, I mean, Grant has one, so maybe he can talk about beards.

I am barbigorous.

Barbigorous.

That’s nice.

I was going to say you’re Pogonophorous.

Oh, nice.

Pogonophorous.

Yeah, yeah.

The Greek word for beard is pogon.

And so you see a lot of words.

If you start looking in the dictionary, you see Pogonophobia, which is the fear of beards,

Or Pogonophilia, which is, you know, loving beards,

Or Pogonotomy is what you get when you go to the barber or trim your own beard.

You get a beard cutting.

I probably should have said barbidurous.

I believe it’s a joke.

Barbidurous.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s taking it in another direction there.

But yeah, so pogon is the Greek word for beard. That’s interesting.

Yeah, yeah. So there are lots of words related to that.

Well, Tyler, you’ve now shared man lettuce with the world.

That’s an opportunity for people to add that to their own vocabularies.

God help them. We’ll see how it goes.

Take care now. Thanks for calling.

All right. All right. Thank you.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

I’m sure you have a word for beard that we haven’t heard yet.

Let us know about it.

877-929-9673.

Somebody told me she had a dream about a bed and a person she knows shot out of the bottom of the bed like one of those things in an auto mechanics garage.

Oh, the trolley or whatever they call it.

Yeah.

There’s a name for that.

Well, that’s where I was going with that.

You have the name.

She said, what is that called?

I didn’t know, but we did some digging.

It’s called a creeper.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

A mechanic’s creeper.

I did know that, yeah.

Who knew?

So you lie flat on your back and you slide under the vehicle to work on it.

Yeah, it’s a creeper.

That’s cool.

877-929-9673.

Want more A Way with Words?

Listen to years of past episodes at waywordradio.org

Or find the show on any podcast app or on iTunes.

Our toll-free line is always open,

So leave us a message at 877-929-9673 and we’ll take a listen.

We’d love to get your messages at words@waywordradio.org

Or hit us up on Twitter @wayword and look for us on Facebook.

This program would not be possible without you.

Grant and I are out to change the way we listen and think about language,

And you’re making it happen.

Thanks also to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director and editor Tim Felten,

Director Colin Tedeschi, and production assistant Emma Kelman in San Diego.

In New York, we thank quiz guide John Chaneski

And that master of keeping it real, Paul Ruist at Argo Studios.

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

From the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, I’m Martha Barnette.

And I’m Grant Barrett.

So long.

Bye-bye.