Had the Radish (episode #1527)

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 want to tell you the tale of two towns. They’re in the deep south, and they both have something unusual in common.

One of them is Remlap, which is in Alabama. It’s just north of Birmingham.

And the other is Treblok, and that is in Mississippi, just south of Tupelo.

And the reason that they have something in common is the fact that these names are formed by spelling other words backwards.

So Palmer and Colbert are Colbert.

Yes. Yes.

There’s something about that word Remlap that immediately makes you think that it’s a word backwards.

Right. Or something out of a science fiction novel or something.

But, yeah, these terms are called anonyms.

A-N-A-N-Y-M-S. Anonyms.

And that’s a special kind of anagram that forms a name because you’re taking a word and spelling it backwards.

So Remlap and Treblok.

Remlap and Treblok.

And they’re where?

Remlap is in Alabama and Treblok is in Mississippi.

And in fact, in Kentucky, my home state, the town of Combs, C-O-M-B, used to be called Lennut.

Lennut.

L-E-N-N-U-T.

Tunnel?

It was near a tunnel.

Oh.

Okay, sure.

And then they changed the name.

That’s outstanding.

You know, for a while, my siblings and I, I had four siblings, we would say our names backward.

And mine actually kind of works.

Tanarg.

Oh, yeah?

Yeah.

Yeah, I’m Athram Edenrab.

That’s not bad.

That’s not bad.

Tanarg to Rab.

That’s me.

I’ll share another anonym later in the show.

And in the meantime, we’d love to hear from you about any aspect of language whatsoever.

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

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, Martha.

This is Donna.

I’m calling from Ithaca, New York.

Excellent.

Well, welcome, Donna.

What can we do for you?

So I have a very interesting phrase that I’ve used.

For many years, I’ve been saying to my family, I’ve had the radish.

And I use it when I become frustrated with a project or with someone and I need to walk away from it.

I don’t remember any of my family members ever using this phrase when I was growing up outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

But every time I say it, everybody always kind of smiles at me because it’s kind of recognized as my go-to remark.

And I’m just interested in hearing from you and knowing when you think when and where I might have picked it up.

So when you say, I’ve had the radish, you’re just absolutely, what, frustrated, exhausted?

Frustrated, walking away.

Yeah.

I’m working on a project and it just isn’t working for me and I’m not going to complete it.

I’ll kind of throw my hands up and say, I’ve had the radish.

Got it.

And have you used this your whole life or since you got to Ithaca?

I don’t ever remember using it growing up in Massachusetts.

So, yes, I’ve used it here in New York for the entire time that I’ve lived here.

I will tell you, and now in Ithaca, for the people who don’t know,

Position it in the state of New York first.

It’s to the east, right?

It’s upstate.

Upstate, but to the east upstate, right?

To the west upstate, central, kind of south of Syracuse.

Okay, gotcha.

Finger Lakes. It’s in the Finger Lakes.

Finger Lakes, okay.

The reason I ask is because it’s a little far out from the center of where we know lots of people actually say,

I’ve had the radish, and that’s in Vermont.

We do find some instances of people using it, of course, in New Hampshire and eastern New York,

Which is why I was trying to pin that down.

So it’s not your expression alone.

It is something, but it really belongs to that part of the country, though.

It doesn’t exist outside that, outside that area.

That’s very interesting because after I graduated from college, I lived in Vermont for five years before moving to Ithaca, New York.

That makes that makes that clicks for me.

So you will find this expression.

I’ve had the radish pop up in New England.

But Vermont is the it’s known to be the home for it.

It’s almost what I would call a chamber of commerce word, which is people from Vermont know that they say this expression and they’re rather proud of it.

So as to the origins of it, there are some theories floating around that I give no quarter to.

But the one that is most likely, the one that any etymologist would prefer,

Is that it comes from a French expression.

And the French expression is n’avoir plus un radis,

Which means to not have a radish any longer or to not have a radish.

Or je n’ai plus un radis.

I don’t have a radish.

And I know that it’s the opposite of I’ve had the radish.

But the thinking is in the French expression, which means I’m broke.

I don’t have any money.

I’m exhausted. My funds are exhausted. My resources are depleted.

There’s a flip there because not only do you not have a radish, you ate the radish,

Or the radish is already gone that you did have.

So it’s an extension of the French expression, I believe, and as do other people who’ve looked into this term.

Very interesting, Grant. Well, that solves the mystery,

And I probably picked it up in those few years in Vermont.

The other part of this that makes me think that it comes to French,

Besides the proximity of Vermont to French-speaking Canada,

Is there’s also a French expression,

Which is tenir sans radis,

Which means to have one’s radish.

And that means you fight or defend something vigorously.

And if you’ve had the radish,

It means you are no longer capable

Of defending or fighting vigorously.

You’re done with the battle,

Which is why I’ve had the radish to mean,

I’m finished, I’m done, I’m tired, I’m exhausted,

I’m sick of this.

That makes perfect sense to me.

I can see the logical progression between the French into the English.

Good. Well, you’ve solved the mystery for me.

Excellent. Thank you so much for your call. We really appreciate it.

Thank you.

All right. Take care.

Bye-bye.

So the quibble I might have with that argument is,

How does it go from meaning I’m broke, I have no money, to meaning I’m exhausted?

And that’s just because we have these similar verbs in both languages, French and English,

Where to be depleted could be resources, like money, or it could be energy, or interest even, or ambition.

Sure. It makes sense to me.

Yeah. It’s both talking about a kind of depletion.

Yeah. I’ve had it.

Yeah. I’m done. I’m exhausted.

Yeah. Done-ski. 877-929-9673.

We had a conversation a few weeks ago about how you talk about your age once you start getting up there.

How do you describe how old you are?

And euphemistic ways to say it.

And people suggested 50 plus or I’m a member of the 600 month club.

You remember that one?

Or I’m 29 plus shipping and handling, that kind of thing.

We got a voicemail from Gene Terriak in Greenwood, Indiana, who said that his mother-in-law used to say, I’m at that cute age.

And so he and his wife have started using that as well.

I’m at that cute age.

Right.

You don’t have to give an answer.

Nobody needs the number.

They just need to know that you feel good about yourself right now.

Right, right.

You’re used to using that about little kids, right?

Six or seven or two or three.

They’re at that cute age.

But, yeah, I’m at that cute age.

That works for any decade.

Right.

You can be at that cute age anytime.

Talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Good morning.

This is Eleni Wagner, and I’m from Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin.

Welcome, Eleni.

What can we do for you?

Well, I have a friend who refers to me as being a clothes horse.

And where I grew up, that was not a compliment.

She means it as a compliment.

And where she grew up, it meant somebody who could wear clothes well or dressed well.

Where I grew up, if you referred to someone as being a clothes horse, it was not exactly derogatory, but it was like, well, they spend a lot of money on clothes.

They’re kind of obsessed about clothing all the time.

My friend is from Pennsylvania, and I’m from Wisconsin, so I don’t know if that’s part of the difference.

Did you take great offense when she said that, or is it just a little subtle thing?

Kind of like one of those little jabs, you know?

And I’m like, oh, wait a minute.

So I finally said something, and she said, well, I mean that as a compliment.

Where I come from, that’s a compliment.

And I’m like, so I always, every time she does that, I kind of take a deep breath, and it’s like, okay.

She means that you wear the clothes well, that you look nice, and you wear nice clothes, right?

Right.

Yeah, you’re stylish.

I’ve seen it as positive, but by far and away, it’s usually negative.

Throughout the history of the figurative use of clothes horse.

It’s almost always poking fun at somebody for spending too much time and money on their appearance.

Well, and that’s how I always took it.

Yeah.

But we do find off and on throughout history it’s kind of neutral.

Because there are circles of people where spending a lot of time and money on your appearance is a good thing.

It is the way that you were meant to present yourself to the world, particularly for women.

There’s parts of our culture where even now, that’s the thing that you do.

You spend money on clothes, so maybe they wouldn’t see clothes horses derogatory.

It just meant that you looked nice, you dressed nice.

They hang nicely upon your frame.

And you know what a clothes horse is, right, originally?

No, I don’t.

Oh, okay.

This is a drying rack for clothes.

This is kind of a frame, a frame that you wash your clothes by hand, perhaps,

And then you hang them on the frame so that there are no creases or knobs or bumps in the wrong places,

So they drive flat or drive straight.

Was it in the shape of a horse, and that’s how that came about, or what?

Roughly. It’s got four legs. It’s kind of like a sawhorse.

You know, it’s got four legs and roughly like a backbone or a spine,

And there are a variety of different shapes for these,

But generally they sit on the ground on four legs.

Yeah, it sort of has that same function as a horse.

When you think about draping a blanket over a horse.

Very good, yeah.

You know, our word easel has the same idea in it.

Comes from a Dutch word that means donkey.

Oh, easy.

Because it bears the weight of the painting.

Okay.

Yeah, I’ve always had a sense of clothes horses being a little bit,

Just like you put a little bit too much emphasis on clothing.

You know, it’s not just wearing your clothes.

It’s showing them off.

Okay.

Well, like I say, every time she says that, I’m like, okay.

She means it as a compliment.

Because I don’t think of myself that way.

Yeah, but it sounds like she was using it admiringly.

So if she’s a true friend and not a frenemy,

Take her word for it and just accept it as a compliment.

And I’m working on that.

Eleni, thank you for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Oh, thank you so much.

All right, take care.

Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

We were talking earlier about the word radish,

And as a matter of fact,

I was talking about the word radish over sushi.

The other night with some friends. It goes all the way back to the Latin word radix, which means

Root. And the stem of that word is R-A-D-I-C, which is the root of a lot of other cool words,

Like, for example, radical. If you’re radical, you have this fundamental, something really

Fundamental about you. Or if you talk about the square root of, say, four, that’s radical four,

Which is two, right, in mathematics.

And another word that’s related to that whole linguistic family is eradicate.

If you eradicate something, you pull it up by the roots.

Oh, nice. I hadn’t thought of that.

So if I’m skating really well on my skateboard and I say,

That was radical, it goes back to having good roots? No.

It’s gone a ways. It’s taken a journey since then.

Taken a journey. English will do that.

English is rad.

Come take a journey with us, 877-929-9673.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And joining us on the line from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hey, John.

Hey, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey, bud.

Hey.

So, you know, we did a quiz on Aussie slang a little while ago, and it inspired me to look at kangaroos.

Specifically, that particular form of recreational linguistics known as a kangaroo word.

Are you familiar with those?

Is it a word tucked in another word, like a kangaroo pouch?

Sort of, yeah.

Very much so.

A kangaroo word is a word that contains within it a synonym of itself.

Oh.

Right.

Now, the letters might be all together, such as in the word alone, which contains the word lone.

But that’s, you know, low-hanging mangoes for serious word players like us.

A better one is the word devilish, which contains the word…

Evil.

Evil, yes. Very good.

Now, what I like even more is a kangaroo word in which the letters are in order, but they’re not together,

Such as the word curtail, which contains the word… Anyone?

Cut.

Cut, yes, C-U-T right there.

So now you know how a kangaroo word works.

So we’re going to work with just those kangaroo words

Where the letters are in order, but they’re not together.

Let’s see if you can tell me the Joey words,

That’s what they’re called,

Inside each of the following kangaroo words.

You might need a paper and pencil for this one.

It’ll help.

Ready? Here we go.

The first word is respite.

Rest.

Rest, yeah, that was pretty good.

Next one is observe.

C.

C.

C, yes, S-E-E.

Very good.

Let’s try honorable.

Able?

No.

No.

Honorable?

Noble.

Honorable.

What’s that?

Noble.

Oh, right.

Noble, yes.

Very good, Grant.

Let’s try this one.

Destruction.

Destruction.

Yeah.

Ruin.

Ruin is correct.

Yes, very good.

I keep trying to work with that C.

This one might be a little challenging, too.

It’s another three-letter word you’re looking for.

The kangaroo word is substandard.

Substandard.

Good gravy.

Bad.

Bad is right.

Oh, good.

I was just sitting here looking at the word,

And I just realized the word sad could also be substantive.

Sure, yeah.

That’s pretty fine, too.

Yeah, those are called twin kangaroo words with two Joey’s.

Oh, how cute.

Let’s try the word strives.

Strives.

Tries.

Strives.

Strives.

Tries.

Tries, yes.

Very good.

I actually like this one very much.

The word prematurely.

Prematurely.

Early.

Early is correct.

Yes, very good.

That’s great.

I have a lot of friends who collect different kinds of wordplay,

And I encourage, that is urge you, to leave the real kangaroos alone

And collect your own set of kangaroo words.

So hop to it, everyone.

Thanks, John.

We’ll talk to you next week.

Take care of yourself.

Well, you know, we are interested in bending your brain.

If you’ve got a question, we’ve got answers, 877-929-9673.

Or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lisa calling from North Carolina.

Well, hello, Lisa.

What can we do for you?

And where are you in North Carolina?

I am in Wilmington on the coast.

Lovely.

How can we help?

I am calling to ask about the phrase, who struck John?

My grandmother, who was born in 1905 in Baltimore, used this phrase when I was a child,

And I always thought it meant confusion, foolishness, or bad behavior.

If my friends and I were cutting up in the house, she would say,

We’re not going to have any who struck John in this house, and that meant be quiet and settle down.

At least that’s what we thought.

I was wondering where the phrase came from, if you knew, and if it’s just a black community thing,

Because one of my friends who grew up in North Carolina,

She said that she heard that phrase growing up as well.

Wow. There’s a lot here that I love.

One is I love the expression cutting up to mean fooling around

Or cutting a dido or messing about.

So traditionally, Who Struck John describes a situation

Where there’s a lot of blame to go around,

But nobody can really come to an agreement as to who is at fault.

You might find it in politics, for example.

So Who Struck John is about an argument that goes nowhere or a debate that has no end.

So I think what your grandmother, was your grandmother?

Yes.

I think what she was saying was, I don’t care who started it.

I don’t want to hear your arguments.

Just stop it.

It’s not necessarily a black community thing, although there’s no reason it couldn’t also be a part of that.

It dates at least to the early 1900s.

But there’s really two curious things about it.

It had a resurgence in the 1950s after World War II.

When kind of modern American politics really got started, and these big national debates that we’re still fighting now started to happen. And there was a newspaper columnist by the name of Jimmy Cannon, who had a book published in 1956 that used the title Who Struck John? And he apparently was very fond of the term. So you’ll find, if you look in newspaper databases, you’ll just find Who Struck John everywhere, even when they don’t mention his particular book.

But earlier than that, the interesting thing is, before Who Struck John, people didn’t say Who Struck John. They said, Who Struck Billy Patterson?

And we don’t know who John was, and we don’t know who Billy Patterson was, although there’s been a lot of speculation that I won’t go into.

But the Billy Patterson version of the saying, exactly the same meaning, like a lot of debate, a lot of argument that can never be resolved, dates to the 1840s.

And that, by the way, probably comes from a minstrel song that was sung on stage by black performers.

I don’t have that song with me, but apparently in the song, somebody is trying to get to the bottom of who hit his brother.

And so the whole thing is this never-ending, unanswerable question about who hit his brother.

And it’s a comic piece, apparently.

So anyway, so it goes back quite a ways.

Again, I don’t know why it switched to John in the early 1900s, but there’s a serious, like, definitely a bridge between these two expressions, Who Struck Billy Patterson and Who Struck John.

They’re used in exactly the same way, just the name changed.

Lisa, what do you think of that?

I am surprised and shocked.

Glad to know that there is a historic grounding in that phrase, which was just so common when I was growing up.

So you were cutting up a lot?

Is that what you’re telling us?

No, not quite.

I kind of thought it was a euphemism for a curse word, MFS.

Since it flows kind of rhythmically, a lot of Who Struck John, a lot of MFS.

I was wondering if it was a curse word, but I’m glad it was not a euphemism.

No.

I know that it has a historic basis.

Yeah, as far as we know, not a euphemism.

Okay.

Thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it, Lisa.

Thank you.

Y’all have a great day.

You too.

Take care.

Goodbye.

877-929-9673.

Here’s a lovely quotation that’s attributed to Sigmund Freud.

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

What was the context of that? Do you know?

Well, actually, I started doing some digging, and as lovely as that quote is, is not from Sigmund Freud.

It was some influencer last year on Instagram.

Well, yeah, and it’s on a lot of posters now.

Everywhere I go, I find a poet has been there before me.

I mean, it’s sort of lovely to think about Sigmund Freud thinking about human consciousness, and admitting that poets have been there long before he ever got there.

Or you could say it of yourself, but the Freud Museum in the UK has done some digging on this, and they say that he’s not on record as having said this, and it’s probably a corruption of another quote from him, which is, the poets and philosophers before me discovered the unconscious.

What I discovered was the scientific method by which the unconscious can be studied.

Yeah, that happens, right?

Inevitably, that quote will end up in the mouth of Shakespeare, Lincoln, or Einstein.

Right.

I know there’s another one that’s attributed to Freud.

Time spent with cats is never wasted.

Did he say that one?

No, he didn’t.

As a matter of fact, he wrote to a friend, I, as is well known, do not like cats.

He was much more of a dog person.

Oh, interesting.

But I still like the quotations.

Right.

Yeah, that’s a hard thing.

Just always fall in love with the quotation, but don’t pay attention to the attribution because they’re so often wrong.

Yeah, yeah. Visit Quote Investigator.

Oh, yeah. Quote Investigator. Great stuff.

877-929-9673.

Hello. You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

Hi, who’s this?

Thanks for taking my call.

Yeah, sure.

Oh, Richard White in Texas.

Richard, welcome to the show. How can we help?

Well, something that’s always puzzled me is one time I was visiting relatives up in Iowa, and there’s a town that we drove through with an unusual name.

And the name is What Cheer.

The two words, W-H-A-T-C-H-E-E-R, What Cheer.

What does that mean?

I’ve always puzzled over what that meant.

-huh.

And did you ask around?

Well, somebody was saying there in town that it had something to do with the Civil War, like a Civil War greeting or something, and I thought, that’s kind of a puzzle.

But that’s all I ever heard.

Yeah, well, what cheer has long been a friendly greeting for hundreds and hundreds of years.

What I find really interesting about it is the word cheer itself in English means simply an emotional state or disposition or mood or humor.

And so you can have sorry cheer, you can have dull cheer, you can have heavy cheer, or you can have wrathful cheer.

Those are all examples of words that have been used in connection with cheer.

So when you’re saying what cheer to somebody, you’re asking, how are you doing?

What kind of mood are you in?

And there are different stories floating around about why that particular expression was applied to a name in eastern Iowa.

There’s one story that goes that one of the early residents was originally from Providence, Rhode Island, and wanted to do something in honor of his hometown.

And apparently the expression what cheer was closely associated with Providence, Rhode Island.

And the idea that when European settlers came to that site in Rhode Island, they were greeted by Native Americans there who said, what cheer neetop, which means neetop in the Narragansett language means friend.

So it may have something to do with that, but that’s just one of the stories that’s floating around about why it’s called What Cheer.

And they literally were speaking English because they’d gotten it from other settlers, right?

So just to clarify, in the 1600s, Europeans landed in what is now Rhode Island.

The Native Americans greeted them with what cheer.

Somebody from Rhode Island moved to Iowa when they needed a name for the town.

He possibly suggested it, and then they used it.

Yes, that’s one of the stories floating around.

Now, the Civil War story, there’s not much to that because the expression is 400 years older than the Civil War, right?

So today we would say, how you doing?

Yeah, yeah, how you feeling?

How goes it?

Yeah, although I like What Cheer.

Well, thank you so much.

I just really enjoyed it.

That’s really amazing.

Well, you’re welcome.

Thanks for calling.

Call us again sometime.

Okay.

All right, bye-bye.

So there’s a Harry Potter connection I want to make.

What?

Have you seen the movies or read the books?

I’m reading them now.

So there’s a character named Tonks who can change her physical appearance, and she’s known for saying Whatcher, W-O-T-C-H-E-R.

And Whatcher is an abbreviated kind of abridged form of What Cheer, and it’s used in, sometimes it’s subscribed to the Cockneys or East London, but it’s generally kind of a middle or lower class greeting to say hello to somebody.

Yeah, W-O-T-C-H-E-R, right?

Yeah, so if you read Harry Potter and wondered about Watcher, it’s a form of Watchier.

Basically, how you doing?

How about that?

See, I didn’t know because I’m told I’m still a squib, whatever that means.

I don’t know what it means yet because I’m still working on book two.

Born to a magical family, but you don’t have powers.

Oh, is that it?

Oh.

A muggle is born to a non-magical family and doesn’t have powers.

I knew that about muggles, but I did not know that.

People keep telling me I’m a squib, and they wouldn’t tell me why.

And to plug this into literature in another place, Shakespeare used Wat Cheer in at least three of his plays.

So Wat Cheer has kind of been there in the Anglosphere for a very long time and pops up again and again.

You have to just connect to the pieces, as we always see on the show.

Every word has a story.

It leaves an imprint. There’s a spore.

Yep, and that’s a great one, and now I want to adopt that.

Watcher.

Watcher.

Might sound a little fake.

All right, I’ll finish the Harry Potter series first.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, I’m Margaret Young from Denton, Texas.

Hey, Margaret.

What’s up?

Okay, so I spent about 22 years in northern New Mexico.

I worked for a university there in Las Vegas, New Mexico.

And when I was working there, there’s three cities in northern New Mexico.

There’s Santa Fe, Las Vegas, and Taos, and it forms kind of a triangle.

And within that triangle, there are people there who speak Spanish or they grew up speaking Spanish but now speak English.

And so when they speak, you know, when we’re talking to them about everyday things, oftentimes they’ll say something like, oh, you know, I was going to go visit Joe last night, but I landed up visiting Sue instead.

So instead of using what we would normally hear somebody say, like I ended up going to here or there, they used the term landed.

And it’s pretty universal for people that grew up and live in that area.

It’s very common for the local people to say that.

Another thing they say is they’ll say, well, you know, let’s go. I need to get down off the car instead of saying I want to get out of the car.

And so those are two things that come to mind that I hear on a regular basis.

And I just wondered if you, you know, if this is something that’s just specific to northern New Mexico.

It seems to me that it might have something to do with sort of their ancestry and the fact that a lot of folks who live up there are descended from, over time, some of them are even descended from some of the conquistadors that came up through the south, you know, through Mexico and ended up in the Santa Fe area.

Yeah, there’s something to the heritage story there.

It’s just really about the language.

To deal with the car one first, just to be clear, they’re not climbing down off the hood of their Camaro when they’re talking about getting down off the car, right?

They’re opening the door and getting out of the seats.

Yes. Yes, they are.

Yeah, and do you ever spend any time in Louisiana?

No, I never have.

The reason I ask is because this happens actually in Louisiana as well, where they talked about getting down off a car or down out of a car, because both French and Spanish have a verb which directly translates into English as to get down off of or to come down out of a thing.

So in Spanish, you might say bajar del carro or bajar del coche, meaning get down out of the car.

And in French, the verb is descendre, which means to get down out of.

And so this expression is what we call a calque, C-A-L-Q-U-E.

It’s a literal word-for-word translation from language A into language B.

It is, I do know that it exists very commonly in the Southwest in places that have a Spanish-speaking heritage.

So it’s more about the language heritage than the cultural heritage.

And it also exists in Louisiana independently, and they came up separately.

As for the other one, landed up in, I know that New Mexicans often talk about as a landed up in, meaning to end up in a place as if it’s theirs, but it’s actually very widespread.

It’s common throughout the United Kingdom. It’s used here and there throughout the United States.

It might be a little more common in New Mexico, but it isn’t particularly New Mexican at all to say landed up in.

This is a mix, obviously, of to end up in a place or to land in a place, meaning to arrive in a place.

So more than likely, it keeps being reinvented.

It’s a really, I could see that happening over and over again, and it might become fixed in the local language.

You’ll find it in Irish novels. You’ll find it in BBC commenters talking about it.

You’ll find it in forum threads from Australia.

So it’s not just that one part of the English-speaking world.

I can almost picture somebody landing up on shore, you know, washing up on shore like that.

But it’s also logical to land up at a place, right? To mean that you, that’s where you fixed your flag, right?

Yeah, I landed somewhere.

But, you know, it’s just, for me anyway, I had never heard it before.

So it was just, it was kind of unique to the people that I knew in northern New Mexico.

Well, like I said, I think it might be a little more common there.

And I know they certainly, when you see a list of New Mexican slang that people have put together, it sometimes shows up on those lists.

So they do believe that it’s theirs, and sometimes that’s enough to make it a local thing.

Thank you. I didn’t know there was a list of New Mexican slang.

Oh, yeah. Google it, New Mexican slang.

You’ll find wonderful things out there.

Also look for burqueño slang, the slang of Albuquerque.

Oh, yeah, from Albuquerque.

Yeah.

Right.

Margaret, thank you so much for calling.

Thank you so much.

I appreciate it.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

So the landed up isn’t from Spanish, for example.

No, the landed up isn’t from Spanish.

The landed up is just a normal mixing of two idioms in English to come up with a new one.

And, by the way, if you want to learn some more of that burqueño slang, just look for it on our website.

If there’s a word or phrase that’s puzzled you, we’d love to hear about it.

You can call us at 877-929-9673 or send your questions and comments in email to words@waywordradio.org.

More about what we say and why we say it.

Stay tuned to A Way with Words.

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

And speaking of Martha, I was always pretty comfortable with my name.

But I remember really clearly the first time I looked up the meaning of my name in one of those baby name books.

And it said that the name Martha means ladylike.

I was horrified. I mean, it comes from an Aramaic word that means lady or housekeeper, because the story of Martha and Mary in the Bible is about Martha being industrious and very domestic.

And so I was horrified to see that my name meant ladylike because I was a tomboy and climbing trees and playing touch football with the guys in my neighborhood.

But my mother told me that it was an old fashioned name and that it was going to come back in style someday.

And when I was born, it was the 63rd most popular name in the country.

And now it’s about the 750th.

So I’m still waiting for it to come back.

But she mollified me.

I never really had much of a desire to change my own name.

Did you?

I never wanted to change my name.

I was always pleased that it was fairly uncommon.

It was never really all that common.

It kind of peaked in the 90s and kind of slid down a little bit.

But I never really wanted to change.

I never cared very much.

I don’t even feel particular attraction to it.

It’s just who I am.

It’s my name.

It’s just a label, really.

But I’ve known people.

There was a boy in the fifth or sixth grade whose name was Steve.

And one day he came to school and said, I want you to call me Jack.

And he decided and his mom had decided that they were going to call him Jack.

He said something about his mom, said he looked like Jack Kennedy.

And I think there might have been more to the story.

But it’s odd when somebody changes their first name around you.

And you have to start and restart and just kind of catch yourself saying, and when you should be saying Jack, right?

Just interrupt that first old word.

Yeah, I have a friend who recently tried on a different name because she had some trauma associated with her original name.

And she tried on this other name and people were really supportive of her.

But after a few weeks, she just decided I had to try it on to know that it didn’t fit.

That exercise actually made her go back to her original name and her memory of herself before that trauma occurred.

I knew somebody who worked in advertising with me, and her name was Polly until she decided to call herself something else.

She felt that she wasn’t being taken seriously as a Polly, P-O-L-L-Y.

And so she changed to something a little more conservative, a little more traditional, but still exceptional in a way.

So something memorable and just not like every other name.

And I think it worked for her as far as I could tell.

And I don’t know that in that environment, in that particular office, she immediately got more respect.

But I’m betting that in her whole life to come, people treated her differently with a little more respect because she wasn’t called Polly.

And we, you and I know people in common who have changed their names because of gender issues.

And that’s a whole big deal.

And sometimes folks do try on their names to see what matches the person that they’re going to be, right?

This new place that they’re finding themselves.

We’d love to hear your thoughts about it.

Did you have a name that you decided to get rid of and replace with another one?

Or did somebody close to you change their name and you’re having problems with it?

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

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, good morning. My name is Marcos Cavuzzo, and I’m from San Diego, California.

Welcome.

What can we do for you?

I just had two questions today that are related to sports.

I’m an avid sports fan, and I’m also a personal trainer.

And one of the examples is when an announcer will use the word English in a sport, having a ball.

If a player puts an exaggerated spin on it to make it curve a certain way, they might say with some astoundment, wow, there was so much English on that.

And I was just wondering a little bit about the history of how that got started.

That’s a great one.

And so are we to understand that English on it means that it did something unusual?

Yes, an extra dramatic spin of some sort to make the ball go in an unusual way.

Right, yeah.

It comes from billiards or snooker or pool or other games like that are played on the felt tables with balls and cues, that sort of thing.

And it supposedly comes from the fact that the British players of snooker and games like that were the first to really understand how to use the spin of a cue ball in order to do new crazy things on the table.

And they brought it to the United States where we started calling that effect on a ball English after the English themselves.

Now, there are other theories that I think hold no water that you may find out there, but this is the most solid one that we have the most evidence for the furthest back.

All the other theories are new, and there are surmises that don’t really have evidence, so I won’t get into them.

But have you heard of body English as well?

No, I have not.

So body English is also sometimes when somebody contorts their body to do something extraordinary.

Thinking about somebody going up for a layup and in order to get around their opponents, they’ve got to twist and turn to kind of really put that ball in the basket.

That’s called body English.

But there’s another kind of body English that I really like, which is the one where you’ve already thrown the ball or the dart or whatever, and you’re waiting for it to do something, and you’re moving your body and your arms as if somehow you can control it from afar.

Oh, yeah, when you go bowling.

Yeah, you’re bowling and you’re like twisting your body to make the ball move.

That’s body English as well.

It doesn’t actually have any effect, but we all do it, don’t we?

Yes.

So that’s what we know about English, putting English on it.

So I was just wondering maybe it had to do with if English people were causing bad deals by spinning the truth or something like that.

No.

Do you find anything like that?

No, not at all.

It goes back to at least the mid-1800s, and it’s from the very earliest days.

It’s from billiards or snooker or pool or similar games.

Oh, okay.

Thank you.

And my other question is sports-related.

When an announcer will use the word mustard, if a player is receiving a pass and it has been thrown too hard where they cannot control it and they end up dropping the pass, either fumbling it or hitting it out of bounds, they will sometimes say there was a lot of mustard on that one.

Yeah.

What was that?

2016, I think we talked about that on the show.

You can look it up on our website, but the short version is to put the mustard on a ball means to add a little spice to it.

Think about spicy mustard and the little bite that it has, the tang, the oomph.

So it’s just really using the food metaphor to mean something sharp’s happening there, something really pungent and pointed.

Yeah, you’re not adding yogurt to it.

You’re adding mustard.

Yeah, mustard.

Yeah, I thought that it might have something to do with spice, but I was also wondering if there was any evidence for maybe in baseball, they’ve had different cases of pitchers using grease on the ball.

And I was thinking maybe like a dark brown granular mustard may have been used as a way to grease the ball sometimes.

I think once that ball ended up in the umpire’s hands that he would smell it, right?

Oh, yeah.

As far as I know, there’s no evidence for that.

The best source that we know for all baseball language is Paul Dixon’s Baseball Dictionary.

If you have that, he’s got a solid entry on mustard.

Okay.

So it was usually first used in baseball?

Yep.

Comes from baseball and it’s been used for many decades.

Okay.

Well, thank you very much.

Marco, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yeah.

Thank you so much.

I love your show.

Thank you.

Take care.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

I was pleased to see that Tennessee lawmakers have passed a resolution that states that Appalachian English is a fully legitimate dialect and most deserving of the respect afforded other dialects of American English.

Outstanding. I agree.

Yeah, I would like to see that same resolution passed by our friends in the Northeast and the Northwest.

Yeah, every dialect deserves that proclamation, right?

Yeah.

It’s easy to pick on the small dialects that aren’t part of the mainstream, but there’s no reason to.

Right. 877-929-9673.

Hello. Welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi. This is Amanda Hooper calling from Evansville, Indiana.

Well, hello, Amanda. Welcome to the show.

Hi, Amanda.

Thank you.

What’s up?

Thank you.

What can I do for you?

Well, I am calling with a question regarding a phrase my mother often used when I was a child.

But when I was growing up here in southwestern Indiana in the 1980s, my mother would, we’ll say, encourage my sisters and me to hurry.

Say, if we needed to leave the house for an appointment or finish a chore, she’d encourage us by telling us to hoop it up.

She’d say, hoop it up, girls, or Amanda, hoop it up, and then we’d know it was time to get moving.

And now it’s funny because my married name is now Hooper, and I use it with my own two kids nowadays.

But I’ve never heard anyone other than my mother use this phrase.

Of course, you hear it referencing basketball, but my family has not been involved in sports or specifically basketball.

And when I asked my mother about where she got it, she said her grandmother.

So my great-grandmother would use it in the same way toward my mother and her siblings.

And she’s not sure otherwise where it comes from.

And Amanda, you said that she used this expression, hoop it up, to quote-unquote encourage you all to get out of the house?

Yes.

Usually it came after kinder, more patient warnings.

Hurry up, girls. It’s almost time to go.

And then finally, when she was probably at her wits end, it was hoop it up, hoop it up.

-huh.

Yeah, that makes a whole lot of sense, really, because there’s a long tradition of urging people along by making noise.

That sounds like hoop or oop or something like that.

There’s the expression hoop it, which can mean to run away.

And if you’re hooped out of something, you’re driven out.

And hoop it up is another version of that.

It sure sounds like it.

Well, I had wondered if it was related somehow to maybe whoop it up, but she always said hoop.

So I was just curious about that history.

Yeah, they’re related for sure.

Some people do pronounce the H in hoop, like hooping cough, and some people don’t.

And so they’re actually the same.

They’re the same expression.

Hoop it up and whoop it up are the same.

Oh, really?

That’s funny because my husband, we tease, he often pronounces the H with the WH sound harder than I do.

So I tease him about that.

So I totally get that pronunciation difference now.

So Martha, am I remembering correctly?

This is related to the French houpla.

It’s H-O-U-P-L-A, right?

Which is a cry to dogs or something like that.

Yeah, motivation to the dogs hunting the animals.

But also it means excitement in English.

We borrowed it in the word hoopla in English.

Yeah.

So it’s a vigorous motion accompanied by noise that sounds pretty similar.

Well, excellent. That does a lot of clarifying for me.

And I just find it all so fascinating.

I’m a language teacher myself, so I love your show,

And I love learning about the history of words and phrases and their evolution.

So I’m so glad that you could answer this for me.

We’re glad to help.

Thank you, Amanda, so much.

Thank you.

All right, take care.

You too.

877-929-9673.

Someone with the Twitter handle Nun King said,

20 years ago, my friend Paul asked me,

What’s the word for a serving dish that’s shaped like the dish it’s going to serve?

I still don’t know the answer.

Wow.

Well, a pickle dish shaped like a pickle?

Yeah, or a fish plate that looks like a fish.

Or the turkey plate that has a turkey on it.

-huh.

Yeah.

Is there a name?

I am not aware of one.

This is one I thought I would throw out to our listeners because I’m not sure.

The only thing that I could see that was remotely like that is epimorph,

Which is defined as a hollow shell or mold left by a mineral that had overgrown an initial mineral,

Which is dissolved away.

That’s what somebody suggested, but it might just be a fish plate.

Fish plate.

Roly-poly fish plate.

It’s just a fish plate.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello, this is Mark Williams from Texas.

Where in Texas are you, Mark? It’s a big state.

Louisville, Texas.

Okay, Louisville. Welcome to the show, Mark. What can we do for you?

As a young man, cartoons used to only be on on Saturday morning.

And then sometimes a show on Sunday nights would show like Walt Disney cartoons.

There’s a lot of cartoons that they had like automobile gags and like old, old timey cars and just like driver safety kind of cartoons.

And every once in a while, someone would do something as a mistake.

And I guess another driver on the road near them would zoom past them and say, Sunday driver.

I always wondered what Sunday driver, what that meant and what that, where that originated from.

Because I would rather do that than some of the other gestures

And things that people shout in traffic.

That’s true. Those are pretty clear. We know what those mean.

Mark, you’ve been holding on to this question for a very long time.

There haven’t been regular Saturday morning cartoons for decades.

Yeah, yeah.

And unfortunately, a lot of the serials that were around at that time

Have gone out to pasture as well.

Yeah, but you’re bringing back memories for me because I can picture these cartoons where somebody, you know, the window’s down and they’ve got their arm out the window and they’re shaking their fist and they’re saying, Sunday, drive-a.

And the car is always chugging.

It’s always blowing a little too much smoke and steam, right?

And kind of bouncing like a jalopy.

Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, the melt blank sound effect, right?

That’s really good.

The horns that go, huh?

Like that.

The augas.

Yeah, and the expression Sunday driver is really pretty straightforward.

It’s those people who drive on Sundays, you know, not like the other working stiffs who are commuting to work.

So they only drive on Sundays or they drive like it’s Sunday.

Yeah, you know, just a leisurely, you know, sort of like Mr. Magood is kind of leisurely driving around.

And don’t necessarily have a destination like the rest of us.

There was a column in a set of newspapers back in 1928

Where a guy was complaining about the Sunday driver,

And they described him as,

The Sunday driver is he who gets razzed by all of us old veteran drivers on Sunday.

He doesn’t go out during the week to practice.

When he gets out into the heavy traffic on Sunday, he winds up in the ditch.

If he doesn’t chase other drivers there first.

And it just goes on and on and on complaining about these drivers.

And, of course, back in the 20s, you know, automobiles hadn’t been around all that long, you know,

And you’re still trying to figure out how to work them and not end up in the ditch.

But you’re connecting to the point that I think needs to be made, which is the term Sunday driver predates automobiles.

It comes from horse and carriage days.

Right.

The driver of a coach or the driver of a wagon could be called a Sunday driver because they spent six days a week on the farm and one day a week they drove to church or drove to town.

And just kind of moseyed there.

Yeah, kind of moseyed.

So you have like the banking stagecoach passing by the little house on the prairie buggy as they’re going in.

Yeah, we go. That’s it. Exactly right.

Yeah, and the idea of Sunday, too, has historically been associated with leisure, like a Sunday poet.

A Sunday golfer.

Yeah.

Somebody who just does it once in a while, but not as a pro or even as a way to get good at it.

Kind of like a weekend warrior, I guess, today.

You know, that person who goes out and exercises once a week.

Sunday sailor is another one, and I’ve seen Sunday architect.

Somebody who just dabbles in architecture, but doesn’t really know what they’re doing.

I guess I’m a Sunday cook.

Sunday cook, yeah.

Thank you for a really fun question.

I’m sure we’re going to ring a lot of bells out there and people are going to go, oh, yeah.

Top to bottom, starting with Saturday cartoons.

We all remember that one Sunday driver, don’t we?

Yes, that’s fantastic.

Thank you so much.

Take care now.

All righty.

Thanks for calling.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Thanks to senior producer Stefanie Levine, director Colin Tedeschi, editor Tim Felten, and production assistant Tamar Wittenberg.

You can send us a message, subscribe to the podcast, get the newsletter, or catch up on hundreds of past episodes at waywordradio.org.

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Who are changing the way the world talks about language.

We’re coming to you from the Recording Arts Center at Studio West in San Diego, California.

Thanks for listening. I’m Grant Barrett.

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

Bye.

Thank you.