Hair on Your Tongue (episode #1517)

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.

Norwegian.

Let’s talk about Norwegian.

We never talk about Norwegian.

We don’t, do we?

But let’s.

Okay.

We got an email from Zach Bressler, who’s originally from Omaha, Nebraska, but he’s studying in Norway as a doctoral student, and he’s picked up a lot of great Norwegian slang that I know you’re going to dig.

Yes, please.

One of the expressions translates as to be in the middle of the butter’s eye.

Be in the middle of the butter’s eye.

Butter as in the thing you spread on toast.

Mm—

Mm—

And it means to be in exactly the best possible spot.

And the idea there is that there’s a Norwegian rice pudding called a rysgrut or something like that.

Mm—

And traditionally, you put a spoon of butter in the middle, and it slightly melts before serving.

It sounds just perfect.

But if you’re in the middle of the butter’s eye, you’re in exactly the right place.

So the hole melted by the spoon is the butter’s eye?

Okay, nice.

Isn’t that just gorgeous?

And then this other one I really like is takforsist, which means thanks for the last time.

And it’s what you say to somebody you haven’t seen in a while, typically when you bump into them at a party or something similar.

Isn’t that an interesting greeting?

So just to say we’re now reconnecting and I remember you very fondly.

Yes.

We had such a wonderful occasion before.

Yes.

Thanks for the last time.

I mean, you can say it more casually than that, but what a great way to greet people, right?

What is it again?

Talk for Zist or Talk for Zist, depending on the dialect.

Oh, right.

Yes.

Thanks for the last time.

How lovely is that?

Do you have more?

I do.

And I want to share it later in the show.

Saving it for later.

Oh, I got to wait.

We have listeners from all over the world, and we have listeners who are living in countries that they didn’t grow up in, and they’re learning languages, and they’re learning slang, and new words, and local expressions, and a lot of it’s wonderful and colorful.

That’s what we want to hear from you.

Share your colorful foreign expressions that you learned in the field with us, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org, and you can talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hey, hey, how are you?

Excellent.

Who are we talking to?

This is Connie Bolin from Wasis, Florida.

Hi, Connie.

Welcome to the show.

Well, I have a question from way back when I was six years old.

My grandmother lived in Kennett, Missouri, down kind of in the south.

That’s where my people are from.

And she would come down to Panama City, Florida, every time that mother would have another baby, she would help.

Well, I’m the oldest of six, so I saw her quite a lot.

One day she was down there visiting, and she hollered out of the bathroom door for me to go get her step-ins.

So being six years old, I had no idea what that was.

I went to her room.

I looked in her suitcase.

I brought her back her bedroom slippers.

It’s the only thing I could think of that she could step in.

So my question is, what on earth is a step-in, and why did she use it to ask for her underwear?

She was a little confused.

Seriously.

You were confused.

But now step-ins, I don’t know that one, Martha.

I mean, it’s not something I ever heard or used.

No, I didn’t use it growing up, but it does give us a chance to talk about the history of underwear, doesn’t it?

What?

Okay.

Yeah, because you weren’t wrong, Connie, to bring her slippers because step-in has been used over the years to mean shoes.

But it also means underwear.

Okay.

And it has to do with the history of underwear and the fact that underwear that you step into is relatively recent in human history.

You think back to the 1840s and you had Amelia Jenks Bloomer who invented bloomers that she tried to popularize.

They were like panties that you step in or like little knickers that you step in.

But the term step-in as a term for underwear has only been around since the early 20th century or so.

And before that, a lot of times underwear didn’t have crotches.

It was sometimes just two pieces.

And so to have something that you step into, like a pair of shorts, is relatively new.

But there was something avoidant about that phrase as well, right?

It wasn’t panties.

It wasn’t underwear.

Well, sure, yeah, it’s a euphemism.

You were just trying to not specifically mention the unmentionable.

Right. Was she kind of prudish?

No, she was wild.

She was wild.

Being born in 1911, she was kind of crazy.

So I don’t know why she called it that.

Oh, okay.

I just want to say, I would never send someone else for my own underwear.

Regardless.

Well, I think she was in, you know, kind of halfway dressed.

Gotcha.

Out of the shower kind of thing.

She couldn’t go gallantin’ down the hallway.

Well, thanks.

That kind of vindicates my six-year-old self anyway.

Oh, absolutely.

Now I know, but she wasn’t completely crazy.

Yeah, neither one of you were.

I mean, you were right to look for shoes, but I can see why she asked for her step-ins.

Well, I’ll have to look it up and see if I can get a pair just for old time’s sake.

Thanks, Connie.

Take care now.

All right, thanks.

Bye-bye.

Thanks, Connie.

Bye-bye.

And I see here that occasionally they were referred to as pull-ons, not to be confused with pull-ups, which is a very different kind of undergarment.

Right.

And it’s funny because all of these about pulling up remind me of drawers, which is another name for underwear.

Oh, drawers.

It’s something to draw something up.

You’re pulling it up.

So there’s all these terms that have to do with the action of, it must be this very self-conscious action we do when we pull up the undergarment to cover ourselves.

Well, it also makes sense that, you know, there are pieces of clothing named for how you put them on.

Sure.

Like a pullover sweater, for example.

Yeah, absolutely.

A wraparound skirt.

Mm—

Actually, yeah.

Outstanding. Well, if you’ve got questions about underwear, Martha’s your lady.

877-929-9673. Tell us on Twitter. Don’t be embarrassed.

@wayword.

Hi. You have A Way with Words.

Hello. This is Jane McCarthy.

Where are you calling from, Jane?

Big Sky, Montana.

Oh, Big Sky.

Nice.

That sounds like a place I want to go.

It’s gorgeous. We love it.

Oh, nice. Well, welcome to the show. What can we do for you?

We have a daughter who is studying veterinary medicine.

And so she goes into the lab and she says, I have to do an experiment today.

And I say, Bridget, isn’t it experiment?

And she said, no, it’s experiment.

And my husband and I both called them experiments.

So I’m just wondering where she got this.

And her cohorts do the same thing.

So your daughter says, I’m going to exaggerate it here for a fact.

Your daughter says experiment and you say experiment.

Correct.

Okay, yeah.

Where did she get it from?

Well, that’s the way that it goes pretty much for all kids.

Around the ages of 10 to 13, they start shifting, and their influences become far more their friends and their cohort at school or after-school activities, that sort of thing, and far less of their parents.

Where they do continue to pick things up for their parents tends to be vocabulary, but not vowels or pronunciation, things like that.

Interesting.

Yeah, so I’m sure if they’re talking about it in class all day, the teacher’s talking about it, the students are talking about it, yeah.

Yes.

And what’s really interesting about this pronunciation of experiment is that it has been excoriated by some language mavens over the years.

But generally, it’s always been present, as far as we know, in American English.

You can find mentions of it as far back as the mid-1800s, where it’s usually put in the mouths of, like, uneducated rubes or foreigners speaking English.

But it has always been here.

And the thing is, there’s something like six different common pronunciations of the word in American English today and two major ones.

So it’s not a surprise that you differ because you come from different generations.

Well, I’ll have to watch and see if I can get her some more vocabulary.

You could settle on a third pronunciation, which is experiment.

Or a fourth one, trial.

Yeah, just call it trial.

Yes, and my husband calls it spearmint.

Spearmint, like the gum.

Yeah, just being silly.

All right, cool.

Thanks for calling, Jane.

We really appreciate it.

Well, thank you.

It was fun.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Take care.

Bye.

Bye, Jane.

So one of the ways the pronunciations of experiment differ is that first syllable.

So some people it’s experiment, and some people it’s experiment, and some people it’s experiment.

Experiment.

Wow.

It’s interesting, right?

So some people kind of skip the K sound.

They say experiment, which is kind of more of a childish pronunciation.

But they’re out there, and you can find them chronicled and recorded, and the linguists are looking at them and trying to figure out if there’s patterns there.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah.

And I’m sure if you’re saying it a whole lot, because that’s your work.

Yeah, and you’re going to say it like your peers, the people who are doing the same studies that you’re doing.

Absolutely.

877-929-9673.

In Norway, there’s a slang phrase that translates as, that’s totally Texas.

What?

And it means that’s so crazy.

Where? Why? Did they all watch Dallas back when Dallas mattered?

Well, apparently it’s the idea of the Wild West and gunslingers rooting tootin’.

Oh, I see.

You wouldn’t describe a person that way, but you’d describe a chaotic situation that way.

So we’re talking about like the old Western towns in movies where there’s no law and the one with the fastest gun wins.

Yeah, rip snortin’, just like the old Westerns.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hello.

Hi, who’s this?

This is Jeff Cooper.

Jeff, where are you calling us from?

Iron Mountain, Michigan.

Iron Mountain, Michigan.

All right.

Well, welcome to the show.

What can we do for you?

I was listening to your show for the first time, and I was driving in my car.

And so when you were talking about way with words, I came up with a word that I don’t have the meaning for.

It was called happenstance.

Okay.

How would you use it in a sentence?

I’ve used it in words or sentences before and say just for the happenstance, meaning, in other words, the occurrence, I thought.

But I’m not sure.

So I thought I’d come to you folks.

Yeah.

So it basically means by chance or by accident or just by the way or by coincidence, something like that.

It’s a combination of the two words happen and circumstance.

OK.

And so you can kind of get from those two words something that happened by circumstance and you get happenstance.

It comes from about the 1850s, and it’s a kind of elevated word, wouldn’t you say, Jeff?

So it’s not the kind of thing that you would write in a letter maybe to a friend,

But maybe more writes in something formal.

Truly, yeah, because it is a formal word.

Like you said, from 1850, I would probably guess it’s got a lot of history behind it.

Yeah, it actually had some competitors in the beginning, including happen chance,

Which didn’t catch on as well, and happen so, kind of a reduction of it so happens.

But happens, stance happened to be the word that won out.

Interesting.

Yeah, right?

We have a lot of quokalisms in the UP of Michigan,

And we have a Finnish community.

When I came to town in Marquette back in 1967,

And it was a greeting when you walked down the street

And you passed somebody and you wouldn’t be recognized,

They’d say,

How come you know Halomi when you know me so easy?

That’s melodious.

It’s like a little poem.

That’s wonderful.

One of those things that’s up here in the UP.

Jeff, welcome to the show.

We’re glad you caught us for the first time.

Thanks for listening, and we appreciate your call.

I will continue to listen to you, folks.

You’re very enjoyable and very entertaining.

Aw, thank you.

Okay, great.

Take care now.

Bye now.

Bye, Jeff.

If you happen to have a language question, perchance, give us a call, 877-929-9673,

Or send an email to words@waywordradio.org.

This show is about language examined through family, history, and culture.

Stay with us.

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 from New York City is our quiz guy, John Chaneski.

Hi, John.

Hi, Martha.

Hi, Grant.

Hey, bud.

So, you know, every time you turn around, there’s a quiz that goes something like,

Hey, did you know that in the U.K. a diaper is called a nappy?

In the UK, they call it truck a lorry.

But, you know, another country that calls Elizabeth II their monarch,

Which is also the oldest, flattest, driest continent that is the country, is Australia.

And Australia has a rich slang all its own.

So shall we do a quiz on Aussie slang?

Oh, boy. Okay. Let’s try it out.

What do you think?

Now, I have to warn you, I will occasionally probably drop into a very awful Aussie

And or New Zealand slash English British accent.

So just you can hold me to that.

It’s okay.

Now, in New York, this is a Bronx cheer.

But an Aussie salute is when you wave your hand in the air to what end?

To get someone’s attention.

Not to get someone’s attention.

Order a beer.

Not to order a beer.

That’s a very good reason to wave your hand in the air.

To complain about the cricket match.

Think more about being way out in the outback and you’ve got to wave your hand around in the air.

To catch a swat a fly?

Yes, to shoo away flies is known as an Aussie salute.

Gotcha.

Now, it’s a wonder why J.K. Rowling would name non-lazy sporting equipment after a lazy person.

But the Aussie term for a lazy person shares its name with a heavy iron ball that flies around attempting to knock players off their brooms in the game of Quidditch.

Do you know what it is?

The heavy iron ball.

It’s a bludger.

It is a bludger, yes.

So a lazy person in Australia is a bludger.

And if you’re living off the state, they call you a dull bludger.

Dull bludger, okay.

Because you’re a dull bludger.

Now, I guess a country completely surrounded by ocean with a desert and wilderness in the middle would have a lot of beach slang.

If a man is wearing bathers that leave nothing to the imagination, an Aussie might say that they’re smuggling what small parakeet native to Australia?

Budgie smugglers.

Budgie smugglers.

Budger-a-ga.

No, no.

Buggger-a-ga.

In the Australian world is grape smugglers.

Grape smugglers.

I’ve heard those too, yeah.

Aussie slang for just about any regular Australian bloke is what relatively common man’s name?

Bruce.

Bruce.

Bruce is right.

Change the first letter of the UK slang for diaper that I mentioned earlier, and you’ll

Get modern Aussie slang for portable computer.

Nappy and lappy.

Lappy.

Lappy.

Yes.

You know, you can check your facey on your lappy.

That’s what they call Facebook.

They call it facey.

Whoop whoop means one thing to a Three Stooges fan.

It means Curly is excited.

But if an Aussie says you live in whoop whoop, what does that mean?

It’s a town way, way, way out.

Any place way out in the middle of nowhere.

Yeah.

Oh, he lives way out in whoop whoop.

Yeah, whoop whoop.

If an Aussie offers you their brekkie, what might you do with it?

Eat it.

It’s breakfast.

Eat it.

It is breakfast, yes.

You guys are all set for your trip down under.

There you go.

Absolutely.

Thanks, guys.

I’ll see you next time.

Thanks, John.

Thanks.

Bye-bye.

You know, we do goof around about language,

And we welcome our Australian listeners and everyone else around the world

Who speaks a different English than we do to email us

And tell us the cool things about your dialect of English.

We’d love to hear about it.

The email address is words@waywordradio.org.

Or if you’re in the United States and Canada,

You can call us toll-free, 877-929-9673.

Hi there.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Lael Taylor from Harlan, Iowa.

Well, hello, Lael.

How are you?

Welcome to the show.

One day, my family and I were baking, and we were using cream of tartar.

And this, for some reason, reminded me of tartar sauce.

And so we looked up the definition of tartar, like your teeth, and tartar sauce, like leftovers of wine.

And then we looked up the definition of tartar sauce, and it had nothing to do with either of those things.

So I was wondering how tartar sauce got its name.

Oh, wow, yes. This is a great question.

It’s a great question, and you sound like you have a fun family.

Yeah, we do.

And you did a lot of your own research, so bravo for that. We appreciate that.

Mm—

All right, you’re right. There are two different words that sound a lot alike here, that each of them gave a word that looks like tartar to different parts of the English language.

So you mentioned something about wine, and that’s the one I want to start with.

When we use cream of tartar to cook with, it’s actually a white residue left over from winemaking that comes from the inside of the casks.

And somehow somebody figured that you could use it for baking.

That word tartar, T-A-R-T-A-R, comes from a Latin word tartarum.

And it is unrelated to some of the other tartars that we’re talking about.

It is also, however, the one for tartar on your teeth because it looks a lot like that white substance you get when you haven’t brushed in a while, right?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So the cream of tartar and the tartar on your teeth are related, and they go back to a Latin word, tartarum, and it means the white crust that forms during the winemaking process inside the cask.

All right.

And then we have other tartars happening here.

And we have to start with the people known as the tartars, T-A-R-T-A-R, and sometimes called the tatters without the first R.

And they were a huge 13th century army of Mongols and Turkic people who were led most famously by Genghis Khan, if you know who he is.

Not really.

He was the warrior to end all warriors.

He was one of the most savage leaders of military that has ever existed on this earth, according to legend anyway.

Yeah.

So a really big deal.

And so this army, get this, they would take meat and put it under their saddles while riding their horses all day.

And the meat would be cooked through friction and the saltiness of the horse’s sweat.

Really?

Kind of cured and cooked at the same time.

Yeah.

And they would eat it.

So it was still technically raw, but it was somehow, I don’t know.

This is what they did.

All of the resources they have say that this happened.

I would like to know how they know that the Tartars put raw meat under the saddle of their horses and then ate it after a while.

In any case, so that became a dish known as steak tartare.

Have you ever heard of this?

Kind of.

Well, the Germans in Hamburg, Germany, in the medieval times, later created a raw meat dish that we call steak tartare.

And they mimicked this dish from the Tartars, the Mongols and the Turkic people.

And they added some seasoning to it.

So they took the raw meat and they added mayonnaise and pickles and onions and olives and capers and some herbs.

And this kind of spice that they added to it is what we now call tartar sauce.

So it’s kind of like what you add to steak tartare without the steak.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, so the tartar sauce mimics the spices and flavors that were added to steak tartare originally in the medieval times.

How about that?

That’s a really, really long history.

And can I give you one more thing, Leo?

Yeah.

Ultimately, this same raw meat dish made in Hamburg, Germany, became what we know as hamburgers today.

Later, of course, shaped into patties and cooked, but still, ultimately, its origins go back to medieval times with these Germans mimicking this tartar dish.

Whoa.

That’s a lot, I know.

You know what? When we get a chance, we’re going to put this up on the website.

We’ll have links and the full story, and you’ll be able to listen to it in detail, all right?

Yeah.

Thank you for having me.

Hey, you know what? It was a real delight.

Thank you for taking some time out of your day to talk with us.

Yeah, it’s a great question.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Okay.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.

Here’s a handy word you don’t see too often.

Antigentacular.

Antigentacular?

Mm—

That’s A-N-T-E-J-E-N-T-A-C-U-L-A-R.

Antigentacular.

So opposed to…

No, it’s A-N-T-E.

Oh, before…

So something you wear in front of your genitals.

I don’t know.

Your spectacular genitals.

No, that’s an antipudic.

Oh, okay.

Antigentacular means before breakfast.

Oh, I’d heard that.

Why didn’t I call that up?

I know you know the word gentacular.

Yeah.

We’ve talked about that one.

But it comes from the Latin word for hungry, jejunus.

And get this, the word jejun in English means dull or unsatisfying or insipid or something like that.

And it’s related to that.

It’s empty.

Oh, I see.

Yeah.

So if you’re empty, it’s at breakfast, which means hollow.

When you’re breaking your fast, right?

So antigentacular, I took an antigentacular run with the dog this morning, something like that.

Yes, exactly.

And one more little tributary from that.

Jejunum is the second part of your small intestine, which usually turns up empty in dissection.

Okay.

That’s why it’s called jejunum.

That’s why it’s called jejunum.

Gotcha.

Yep.

877-929-9673.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

My name is Dennis, and I’m calling from La Crosse, Wisconsin.

All right.

Well, thank you for calling, Dennis.

What’s on your mind?

What’s on my mind is this phrase that my mom used to say to me whenever she was scolding me.

And so the phrase was, I have no hair on my tongue and this is what it is.

And so I would usually get that before a rebuke or before some hard advice that she would give me.

So I was just wondering where that came from, that I have no hair on my tongue.

So I have no hair on my tongue, meaning I’m going to give it to you straight.

I’m going to tell it like it is.

Pretty much, yeah.

I’m going to hold back.

Yeah.

Can I ask you, Dennis, is she American?

No, she’s a Hispanic, so she would say like, no tengo pelo en mi lengua.

Yeah.

That way.

Okay, that makes a lot more sense.

Because this idiom isn’t that common in English, and almost any time I find someone saying I have no hair on my tongue or something like that, it’s a multicultural or multilingual context.

But the same expression is used in Spanish-speaking countries, in Italian and Welsh and Croatian and Serbian, Turkish.

The origins of it are deep as far back as European culture goes.

Generally, it’s believed, the general analysis of this tends to be by people who study these sorts of sayings, is when you have hair in your tongue, you can’t speak clearly, because you’re kind of trying to catch it with your teeth and your tongue, and so it’s affecting your feet a little bit.

Trying to get the hair out of your teeth.

So you wouldn’t be speaking clearly.

And if you’re not doing that, then you are speaking clearly.

As a matter of fact, in French, to have hair on one’s tongue does mean to speak with a lisp or to speak unclearly.

And in Turkish, it’s a little different.

In Turkish, if you say, I have no hair in my tongue, it can mean I’m tired of repeating myself.

Yeah, but when she would say that, I’d kind of figuratively speaking be like a dog with a tail between its legs.

And then I’d just listen to what she has to say.

Oh, yeah. So you’re the poor whipped boy, right? Waiting to get the chastisement, right?

Oh, yeah. I know those moments well. I had more than my few, but my mother didn’t say that particular idiom.

Yeah. So in Spanish, if you do have hairs on your tongue, then it’s sort of like you tell white lies or you sort of equivocate.

Did she use it that way?

No, just that she wasn’t going to like soft tongue or sugarcoat anything for me.

And that if I didn’t like what she was hearing, you know, tough.

Right.

And the Spanish version again is?

No tengo pelo en mi lengua.

Right.

Because it literally, I don’t have hair on my tongue.

Perfect.

Well, that’s what we know, Dennis.

Thanks for your call.

All right.

Thank you, guys.

Love your show.

Thank you.

Take care now.

Thanks, Dennis.

Bye-bye.

Bye.

877-929-9673.

Hello.

You have A Way with Words.

Hi.

This is Marlee McLean.

I’m calling from Indianapolis, Indiana.

Hello, Marlee.

Welcome to the show.

Hey, Marlee.

Hi, thanks so much for having me.

Sure, what can we do for you?

I’m going to see if you can weigh in on a debate I’ve been having with my friends.

Before I explain the two arguments that I have, I want to see what your initial response is.

So if I were to describe you as scrappy, would you take it as a compliment or an insult?

What kind of conversation are we having where you bring this up?

I knew you would ask for context immediately.

The two sides that come up in this debate are, in a positive way, might be someone who is kind of the underdog, but makes their way through a situation with the resources they have.

They might face a lot of obstacles along the way, but it’s kind of associated with like a David and Goliath or just a resilient and resourceful person.

And then the negative connotation would be someone who fights dirty and does whatever they have to do to win.

They really take the value of victory over integrity or fairness.

So kind of a scrawny, mischievous, sneaky, or conniving person was the negative way to describe someone.

So in brief, you might say one definition of scrappy is willing to go after what one wants.

And another definition might be always picking a fight.

Yes, absolutely.

And there’s something in common between the two that’s about getting the job done.

I think the difference is between if it is a positive characteristic that you see in someone that’s good and they’re a fighter or if they’re a dirty fighter.

Martha, Marley just called you scrappy.

How do you take that?

Well, I think I take it in the positive sense.

I am scrappy when it comes to challenges.

Yeah, I think so.

What about you, Grant?

Do you take it differently?

I’m like you, I think.

Marlee, we often think of the little nonprofit that runs our radio show as a scrappy outfit.

We take resources, cobble them together into a national radio show.

And so we take that definitely as a compliment.

But I could see there in the right context, scrappy meaning quarrelsome or just itching to fight.

Yeah, pugnacious.

That’s the traditional meaning of it because it has to do with, you know, scrapping.

You know, when you are in a scrap with somebody, you’re fighting with somebody.

But I think both of those meanings are perfectly valid.

It’s all context.

And that’s why you knew that we’d bring that up, right?

Yes, exactly.

So I would love to hear from you guys as the experts on where it originally came from.

And, yeah, does it have to do something with scraps?

And why would it be used, like, more commonly, positive or negative?

Yeah, well, it doesn’t have to do with scraps, like scraps that you might make a quilt out of.

It has to do with a scrap or, you know, the verb scrap when you’re fighting with somebody.

You know, to get into a scrap with someone, to get into a fight?

Yeah, or a scrape.

Or a scrape.

Yeah, and it goes back to the 19th century, late 19th century at least.

But I can see both of those meanings be valid.

Do you think of them applied to one gender or the other?

I don’t have a specific gender I think of, but I always picture a smaller person for some reason.

That they’re somehow like scrawny or that is always associated in my mind with like the underdog, the little guy fighting his way out of a situation.

Right. It reminds me of the word feisty, which has the same kind of connotation.

You know, somebody can be feisty and that can be a positive thing if they’re really fighting against great odds.

David and Goliath, like you said, but feisty can also mean somebody who’s scrappy.

Yes, and some people actually argue that it was a condescending or kind of an annoying quality, which I can also understand if you’re kind of the little guy that constantly has to work 10 times as hard to make your way out of something that people might be frustrated with than, like, taking a shortcut or doing something that’s not fair to get what they want.

Oh, I see. I don’t have that sense of scrappy. That sounds more like a nudge to me, somebody who’s just constantly annoying you with their desire to succeed and wanting you to make it happen for them.

Yeah. When I think of somebody who’s scrappy, I think of them swinging, you know, swinging with their fists, you know, just fighting and fighting and fighting. But I think as Grant said, it’s all context.

It has to be context. Where were you arguing about this?

Just with a group of friends that I have, we all had dinner together and then got talking about the word scrappy.

And I have to say, it was a pretty heated argument.

Wow.

People very avidly feeling like, no, you don’t want to be scrappy.

And others saying, yes, absolutely, I do.

Wow.

I love it.

When these arguments come up, often the problem is that people are trying to treat the word alone as if it never keeps the company of other words.

And that is almost always a mistake.

Words have meaning because of the company they keep in sentences and paragraphs and pages and larger works.

Words do not stand alone, and you cannot simply take them by their dictionary definition.

You have to look for examples in context to find the true meaning of the word and all the pragmatics and all the other connotations that go with it.

So often when these arguments happen, it’s because people are not working with enough information.

Marlee, thank you so much for your call.

We really appreciate it.

Yes, thanks so much for taking the call.

I really appreciate what you guys do.

Take care.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Marlee.

All right.

Bye-bye.

Do you find scrappy to be a word that you don’t want applied to you?

Do you not want to be called scrappy?

Or do you not care?

Are you considered an attribute that’s worthy of you?

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

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

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette.

If you want to be a better writer, then you must read an absolutely glorious essay by Joe Moran.

It’s called In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence.

And it’s such a beautiful treatment of the joy of long sentences, the ones that really work, the ones that just carry you along to the end.

And it’s hard to pick out favorite passages, but I’m going to share a couple here.

He says, a long sentence should exult in its own expansiveness, lovingly extending its line of thought while being always clearly moving to its close.

It should create anticipation, not confusion, as it goes along.

And he makes all these great analogies with other art forms, including comedy and poetry and even tightrope walking.

Of comedians, he says, the secret of a great comedian is that he makes the audience feel simultaneously safe and slightly on edge.

He must quickly convey calm and control so that the audience members relax into their seats, safe in the knowledge that nothing truly awkward is about to happen.

But he must also create a sense of unpredictability that makes them lean forward.

A good long sentence has that same tension.

It should frustrate readers just a little and put them just faintly on edge without ever suggesting that it has lost control of being said.

Oh, that’s wonderful.

He goes on to say a long sentence can seem thrillingly out of breath, deliciously tantalizing, so long as we feel the writer is still in charge.

It is like listening to a great singer as he holds his breath and prolongs a phrase.

And he goes into the whole way that Frank Sinatra learned to sing and learned to carry tunes for a long time by watching the way trombone players did it.

Oh, wonderful.

I just can’t recommend this essay enough.

And the essay is?

The essay is In Praise of the Long and Complicated Sentence by Joe Moran, and I read it on lithub.com.

We’ll put a link to that on our website, waywordradio.org.

This show is about words and language and everything in between, 877-929-9673, or email words@waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, my name is Destiny Howell, and I’m calling from Huntington Beach, California.

Hi, Destiny. Welcome to the show.

Hi.

What’s up?

So I speak pretty good German and a little bit of Spanish, and I recently started learning Russian, and something kind of interesting happened.

So when I was learning Spanish, I already knew German pretty well.

And if I didn’t know a word, my brain would automatically put in the German word.

And then when I started learning Russian, my German is significantly better than my Spanish.

But my brain started putting in the Spanish words instead.

So I was curious if there’s some kind of similarity between those two languages that would make that a more optimal choice for my brain rather than using the language that I’m more proficient in.

I’m so glad you asked about this because you’re describing a really cool phenomenon.

I don’t think it has to do with similarities between the languages so much as something that’s called faulty language selection.

Have you heard about that?

No.

Yeah, this is something that polyglots experience where they learn one language and then they learn another language.

And if they’re learning another one, then they tend to substitute words just like you’re talking about.

And a lot of people report this phenomenon.

And we’re not really sure why it happens.

Does it happen to you more when you’re speaking rather than writing?

Yes, significantly more.

Yeah, that’s what a lot of people report.

And it also doesn’t seem to be as common with people who grew up bilingual, but it’s people who acquire languages later in life.

And it’s a really cool thing, right?

Because sometimes you just cannot think of the word in the other language, but you know you know it.

Right?

But the question at large is, do Spanish and Russian have some kind of similarity that would make her more likely to call on the Spanish rather than the German, which she knows much better?

Yeah. No, I don’t think so.

I mean, ultimately, they go back to the same Indo-European language,

But I don’t think it’s a similarity issue so much as this phenomenon of faulty language selection.

Destiny, did you learn German and Spanish in different ways?

For example, did you learn German in school or in Germany and Spanish, say, from an app or a class?

I learned them both in classroom settings, but I did learn—

My teacher with German was very different style,

So we didn’t translate anything.

You would use hand signals.

And so that made it a little bit, it seemed anyway, more natural

Because you’re associating the word with whatever the action is

Instead of a different word in another language.

And how were you learning Russian?

I started with an app and then went to a tutor.

And so that was kind of like a private one-on-one session.

You’re committed.

But the reason I’m asking these questions is sometimes what Martha is talking about, one idea is that it might come from difficulty in context switching.

For example, if you learn two languages in very much the same way, say even the same school and the same kind of textbooks or the same app, then it’s hard to separate them out in your mind.

You need much broader context differences.

So, for example, if I had learned German in Germany, but Spanish in class, no confusion, but I’ve learned German in Germany, Spanish in class, and Russian in another class, the context between the Spanish and the Russian might be so similar that I need more than just the language to tell me that I need to use the second language.

I need the mood, the feeling, the room, the air, the weather, the people, the attitudes, the trappings of the society around me in order to give me the context, oh, now I need to switch to that other language.

And a lot of that is unconscious.

Yeah, we heard from a woman who grew up speaking Chinese, and then she learned English, and then she was studying Japanese in college, and she was having the same kinds of problems that you have.

And she said that one of the things that helped her when she was speaking was to physically embody the way that she spoke in different languages.

Because she would physically be different depending on which language she was talking about.

You know, use different gestures or a different stance.

And that seemed to help if she would embody the language that was the target language she was trying to speak in.

That’s a really cool idea.

Right?

Taking on different personalities or characters, almost roles.

Right.

This is how I am in German and this is how I am in Russian.

Yeah, kind of exaggerate it, yeah.

So you might try that.

Very cool.

Yeah, I think I will.

Yeah, but you’re not alone.

So go to our website, waywordradio.org,

And you’ll find lots of information

If you search for faulty language selection.

Okay, I’ll definitely do that.

Thank you, guys.

Thank you, Destiny.

Call us again sometime, all right?

Thank you.

Take care. Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

We’d love to hear about your experiences

With faulty language selection

Or any other stories you have to share about language.

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

We had such a great time recently in Dallas.

I know, right?

They were fantastic.

That’s our third time there.

Yep.

And there were endless questions.

We could have done Q&A for another couple hours.

I know.

They pretty much turned off the lights to get us to go out of there.

But you remember that one couple who was there?

They were sitting in the back, and they had their four-month-old baby with them.

Oh, yeah, a little cutie.

Yeah, and she was perfectly behaved through the whole thing.

But they asked about fret.

The couple was David and Angela Heat-Dierks, and she’s originally from North Carolina,

Where they use fret as a transitive verb.

Remember that?

She was asking about—

Yeah, so her question was, can you say, is it all right to say, don’t fret him?

Like, don’t fret your brother.

Right.

Exactly.

And it turns out that, yes, in parts of the country, particularly the South, you can use fret as a transitive verb.

And I couldn’t think of what the etymology would be, but it goes back to an old word that means to eat.

Like, you know, a dog will worry a bone, meaning gnaw on it.

And, like, eating on something is, like, gnawing at it.

So that’s where we get the idea of fretting over something.

You’re sort of gnawing at something.

But you can use it as a transitive verb as well.

Oh, that’s interesting.

Yeah, so that’s counter to most people who speak other varieties of English, right?

Right, right.

But in the South, you might say, don’t fret the child, but let him alone.

Or it ain’t fretting me, something like that.

Well, that is perfect.

Isn’t that cool?

Yeah.

One other thing to say about that, that beautiful little four-month-old baby is named Dayspring.

Oh, nice.

Isn’t that gorgeous?

I did not know until I learned it from them and looked it up.

That is a term in the Bible that means dawn.

It’s a translation of Greek that means dawn.

Almost like a kenning, right?

Yeah.

Almost an Anglo-Saxon combination of words to make a compound.

Right, right.

Like the spring from which dawn comes.

Lovely.

Yeah.

By the way, we do live events all around the country,

And you can find the latest dates and tour stops that we’re making.

And ask us to come to your town on our website at waywordradio.org.

Hello, you have A Way with Words.

Hey, how are you?

Doing fine. Who’s this and where are you calling from?

Tom in Tallahassee, Florida.

Hi, Tom. Welcome to the show.

What can we do for you, Tom?

I always had a real curiosity about the word geedunk.

It’s a term I heard in the Navy.

When you went to the ship store, you went to the geedunk.

When you’re at the ship store, you buy geedunks.

So it could be a range from candies to cigarettes to whatever.

And so you were in the Navy?

Correct.

And how long ago would that be?

I was in there from 60 to 64.

60 to 64, gotcha.

So G-E-D-U-N-K, and you might spell that what, G-E-D-U-N-K?

That’s as close as I could get.

So I like it.

So it’s both the place that you buy the sweets and the sweets themselves?

Correct.

That conforms with what I know.

I think we talked about this once before on the show,

And I dug up some information on this for one of my books.

And it’s got a really interesting history.

It probably dates back to a comic strip from 1925.

There was a comic strip called Harold Teen, T-E-E-N.

And it was at a time when comic strips could be popular.

And they actually had an influence on language and culture in the United States.

And so in the comic strip, these teens go to soda fountains.

And they have a Gidank or a Gidank sundae.

And sometimes it’s just a sundae like we know it today,

You know, with the whipped cream and the cherry and the banana

And the ice cream and the glass dish.

Sometimes it’s an ice cream float

Where they plop a scoop of ice cream into the soda.

And the story supposedly is,

Although it’s never explained in the comic strip,

That the name Gidank is roughly the sound

That an ice cream float makes

When you put the ice cream into the soda.

It’s that noise, that plopping noise almost.

Though I know many years later

I’ve seen this in Paul Dixon’s

War Dictionary, there’s an entry for

And many soldiers

Or navy men or

So forth, because sometimes it’s used in the army

And marines as well, they believe that

It’s the sound of the vending machine that you might

Get that chunking noise when you get

Candy out of the vending machine.

So like a

Grunk, a big

Mechanical weird noise.

I sort of thought it was

A conglomeration of a military term

That they would use the first letters

To make up a word.

Oh, an acronym.

No, it predates the military.

The military just borrowed it

From general culture.

Another interesting aspect of this

Is many German verbs

Begin with the G-E.

And so there’s an idea

That maybe G-dunk

Is a combination of

The English verb dunk

Plus the German prefix G-E.

But the evidence is pretty slim on that.

And, Tom, my sense is that a gi-dunk was a really, really, really important factor in morale.

Isn’t that right?

Correct.

Yeah, I read that the Navy during World War II commissioned a $1 million gi-dunk barge.

What?

Yeah, and then refrigeration ships that would carry all these things so that they would be easily available to ships.

I mean, it was a really important thing, right?

Right, for morale.

Yeah, to be able to look forward to that gi-dunk.

Particularly if you’re serving in hot climates.

Where did you serve, Tom?

Well, I was in Naples, Italy for two years.

Okay.

Ice cream would go over easy there, right?

Pretty much.

Yeah, I think I’d want to go ashore for pizza, though.

Most anything would go over pretty good by the time we got out of there.

Tom, thank you so much for sharing these memories with us.

Thank you.

Thank you for the information.

Sounds good.

All right.

Take care.

All right.

Appreciate it.

Thanks, Tom.

Bye-bye.

Thank you.

Bye-bye.

877-929-9673.

My friend iris introduced me to an expression that she learned from her mother who grew up in

Brooklyn and it’s don’t that jar your preserves that’s good pun on jar right yeah yeah it’s kind

Of like one of those paraprosdokian statements we’ve talked about before you think it’s going

Say one thing but it takes a detour and says another. Yeah, don’t that jar your preserves?

I mean, don’t that get your goat or don’t that surprise you? Yeah, how about that? How about that?

Yeah. How about that? Call us with your language story, 877-929-9673. Hello, you have a way with

Words. Well, hello, my name is Kevin and I am from Alabama. I have a question about the word

Poo-poo. P-O-O-H. P-O-O-H. I first heard it as a kid. Poo-poo to the who’s. The Grinch said with a sneer,

It’s almost Christmas. It’s practically here. And then I saw in Newsweek magazine where Congress

Poo-pooed this one congressman’s bill. What can you tell me about it?

To poo-poo something. So you’re taking this to mean what?

Say no or disapprove.

Yeah, that’s pretty much it.

Just to clear the air a little bit, it doesn’t have anything to do with poop or excrement or feces.

No, that’s T-O-O.

Yeah.

There’s an H on the end.

But there’s a lot of similarity there, and people might think that if you say that you’re poo-pooing,

It’s like, you know, not literally, but figuratively throwing poo on a thing.

You’re not doing that.

Yeah.

What it is, is it’s a spelling version of the sound that you make when you have a sudden disregard for something.

So there’s this sharp plosive sound that you make when you are reacting dismissively.

So you go, like it’s a sharp exhalation of air with a P sound at the beginning, like, right?

And so it’s basically a spelling version of that.

So we made the sound first, somebody spelled it as a word, and now we say the word as a word rather than making the sound.

Well, we also make the sound, but we also say the word.

Did Dr. Seuss actually make up that word?

No, no, it’s much older than that.

Oh, it’s been around.

1500s, easily.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it goes back to the 1500s.

It starts as a single word to poo something.

Again, no reference to excrement.

And then both as a noun as an interjection,

Eventually shows up by the 1600s as reduplicated.

And this is a linguistic term that means to be duplicated,

To say more than once for emphasis.

So it shows up by the 1600s as poo-poo.

And then we get the verb.

Redundant.

It’s not redundant.

No, it’s emphasis.

It’s a reinforcement.

Oh, okay.

And then we get it as a verb by the 1800s.

Well, thank you very much for your time.

This was really fun.

You guys have a good day.

Bye-bye.

Thank you very much.

All righty.

Bye-bye.

Thanks for calling, Kevin.

Take care.

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

The address is words@waywordradio.org.

Another fun phrase from Norway translates as,

There’s no such thing as bad weather, only bad clothes.

Oh, that’s so perfect.

It’s true, right?

How many times do I tell my son, put on your jacket.

I don’t need it.

Put on your jacket.

I don’t need it.

Put on your jacket.

And then two hours later, he’s cold.

He’s cold.

Yes, it’s cold, Papa.

I’m like, I know.

I said put on your jacket.

Take a raincoat.

Or he sits at the breakfast table in these cold winter mornings, San Diego cold.

Oh, my gosh.

I’m cold.

I’m like, there are four blankets on the couch.

Get a blanket.

I’m cold.

Get a blanket.

There’s no such thing as bad weather, just bad clothes.

Bad blanket choices.

Yeah.

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.

Our toll-free line is always open in the U.S. And Canada, 877-929-9673.

Or send us your thoughts to words@waywordradio.org.

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

A nonprofit supported by listeners and organizations

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.